Slack Takes an Important Step to Block Abuse
foundation.mozilla.org
foundation.mozilla.org
For Slack's primary use-case of intra-organization communications, this is completely useless and wouldn't work anyway (if you block and hide messages from a team member, how are you going to collaborate?). If there is abuse, it should be up to management/HR to step in and address this issue.
Mozilla should really mind its own business - Firefox marketshare is dwindling and so are the reasons to pick it over its competitors (and they don't even focus on the few reasons that do remain!).
What makes you think any given organization is a corporation?
I'm currently in 13 Slack organizations, and only 2 of them are companies. Slack is widely use for collaboration in co-ops and closed communities.
>Mozilla should really mind its own business - Firefox marketshare is dwindling
Mozilla is a non-profit organization whose stated goals[1] align with this post perfectly. Not a company who's sole product is Firefox.
IDK. With safety angle, maybe. But Slack is the opposite of "Healthy Internet". It's a corporation that wormed its way into companies and communities alike, by doing "embrace, extend, extinguish" on IRC to gain initial organic marketing from naive techies. And they've paved the way for Discord making so many good communities no longer accessible.
It's not the kind of association that makes Mozilla look good to me.
> It's not the kind of association that makes Mozilla look good to me.
they're probably ok with that. can't please em all.
They're not doing the adding, though. But I guess it's different if you knew before that Mozilla was involved in this space. I didn't, so it got me by surprise.
That said... it's also good free marketing for Slack, because I for one though they're mostly dead already, and that outside of corporate space, everyone ditched them for Discord long ago.
Disagree. My employer's slack has about a million members. I don't collaborate with all of them. Speaking for myself, I would be glad of the opportunity to mute or block some of them.
HR's job is to protect the company, not the employee, so I would not expect them to help except in cases of extreme harassment. And even then, self-service tools that do not make you a target of further harassment are a foundation of public social networks. Why not private social networks too?
Of course, when you are relying on Google to keep the lights on, it's probably not the best idea to give your CEO over $5.5 million / yr. compensation [1], one of the highest paid nonprofit CEOs in the US. It's also probably not the best idea to focus on advocacy instead of trying to make the core product more competitive. Otherwise, one morning Google might just decide that it's too insignificant a market share to matter, or decide that Firefox is finally small enough they can finally kill it without upsetting regulators, and Mozilla would be dead overnight.
[1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-990...
It’s widely used for open source communities, eg:
> lacks many features suitable for this such as moderation features
This is the whole point of the OP; adding missing features for this usecase.
If this is true what is Mozilla's business making niche feature requests to other companies products that they don't own? Is the plan to do this kind of advocacy for other products?
I think it's fair to call out that Slack isn't a platform for interacting with strangers, nor the right tool for discussing a topic that would get you in trouble if e.g. your government saw your messages. But it's okay to just say, don't use Slack for that kind of thing; there's already other E2E encrypted messaging apps, and there's better platforms for managing communities of strangers where you have bad actors (who you can't deal with by contacting an HR department).
Isn't a better solution to have per instance administrative controls? Default to allowing blocking but allow companies to disable that feature. Make it clear to users in the UI when this has been done so they can complain if it's not appropriate to disable it.
Which would be a great thing. Communities should not use Slack.
Not exactly true in companies, where you're subject to the whims of HR department eventually, maybe, probably not deciding to fire someone abusive. In the mean time you're subject to abuse over and over again. Great you get lots of evidence to give HR, but in the mean time you're still subject to the abuse and taking the toll on your mental health.
Outside of a work environment, you're also subject to whatever delays the admins of your more private slack space might have around resolving the problem. Not everyone is going to be 24x7 to jump in and deal with abusive behaviour and kick people out.
The lack of blocking in Slack has been repeatedly called out by people who have been on the receiving end of abuse in slack, through both work and community slacks, and have had to deal with either major delays, or flat out refusal to deal, from the relevant authorities for the workspaces.
But also will be good a push to move those communities to a self hosted open source products like Zulip [2], Element [3] or Rocket Chat [4].
I honestly find the idea of this really perverse. In a work environment you don't (nor should you) get a choice in who you interact with. If some if those interactions are negative, well that's not a problem Slack should be attempting to solve.
While it is a bit weird to be pushing for a proprietary product (Slack) to add a certain feature, I suspect that this was done to 1) make the web better and 2) as a PR act to show off the work they are doing in advocacy.
Through technology? Or through (non-technical) activism?
It seems like a better spend of their time would be to build better collaboration and social media solutions, rather than lobby for a feature like this on a platform that’s mostly used in organizations but not the wide internet.
Both? Mozilla Foundation isn't just an engineering org, and the internet isn't just a technology but also a place with rules and norms. Influencing the direction of the internet is a necessary part to making it better. If the EFF was the one doing this I imagine there wouldn't be any complaints, and the Mozilla Foundation is a nonprofit just like the EFF is.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
While a block button can have positive uses, you shouldn’t need one to deal with legitimate harassment in a corporate environment (you’ve got HR and disciplinary policies).
And a collaboration tool will cease to serve its purpose if team members start arbitrarily blocking each other over petty disagreements.
In non-corporate cases, well, there’s other collaboration tools you could use.
And why is this a significant issue for Mozilla?
I've heard some really crazy stuff about managers laying off whole teams then changing a password and login in, reading the teams private channels after everyone was laid off.
Am I the only one remembering how they wormed themselves into workplaces by EEE-ing IRC to alleviate early concerns about the platform?
One's a lot easier, and still makes the news.
The Brendan Eich debacle was their Waterloo.
(Picture in article)
Edit: Yes they are. I zoomed in on the pic.
[1] assuming what you say is true
Mozilla investing time and money in this makes the free and open internet worse due to the opportunity cost.
It seems to me like a huge waste of resources to put time and effort into convincing Salesforce of anything. How about telling people to stay away from it and make sure some "sudo apt-get install chatzilla" is available and easy to setup for the Women rights group and what ever.
Also, "deafening" one user for your messages in a group chat is a great tool for bullying I guess. I don't see why you would want that or cheer it as some anti-bully step forward.
Otherwise "blocking" should not be something that is utilized within a work setting. If you have a problem with someone you go to HR not just block them and ignore the problem doesn't exist. You can't convince me otherwise, I don't care how big your company is. If you feel the need to block someone at work, talk to HR. If they won't do anything you should leave since that just speaks to fundamental issues.
Same with "Hide messages from another member" which if that is doing what it sounds like it is doing, again I can't imagine actually sending a message in a public area and marking specific coworker(s) as not being able to see it.
Sure I know I have seen slack used for other purposes but I can't imagine this is actually a majority enough of a use of Slack that pushing or celebrating this feature is really useful? I honestly figured most of those non work use cases have likely moved to Discord at this point.
Unless Slack is working on trying to dethrone Discord... this makes zero sense to me and if it isn't able to be disabled by administrators I will stop advocating to use Slack again... as bad as Teams is.
1) I thought Slack was mostly a teams thing where you know who you're interacting with?
2) Why Mozilla?
But in any case, why would knowing someone you interact with make you less likely to block them?
I can't fathom the idea of coworkers blocking each other in digital tools and pretending like that's a solution to anything.
If someone is reducing the S/N of a large channel then it is a culture problem that needs to be solved by the management. I have seen a few Slack dramas like that in companies I worked with (e.g. a person trolling), and it wasn't difficult to solve. Letting team members to arbitrarily block each other seems insane to me from a company standpoint.
There are 850,000 people on my work Slack. I do not need to talk to all of them, much less read what all of them have to say.
> What's next, jumping off the daily standup call for a while when a colleague you have a problem with is speaking?
No that's not next, and I think the goalposts you're looking for are way back over here.
I don't disagree that Slack can be a vector for "culture" problems. I don't see why it follows that employees should be deprived very simple tools that allow them to fix the symptoms themselves if their employer disagrees or doesn't care.
Can anyone please link me to the announcement? My google-fu is failing me today.
It depends on the organization of course, so a blocking feature makes sense as a local admin option. In our case a "flag this comment" feature would work better.
For instance, Reddit has a different take on the block feature: instead of the blocker being able to hide posts from people they don't want to see, the block function disables the ability of the blockee to see or respond to any posts from the blocker, thus making them invisible and removing the ability to respond to entire threads without recourse. This led to a wonderful tendency to end arguments with one party getting the last word in, then blocking the other party so that they couldn't respond.
At the time I was amazed anyone signed off on that feature, and am still even more amazed they never rolled it back.
Arguing online is a fun hobby. Who gets the "last word" doesn't really matter.
I don't really have a problem with Slack implementing a block button (I assumed it already had one) but this manipulative rhetoric and induced fragility is worth calling out in any case
Mozilla Foundation blog [1], MDN Blog [2] and Mozilla blog [3]
[1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/ [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/ [3] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/