People should be welcomed and commended for posting like the GP, not shamed and hammered.
I'd say this thread being high on HN's frontpage for many hours* has been beneficial. In addition to calling attention to Hack Club's predicament (and who doesn't love Hack Club?!), it gave a chance for many HN members to post their own relevant experiences, which it turned out there were a lot of—surprisingly many.
But in the later stage of this process, when the thread has basically done its job, drawn attention and generated a response, I think it's harmful to escalate even further and get into a tar-and-feather treatment of poor sods who wander in to offer a "sorry" or "we'll fix it". The dynamic at that point goes from "let's rally together and help these awesome kids, plus hey, something similar happened to us" to something darker and meaner. The former is good for this community, the latter is bad for it.
My point is that we should assess this based on how it affects us. That's handy, because that's information we can access, whereas we can't actually peer into $BigCo to find out whether what happened was a regrettable mistake or a nefarious grab they got caught at.
As long as I'm going on about this I want to repeat what I said in the cousin comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45293388): the distinctive quality of internet indignation is unprocessed, opportunistic rage: unprocessed because it is pre-existing in a person (<-- and we all have this) for whatever original reasons that haven't been metabolized yet; opportunistic because it waits for justifiable occasions to lash out, and then lashes out with vengeance. This is not a great way to handle one's rage—it's a recipe for repetition instead of growth. How do I know that? I know it by self-observation, and I believe that anyone who wants to can know it by self-observation.
It's particularly important to know this in a group context. When a group joins together to vent rage—because an occasion justifies it, even though the driver in each person may be very different—that's when a group turns into a mob. This happens easily because it happens without awareness and no one intends it. This is when we become our ugliest, so we should pay attention to signs of it in ourselves and in our groups, and learn to respond differently. Not easy, of course, but a good use to put an internet forum to!
* something, btw, that the community corrected us about - we initially downweighted the thread, which was our mistake. Fortunately we like getting corrected by the community, so it was an easy fix.
Fixing the immediate problem is only step one. It's reasonable to ask for accountability and that they tell us about what they're changing going forward.
Their envoy is out of the loop so when Hack Club tries to respond they are at best rejected as some spurned rouge customer, and at worst completely ignored as they fail to reach anyone who has the power to properly look into it. So they have to go nuclear and make things public just to get the attention of a billion dollar corporation.
The fix, if any of this speculation is accurate, is indeed cultural. One counter to the current culture of tech trying to lay off as much as they can and letting Customer Service rot on the wayside. These PR crises were long determined as an "acceptable risk" of such cuts.
I don't think our engineer quoting Rob upstream has anything directly to do with this (maybe Rob does, but that's too speculative even for this post), but I do think we need to bring some shame back to corporate America. This is indeed endemic at multiple companies, not just Slack. I hear this is one of many reasons companies prefer to deal with Chinese companies; these kinds of CS slip ups just doesn't happen in their culture as regularly as the US.
In a culture of worshipping ARR you’ll need to put a price tag on everything you find shameful or it won’t happen.
From what I can tell the "tar-and-feather thing" is outrage directed at Slack and its CXOs, rather than the poor guy who happens to be reposting a message from the CPO.
Please don't let your moderator's concern for injury to individual people blind you to the fact that the outrage triggered by outrageous conduct is directed at the outrageous company and its officers, rather than at individual folks who aren't in a position with any real power.
I apologize for using your comment as a place to hang a whole generic thing about mobs and whatnot—I certainly didn't mean it about you personally (or even your post) - it's a shared group phenomenon for sure, and I could have made that clearer.
In my days of heading R&D for a regional social networking site, we discovered that first ~100k of our users were both the most valuable ones, due to the extent of their interaction with the site, and due to the fact that their risk tolerance for our /new/ product meant they would also tolerate future products. As such, that "first wave" of community around a product - is - the wave the creates the market for the product.
In case of Slack - they were taking that goodwill for granted. And the community's outrage called that bluff. It highlighted to other readers (like myself, I don't use Slack anymore so never paid attention to the ownership change) that it's now part of Salesforce (and that's a negative signal for me, might be positive for others); that it got pretty dubious business practices (as others in similar situation to OP have spoken up); and that none of the CXOs' committed to meaningful (from my and community's perspective) responses - post mortems; blast radius; accountability; data export.. which means either they don't have the power to make such commitments (wouldn't be the case pre-acquisition), or don't want to make them. Another negative signal.
The mechanism you talk about is all too real, and it can be semi-consciously exploited. A bit off-topic, but the way genocides happen is via a similar mechanism. A group is depicted as base, a disease, faults are attributed to it. It becomes a moral imperative to clean the body.
This feeling is thus rationalized, and people start to reinforce each other's conviction. It becomes a twisted status game: the more you lean into the mentality, the higher you rank. Often times the goal isn't even to "address" the original trigger, it's to show your peers your approval and distance yourself from "those people". They the immoral, we the moral.
This is relevant to so much, well outside of this forum. Thank you for writing it.
I would love to read some more thoughts you have on this or discuss other questions about moderation and advice. Could I email you with some questions? Happy to also look at an archive of comments where you've discussed this before.
Thank you!
I mean, objectively, unless it was an honest mistake, which we can generously assume because this is HN, this was a really cheap shot, worthy of Broadcom and friends.
how do you know they're "showing up to fix something" and not simply servicing the "10% returns" end of a widespread scheme to shake down customers? This has every bit the look of "shake all the low-paying customers down as much as possible, if one of them manages to raise too much awareness, act like it was an isolated incident".
It matters a lot of this is an isolated incident or if this is par for the course; in the latter case, responding to those customers that were lucky enough to go viral is just part of the scheme proceeding as planned.
Not saying it is right or wrong - just pointing out that people's patience is in short supply when it comes to mega corps, simply because of their very bad track records...
> We will be reviewing our billing and communications processes to provide nonprofits clearer guidance and adequate grace periods as they grow.
I don't think we're going to get a different answer if we ask again, and frankly I wouldn't expect one.
2025 has told me that actions speak louder than words. I don't really see much engagement on trying to "relate to each other" on this platform lately. Not from the community nor those who moderate it. Just a facsimile of trying to maintain decorum in an age of chaos
----
Rant aside: a company isn't a person to relate to. They are made of people, but those people clearly make no attempt to relate either. This is a PR response, which despite having "relations" in it is not an attempt to engage with the community nor promote curiosity. So I will treat it as such.
Anything personal would have been appreciated, especially in this context. Maybe “I’m one of the thousands that work here but this means something to me…”?
Actually even a professional stance that showed concern: “One of our shared company values states…”
Sadly Jamie’s response didn’t build any trust of Slack from me…
As an aside, there's plenty of hardly subtle trolling you're letting by on the daily, usually the older the user somehow the more leeway there seems to be, so I'd suggest you focus your moderating attention on that.
> there's plenty of hardly subtle trolling you're letting by
I'd need specific links to respond meaningfully. Generally, though, if you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. There's far too much content here for us to see it all, let alone read it all. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Sense of entitlement off the charts. Take a second to reorient yourself, you aren’t even in the wrong lane, you’re on the other side of the barrier going in the wrong direction.