I guess this can be useful for large-scale public communities but as far as I know Slack never explicitly supports this use-case (and lacks many features suitable for this such as moderation features, etc).
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!).
>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.
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.
> 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.
I don't think the association between Mozilla and Slack is as strong as you think. They aren't collaborating with Slack, they are pressuring them to add this feature. If their goal is to make the web better, pushing for companies that control a significant portion of online communities to add safety features like this is actually a decent act.
> the idea is to add a safety control for preventing harassment to a hugely popular communication medium, not to promote a company.
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.
Slack really shouldn't be supporting this feature. The large scale communities using it won't pay a single cent and are basically just freeloading off their freemium model.
It's also a bad idea because Mozilla Firefox has less users every year, and currently floats at about 3.5% marketshare, give-or-take .5% by source and margin of error. Also, ~90% of their income is from Google, for being the default search engine (an obvious conflict-of-interest they are unable to resolve).
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.
Yes. As a multi-decade Firefox user who does donate to FOSS projects, I don't bother with Mozilla since they seem determined to spend it on everything except actually writing a browser. And if I wanted to donate to an organisation that actually advocates for digital rights (rather than being more interested in clutching pearls about how random communities moderate themselves), I'd go with the EFF or 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.
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?
My impression is that most Slack instances are highly private and most users are explicitly invited. This is in contrast to Reddit and to some degree Discord where the barrier to joining subreddits or servers is generally low.
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?
Yeah, to me this is a bit odd. Many industries require that internal communication be logged, so E2E encryption and blocking are a no-go, and even having that option in the software can add potential regulatory headaches.
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).
Maybe people are using Slack in ways you don't expect? That's fine, surely.
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.
> My impression is that most Slack instances are highly private and most users are explicitly invited.
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.
Mozilla's guiding principle is to create a "healthy Internet" [1]. Why wouldn't it be their business to make a feature request to another company in service of that goal? Obviously Slack thought it was valuable, too, because they added the feature.
I find it weird anyone would have a problem with this, since the alternative is these advocacy groups actively pushing people to stop using these services.
If utilised in a corporate environment it will undoubtedly sow chaos. I trust that those administering instances in such a setting will have the ability to disable it entirely?
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.
Why should Mozilla care about anything than trying to make their browser better? Slack is not their responsibility. The browser is already ton of work.
Mozilla Foundation is a nonprofit whose job is to make the internet better. Part of that is the subsidiary Mozilla Corporation, which makes money and develops Firefox, but the overall nonprofit can do other things. Think EFF, not Google.
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.
> Mozilla Foundation is a nonprofit whose job is to make the internet better.
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.
> Through technology? Or through (non-technical) activism?
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.
So what are they going to do next, campaign for MS to make "Teams" actually usable? That might actually make the Internet better, but it's also way out of scope of what Mozilla's mission ought to be. This seems more like a desperate attempt to stay relevant (and continue to receive donations).
"Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent."
It’s about the trend of using censorship/silencing as a solution for everything, of hiding from opposing viewpoints rather than countering bad ideas with reasoned debate (and simply not feeding the trolls)
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.
I'm sorry, but having e2e encrypted dms in slack PROMOTES anti-censorship. Right now I literally have a second slack set up for just my team at work so we can have conversations without having to worry about our superiors looking over our shoulders via being able to read our DMs and 'private' channels.
A trend I see in companies these days is once someone leaves, instead of deactivating the account they just change the password(/or the email).
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.
they can get access to private channels from their slack admin. Nothing is actually private from the admin, at least admins from paid enterprise style accounts.
You should follow your own advice, and not try to flamebait in bad faith by framing Brendan Eich as some kind of martyr or victim. Nobody ever tried to cancel HIS marriage, but he's the one who wanted to cancel and criminalize many other people's marriages. Attacking other people's human rights makes him the victimizer, not the victim. The GamerGate trolls with an axe to grind against LGBTQ+ people still regularly push that false narrative in bad faith here and elsewhere about Brendan Eich being fired and being a victim, which is bullshit. It happens often and predictably enough, and your implication is obvious enough, that it's worth debunking preemptively.
Well, since tons of open source projects and foundations unfortunately use Slack already, they are being pragmatic, it makes sense.
They should also push for opensource solutions for communication, at least lobbying in places like CNCF etc? Maybe.
Mozilla's mission is to make the internet better. Is it really so bad for them to praise-with-critique when a major service takes a (albeit small) step forward?
It is not a step forward. Trusting Salesforce, especially for civil rights activity, is fundamentally broken.
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.
I am super confused about this and I really hope this is an optional feature (hopefully turned off by default) for administrators.
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.
There's a lot for large and small thematic communities around, for instance there's a sizeable Python Slack, my university has a few, and I'm in a few geographic ones for developers in different cities.
HR's job is to protect the company, not the employee, so I would not expect them to help except in cases of literal harassment (rather than, for example, people who reduce the S/N of a large channel). 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?
Why not? – Because coworkers need to talk to each other. What's next, jumping off the daily standup call for a while when a colleague you have a problem with is speaking?
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.
> Why not? – Because coworkers need to talk to each other.
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.
> On July 5, Slack announced it would soon be introducing a “Hide messages from another member” feature, allowing people to “support their needs for a safe and productive work environment.”
Can anyone please link me to the announcement? My google-fu is failing me today.
I'm afraid that in a small organization, where Slack is so often deployed, blocking abuse is a poor substitute for a low tolerance for abuse. My boss fired someone immediately after they made a degrading comment to someone on Slack, and in that case I think it was warranted. If that person was simply blocked by anyone involved it would have seriously broken communication with a core service. Putting a non-abusive person in that role was the better choice.
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.
I think it is important to fully consider the implications of implementing any feature which will allow users to silence other people.
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.
> 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.
Arguing online is a fun hobby. Who gets the "last word" doesn't really matter.
That doesn't mean it isn't ridiculously frustrating when you come up with a response that may have taken a lot of thought and effort and find out you can't post it.
The over/misuse of the word "safety" and its variants is reaching insane levels. No, seeing messages you don't like is not a threat to your safety. The intentional conflation is increasingly used as an emotive bludgeon/thought-terminating cliché to pressure organisations into doing what the speaker wants, because to do otherwise (or to even question the proposal) would be "endangering" people
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
Oh please: Letting a user block another user has nothing to do with a free and open internet. Save the anger for when there’s an actual threat to the internet, otherwise people will just start tuning free/open internet advocates out entirely.
It is quite bad really. One feature seem to be to single out users so they can't hear you in a group chat. To me that is highly toxic. Speaking behind someone's back, to everyone. It will be used for bullying of anything.
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!).