On a new feature in Slack via which anyone on Slack can message any other Slack user, across companies:
When Slack introduced the feature today, it hadn’t implemented any features that can help someone who gets harassed. There is no block button or built in mechanism to report the message to Slack or your company’s Slack administrator.
Slack reacted:
… “we received valuable feedback from our users about how email invitations to use the feature could potentially be used to send abusive or harassing messages. We are taking immediate steps to prevent this kind of abuse”
– Slack Says Letting Anyone Message Anyone With Few Limits Was ‘a Mistake’
This is a failure to empathise, a rather basic failure when designing products. Gmail took off in its early days in large part because it decimated spam. That is a fifteen year old lesson. Twitter’s issues with harassment and spam are an ongoing lesson.
At Slack’s scale, one should expect product managers to consider the potential for harassment. For information overload. For ambiguity. For bias.
If Slack – or any other company – consciously builds and promotes its products to be used by organisations of all sizes, across all industries, globally, they cannot also dismiss or discount these as incovenient or unnecessary.
These considerations will slow down design and development, they will make the product somewhat less agile and they will increase monetary costs.
That’s the price of making a product that widely available.
You expect that with the increase revenue from this scale, you hire the best product, design and engineering talent to build efficiently while also considering everything above.
(ends)