Blind: an anonymous, corporate social network | Hacker News Reader

Blind: an anonymous, corporate social network

techcrunch.com

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Blind is actually a cool, if at times strange, place. I've posted legitimate requests for advice on here, Reddit, and Blind, and the quality of responses were overwhelmingly in Blind's favor. Blind actually gave me real, if not blunt/brief, feedback about what I could/should do for various situations I've been in. Here and Reddit? The same tired old platitudes from well-meaning people that make them feel like they're helping and making a difference, but are in reality providing highly generic advice that could apply to just about anyone at most skill levels and just showed that those who did respond skimmed the title and nothing else.

Of course, there are in-jokes, people who take those in-jokes deathly serious, people with mental instability (though that poster is actually taking a break after receiving feedback, fortunately for them), people who lean waaay too hard in one political direction or another, and other unsavory people and topics. However, this atmosphere allows for some brutally honest questions that would normally get shadowbanned/shoved somewhere else/otherwise manipulated by others or people in discussion board positions of power. There have been a few interesting relationship threads, a really good AMA about someone who works in Japan (I wonder if it's Patrick McKenzie, the posts in the thread were REALLY informative to the detail he's gone into before. I've forwarded stuff he's written before to people I know who want to dream about working over there), salary numbers, advice for H1Bs, people going through rough times at work without having to reveal who they are without jackassing around with a throwaway yet still having an identifiable company attached to their username, and so on.

Dunno how long Blind will last for, but if you download the app and find you really don't like the cons, just don't use it every waking moment.

Currently, Mastodon is in a very similar state. I often have deep, insightful conversations with interesting people, some of who are even local! Its like Reddit circa 2008, but easier to find quality users to add to your feed.

Is Mastodon good now? I've never been able to have a conversation on Twitter that isn't with people I already know, yet people apparently do; I don't know how they do it. Mastodon has always seemed like an even bigger mess than Twitter was with the same issues but it's "federated," as if that's supposed to solve any actual issues.

With joinmastodon.org you can try to narrow in an instance that meets your interests. I signed up for three to just explore which ones I wanted to be on. One was Mastodon.social which is fairly large, and then two more niche ones. Being able to explore the niche ones for their topics, but knowing I can hop into federated or .social is kind of like utilizing lists.

I think all of this allows you for to more easily just throw a thought out there and get some engagement since your smaller niche instances will have less noise.

mastodon.social is closed/invite only now. Do you know any way to join that instance now?

Mastodon is fairly decent, I've taken to looking at my local instance's aggregate feed and the federated timeline to find interesting discussions. Browsing the federated timeline is a bit about timing, as the federated timeline can get quite busy with uninteresting posts when Japan wakes up.

I’ve seen several anonymous corporate networks before (three other full implementation actually, all reach exploding point). The same four things always pop-up, unless you ban one explicitly:

- mental health; single-handedly justifying the existence of every instance. The posts are boring overall: introversion, depression, burn-out, what to do (and the well-meaning responses to go see a doctor and hopefully links to internal references claiming the company will support you); it’s as exciting as a waiting room, but it’s helpful. On that note, if you feel like something is wrong and you are not sure: GO TALK TO A DOCTOR.

- salary; kind of hard not to have it here, but anonymity takes off the ability to tell people “Nah, you are incompetent, that’s what you deserve” so it’s a little locked; I really like the idea that Blind turns it to a conversation recommending LeetCode & co. because that’s an interesting, objective exit from that conversation.

- bitching about bad manager: I think that’s the best aspect of those, but the tone can be very nasty and trollish. Unless you have great leadership who can take it, own it and improve, not the best idea. With good leadership, it can be staggering what feedback can accomplish.

- internal in-fighting, notably around incompetence and team rivalry, Social Justice, etc. Same as previous: good to take the temperature overall, but the tone is structurally problematic, unless you have really good content moderators. I'd recommend to limit some of that explicitly.

>> "With Blind, users are completely anonymous, but are required to submit a verified work email to join a company channel."

That sentence doesn't make sense. How can it be "completely anonymous" but you have to submit an e-mail address?

I interpreted that as "completely anonymous to users". The owners/operators of Blind have the mapping between pseudonyms and email addresses. These will not be available to others until the inevitable data breach or exit (possibly to one of the organizations whose employees use the service).

One possible approach is to relax the gate-keeping guarantees, so that every "wait for email and click the link in it" exchange allows the user to create one new account which is not scoped to their work-email address but simply associated with the company-name. (Like almost all privacy, this requires some basic "we're not recording that" choices by the social-media site.)

During the creation process, the user gets the option to set a non-work email for password-recovery etc.

The main risk of this scheme is that a single jdoe@acme.corp could easily create a thousand sock-puppets or "give" new accounts to people who don't work at the same company.

This can be minimized by only allowing a corporate e-mail address to be used once, but that does mean keeping lists of which users in a given company happen to have accounts, even if a direct email-to-account link doesn't exist. (It seems pointless to hash the "already used" emails for privacy, since the search space is so small.)

One could probably use some crypto to not even require any "we're not recording that", e.g. let the user use a ring signature (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature) which could have been produced by any of the people registering a work address.

You should probably put in some extra work to make sure that people really are anonymous, e.g. you could make the Blind server a Tor hidden service, forcing people to connect to it using Tor and therefore not revealing their IP address. Basically making sure that Blind is not even accidentally exposed to any personally identifiable information.

Neat, I hadn't heard of ring signatures before -- but unfortunately it sounds like it involves (A) a predefined and fixed set of users and (B) all of them already having public keys.

If so, then you can't really use a ring-per-company, because you'd first need an authoritative list of all current employees (whether they have an account or not) and their public keys, and you can't easily add (or drop) employees without creating a new ring.

I was thinking, each time you register a company email you would get a reply with a list of all the public keys from people who registered with the same email domain. It would mean that the first few people to sign up would have a small anonymity set---but they could wait a bit, and then send another email and get an updated list of the public keys of people who have registered since then. As long as you wait until (say) 100 people have signed up, you'd still have some cover.

Couldn't they issue some blindable certificates (it's in the name!) that attest that someone belongs to an org without being able to trace it back to a specific email?

OK, but that's not "completely anonymous".

Maybe it'd be OK if they had a way to authenticate without retaining any record of the mapping. And could prove it, somehow. But otherwise it's bullshit.

I mean, the Tor Project is very careful not to claim that Tor is "completely anonymous".

Here in India we have an app Hush[0] (not sure if it's widely used outside India).

They claimed they used to decide what company you worked for based on your "office network information". Anyway the quality of conversation was as bad as it gets even from a trolling and gossip forum standards. Now they have moved to collecting professional email address to verify and they still say it's "anonymous". The quality of conversation hasn't changed, definitely not for better. This kind of anonymity is one hack, or acquisition, or legal request away from going for a toss.

[0] http://thehushapp.com

Not just that, it has the same issues that Secret had, at least for smaller companies - you can just create a bunch of fake accounts and invite a single person you know, then have the fake accounts post some stuff to make it look like there are a lot of users, then hear what the individual says.

In addition there are two other pretty big holes. The first is the LinkedIn versification (where anyone can claim to be part of any org) and the second involves ways of receiving mail sent from the domain that is sent to non-employees (e.g. via a helpdesk ticket - a common attack against slack and other services that use domain name as a security identifier).

I like Blind, but I also hate Blind. It's full of excessively cynical replies and people who like to troll each other. I have found lots of great advice, yet still come away feeling really annoyed or frustrated.

To contrast the character, Reddit comments are usually full of jokesters who make me laugh, and Blind takes itself way too seriously. Sometimes humor and lightheartedness go a long way to building a powerful social network platform.

Is there a recommendation system within Blind? It seems it would be the obvious solution to remove 'undesired content' to the user..

You can block users so you never see their posts/comments which might work.

Blind is the quintessential “I feel worse after opening it” app for me. The self and company loathing is pretty incredible and I would hope many of the extremely negative posters find greener grass elsewhere.

So you're saying it's "'Nextdoor' for work"?

I signed up for this a few years ago when I was working for a larger company. It was full of people using the anonymity to be very petty. I deleted my account without posting anything.

This still happens for sure, in the form of the mentioned "bro talk" and unbearable clique-type memes, but it is now augmented with many more useful posts.

same. their traffic probably explode during a large corp layoff, and completely dies on the next week.

Which is ironic, because now lay'd of people will be "verified" on the old company email (and hearing all the grapevine pettiness about internal projects) while working for the competition.

This has been my experience. Most posts I see criticize a team, product, or person (usually an executive) — and it's often clear they have very little context / criticism is usually directed from one part of the org to another.

I found Blind a pretty good social network for the niche. I got a useful info on industry salaries and interview prep from the general section. The company I work for had a section that was pretty negative and I think doesn't reflect the overall thought of employees but still had great info regarding salary data and promotions. Along w/ entertaining (albeit hard to verify) rumors.

How do they guarantee the anonymity? Is it only because the promise it? If we look at criticism against Proton Mail / Lava Bit you have the same problem that they will only be private if they can be kept honest? See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8755492

Also, how do they expect to monetize this? Selling users data that is anonymized?

It's the yik-yak for the corporate world; an absolute cesspool. Whatever valuable information exists on that platform isn't worth sifting through all the toxicity, as some others here have alluded to. I installed it and deleted it forever within 45 mins. Don't do it to yourself, folks.

I checked Blind and total compensation info is pretty much in the right ballpark (for my company and my partner's company). This must be a nightmare for HR, who wants to hide that data as much as possible.

If Blind's TC information is accurate, I am criminally underpaid.

Right?? Apparently everyone on blind is making $400k TC with four years of experience.

They’re buying those $1.2m houses somehow; making 1/3rd the median price is a pretty tame explanation.

It is accurate

I think it's accurate for people who get competing offers and negotiate.

Considering my last job search resulted in most companies disqualifying themselves because they couldn't hit my very modest (per Blind) floor of $225k TC in NYC (16 YOE total, 10YOE SW). I feel like there are only three or four companies with highly competitive entry that could hit the numbers Blinders seem to think is normal.

In my previous job searches I've noted that many startups are valuing their equity extremely high and trying to pay less cash instead. As a made up example to illustrated they may offer $120k cash, but give you a ton of options they claim are worth $200k per year.

In a real case I had a recruiter tell me they were "getting me" $60k a year in options, which in reality has been more like $10k. I like https://tldroptions.io/ to reality check the equity portions.

There are like a dozen or so top companies that pay the top TC. This list is roughly accurate, though I question some of those being tier 1 (Jet, Splunk, Oracle, and Quora at the least seem to be off): https://www.teamblind.com/article/Compensation-Tiers-of-Comp...

It's certainly true though that you can't get the kinds of top compensation numbers you see on Blind if you aren't good enough at Leetcode questions (and systems design questions) to get offers from multiple top companies.

levels.fyi is also pretty good for TC, and they’ve got a great breakdown

Check out http://levels.fyi for TC info too

echoing the two people above me, levels.fyi is sick for comp data + great viz

The lack of a strong karma system on Blind(the "likes" are a pretty casual form) makes the advice so good there. With karma, you write for the entire audience to gather points. Without karma, you write to a person. Also the lack of political correctness makes for outstanding real world applicability. I've done a similar comparison with asking about cycling on bikeforums.net vs Reddit. bikeforums responses were far more informative and open minded and diverse, most of all specific to me.

It's easy to get banned. People use the report button to wage war on posters that they don't agree with. That's not better than a karma system.

I started two of the most popular threads on Blind and was banned for life. I contacted their support and the response was one word, "DENIED." Great people over there.

Curious what the topic was that got all the flags

I was going to post it, but now we have a troll in the comment thread.

Yes, this is something I forgot to mention. It's one of the absolute worst parts of Blind that needs to be fixed: any amount of users can simply flag posts and users to delete their posts from the community, and in your case, get banned.

> I started two of the most popular threads on Blind and was banned for life

Knowing what gets popular on Blind, I have a feeling that these topics were intentionally inflammatory and probably deserved a ban. Feel free to prove me wrong.

I don't have anything to prove. Continue posting your feelings if you like.

"and the US Navy coming online recently."

What could go wrong?

Certainly an app that helps rebalance the information-asymmetry between employers and workers is welcome, but I think it could be quite open to abuse when it comes to national security. Are the CIA and FBI going to join? Will we see the development of cyber 'sentiment/morale bombs'?

Who owns Blind? Where are they based? Sounds like a great way to mine insider info from tech companies naive employees.

Some koreans

I still don’t really get why these companies that have absolutely no specific regional relevance are limited to sign up from two countries. Is there a problem with someone from say Germany, working for a German company signing up?

I'm gonna guess it's because of increasingly region-specific regulations about the internet. GDPR being the most recent big example.

It might have to be with i18n and load (and bill) on infrastructure too!!! You don't want to pay too much too soon... at least not until there's a sufficiently validated product/market fit and there's a strong business model generating some cash. For what I've seen, it's free for now and I'm not sure that companies can be a good target for selling informations: it would be a hard sell to the content-producer (common users) and to the so-called awfull HR. So I guess that they're just test-driving in "local" markets (Silicon Valley & S.Korea) to validate the business model without too much technical hassles

I've heard of Blind but I'm too chicken to give them my work email address. Can anyone on HN testify to having done this? If so, aren't you concerned that your employers can see you're using Blind?

I believe their current model only really works if more than one (or a few people) at your company are using Blind. At that point it becomes difficult to map Blind users to employees. In any case, simply being a user of it shouldn't be an issue, and if it is, perhaps you really should look for work elsewhere anyway.

There is a minimum user limit. I tried to join at my last place of work but you need 35 people to join.

Blind is approved by my CEO. Your employer shouldn't discourage you from being on Blind.

I had never heard of Blind til now, from what I read in this thread it seems like a workplace Ashley Madison waiting to happen.

Let everyone vent about their employer anonymously until there is a breach and all employers get to see who said what.

Overall, they seem to censor attack with PII so they want to avoid any kind of scandal. Some posts I’ve seen are fairly transparent, but as long as you don’t pile on, I can’t imagine management would have a real problem with you wanting to know about gossip.

If I had access to senior management, I would probably escalade the attacks that I read about are likely issues: communication, priorities, empathy, etc. I actually do that quite a lot with my own manager: “last meeting, you really said hurtful things, and I spent 20 minutes calming people down”; he’s quite astute and it has helped him know when, who and with whom to be more empathic and supportive.

Yeah seems fine. Sure they have a database that can track you but you can change your name in the app daily so only your org stays the same if you want. Don't break any NDA (salary cannot be covered by NDA legally in US) and why worry.

I like the idea of the service. But I am having a hard time trusting it. It does require a verified work email address, which seems logical, else how would they know who works where. My worry is the chink in the armor that allows for abuse or exploit. You would be anonymous today, and not so much tomorrow.

Seems to be active only in US and South Korea. Any reason for this?

I love it! This same idea has occurred to me but I didn't realize somebody already did it.

i.e. yik yak, but centered around employer and not location?

Correct.

"With Blind, users are completely anonymous, but are required to submit a verified work email to join a company channel."

That sentence seems to contradict itself.

I just download Blind for iOS, denied it the ability to send me notifications and it just crashes on launch. Does that happen to anyone else?

Are Blind conversations still indexed by Google?

wow, i thought about making exactly this a while ago, so glad someone did it ! haven't been this excited in weeks.

Microsoft has 124,000 employees. You're telling me one in three are on Blind? Yea right.

Do you use Blind? You'd be surprised. Especially how it works at companies that big - aka network effects.

I believe it.

Blind does nothing to revoke accounts. I still have one for a former employer and interesting to see how much internal baseball is available on blind.

>It has over 2 million users, including 43K at Microsoft, 28K at Amazon, and 10K at Google. In

It's remarkable how unhappy the people at Amazon on Blind are.

Literally everyone is just leetcoding to get out or bragging about getting in early enough to make a killing on the stock surge.

I just browsed through it and there's a ton of Amazon workers bragging about how hot they are and how much money they make, how girls in Seattle won't suffice because the "attractive ones aren't well educated", masturbation, "dealing with dumb people".

Seems like a tech bro nightmare.

Lots of 'Crying at my desk' posts by Amazonians

Why are they crying? Could you link to a post? They still publish threads on their webpage, right?

https://www.teamblind.com/article/Why-shouldnt-I-go-to-Amazo...

https://www.teamblind.com/article/Amazon-Culture-V5mEefBn

>Seems like a tech bro nightmare.

This precisely summarizes my reaction to Blind each time I’ve decided to log in over the year or so I’ve had an account.

Are we reading the same Blind

Most of them are Indians mad that they can’t get laid (typical for Seattle and Amazon-tier Indians).

I wonder if the Indians at Google Fremont have that problem..

Quoted from Blind:

>As a male engineer I look down on you f%%ks that wear the same s%%t everyday, you are the s%%theads that premature optimize a code and add tons of complexity to save unneeded CPU cycles. Bet you wear the same boxers for days without washing in the name of efficiency.

It's pretty much 4chan for tech bros, but it does seem to be quite diverse tech bros, yes.

Are you suggesting it's status? Google engineers do better in the dating market?

They also seem more attractive and less self loathing. I’d wager they do.

Why the obsession with the big tech companies?

Because they are clearly superior humans than me.

Why do you need to be the best?

The key is to just laugh it off and consider it trolling, jokes, whatever. Most of it is but there's useful info there also and people who feel oppressed by the SJW movement at work let off the steam in a safe space (how ironic).

Lol opinions like those deserve to be oppressed. What a cesspool.

God forbid people address an issue directly. I accidentally upset a coworker by a comment I made, we had lunch and it was addressed. I realized why it bothered the person, we hugged and moved on and have a good working relationship.

Blind just sounds plain stupid and a terrible idea for work place culture.

>hugged

Oh jeez I hope you didn’t create a new issue

It's hard to describe the context of the situation but it was more of a funny moment. We hashed something out as adults.

Super interesting.

very interesting.

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