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Comment by zangief | Hacker News Reader

This thing will be a victim of its own success. If it ever takes off, it will be blacklisted by every web-content filtering program. If gmail and vault.com are blocked, you'd better believe this will be, too.

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They thought of this. In that case people will use it from home. And if they're working for the kind of company that would block Overhear.Us, then there will probably be a lot they need to talk about.

People are lazy. And people at big companies, where web-blocking software is routinely deployed, are especially lazy. Standard Bayes.

Vault.com, despite not having nearly as nice a site as overhear.us, had reams of traffic and posts about individual employers, until it got blacklisted.

I can imagine this site having a good following with companies that are not strict about the web-filtering list [which I abhor, btw].

However, those companies are not likely to be large because large companies have burdensome regulations [SEC in financial industry, HIPAA in healthcare industry, SarbOx for all public companies] that generally require (or imply that) employee communication and web usage should be monitored.

And large companies are the interesting ones for overhear.us, because they have the most interesting networks and stories!

And also provide the least chance of getting caught. Yeah, I know it's anonymous, but at a small company "anonymous" doesn't mean much. It's not hard to figure out who's dissatisfied, who's the gossip queen/king, or even figure things out just by the way someone writes.

Management at big companies is good at beating the ambition out of their employees.

I hardly think Gmail can be called a victim. Blocked? Use it elsewhere -- gossip doesn't run dry outside the workplace.

and gmail is hardly a success at all.

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