Slack Says Letting Anyone Message Anyone with Few Limits Was ‘A Mistake’
vice.com
vice.com
Spam should be really obvious: if you build a messaging medium, people will use it to send spam. It's also going to be used for harassment and other unsavory things. These aren't novel. We've seen them time after time.
There's no one solution to the problem. There are lots of approaches, with pros and cons. But it's long past the time for people to start thinking about them before they roll this out, not after. If you provide communications between people, then the way people behave will affect your customers. These things are people problems, not just technical ones, and failing to take that into account is going to cost you.
The other day, I saw someone’s pitch for an auction website where users’ home address was publicly available by default. They didn’t see anything wrong with that. Big yikes.
I’m not disagreeing with the premise that people should be more aware, just explaining how I’ve seen it happen. People excited about bringing a cool thing to market often don’t have an answer to the question, “but what if a bad actor decides to use it for nefarious purposes?”