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Comment by sinak | Hacker News Reader

Eric Mill's excellent post about Slack's new arbitration clause was just merged into this thread by the moderators. Here is the URL:

https://konklone.com/post/slack-is-now-forcing-users-into-ar...

The post is titled "Slack is now forcing users into arbitration and that is terrible." I highly recommend reading it, as there's no mention of the arbitration ToS change in Slack's own blog post.

Edit: Also worth reading the ongoing conversation between Stewart Butterfield (Slack CEO) and Konklone on Twitter: https://twitter.com/stewart/status/536975596920635393

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There is a cluster of related stories here. Many users seem to feel that the konklone.com post is the best representative of the set, so we changed to that from http://slackhq.com/post/103473448150/slacks-policy-update, and gave it a neutral title.

We're working on a system for grouping related stories together, but don't know yet when it will be ready. In the meantime, we merge threads manually, and you have to fish through the comments looking for context (like what the previous url was, why it was changed, and so on). That's not great, but see the first sentence of this paragraph.

There were a couple of borderline calls here: first, whether there are two significant stories that deserve to be on the front page, or just one (I'd argue just one, but it's not obvious); second, which of the two urls should be on the front page. Initially we chose the one that had been submitted earlier and had the larger discussion. Based on user feedback, we've flipped to the other.

I'm marking this subthread off-topic now, so it doesn't stay at the top and make the thread be about HN story merging policy.

I think it's worth saying that I appreciate when you give the community greater insight into the decisions you guys make. I know sometimes it's a hard judgement call, due to the risk of fueling an endless argument. I often have to make this call myself, and usually err on the side of leaving out the details. So I appreciate it when details are provided when most, like myself, would opt to leave them out.

Anyway, I thought this might be an encouraging word for whenever you have to face this choice again in the future.

That is indeed encouraging, and I appreciate your taking the time to post it.

Wow, I can't believe these were merged... one is talking about flaws in an arbitration clause and the other is a press release from the company... and they choose the fluff press release.

It makes these comments not make sense, and buries the real issue.

I agree, but the appropriate route is to email hn@ycombinator.com with this sort of feedback.

Contacting the team is great & should happen, but declining to post feedback on an affected thread would be unfortunate for everyone involved.

Context is key in any discussion. Let the voting system sort it out :)

OP here. Two things happened today. Slack adopted new terms of service with a binding arbitration clause, which they linked from this press release. They also announced a new feature, Compliance Export - which allows team owners to inspect direct and private chats under certain circumstances. The blog post talks about that too.

In my opinion, both are pretty serious and not fluff. I'd still advise digging deeper if you're a Slack user.

Update: wow, someone changed both the title and url to point to the konklone article. I originally intended to primarily talk about the privacy implications of Compliance Export. Oh well.

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