[seamanrob]

As I said in another reply, I cannot guarantee something like this won't ever happen again. We're fallible for sure. But I can guarantee we'll keep trying and improving.

This was the result of an oversight in our billing process, and we are returning Hack Club to its previous nonprofit pricing while we work with them directly to ensure their workspace remains fully accessible. We will be reviewing and modifying as necessary our billing and communications processes to provide nonprofits clearer guidance and adequate grace periods as they grow.

[tobr]

I can see how the bill itself was a mistake, but the real scary thing to me is the timeline. Seven days from action required to deletion of all your data isn’t reasonable under any circumstances.

[scinadier]

Let's be real, when an entity like Slack says "delete all your data," they actually mean they will add a flag in the database to make it inaccessible to those who aren't purchasing bulk data for data mining and llm training. The data will persist regardless.

[electroglyph]

yup, agreed. this is a super shady pressure tactic that should be shamed.

[arolihas]

So what exactly was the oversight here? Is it normal practice to change contracts and billing plans and threaten deactivation within 7 days?

[sandworm101]

Nah, this was one of those evil customer service reps who will do anything to make thier employer look bad. No corporation would ever leverage data custody to extract a quick balloon paymemt. Devilish customer service reps reading from false scripts are the real problem.

[yallpendantools]

Hey. I think we all accept that all companies are inevitably fallible. What companies can be consistently good at---but very few take the effort to excel at sadly---is customer support communication. Honestly, reading TFA, it's still conceivable that putting Hack Club in the wrong pricing tier was an honest error on your part, but the communication was horrible to say the least. As others already pointed out, seven days to pay-up or your data goes poof sounds more like ransomware than a company trying to meet a customer half way.

And ofc, it has C-level attention now because it blew up on HN. Sorry but this screams damage limitation. For every Hack Club, you wonder which other non-profits suffered this "mistake" but didn't have the social media reach to get C-level treatment.

(Speaking as someone who spent this week being gaslit by Amazon and Google support. :mad: )

[itissid]

A postmortem — software bug fix please. 1. Why did this happen? 2. What was the root cause in billing that caused this? 3. What are you doing to fix the issue that will ensure that if this error was to happen it escalated to the right medium expediently? What is the SLA on disputes?

One would like to know why were https://slack.com/help/articles/204368833-Apply-for-the-Slac... changes not applied to billing this time around?

With great power comes great responsibility.

[ineedasername]

@solarkraft: This response you got from Rob is why its important not to treat this sort of outreach as if it's being made in good faith when it clearly is not. It is precisely what Rob and the crisis communication team he's working with hopes for.

Let's walk through what's going on a little more clinically in this response from Rob that was shaped like an answer:

Rob's comment looks like a good response, but only in form. Structurally it mimics apology in syntax but the batteries are missing. He starts with something a little self-effacing, a little "ownership", to bring down dehumanizing walls. All fine, if you're sincere. But Rob didn't choose to respond to a direct question and there were plenty. If he had, the mismatch between his words and the reality where his use of "oversight" did itself elide over a phone call demanding $50k in five days... that would sound absurd. By replying where he did, he gets the appearance of substance without risking contradiction when he's a no-show on any followups after this.

For crisis communication, getting a question for Rob to respond to like this works better actually than getting incoherent rage. That would be easy to dismiss as "unwilling to engage in discourse". But a comment like this can be answered harmlessly precisely because the commenter is looking to have a discourse, and socially acceptable discursive pragmatics don't require an immediate and comprehensive answer. The established pragmatics allow for a response like Rob's without seeming immediately absurd. As a result, he can be the more grounded human personality, less distant than even a sincere CEO of a multi-billion corporation would look, and soak up blame without conceding anything or answering any questions.

That's Rob's role here, to be the face to blame. This is hugely important in a crisis like this where the situation was highly avoidable and the damage is reputational. Blame. Not to be accountable: that is different than blame, though they overlap and get confused. Blame is hard to do in either direction without a specific face, and so we have Rob. Rob is the blame face. Not the architect of the policy, not the one who made the phone call, but the human buffer that makes Slack look responsive without putting someone in the firing line.

It's worth watching for this dynamic in other crises. Even if a CEO does hang out for more than the single copy-paste in the comments that Slack's did, it isn't proof of sincerity, but its absence sure does say the reverse.

The problem is that PR has learned how to simulate sincerity since the literal SCCT Theory playbook of the '90s. Unfortunately the the lesson learned wasn’t "do better" it was "signal better". But hope springs eternal, here's a paper & data set that could be part of the foundation, a a small bit of RLHF, of a state of the art corporate BS detector. It's interesting reading either way: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03638...