https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/07/a-natural-history-of-trust-safety/
"
In the beginning, there were harms.
No, not yet. First, there’s an idea, a product, a company. You’ve made an app
where people can express themselves in some way (text, images, videos,
something else, some combo of them…) and with some ingenious and distinctive
features (everything is ephemeral… or permanent … or upside down … or run
through a filter … you get the idea). Congratulations. You’ve raised some money
and are gardening the community and it grows. Maybe it’s big enough that
someone calls it a platform.
Much of the company is thinking about questions like these: How do we make the
product better? How do we make money? How do we tell more people we exist?
Then, without warning, come the complaints. They come in all shapes and sizes,
from all directions. Probably to an email address like, “
help@ourstartup.com”
or eventually, “
abuse@ourplatform.com.” They range from things that are fairly
simple and not too painful, like, “How do I log in?” or “Why is the ‘post’
button oval instead of rectangular, I think that’d be nice,” or “Why doesn’t
your app work on my Android phone from 2011?” or “Who are you and why are you
emailing me?” These are real problems, and there’s honor in solving them, but
they’re not Trust & Safety problems. The team that handles these kinds of
problems are usually called something like “user services” or “help desk.”
And then there are problems like, “Someone told my phone company they were me
and took control of my account, can I have it back, please?” or “I clicked on
an innocuous looking link and now my account is selling a cryptocurrency but I
don’t know what that is” or “I’m 16 years old but I found a line of code that
lets me destroy your entire site, can I have some money and I’ll tell you which
line.” The people who handle these problems are called something like
cybersecurity. These are also important problems.
We’re getting closer.
But then other grievances come in and they’re more like this: “My ex posted
naked photos of me from 8 years ago on your website, my children’s classmates
are turning them into dank memes, help” or “People are using your product to
share recipes for arsenic smoothies and I heard some kid drank one” or “one of
your power users posted my address and told everyone to not send pizzas to my
house and then 700 pizzas arrived at my house, along with a SWAT team, help.”
Many people, if emails like this regularly arrived in their inbox, would
quietly close the email tab and slowly back away from the computer. These
people are not cut out for Trust & Safety work. It’s best not to try and make
them."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
