Thank you.
Something I was thinking about last night regarding what @Syphus and @jprspereira said about the Hello Talk guidelines/users being sorted by over/under 18. Was your guys’ idea for a way to reinstate (but regulate) a messaging system or just for the forums in general. The latter I would be more against because I think a lot of our most helpful people on the learning side are going to be over 18. I think forcing users under 18 to lose those learning opportunities would be a bummer. I know zero about Hello Talk, though, so I wasn’t sure specifically what you guys were talking about.
I certainly don’t see any problem with having a reminder like that as part of accessing the forums. The wording you suggested is also fairly snappy and informative.
My concern, though, and the reason for mentioning scanning PM text itself, is that “Do not disclose private information with anyone.” is something we’ve all read dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands of times. But a message seen weeks or months before may not help when someone seeking to manipulate has established just enough trust to start breaking down the defenses we expect most people to have against strangers making advances.
If a banner appeared on the PM screen itself, and only when contextually relevant, it would break routine, disrupt expectations, and hopefully trigger enough of a reaction from the user to make them read what it has to say and apply that message to the context they’re currently in.
For the vast majority of us, it would never happen and everything would be transparent and happy and good. For some, there would be false-positives and, well, it’s an algorithmic evaluation; they’d likely just shrug it off and no harm done. But for those who are at risk, it might be an alarm at just the right point in time.
Now, of course, this would have to be a Discourse feature, not something the WK team would implement themselves (and not something that should be implemented in isolation, since patterns and tech names and stuff will evolve rapidly), but it might be sufficiently beneficial as a concept to be put forth as an upstream feature-request by someone more familiar with Discourse’s internals.
Honestly, it’s not the different opinion that annoyed me. It’s that elise is clearly taking some of this stuff personally, so lines like “Don’t be an idiot about what you put on the internet” and similar lines just really make me see red. It’s unnecessary to be that condescending. And the joke about being the victim of a headache was frustrating, it seemed to be trivializing the situation. My response was out of line, but it wasn’t just “I disagree with you so I’m going to insult you”.
I say this not to justify my initial response, but more just to shine a light on how tricky talking about this stuff in a civil manner can be.
OSad’s last post was much more agreeable, however. A lot of his practical advice is genuinely solid. If we can keep that positive tone I think things will be better all around.
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I don’t disagree with the intention here, but similar to what @fl0rm said, as an app developer, I know that users just don’t read what is in front of them, and even if you do, the major don’t. We’re too impatient and want to get to the good stuff.
While I have never used PM’s, I’ll add my thoughts…
- Under 18’s cannot use PMs.
- For everyone else, PMs are opt-in.
Personally (and it’s okay to disagree) I don’t think the PMs should be disabled completely. If your are an adult you are your own responsibility, not WaniKani’s (or any other company or service you use). There should always be the necessary resources provided to help users in need, but I just don’t think disabling features for all user is the right solution. Conversely, I think we should do what is necessary to help protect younger users, hence why I think disabling PM’s for under 18’s is fair. I was a dumb impulsive child once, and I needed someone else to stop me from making stupid mistakes (which I did anyway, because you can’t stop stupid). But now I am an adult and I don’t want someone else taking features away from me because I (think I) know how to keep myself safe online.
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I’m not really hot on the idea of scanning PMs for specific words or patterns. At that point I imagine a server admin has access to the content of your PMs and then they’re not really Private Messages anymore (which is why I think apps like Discord have started naming them Direct Messages instead, to avoid having to use the word private). I am not a server programmer and I know nothing of backends, but this is where we have to disagree, this is where you’d have to get extremely technical with me to satisfy my concerns (which would be a chore for all parties involved), so this is where I personally draw the line.
The banner thing is fine, something that reminds people every time they could potentially mess up is good.
I’d hope it would just be for private conversations, since the general consensus here seems to be that this is a constructive, supportive place and we don’t have bad actors doing nefarious things in the open, just that the back channels are subject to abuse, as we’ve seen.
But I’m also not sure I’d want to, or even really care to, know the ages of those I’d contact via PMs, because I wouldn’t want it changing the tone of what I have to say. I can’t speak for anyone else, but the only times I’ve sent PMs were when I noticed something in a post that seemed like a potential source of embarrassment for the poster (outside of the normal process of peer-supported language-learning) and didn’t want to call attention to it unnecessarily when suggesting that they may want to make a revision.
For everything else, I’m content to subject everything I’d write to public scrutiny and wouldn’t want it any other way.
I’m also on the older side of the demographic, at 33.
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Well, if you don’t like the vocabulary I sometimes use when I talk about an issue, sorry, that’s just how I’m like. You certainly don’t have to assume I’m being condescending to you or anybody else, I’m not throwing insults at anybody in particular and I’m talking to you all on the same level and same platform you all are on. If someone breaks down to simply insulting people and saying they’re wrong, they’ve lost the argument so I have a strict policy of keeping it in check as much as possible.
At some point though, you have to consider that to talk about the underrepresented side of a potentially controversial issue, you have to risk offending a few people to get the conversation rolling. This is obviously not always the case, but if bystanders are afraid to jump in because they’re afraid to offend someone on something, nothing would ever get done anywhere, because only one set of people would get their words out.
In general, unless something is advertised as being end-to-end encrypted (and even then, it depends on the architecture used, whether the devices on both sides control the keys, and where the data is stored), it should be assumed that the text is sitting in an accessible form on some server, and Discourse’s private messaging is no different: it wouldn’t be possible to access it by logging in from any computer if it weren’t.
The only privacy you can assume is that the admins (or maybe mods) won’t go out of their way to peer into your conversations, but even that comes down to ethical conformity, most often by design.
One of the reasons LINE has come up repeatedly is that it allows for end-to-end encryption without persistent conversation storage and has some strong safeguards against unauthorised access in the case that you deauth a device. It’s an easy sell to many people, too, since it’s big in Japanese and otaku youth culture and its stickers and themes can be used as a compelling reason for people to use the platform for well-intentioned interactions with their friends instead of something like Google Hangouts.
Excuse me sir/ma’am or whatever you’d like to call yourself. I never said that I didn’t go to the authorities. And if I did, why the hell would I put that out there? It would compromise the hypothetical investigation.
Also, you have no damn right to blame me like that. Okay? I’m assuming that you’ve never been groomed before. He got into my head and twisted and manipulated me. He was obviously very good at what he was doing, and I don’t need to take crap from someone who doesn’t know the whole situation.
I have a good head on my shoulders for a 16 year old, or so I thought. Kids are stupid. I am one, and I know that! Your brain doesn’t fully develop until the mid 20’s, and I was 15. Especially the decision making part. Yes, it was partly my fault, but that does not excuse the adult predature/pedo at work here.
Thank you, and good night. Or whatever
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The PM’s have always been visible by Admins if they so desired. There was never any need because no one flagged.
I for one am positive towards the scanning of PM’s. This is still a language learning tool and if it can’t stand the test of being seen my a moderator it shouldn’t actually be said here. But that is just my opinion :). If you want to share a personal story that is also fine. I mean the admin’s arent going to use the thing you shared.
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In fact, I think when they enabled them, they were explicit that they would read PMs if necessary and they were not to be treated as private.
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This goes against the principle of the thing. PMs are meant to be private. If these are not hashed in any way then the implementation of that particular website is fundamentally wrong.
You may be thinking “But then incidents like this happen!”. Well, turns out they happened anyway, admins can’t possibly keep track of all PMs of an active forum at once (but again, they have access, that’s the fundamental problem), and at some point you have to assume the best of the userbase that’s paying you to use your service. If Koichi or Viet are reading into my deep intimate and shameful pineapple pizza addiction conversations I’m having with friends, or where I’m gonna meet up with other fellow pineapple pizza enthusiasts to have a pineapple pizza tabehoudai, that’s just creepy and they should really stop.
Edit: the point is, is that I imagine nobody likes to have their private conversations read into. Think of how upset you would be if a person you considered a friend you could trust would unlock your phone and read your private conversations. This is the exact same idea.
Dayamn, you’re durtverted 
If they bring the functionality back, they should indeed call them DM’s.
They are not totally private, nor should they be.
The incident happened because the person in question did not think it was a wise choice to flag the sender because of possible reprecussions.
And maybe… this isn’t to place to share about your pineapple pizza addiction or to find people to meet up to talk about them.
So you just made my point. Sort off. I would be willing to make a compromise. I would like DM’s back… I do not want anything like this to happen again. I would like DM’s to be scanned for specific keywords and to check a message out if it was flagged.
Also… your phone analogy is bogus. I keep conversations with my partner and family on there. DM’s I would send here are to strangers that might develop into friends.
Also… if I would do something that is against all moral and decorum I would want my friend to call me out on my totally bad behavior. Ofcourse it would be a violation but appareantly I need to be kept in check :).
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Well, yes, and that’s what happened here: WK’s admins almost certainly ARE being very respectful and not reading into your rather poor taste in pizza. Without someone calling attention to your conversation (by explicitly flagging it), they’re content to let “private” be private by policy (or just because they’ve got other things to do).
The technical point is that, much as with any EULA, your rights as a user are not necessarily what you think they are. “private message” may be a misnomer, but now you know that, on the Internet, it very rarely means what it sounds like it should mean.
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hey now 
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He is right. Fruit should not be on pizza! Only in the form of sauce.
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I stand by my ad hominems when it comes to pizza.
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