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[cw:online harassment]
I've never really talked openly about the end of TodaysMeet. I told the truth at the time—changing regulations—but not the whole truth. But, fuck it. (Here is a long, rambly, self-indulgent thread.)
I've never really talked openly about the end of TodaysMeet. I told the truth at the time—changing regulations—but not the whole truth. But, fuck it. (Here is a long, rambly, self-indulgent thread.)
I'm not going to sell TodaysMeet. I thought I might at the time, so I focused on the regulatory and compliance part, the things that a team, and lawyers, might be able to solve.
But the other part was that I was no longer convinced it was a good thing to have in the world. In fact I had become convinced that it was not.
TodaysMeet was a chat platform designed to have the lowest possible barrier to entry, to enable ad-hoc use by people without a lot of the affordances or skills we typically assume of users. Literally, it was designed to be used by 8-year-olds—and it was!
So, no assuming email addresses, no requirement for account creation, no hurdles to engagement. I was even worried when the lawyers I did work with insisted that I had to have a "I agree to the T&C" checkbox, because it was 50% more things you had to do to chat
And I had a privileged naïveté about what that was going to mean.
Over the years I got probably a dozen reports of extreme harassment. Things where the police got involved. One time it was Australian federal police, because it was ~*international*~. If this is what got reported, I can only imagine what went unreported.
[cw:harassment, rape, threats]
The ones I saw, the ones were someone called the cops, were usually rape threats. They were vicious, horrible, pointless threats, designed to do nothing but intimidate and silence a classmate.
The ones I saw, the ones were someone called the cops, were usually rape threats. They were vicious, horrible, pointless threats, designed to do nothing but intimidate and silence a classmate.
There were lots of others where school administrators got involved but didn't call law enforcement. Less extreme examples but still bullying, harassment, circumvention of what few moderator tools were possible.
In 2014, I took some time to under-employ myself and make TodaysMeet pay for itself. I added (optional) accounts, which were really just a precursor to enabling some moderation tools and paid subscriptions.
That was in the middle of the most rapid growth it experienced. Most of the reports I got were after 2014, just because usage went up. At that point I was making money of this platform.
Eventually, I had other jobs, I had less time to spend improving TodaysMeet. At some point, most of the time I spent on it was customer service, split between canceling subscriptions for people who couldn't find the UI to do it, and dealing with these reports.
It was a font of human misery, it was terrible.
But so many people loved it! I got so many messages from teachers saying how it helped their students. Especially ESL students, because the short message format encouraged fast, typo-laden conversations, anyway.
In its best months, TodaysMeet had around half a million users. Even in the decline towards the end, a quarter million was an extremely bad month. That's helping so many people, right?
I told myself that. And I liked the extra money. It was never a ton, but at its peak it maybe added 20% to my income.
But TodaysMeet was built to be anonymous, to work without accounts—or accountability—and it enabled the worst in people. I had to build a system to ban room names because if someone closed a room, the harassers would open a new one with the same name.
Outside of the few hard-coded, reserved names, bans had to have expiration dates. That was fine, since even interrupting the pattern for an hour was usually enough to stop that particular instance of it.
[cw: online harassment, nazis]
The default ban length was, I think, 24 hours. There was only one I remember that I'd set to expire in 2050: the unicode swastika. In retrospect, there were a bunch of others that should have had permabans.
The default ban length was, I think, 24 hours. There was only one I remember that I'd set to expire in 2050: the unicode swastika. In retrospect, there were a bunch of others that should have had permabans.
Toward the end I struggled a lot with it. I contemplated adding much-requested features like file sharing, but that was just going to make the harassment problem worse (plus who knows what else). (No, I know what else, and no.)
In the end, I shut it down. I looked half-heartedly for a buyer, and I talked to a couple of interested folks. But it was not a good thing.
TodaysMeet was designed by young me—young white, male, cis, hetero me. It was fundamentally not designed with the tools to handle deliberate misuse—aka abuse—and that's what happened. I like to think I have learned a lot and would not build that again.
I think TodaysMeet did a lot good, it certainly got a lot of love from teachers. It still gets traffic—a thing that tugs on my heartstrings. But I don't think it was worth it, in the end. And that's the major part of why I shut it down that I've never shared.
There's a lesson here: how a tool is used, and misused, is the responsibility of the creators and maintainers. If you're in tech, if you have a platform that enables users to interact, that means you.
I learned it the easy way, because I was not the target. Fuck, I got paid to learn it, which is karmically some bullshit. I'm thankful I got to learn it and I'm sorry it took me as long as it did.
