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[cw:online harassment]
I& #39;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& #39;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& #39;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& #39;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& #39;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& #39;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& #39;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& #39;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& #39;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& #39;t think it was worth it, in the end. And that& #39;s the major part of why I shut it down that I& #39;ve never shared.
