
Blind: an anonymous, corporate social network - Sonnol53
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/11/blind-loyalty/
======
rc-1140
Blind is actually a cool, if at times strange, place. I've posted legitimate
requests for advice on here, Reddit, and Blind, and the quality of responses
were overwhelmingly in Blind's favor. Blind actually gave me real, if not
blunt/brief, feedback about what I could/should do for various situations I've
been in. Here and Reddit? The same tired old platitudes from well-meaning
people that make them feel like they're helping and making a difference, but
are in reality providing highly generic advice that could apply to just about
anyone at most skill levels and just showed that those who did respond skimmed
the title and nothing else.

Of course, there are in-jokes, people who take those in-jokes deathly serious,
people with mental instability (though that poster is actually taking a break
after receiving feedback, fortunately for them), people who lean waaay too
hard in one political direction or another, and other unsavory people and
topics. However, this atmosphere allows for some brutally honest questions
that would normally get shadowbanned/shoved somewhere else/otherwise
manipulated by others or people in discussion board positions of power. There
have been a few interesting relationship threads, a really good AMA about
someone who works in Japan (I wonder if it's Patrick McKenzie, the posts in
the thread were REALLY informative to the detail he's gone into before. I've
forwarded stuff he's written before to people I know who want to dream about
working over there), salary numbers, advice for H1Bs, people going through
rough times at work without having to reveal who they are without jackassing
around with a throwaway yet still having an identifiable company attached to
their username, and so on.

Dunno how long Blind will last for, but if you download the app and find you
really don't like the cons, just don't use it every waking moment.

~~~
StudentStuff
Currently, Mastodon is in a very similar state. I often have deep, insightful
conversations with interesting people, some of who are even local! Its like
Reddit circa 2008, but easier to find quality users to add to your feed.

~~~
rc-1140
Is Mastodon good now? I've never been able to have a conversation on Twitter
that isn't with people I already know, yet people apparently do; I don't know
how they do it. Mastodon has always seemed like an even bigger mess than
Twitter was with the same issues but it's "federated," as if that's supposed
to solve any actual issues.

~~~
TarpitCarnivore
With joinmastodon.org you can try to narrow in an instance that meets your
interests. I signed up for three to just explore which ones I wanted to be on.
One was Mastodon.social which is fairly large, and then two more niche ones.
Being able to explore the niche ones for their topics, but knowing I can hop
into federated or .social is kind of like utilizing lists.

I think all of this allows you for to more easily just throw a thought out
there and get some engagement since your smaller niche instances will have
less noise.

~~~
CapitalistCartr
mastodon.social is closed/invite only now. Do you know any way to join that
instance now?

------
bertil
I’ve seen several anonymous corporate networks before (three other full
implementation actually, all reach exploding point). The same four things
always pop-up, unless you ban one explicitly:

\- mental health; single-handedly justifying the existence of every instance.
The posts are boring overall: introversion, depression, burn-out, what to do
(and the well-meaning responses to go see a doctor and hopefully links to
internal references claiming the company will support you); it’s as exciting
as a waiting room, but it’s helpful. On that note, if you feel like something
is wrong and you are not sure: GO TALK TO A DOCTOR.

\- salary; kind of hard not to have it here, but anonymity takes off the
ability to tell people “Nah, you are incompetent, that’s what you deserve” so
it’s a little locked; I really like the idea that Blind turns it to a
conversation recommending LeetCode & co. because that’s an interesting,
objective exit from that conversation.

\- bitching about bad manager: I think that’s the best aspect of those, but
the tone can be very nasty and trollish. Unless you have great leadership who
can take it, own it and improve, not the best idea. With good leadership, it
can be staggering what feedback can accomplish.

\- internal in-fighting, notably around incompetence and team rivalry, Social
Justice, etc. Same as previous: good to take the temperature overall, but the
tone is structurally problematic, unless you have really good content
moderators. I'd recommend to limit some of that explicitly.

------
stryk
>> "With Blind, users are completely anonymous, but are required to submit a
verified work email to join a company channel."

That sentence doesn't make sense. How can it be "completely anonymous" but you
have to submit an e-mail address?

~~~
mcculley
I interpreted that as "completely anonymous to users". The owners/operators of
Blind have the mapping between pseudonyms and email addresses. These will not
be available to others until the inevitable data breach or exit (possibly to
one of the organizations whose employees use the service).

~~~
Terr_
One possible approach is to relax the gate-keeping guarantees, so that every
"wait for email and click the link in it" exchange allows the user to create
one new account which is _not_ scoped to their work-email address but simply
associated with the company-name. (Like almost all privacy, this requires some
basic "we're not recording that" choices by the social-media site.)

During the creation process, the user gets the _option_ to set a non-work
email for password-recovery etc.

The main risk of this scheme is that a single jdoe@acme.corp could easily
create a thousand sock-puppets or "give" new accounts to people who don't work
at the same company.

This can be minimized by only allowing a corporate e-mail address to be used
once, but that does mean keeping lists of which users in a given company
happen to _have_ accounts, even if a direct email-to-account link doesn't
exist. (It seems pointless to hash the "already used" emails for privacy,
since the search space is so small.)

~~~
vilhelm_s
One could probably use some crypto to not even require any "we're not
recording that", e.g. let the user use a ring signature
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature))
which could have been produced by any of the people registering a work
address.

You should probably put in some extra work to make sure that people really are
anonymous, e.g. you could make the Blind server a Tor hidden service, forcing
people to connect to it using Tor and therefore not revealing their IP
address. Basically making sure that Blind is not even accidentally exposed to
any personally identifiable information.

~~~
Terr_
Neat, I hadn't heard of ring signatures before -- but unfortunately it sounds
like it involves (A) a _predefined and fixed_ set of users and (B) all of them
already having public keys.

If so, then you can't really use a ring-per-company, because you'd first need
an authoritative list of all current employees (whether they have an account
or not) and their public keys, and you can't easily add (or drop) employees
without creating a new ring.

~~~
vilhelm_s
I was thinking, each time you register a company email you would get a reply
with a list of all the public keys from people who registered with the same
email domain. It would mean that the first few people to sign up would have a
small anonymity set---but they could wait a bit, and then send another email
and get an updated list of the public keys of people who have registered since
then. As long as you wait until (say) 100 people have signed up, you'd still
have some cover.

------
jarjoura
I like Blind, but I also hate Blind. It's full of excessively cynical replies
and people who like to troll each other. I have found lots of great advice,
yet still come away feeling really annoyed or frustrated.

To contrast the character, Reddit comments are usually full of jokesters who
make me laugh, and Blind takes itself way too seriously. Sometimes humor and
lightheartedness go a long way to building a powerful social network platform.

~~~
pfd1986
Is there a recommendation system within Blind? It seems it would be the
obvious solution to remove 'undesired content' to the user..

~~~
mrep
You can block users so you never see their posts/comments which might work.

------
yellow_postit
Blind is the quintessential “I feel worse after opening it” app for me. The
self and company loathing is pretty incredible and I would hope many of the
extremely negative posters find greener grass elsewhere.

~~~
retroafroman
So you're saying it's "'Nextdoor' for work"?

------
venantius
I signed up for this a few years ago when I was working for a larger company.
It was full of people using the anonymity to be very petty. I deleted my
account without posting anything.

~~~
austinl
This has been my experience. Most posts I see criticize a team, product, or
person (usually an executive) — and it's often clear they have very little
context / criticism is usually directed from one part of the org to another.

------
40acres
I found Blind a pretty good social network for the niche. I got a useful info
on industry salaries and interview prep from the general section. The company
I work for had a section that was pretty negative and I think doesn't reflect
the overall thought of employees but still had great info regarding salary
data and promotions. Along w/ entertaining (albeit hard to verify) rumors.

------
zitterbewegung
How do they guarantee the anonymity? Is it only because the promise it? If we
look at criticism against Proton Mail / Lava Bit you have the same problem
that they will only be private if they can be kept honest? See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8755492](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8755492)

Also, how do they expect to monetize this? Selling users data that is
anonymized?

------
yashevde
It's the yik-yak for the corporate world; an absolute cesspool. Whatever
valuable information exists on that platform isn't worth sifting through all
the toxicity, as some others here have alluded to. I installed it and deleted
it forever within 45 mins. Don't do it to yourself, folks.

------
RestlessMind
I checked Blind and total compensation info is pretty much in the right
ballpark (for my company and my partner's company). This must be a nightmare
for HR, who wants to hide that data as much as possible.

~~~
vonmoltke
If Blind's TC information is accurate, I am criminally underpaid.

~~~
hobls
Right?? Apparently everyone on blind is making $400k TC with four years of
experience.

~~~
closeparen
They’re buying those $1.2m houses somehow; making 1/3rd the median price is a
pretty tame explanation.

------
starpilot
The lack of a strong karma system on Blind(the "likes" are a pretty casual
form) makes the advice so good there. With karma, you write for the entire
audience to gather points. Without karma, you write to a person. Also the lack
of political correctness makes for outstanding real world applicability. I've
done a similar comparison with asking about cycling on bikeforums.net vs
Reddit. bikeforums responses were far more informative and open minded and
diverse, most of all specific to me.

~~~
atomical
It's easy to get banned. People use the report button to wage war on posters
that they don't agree with. That's not better than a karma system.

I started two of the most popular threads on Blind and was banned for life. I
contacted their support and the response was one word, "DENIED." Great people
over there.

~~~
seattle_spring
> I started two of the most popular threads on Blind and was banned for life

Knowing what gets popular on Blind, I have a feeling that these topics were
intentionally inflammatory and probably deserved a ban. Feel free to prove me
wrong.

~~~
atomical
I don't have anything to prove. Continue posting your feelings if you like.

------
jacknews
"and the US Navy coming online recently."

What could go wrong?

Certainly an app that helps rebalance the information-asymmetry between
employers and workers is welcome, but I think it could be quite open to abuse
when it comes to national security. Are the CIA and FBI going to join? Will we
see the development of cyber 'sentiment/morale bombs'?

------
dqpb
Who owns Blind? Where are they based? Sounds like a great way to mine insider
info from tech companies naive employees.

~~~
mesozoic
Some koreans

------
Aeolun
I still don’t really get why these companies that have absolutely no specific
regional relevance are limited to sign up from two countries. Is there a
problem with someone from say Germany, working for a German company signing
up?

~~~
olivierduval
It might have to be with i18n and load (and bill) on infrastructure too!!! You
don't want to pay too much too soon... at least not until there's a
sufficiently validated product/market fit and there's a strong business model
generating some cash. For what I've seen, it's free for now and I'm not sure
that companies can be a good target for selling informations: it would be a
hard sell to the content-producer (common users) and to the so-called awfull
HR. So I guess that they're just test-driving in "local" markets (Silicon
Valley & S.Korea) to validate the business model without too much technical
hassles

------
wyldfire
I've heard of Blind but I'm too chicken to give them my work email address.
Can anyone on HN testify to having done this? If so, aren't you concerned that
your employers can see you're using Blind?

~~~
Sonnol53
Blind is approved by my CEO. Your employer shouldn't discourage you from being
on Blind.

~~~
gldalmaso
I had never heard of Blind til now, from what I read in this thread it seems
like a workplace Ashley Madison waiting to happen.

Let everyone vent about their employer anonymously until there is a breach and
all employers get to see who said what.

------
sidcool
I like the idea of the service. But I am having a hard time trusting it. It
does require a verified work email address, which seems logical, else how
would they know who works where. My worry is the chink in the armor that
allows for abuse or exploit. You would be anonymous today, and not so much
tomorrow.

Seems to be active only in US and South Korea. Any reason for this?

------
fallingfrog
I love it! This same idea has occurred to me but I didn't realize somebody
already did it.

------
compsciphd
i.e. yik yak, but centered around employer and not location?

~~~
Sonnol53
Correct.

------
wdr1
"With Blind, users are completely anonymous, but are required to submit a
verified work email to join a company channel."

That sentence seems to contradict itself.

------
Khaine
I just download Blind for iOS, denied it the ability to send me notifications
and it just crashes on launch. Does that happen to anyone else?

------
shostack
Are Blind conversations still indexed by Google?

------
naveen99
wow, i thought about making exactly this a while ago, so glad someone did it !
haven't been this excited in weeks.

------
ickler9
Microsoft has 124,000 employees. You're telling me one in three are on Blind?
Yea right.

~~~
actualanswer
Do you use Blind? You'd be surprised. Especially how it works at companies
that big - aka network effects.

------
sadamznintern
>It has over 2 million users, including 43K at Microsoft, 28K at Amazon, and
10K at Google. In

It's remarkable how unhappy the people at Amazon on Blind are.

Literally everyone is just leetcoding to get out or bragging about getting in
early enough to make a killing on the stock surge.

~~~
prolikewh0a
I just browsed through it and there's a ton of Amazon workers bragging about
how hot they are and how much money they make, how girls in Seattle won't
suffice because the "attractive ones aren't well educated", masturbation,
"dealing with dumb people".

Seems like a tech bro nightmare.

~~~
mesozoic
The key is to just laugh it off and consider it trolling, jokes, whatever.
Most of it is but there's useful info there also and people who feel oppressed
by the SJW movement at work let off the steam in a safe space (how ironic).

~~~
paulie_a
God forbid people address an issue directly. I accidentally upset a coworker
by a comment I made, we had lunch and it was addressed. I realized why it
bothered the person, we hugged and moved on and have a good working
relationship.

Blind just sounds plain stupid and a terrible idea for work place culture.

~~~
sadamznintern
>hugged

Oh jeez I hope you didn’t create a new issue

~~~
paulie_a
It's hard to describe the context of the situation but it was more of a funny
moment. We hashed something out as adults.

------
casualtech
Super interesting.

~~~
Sonnol53
very interesting.

