Anonbot

This is the second in a series of posts about Slack bots I’ve been creating. The first Slack bot I wrote about was Karmabot.

Anonymity is a double-edged sword. It can empower people to voice legitimate concerns and ideas that they might otherwise be too embarrassed or afraid to share. Unfortunately, in practice, it tends to create a space where racist, sexist, and similar types of hateful expression is enabled without accountability.

The Hype

It seems the tech industry has moved past the anonymity hype, but in late-2013 and early-2014 there were several anonymous applications that launched and subsequently raised big venture dollars. The expectation among the tech media and the VC industry was that anonymous communications would be The Next Big Thing™. The three most popular anonymous apps, Whisper, Secret, and Yik Yak, raised a combined $103 million over that time period.

In the two years since, Whisper was accused of tracking their users’ locations, Yik Yak has become the best app for sharing racist sentiments on college campuses, and Secret shut down its apps and company in late April 2015.

Anonymity in the Workplace

In May 2015, I had a small gripe about a change made at betaworks. The gripe was too small to merit a conversation with our head of HR, who also happened to be on vacation. In fact, it was so small that I was a bit embarrassed to even mention it myself. However, I did feel that it was worth a discussion with my coworkers as it impacted the company culture.

I felt that, in scenarios like this, having an anonymous way to make suggestions or raise concerns could be beneficial, and empower my coworkers and myself to raise those ideas that we otherwise may have been too embarrassed or shy to share. I took it upon myself to write a small Slack bot called anonbot, which adds a slash command “/anon” to Slack and sends text back into Slack as anonbot, and I dropped it into Slack:

The early usage of anonbot was mostly goofy messages from coworkers, not quite the big vision of empowerment I hoped for:

Maya, who at the time was head of community at betaworks, direct messaged me with some concerns around anonbot and the general notion of enabling anonymity in the workplace:

Despite the mostly goofy, playful trolling nature of most of the anonbot messages, there was one legitimate suggestion raised using anonbot:

However, given how strongly some people despised anonbot , which wasn’t providing much value and detracting from normal Slacking, I decided it’d be best to just kill the experiment with anonymity in the workplace and move on.

Killing Anonbot

When eliminating anonbot, I wanted to be sure that it wouldn’t be possible for people to accidentally issue an anonymous message and have it post into Slack, which could potentially be very embarrassing. So instead of removing the anonbot integration itself from Slack, I modified the anonbot program so that it just returned “anonbot is ded” which results in a slackbot message to the user and does not post anything else into the channel:

Suggestion Bot: Anonbot’s More Mature Cousin

Maya, who is now the head of HR at betaworks, created Suggestion Bot which allows users to type “/suggestion <suggestion>” and have the result sent to both a private Slack channel and a Google sheet. It’s basically the 21st century equivalent of the physical suggestion box, which has all the benefits of anonymity without the drawbacks of providing a platform for trolling (or worse).

This post is not meant to be a betaworks native ad but it’s worth mentioning that Maya made Suggestion Bot without writing any code, just using the Dexter Platform.