Podcast 341: Blocking the haters as a service
We chat with Tracy Chou, founder, CEO, and lead engineer at Block Party, a software platform working to make social media safe and enjoyable by helping users avoid, or at least manage, online harassment.
Episode Notes
Chou, a Stanford educated computer scientist and electrical engineer, cut her teeth in Silicon Valley with stints at Facebook, Quora, and Pinterest, where she advocated for a stronger focus on diversity.
Block Party describes its mission as building “anti-harassment tools against online abuse, but more fundamentally we are building solutions for user control, protection, and safety.”
As CEO and lead engineer, Chou gets to choose the company’s tools. Block Party is built with technologies like Render, Flask, and Jinja. Paul is very jealous of this stack.
Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Bryan Oakley, who answered the question: How to redirect print statements to Tkinter text widget?
Tags: flask, jinja, the stack overflow podcast
9 Comments
Have you tried /dev/null as a Service? https://devnull-as-a-service.com/
Can you elaborate?
Please don’t refer to haters as abusers. Haters is overused as someone being negative and has lost it’s gravity already, but abusers are a whole different beast and also come in the form of (ex-) lovers.
y e s!!!
Was going to just say that.
Let people hate, that’s a 100% acceptable emotion in most cases.
It is the abusers that are the problem. Haters have decency and understand how their actions affect others, abusers typically do not or do not care.
There is a BIG difference!
Nowadays “haters” is a term for people with whom you may disagree or who point out uncomfortable truths. Instead of building elaborate software to protect the fragile snowflakes, wouldn’t it be easier to simply unplug from the World Wide Web?
Shhhhhhhhhhhh… Don’t say the quiet part out loud.
I quite like this comment, much more than the (main) content of the article. Brian Oakley’s solution was quite clever though, so the article was worth a look 🙂
Agreed! The problem is, they don’t want to protect people, but shut down dissenting opinions.
Also, the definition of who is and is not a “hater” changes daily, so nobody is safe.
Belarus has just implemented blocking of haters on the country level.