Slowclap Design Philsophy: Privacy

Today I want to talk about privacy and the ways I designed slowclap specifically to respect yours.

First off I want to talk about why I felt this was important in the first place. Our data is bought and sold at alarming scale, and even when we do our best to opt out, it’s increasingly difficult to avoid being tracked everywhere. Most well meaning companies make a pledge not to sell your data, but still go on tracking and storing an alarming amount of your personal information. Which maybe is fine, as long as you trust your government and that the platform won’t get hacked. You do trust both of those, right?

Now maybe claps aren’t a huge risk to expose, but who you clap might be. What if you’re a trans kid living with an intolerant family and applauding someone who is helping you through that? What if an investigative journalist joins and is exposing corruption in your home country and you want to support them?

More innocently, what if you want to support someone anonymously because you don’t want it to be about you.

There have been other platforms trying to achieve a similar goal to slowclap in the past, and many of them have gone the route of tracking where you browse and allocating support without active user choice.

There’s benefits to this model. You can subscribe once and not have to think about it again and feel confident you’re helping indies and creatives organically. There’s less friction. Maybe the sales pitch for creators is even a bit easier. Passive Income!

But that model also requires tracking your browsing history. Privacy isn’t the main reason views aren’t my primary way of allocating support. I think active, opt-in, appreciation is the best way to fight back against the attention economy. But Privacy did play a huge part in this decision.

In fact, one of my early design concepts used views as the fallback for unallocated applause. But once I realized the privacy implications, I knew it wasn’t the right call.

So let’s talk about the ways slowclap does respect your privacy. It starts with account creation. The unique display names are meant to be memorable and fun but they’re also meant to be deliberately unlinked to any other online/offline identity you’ve created. Yes, you can use “links” and “communities” to identify yourself and improve discoverability, but those are opt in. If you’re working across domains and use your Slowclap account in both. The only way someone would know is if they happen to be supporting you in both domains. And when you support, at most, your unique display-name is shared. If you want someone to know it’s you, add a link, if you don’t. That’s the default.

The default actually goes even further. When applauding, your display-name isn’t shared unless you want it to be (you can change this in settings or on the fly for individual applause events. If you don’t decide otherwise, They won’t see “friendly-corncob applauded you” they’ll see “someone applauded you” If friendly-corncob decides to share that they applauded (either with you directly or through a share card) they can, but again it’s opt-in.

Again the goal of this isn’t to inhibit your ability to share your applause or your socials or websites, it’s to keep you in control over what’s shared and when.

Secure mode goes even further and doesn’t store your sender-id when you applaud. There’s some downsides to functionality in this mode (applause can’t auto-allocate, you can’t share that you applauded, etc) but if you applaud in secure mode, it’s actually impossible for me to see who you’ve applauded. I can see that applause happened, but even if my database ever got compromised, there would be nothing linking you to that applause. I don’t think secure mode is necessary for most people, but it is there if you want it.

Some of these decisions (and their consequences) might make slowclap feel a bit less intuitive at first, but that’s only because respecting users isn’t really the norm that we’re used to. Obviously I want slowclap to feel social and fun and community minded, but I want that to be driven by active, informed, decisions made by users, and I think this design is the best way to achieve that.