Block gambling transactions from your Monzo account

Feels a bit like a race to the bottom.

If we can’t do a good thing every group then we shouldn’t do a good thing for anyone?

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I think you’re missing the point of Monzo Time (and Google’s famous 20% time etc.) - the big, wide benefit features are worked on during the vast majority of the week - currently with the focus on the list from https://monzo.com/blog/2018/05/22/making-monzo-better/.

Monzo employees are then able to use a little bit of additional time each week to work on their own ideas, like the gambling block, or flight information which provide benefit for a much smaller number of people (and are therefore low priority in comparison to the Big List) but which have a benefit to a small group of people / or just make the user experience a little bit better (while enabling staff to direct their own work and get all of the other benefits described in the Monzo Time blog). This is where other 1% or 0.5% (or indeed 0.002%) projects can be worked on.

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Coin jar started in exactly the same way and look how popular that is.
It can’t all be scheduled work, that would get very dull and limit creativity

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Not at all, but with limited resources you should attempt to maximise the benefit. In order to do this for 1500 people, a task that could have benefited 150000 may well have been neglected.

I’m not sure you can compare a substantial increase in the quality of someone’s life with making sure a few cosmetic bugs are fixed.

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Exactly this. The number of people helped might be small but the impact on their lives could be huge. Perhaps this is unlikely but imagine if this stops someone racking up such large debts that they would have committed suicide. That does happen.

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I understand what you are saying about benefiting the greater number of users , Im quite happy to put up with a “bug” taking a bit longer to be fixed e.g, the card icon not being centralised on android display - if it helps one person not spend their monthly income in one day on a gambling site because they have an addiction - is it a good use of time - yes I think so , do I want everything working perfectly in the app yes of course we all do :slight_smile:

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Are you going to complain when Monzo launches current accounts for the unbanked because (by definition) they’re the minority?

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If the number of users isn’t justifying the time, maybe the potential money monzo are helping to keep within the bank and avoiding debt might ?

“Individual gamblers lost more than £1,000 on FOBTs on more than 233,000 occasions in a single 10-month period”

If ever user (1400+ monzo) avoids gambling £500 a month on average that’s £740,500 a month ! £500 is a very conservative guess, I can almost promise it’s much higher !

Then look at the scary rate the losses per year on gaming is going up just on FOBT, this was a feature desperately needed …

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I’m quite capable of deciding which points I’d like to raise without you creating incendiary and defamatory insinuations.

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I was just following your ‘logic’ :man_shrugging:

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No you were attempting to put words in my mouth

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I simply asked the question. I’m glad the answer was (presumably) “no”.

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No one in their right mind would complain about it. No need to be provocative. Let’s have a discussion without provocative statements.

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Who complains about a feature that’s intended to stop people with an addiction from gambling? :joy:

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It may not be, they have not confirmed yet. Perhaps it is Yes!

come on ladies and gentlemen can we calm this down a bit - :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

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At the end of the day features like gambling option and coin jar are great ideas. They may seem like for a small amount of people but in the long term can help lots of people. If there only small projects along the larger ones and only being worked on in small amount of time I think there doing a great job.

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I do get frustrated when gambling is often cast off as a minor issue, an easily solved one. It’s a socially accepted addiction that often gets cast as being a waste of time to help.

A feature like this might help small numbers but will save lives, save uncontrollable debt, avoid family breakdowns and actually help some people smile again.

This isn’t directed at anyone, this is just me being passionate.

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Don’t want it to seem like a dogpile on here but I echo most people’s sentiments :raised_hands:t3: I think this feature, while it may not benefit me specifically, definitely would improve the lives of many people who suffer from gambling addiction.

I’m sure Monzo didn’t stop developing and improving all other features in the app just to do this gambling blocker, so it seems a bit petty to complain about it in my opinion! They can work on many features at one time and “little things” like this encourage creativity- stamping out bugs are crucial but I don’t see this as a waste of time :slight_smile:

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