> Good UX is every action should be reversible. And have confirmations before any destructive behavior.

Nah, people just click through. GMail has a much better model: mask destructive / un-undoable behaviour behind a short timer, make the action undo-able until the timer is up.

Is that not what reversible means?

In some sense, yes. I guess it depends on how you want to define your words.

Strictly, the action you start when you click `Send' is reversible for a few seconds, before it actually launches the nukes. But I'd rather call it `delayed' when talking to a human about it.

Delaying is a way to make some non-reversible actions sort-of reversible.

Hell, the minion gif itself would probably be fine. "Oh, shit, sorry: Pressed the wrong button on a dumb April fools prank."

Muting is a much bigger problem.

I agree that it would make it less funny, but the takeaway from that conclusion is that they simply shouldn't do this prank at all. A joke isn't worth harming gmail's UX like this.

How does a confirmation go against the point?

You don't ask for permission before you punk someone.

The sender was not the person being punk'd; it was the recipient. The person who would have seen that confirmation dialog would have been in on the joke...