Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bye bye BetterSlack

g3rv4.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 392 posts

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#231

Post by wolco »

TheDong wrote: post #185
mattigames wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not modifying slack (their product), when you request a website all they are sending you its a bunch of characters, including characters inside CSS or JS files, rendering those its up to your machine, you are not legally binded to render those in a specific way, otherwise screen readers would all be completely illegal, all threads of not modifying your local render of a website always end poorly by the people…

> You are not modifying slack (their product) Their product are the bits they ship to you and the code they run on their servers. You're modifying a part of their product. Since you can't modify their product, you also obviously shouldn't be able to use any web browser to view slack because those browsers take those bytes they ship you and interpret them in the context of the browser windowing system (its userChrome.…

No you are modifying that rendered part. A website can't control what you do with the output.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#232

Post by ashelmire »

mikeryan wrote: post #144
mattigames wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False, how a website is rendered on a device I own is not enforceable (legally speaking) by a acceptable use policy or any website policy; otherwise people would just use that to deter ad-blockers browsers extensions instead of all the shady tactics commonly used.

This just starts a death spiral though. Slacks next step is to start detecting the objecting code and banning users from using the web interface that are found using those tools. There are a bunch of folks doing this already for ad blockers.

Oh no, we might have to use one of the thousands of other chat apps with identical or superior functionality but inferior marketing teams.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#233

Post by paulie_a »

whoisjuan wrote: post #27

I think you can safely ignore this cease and desist. Just change the name and add a disclaimer so your users know that by using your extension they are violating their acceptable use policy. This is no different than any user writing a Tampermonkey script to modify any website they want to modify. Even further, this is no different than a user opening the Dev Tools console and modifying things there.

To be fair cease and desist orders can generally be thrown directly in the trash.

I can't even count the number of them I have received. They look scary but basically will not be followed up with. You might as well just respond with "fuck off"

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#234

Post by wpietri »

g3rv4 wrote: post #189
joewadcan wrote: post #175

At GitHub, we faced the same issue when ZenHub [1] came out with their chrome extension. While, Slack is well within their rights to _ask_ you not to modify their user experience, it's short sighted of them to do so. With ZenHub, we worked with them even closer because we saw that our users were happier using GitHub + ZenHub. We made it super clear that UI changes would likely break their app but that would be a risk…

I’m not being a good platform partner basically because they make it impossible for me to be one. I’d love to avoid reverse engineering their minified code and use well documented APIs. Unfortunately, that’s not possible nor planned (as they told me on a tweet I linked on the post).

I really feel both sides of this. On the one hand, I like customizing things, and I love to see users getting involved in platforms they love. On the other, I see how responsibly providing APIs is a big long-term burden that can prevent internal innovation.

I was talking a while back with some Mozilla people about the move from their legacy API [1] to WebExtensions [2]. It was a giant pain, but their old API exposed way too much surface area in ways that were too closely tied to the original implementation. The way I heard there were significant ongoing costs in trying to maintain the old API and support popular extensions while trying to improve the underlying tech and the user experience. So I get why Slack is very reluctant to expose API surface area, especially for the UI.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Add-ons/Leg...

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#235

Post by g3rv4 »

garmaine wrote: post #229

OP: since Slack is saying they own the execution environment running in your browser, send them a hosting bill for running their application in your computers. Multiply it times every user on your instance.

lol, wouldn't it be funny?

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#236

Post by flurdy »

nsarafa wrote: post #44

One of the nicest cease and desist letters I've ever seen. I think what they're asking in the name change is more than fair, and providing guidence on changing the functionality to comply with their api seems like a good approach. Kuddos to Slack legal for keeping the matter human and civil.

Agree. Was about to post the same.

The name was always going to be an issue when the extension got traction and publicity (via HN etc).

And the issues with script injection will always be an issue. But that is not a Legal department decision. They simply will be told to write the C&D letter.

And this letter was the most polite and flexible I have seen. Usually, other companies' C&Ds are totally inflexible, technically inept and unrealistic overdramatic.

Yes, Slack the company (and not the legal department's responsibility) can handle this in different ways. They can reach out and suggest alternatives, they can hire the creator to implement some of the features, they can extend the APIs for more legal interactions, etc. Or they cut him off and "Teflon shoulder" it to their forums as they seem to have done.

Slack's legal department has done their job, and as I can see in the best possible matter once they got told to do so. Up to the company what they do next. If anything.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#237

Post by pdfernhout »

From something I wrote in January 2016 (just one concern of many): "Reasons Not to Use Slack for Free Software Development" https://pdfernhout.net/reasons-not-to-use-slack-for-free-sof... "Slack requires signing up and agreeing with a long Terms of Service (TOS); the TOS can be changed at any time, and historically such TOS have changed for the worse over time for other services once a lot of users adopt the service and become locked in by inertia and interlocking usages with other groups."

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#238

Post by outworlder »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #5

Folks, use IRC, XMPP, Matrix, etc. Using proprietary protocols is dumb .

I was responsible for getting several development teams on Slack.

You see, nowadays few people outside of us hardcore geeks will want to use IRC (my first option). And there are things that "modern" chat clients do better. For instance, our monitoring system can post messages to slack with links to images to allow us to display graphs inline, links to runbooks, and even buttons to take actions. IRC won't do that.

Second option was Matrix with its (rather cool) open protocol, but the immaturity of clients and lack of integrations was a problem. Almost everything supports Slack, but good luck finding Matrix support. For our own systems this is manageable, but not all are under our control. Also, we would have to host and manage the infrastructure ourselves.

XMPP would be great on the integration front (surprisingly, Slack still wins), but once again it's something we would have to manage.

There were other options. Rocket.Chat, Hipchat, Mattermost, you name it. Each one with their own drawbacks.

So when asked by my manager what should we use, I could just answer "use slack" immediately, no ifs or buts, and most people would be happy with it.Assuming you have nothing against the company, the biggest technical con is the memory hungry client. The other issues are way harder to justify – big companies rarely care about proprietary protocols as long as they have a vendor to yell at.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#239

Post by g3rv4 »

pdfernhout wrote: post #237

From something I wrote in January 2016 (just one concern of many): "Reasons Not to Use Slack for Free Software Development" https://pdfernhout.net/reasons-not-to-use-slack-for-free-sof... "Slack requires signing up and agreeing with a long Terms of Service (TOS); the TOS can be changed at any time, and historically such TOS have changed for the worse over time for other services once a lot of users adopt the service…

wow... you turned down an interview at a place you liked because of their tools?

you certainly have stronger feelings about it than I do :)

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#240

Post by henriquemaia »

rickycook wrote: post #210
throwawaymath wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you're in the extreme minority if you honestly confused Slack the chat client for Slackware the Linux distribution. That's...a leap. Frankly the origin of Slack's name has nothing to do with Slackware Linux (or Linux in general) so I'm having difficulty following your grievance here.

well, his is the second comment in a week that i’ve seen (unrelated to betterslack) that mentioned this point. he’s certainly not the only one!

First time I heard about slack, I thought it was a kind of homage to the distro. I Guess I was also fooled.
Post reply on HN