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Bye bye BetterSlack

g3rv4.com

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Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#291

Post by DigitalSea »

This situation all but confirms that Slack has well and truly become a investor-first, user-second company. Which is a shame because I only just finished listening to an episode of "How I Built This" where they interview Stuart Butterfield who founded Slack out of his failed gaming company and it was a great story.

When you have Fortune 500 companies using you, you know you're not a startup or company for the common folk anymore. As for hostility towards developers, we only have to look at how well that worked out for Twitter when they turned up hositility to 11 towards their developers. Different situation, but same premise of cutting off developers making your product better.

As for Slack, I loved it in the early days. But now, I find is distracting. The numerous bots you can enable on it (most of which are counterproductive) are annoying or distracting (like the Gif bot). I dread opening up Slack because it's not a nicely designed product and it is starting to become dated.

We've been using Microsoft Teams where I work and I must say that it is amazing. You get so much out-of-the-box with it without needing to add in bots and it's more customisable.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#292

Post by Qwertie »

ateesdalejr wrote: post #77

> Injecting javascript into Slack via Chrome extension can have an impact on the privacy and security of our customers and our product. So can taking screenshots of messages. If injecting JS can possibly affect the security of your platform then that's a vulnerability you should fix, not send a C&D to some developer about.

If I make a browser extension that grabs your auth token and all of your messages and sends it to my server. How is slack meant to fix that?

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#294

Post by stock_toaster »

danmg wrote: post #2

Slack has really jumped the shark. Between this and their cutting off their IRC gateway, I don't really see the point of using it. You can't be openly hostile to people who create "hacks" like this if you're claiming to be a communication medium for "hackers."

Agreed. This hostility towards users is ridiculous. As a current slack customer (50 or so person org), I will be investigating alternatives starting tomorrow.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#295

Post by rdl »

Personally, I’d change the name and either not respond to them or send a “8====>~~~~” in response and continue.

(Maybe change the name to “somewhat less abjectly shitty 90s chat monolith”)

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#296

Post by gumby »

kodablah wrote: post #95
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.

> I think you can safely ignore this cease and desist Will you cover his legal costs for choosing this decision? Right matters less than resources if it's expensive to even be right. You can state your case here on HN without repercussion, not so when being sued (it costs to even state your case reasonably due to hazards of self-defense and it costs dearly if you lose).

Oh come on, I chose not to read every word and view every image on a web page -- it's my attention, not theirs. I choose not to download large images or ads -- it's my browser, they are sending me the bits.

And if I choose to run my own code in my browser why not?? Who's computer is it, after all?

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#297

Post by movedx »

segmondy wrote: post #205
detaro wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially since anyone thinking it should continue can just fork and do so.

Once he delete it, everyone will lose their fork if they don't have a local actual independent copy from Github

"Deleting a public repository

When you delete a public repository, one of the existing public forks is chosen to be the new parent repository. All other repositories are forked off of this new parent and subsequent pull requests go to this new parent."

https://help.github.com/articles/what-happens-to-forks-when-...

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#298

Post by movedx »

geofft wrote: post #78
mosselman wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I... just don't do it." You mean you do not ignore cease and desist orders by principal? Why? There should be at least some criteria by which you judge which ones you can ignore and which you can't? What if they told you to cease and desist programming forever on any project because they state in their terms that once you mess with their UI with JavaScript you are not allowed to program anymore? Ridiculous right? So…

> You are free to write any extension that does anything to any website as long as you aren't hurting users' human rights and as long as you aren't hacking them if you ask me. But you're not the person being asked - the courts in g3rv4's jurisdiction and in Slack's are the ones who would be asked, if it came to it. Have you read the relevant law (including case law) about copyright and "cybercrime" in these jurisdict…

> Have you read the relevant law (including case law) about copyright and "cybercrime" in these jurisdictions and concluded that, in fact, Slack does not have the power to restrict this? Have you read the Slack user agreement and concluded that the provisions in that user agreement are unenforceable?

Is this your first week on the Internet? Of course he hasn't read any of those things! We're all arm chair lawyers here with our own personal, grumpy views about what shape society should be.

(I'm agreeing with you.)

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#299

Post by [deleted] »

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).

[deleted]

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#300

Post by TheDong »

Qwertie wrote: post #292
ateesdalejr wrote: post #77

> Injecting javascript into Slack via Chrome extension can have an impact on the privacy and security of our customers and our product. So can taking screenshots of messages. If injecting JS can possibly affect the security of your platform then that's a vulnerability you should fix, not send a C&D to some developer about.

If I make a browser extension that grabs your auth token and all of your messages and sends it to my server. How is slack meant to fix that?

I can ask you for your slack password, and you can then tell it to me. How can slack fix that?

Any extension that asks for the permission to read data off webpages can read data off webpages, yes.

It's the user's responsibility to not install such an extension, not the company's responsibility to do whatever the hell they're doing here.

Anyways, this extension wasn't malicious. Its source code was available freely, and auditing it reveals nothing malicious.

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