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Bye bye BetterSlack

g3rv4.com

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Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#321

Post by hamandcheese »

avip wrote: post #310
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…

Worth mentioning that github ended killing ZenHub, by introducing github projects, which is essentially copycat of the only useful feature ZenHub had.

GitHub projects is a much worse experience and still missing a lot of what ZenHub offers. It ranges from obvious holes like half decent filtering of the project board to niceties like viewing issues in a pop up modal rather than their own page (causing you to lose your spot in the board).

GH projects also has this arbitrary distinction between notes and issues, and notes are more or less useless yet the default when adding new items to the board.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#322

Post by sklivvz1971 »

All they can do is threaten or terminate your access. And even that is debatable. If I create a new browser with BetterStack as one of its features are they going to mandate which browsers I use? What monetary or image damage can they prove? None.

I hope not, but one could argue that the adage that a quality of a product reflects the company that makes is indeed true...

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#323

Post by Arathorn »

g3rv4 wrote: post #276
State_Of_Mind wrote: post #269

Hey g3rv4 sorry to hear the news. Although I personally don't use slack, when I saw your last post (congrats on the double front page btw) I was super impressed by the stuff you'd added, sorry to see it go. So this seems rather unfortunate now but the first thought I had on reading your initial post was "wow, I wish he'd come and do some similar stuff for riot[1], but unless slack shut him down there's no chance." Ho…

woooooowwwwwww so... I could use riot to connect to my company’s slack? that’s a dream come true!!! I’ll def check it out

Speaking as someone working on matrix and riot, we would love you to come and do BetterSlack style things to Riot - we are getting tantalisingly close to being “as good as Slack” (except entirely FOSS, decentralised, standards based and with E2E encryption) - and positively encourage folks to customise the apps as long as they don’t introduce bugs or harm the security model. Plus we can just accept changes straight into the app rather than injecting via an extension. Pleeease come help us make it better - #riot-dev:matrix.org would be the place to come :) And yes, we have bridging to slack too.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#324

Post by craigsmansion »

throwawaymath wrote: post #193
craigsmansion wrote: post #59

"we prefer that you do not include the word “Slack” in your product’s name." From the people who had no problems naming their product identical to the colloquial name of the oldest maintained GNU/Linux distribution, thereby confusing the hell out of actual technical people for the longest time with press releases. Also, Bob Dobbs called... (Edit: you can take away my upticks, but you will never take away my slack. "H…

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.

70's counter-culture and early hacker culture are not that far apart. It's more than likely their origins are related.

Now if "Slack" means the pretty protocol-breaking irc-client to you, that's perfectly fine. But if some party starts threatening someone with 'That's not what "Slack" means! We're the authoritative source on the meaning of "Slack"', a hacker should resists. Slack is for everybody. Many may have forgotten, but it's not VC-money that makes the Internet go round, it's Slack.

To quote the prophet:

"If someone is making money off ``Slack'', it better be me."

"Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to trade their precious Slack for worthless trinkets."

"The Slack that can be described is not true Slack."

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#325

Post by zaarn »

onli wrote: post #127
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.

That is not that absurd, they actually tried that. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-trial-adblocking/...

Axel Springer (not to be confused with Springer, the publisher for scientific papers) is still trying to sue btw, they're trying to go for the angle that Adblocking prevents freedom of the press since it takes away their funding.

And tbh, Axel Springer isn't the most surprising entity to sue for this, the entire publication house is a bunch of asshats, who have been cited for being the most deplorable journalists and in one case someone argued that one should be as mean and rude as legally possible to employees of Axel Springer.

They have also succesfully sued the producer of an Anti-Anti-Adblocker since their Anti-Adblocker was considered DRM by the court (IIRC).

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#326

Post by gnicholas »

mattigames wrote: post #278
gnicholas wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Slack would ever go after end-users who install something like this. But they could go after the creator, who presumably created a Slack account in order to be able to build the extension, and who therefore must have agreed to the T&Cs. This could include a no-reverse-engineering clause that prohibits the sorts of things that this extension does.

Do you know about an instance where something like that already happened?

Which part? Not going after users or T&Cs that include a prohibition on reverse engineering? If the latter, yes this is pretty common.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#327

Post by masklinn »

avip wrote: post #310
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…

Worth mentioning that github ended killing ZenHub, by introducing github projects, which is essentially copycat of the only useful feature ZenHub had.

> Worth mentioning that github ended killing ZenHub, by introducing github projects

Sherlocking is a well-known risk every tenant application must consider if they want to make a business out of it.

I would hope and expect that the ZenHub folks always understood github could just integrate the features directly, and not necessarily by buying zenhub.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#328

Post by inferiorhuman »

aiiane wrote: post #208
Ekuju wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, how do you feel about discord?

Discord doesn't really solve any problems in the text chat space any better than Slack, and introduces additional problems like its lack of ability to leave/join channels.

Oh you can set up mandatory Slack channels too.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#329

Post by afandian »

wolco wrote: post #230
afandian wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try using Slack in a browser on Android. It doesn't work. I find that really objectionable. They don't (last time I asked) distribute an APK. Instead they directed me to a pirate APK site, so I don't believe it's for security.

What browser are you using and are you upto date. Many sites don't work on mobile chrome. I find it hard to believe they would redirect you to a pirate site. Are you sure it was a pirate site and not just a third party site hosting apks

Firefox on Android. Per my other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17874566 it was a mirror site, though I didn't save the chat log so I can't remember which one.

Re: Bye bye BetterSlack

#330

Post by Slartie »

pkaye wrote: post #33
as1mov wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My company of 500 with only 30 devs uses it. Same at my workplace. Slack is mostly used by the managers, all the devs avoid it. Even if you don't mind the proprietory protocol, the performance even on beefy machines is an absolute dumpster fire, that nobody wants to touch the app with a ten foot pole.

Its the opposite at my workplace. Mostly the developers use Slack. What do your devs use instead?

Another Mattermost user here.

When Slack came up, some of our development teams picked up using it, because it was free and didn't have to be installed and because of "it was that hot new thing from Silicon Valley that all devs use now". Most people loved it. I've always been in the "we try to keep our other infrastructure mostly in-house for control/privacy/anti-lock-in reasons, so why add a dependency to an external service and push internal documents onto it while we don't even pay for that thing?" camp and therefore flat-out refused to use Slack until the issue of internal instant messaging got enough attention to be discussed on a company-wide level. It was agreed upon the need for such a service, but it was also recognized that the way in which Slack was used to serve that need was not sustainable and far from rational, so alternatives were discussed and we eventually settled on trying out Mattermost.

Within weeks, all teams using Slack had moved over to Mattermost, and even most of the people who never wanted to use Slack for various reasons, including me, were okay with giving Mattermost a try. Most kept using it, so it has become a widely accepted part of our internal infrastructure now.

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