I agree. The author laughably claims APIs are how applications take to each other and implies they are necessarily remote or on the Internet. Web APIs are one kind of API, but so are various C Library interfaces.
Look at their stock price. I bet there are a lot of tense board meetings happening right now. Culture flows from the top down, and if executives are panicking about the stock price, it makes sense that they'd lose focus. I mean, if you had stock at slack, it would be easy to fall into the trap of cutting costs and following the money instead of shipping an excellent product.
I see a common pattern among utility providing IT companies, that despite the core functionality can be supported by tens of people, it goes ahead and hires thousand anyways, which give raise to features that are neither core nor that anyone wanted. The company then go under as the business can’t generate enough revenue to feed the thousands of developer and management that has been brought in.
If you have a good app, keep it that way by not increasing bloat, both technically and organizationally.
Patreon comes to mind. They're essentially a members-only blog subscription company. It's beyond me what they need all those employees for. The only difficult problem they should have: dealing with fraud.
I'm guessing sales & marketing (and the usual O(log n) amount of management and administrative positions to support that).
It's one of those hidden costs of advertising being a zero-sum game. The waste only grows as you try to keep up with the competition that tries to keep up with you.
It was like 40 or 50, but yeah the points stands, it was still like two orders of magnitude smaller than any other 10+ billion dollar exit we’ve ever seen.
Agreed, and I was highlighting how post-acquisition they moved away from the core functionality and started stuffing other apps into it in a pretty predictable fashion.
Personally I’ve minimized social network use and don’t think every single app needs a status broadcast feature, but it’s popular. Not just a group chat app anymore though.
It got acquired for the trust people put in the brand, not the technology or the employees. Facebook needed a backdoor into people's contact lists and WhatsApp had a huge user base of people who authorised it to access contacts.
More boring explanation: For most people Facebook is just a platform for connecting with other people. Any messaging platform with significant amount of users is a threat for them.
A platform like WhatsApp could evolve to cover the main things people are using Facebook for. History has shown that people are not too stuck on any platform.
Huh, so apparently the Status tab is supposed to be something like Stories? I've never used it, it wasn't really advertised to me, and when I open it it's an empty page with a prompt to add a status update. From what I gather from the internet it's somewhat like the status messages from old messengers, just some text you can set?
Stickers are new, I must have forgotten that because every other chat app I use has had them for ages. They are really an example of WhatsApp moving slowly compared to Telegram and Discord.
Group video chats are something that's probably motivated by rising mobile speeds? As bandwidth becomes more plentiful and smartphones have plenty of RAM and CPU power there's no reason to restrict video chats to one person.
1. Successful software product that is beloved by its core users goes public.
2. The valuation expectations when the company goes public are based on widely optimistic growth projections where the company grows beyond its 'natural' user base (remember 'Twitter is the new Facebook' back in the day?)
3. In order to meet those widely optimistic, unrealistic projections, the company tries a whole host of "throw against the wall and see what sticks" features to attract users outside their core. This has the effect of pissing off their core users while not really attracting many new users in any case.
4. Eventually (hopefully) the company realizes it's not going to be the next world dominating superpower, learns to be content with just hundreds of millions of users instead of billions, and gets back to focusing on making its core users happy.
No - I insist that we name this after Sonos, even though they were hardly the first (and certainly not the most widespread) abuser.
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread:
"... nowhere do you see such a stark juxtaposition between an actually useful product that people pay premium dollars for and pivoting the business model towards shady, sneaky, anti-customer patterns."
The sad thing is that if eg Twitter decides not to accept that VC money, the VCs will turn their back on Twitter and invest all of that into another Twitter clone, and that’s when competition may suddenly become an issue.
This is a problem with the current financing model of tech in NA; the product didn't arise strictly from user-sourced revenue growth, but from the hopes and dreams of investors who are attracted to the user growth. Revenue sourced from user demand is tied to features users almost certainly want, whereas investors want features that will continue growth. That's not always useful to existing users.
I don’t think they’re panicking about the stock price — why should they? They have plenty of runway and shouldn’t need to raise capital any time soon. I’d worry about their stock price at $10 or $5. At $20+, they’re still trading at large multiples above revenue.
Recently I found a bug in Slack, and I was communicating with their support over it. They asked me to check on the web in addition to the electron app. Now, the number of people who actually care enough to do this are a very small minority, but they are also very significant because they're happy to give Slack free QA. And as a member of this small minority that will reproduce a bug on multiple platforms and communicate back, I can say this seems pretty hostile to me and anyone else willing to pay money to do free QA for them.
There's no need for the animations at all. Besides not letting the reader work through the problem at her own pace, the animations hide the previous steps.
Yeah, there's a very real difference between the collection of metadata and actually recording phone conversations and text messages. Both leave a bad taste in my mouth, but conflating the two is dangerous and dishonest.
> Both leave a bad taste in my mouth, but conflating the two is dangerous and dishonest.
Unfortunately that is par for the course here on HN, if you pay attention to the political threads. It so often is just the same political truth-twisting, logic-bending contortions that I often saw applied by the GOP or creationists, where logic becomes subservient to the objective, instead of forming your objective based on logic.
And in this case it's completely needless! Why use propaganda techniques to mislead when the truth is persuasive on its own? I'm not even shocked about collection of metadata per se, but it should not be a secret program run by secret courts issuing secret warrants. If it's important and useful the people will allow it, if not then let us live with that choice too.
I agree with you. But on (B) I'm not sure the people listening would have expected one great big warrant covering all the people in the country.
It is important to be specific and accurate with claims made so that the culprits can't just pick one inaccurate claim and deny that loudly and repeatedly while ignoring the things that they actually have done.
No, it's not, you're apparently just not fully aware of what's going on.
They don't only have access to phone records; they also have access to our communications, and they have had that access for at least the last 6 years without a warrant, not even one from a FISA court.
> The only records taken from Internet companies pertain to non-citizens living outside the U.S
As a 'non-[US]-citizen living outside the US', I'm a bit disturbed by the implication that it's somehow less bad for the US government to demand any data they like about non-US citizens (from private companies based in the US) than data about US citizens. Non-US citizens do make up 95% of the world's population, and they use Google etc. too.
Most European governments seem to recognise that the contents of 'human rights' documents, if they're to mean anything, should apply to, well, humans, not just the citizens of those countries. (Hence e.g. the ECHR blocking the deportation of illegal immigrants if they might be tortured in their home countries). It seems to be mostly just the US that has this strange idea that, despite one of its founding documents talking about 'all men being created equal' and 'inalienable rights', those rights shouldn't apply to non-US citizens.
It is less bad. The US government doesn't have any obligation to protect the rights of citizens of some other country not living in the US. If your government disagrees, tell them to sign a treaty.
Both my country and the US are already signatories to various international treaties guaranteeing a human right against arbitrary interference with privacy and correspondence, e.g. the ICCPR. The US has declined to transcribe it into its own law. My country is also a member of an international human rights court that enforces a (admittedly qualified) right to privacy (for humans - hence 'human rights' - not just citizens of the particular member state concerned). AFAIK the US is not a member of any such organisation.
I'm a bit bemused at the level of cognitive dissonance required to loudly assert both that something is an 'inalienable human right' and at the same time that it doesn't apply to non-citizens. Perhaps the US government uses 'inalienable' and 'human' to mean something different to everyone else?
Frankly that level of xenophobia is just bad - period. Sure, it would be "worse" if the US was spying on their own citizens as well (and frankly I'm not convinced that they're not), but I take real objection to you saying that it's "less bad" as it's essentially saying that something is "ok" when you compare it to something even worse - when in actual fact both examples are appalling.
America should be leading by example rather than hypocritically condoning China (et al) for their spying then turning around and doing the same thing themselves. And most importantly, America (and every other country for that matter) should be comparing themselves to the best examples - constantly trying to better the nation - rather than comparing themselves to the worst and saying "we're less bad than those governments".
It's not like these programs just got setup without approval. I'm sure they have secret rulings from FISA to justify all this stuff (not that a secret ruling makes anything legal, but hey). The problem with secret courts is obvious.
