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Comment by jbindel | Hacker News Reader

This and the WYSIWYG debacle indicate that Slack [or their product managers] have stopped caring about a significant portion of their users.

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Warning: pure speculation ahead.

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.

WhatsApp (pre FB) being the only exception I know of.

I’ve never used WhatsApp, but I assume it got the same clone of Snapchat Stories that facebook stuffed into Messenger and Instagram?

IIRC the interesting point is it was a very, very small team - like 10ish people - and got acquired for $19 billion.

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.

5 seconds on google finds that adding a SnapChat stories clone is exactly where WhatsApp has gone now, just like Messenger and Instagram: https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/01/whatsapp-stories/

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.

It has stayed basically the same. No relevant features were gained or lost.

Color me skeptical

https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/01/whatsapp-stories/

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.

This feels like the trajectory Mozilla is on. :(

Could you share a few examples of this common pattern of IT companies hiring thousands and then going under?

Uber? They are on borrowed time

Maybe we should call this the Twitter-Way:

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.

Maybe can also be called the Snap-Way??

"Maybe we should call this the Twitter-Way"

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.

Such is the market's race to the bottom.

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.

They have no moat and their product is expensive.

Yeah... the people who use the web app on their mobile over the app are in no way a significant portion but a very small minority.

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.

The reason they did that is to see if something in the local state of your client was causing the problem, not to get you to QA the bug.

Sounds like QA work to me.

Par for the course in modern software dev I'm afraid.

How do you define "a significant portion of their users"? 51%? 25%? 1%?

Following the same kind of pattern as Flickr then, really.

Why is the WYSIWYG thing a debacle? They provided the option to disable it within a few weeks.

They provided a way to disable it because it was a debacle.

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