Enjoyable to see these mockery sites. The original Hey marketing was just asking to get mocked. Hopefully they take it in good spirit. The lesson learned I think is, don’t act like God unless you want to get mocked for it.
Here’s what they originally put up, for reference: http://web.archive.org/web/20200207101953/https://www.hey.co...
I’m exaggerating a bit. But I don’t understand why they built a service and not a client.
For me, email is about being not locked into a specific client. And Hey requires a separate client than the one for my existing email addresses.
> For me, email is about being not locked into a specific client. And Hey requires a separate client than the one for my existing email addresses.
The graveyard of services acquired or dead (or both) is littered with those who attempted to 1) bring about radical change to email 2) without disrupting the current ecosystem of mail clients and hosts. It clearly almost never worked for anyone, so I at least applaud them for going out of their way, loudly trying to veer off of said graveyard. It speaks to the experience they're selling. It may not have appealed to you, but they aren't short of the ones it appealed to.
Now, whether it'll work out for them, that's another topic :D
Some of the core features aren't feasible with a simple client. For example screening new contacts by default, merging/renaming threads only for you, adding notes to a thread, save bits of content…
A client could certainly handle this, but it may not translate to other instances of the client.
> merging/renaming threads only for you
An advertised feature that did not even work on their release. Maybe they fixed it by now, I don't know, I did not end up buying the product. The initial release was quite buggy.
They're not about better managing your existing inbox, and I also think completely changing the management of a third party email services while staying within the standards is a lost battle. Hey doesn't solve my issues with email either, but I am sympathic to people trying to rebuild an experience beyond what existing clients can do.
It's a trade-off for theoretically better privacy.
I wouldn’t call that novel or poetic but I understand resenting it.
HN people will get mad when a landing page is not just words on a page, but will also get mad when it is.
So when I read their pitch, I see another locked in platform à la Slack. The tone is quite pretentious too. Sounds more like a pitch from a clique leader to join them.
That's what bothers me I guess.
This is Basecamp you're talking about. That's part of the cultural DNA.