Twitter shutting down acquired service Quill with 4 day notice and no DM export | Hacker News Reader

Twitter shutting down acquired service Quill with 4 day notice and no DM export

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82 pointsAissen32 comments

Great info on their site: "We’d like to thank everybody who has used Quill — if you came on board during our beta, or if you just sent your first message last week. We can’t wait to show you what we’ll be working on next."

Oh yeah, I'm just waiting to jump to your new ship after this.

Twitters cavalier attitude bleeds into everything from suspending accounts to overnight cutting APIs to developers. No surprise here. And new CEO seems worse than Jack Dorsey having banned accounts that cover Ghislaine Maxwell and Nancy Pelosi’s stock investments.

I don't think any CEO will be as good as Jack. He was the founder and had lots of control so he could at least steer Twitter towards some goal he had in mind. He wasn't trigger happy either. Now corporate interests will prevail and Twitter will likely get a lot worse than it is now.

Try providing arguments instead of silently downvoting, maybe we can all learn something.

A whole 4 days! Way better than what Smyte customers got https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/21/twitter-smytes-customers/a...

Maybe twitter will be able to provide a week's notice by 2024-25

So on 7th December they announced that? :

"You’ll be able to export your team message history until 1pm PST, Saturday, December 11th 2021, when we will be turning off our servers and deleting all data."

4 day notice that service will stop and all data deleted?

If correct, that's extremely poor, indeed.

[Dupe] Lost of discussion only two days ago when this was news https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29472836

This seems incorrect. It says on their site:

How do I export my team’s messages?

1. Go to your Settings in Quill → https://app.quill.chat/settings

2. Click the team you want to export

3. Under the Export Team heading, press Start Export

4. Export will have started. After a few minutes, you will receive an email with the link to the .zip file containing your export.

According to other tweets: the export does not include Direct Messages which is what some companies use (almost) exclusively, meaning they cannot export 99% of their content.

https://twitter.com/rdjpalmer/status/1468526843129208834

I think this is a pragmatic decision. Direct messages are somewhat private (though I do understand that is not always the case with companies). It seems to me to be a privacy / security thing. I am not aware of any companies who solely use DMs, I am sure they exist. But the point of Quill was to not lock up information in DMs and to better organize channels. I would think users of Quill most likely did not solely use DMs, if they did, why bother with Quill in the first place?

Edit: ah the linked tweet (sorry, on a mainstream social media break), well that is certainly one company. I feel for them.

Companies with data retention requirements might be legally obligated to keep those DMs, and I don’t see how Quill would be unaware of that. Either they’re confident that none of their clients have such a need or they decided that it would be too hard to export DMs with 4 days notice and said “meh.”

If they are legally required for data retention why did they use this product in the first place?

Here are a few possible explanations based on my experience at various employers.

1. Departments/divisions have their own budgets; Quill was purchased before security or compliance was involved.

2. Quill was deployed or piloted for a group without retention requirements then escaped into the wild. Security or compliance wasn't involved until it was in use company wide.

3. A client required using Quill so the usual compliance requirements were waived.

This isn't possible on slack either. We lost messages from even private channels, let alone direct messages when we migrated

I believe there is a channel that you can explicitly request PMs however it’s subject to review, assuming its along security/privacy lines.

It is if you pay them enough (i.e. you have a Plus or Enterprise Grid account)

Quill owners could prevent that while selling. I'm pretty sure they were aware that Twitter will/could do that.

You can negotiate these things while selling.

> You can negotiate these things while selling.

Can you do so in a legally-binding way? Surely if you are selling then they own the company, the staff, etc and can do whatever they want?

To do otherwise would mean that you still retain ownership and control of the company, thus not legally "selling".

A contract’s a contract and if they agree to something, it’s enforceable.

For example — it’s not uncommon when adopting a dog to sign a contract agreeing you will walk it N times a week, or never leave it unattended in public, etc.

Yeah but who would enforce a contract in such a case? The previous owners, working now at Twitter?

Yes

Does that actually work successfully though? My reason for my original post was that Whatsapp founders apparently used a clause to prevent Facebook from using its data maliciously, and we both know how it went down in the end.

There are a lot of sales that retain rules on property sold, like housing covenants.

You absolutely can! As long as the clause doesn't violate another law, you can 100% put in a clause that says "You will continue you provide the service for 365 days from the date of purchase." Typically the rest of that clause would specify the penalty for the purchasing company, which could range from monetary penalties up to cancellation of the sale, which would immediately revert all assets the company owns to the original owners.

Yes, but if you want to enforce something that the buyer doesn’t want to do, you’ll have to give up something else, typically money.

If it’s something the buyer really doesn’t want to do, it would be a lot of money and could kill the deal.

You can export until Saturday, no? https://quill.chat/updates/2021-12-07-quill-twitter/

Previous comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29472836

I used Quill for a project and was fairly impressed with the user flows. Kind of like a slack/discord but with better threading like bbforums. Curious to see if Twitter ends up doing anything with this but I imagine they won't.

Their message says there is export: https://quill.chat/updates/2021-12-07-quill-twitter/

Surely this would be illegal under the GDPR. Couldn't you just request a full data dump, and they'd have to provide it to you?

(Deleting it seems like it shouldn't excuse not providing it. If Google just deleted all my data when I asked to know what they knew on me, that would pretty clearly violate the point of that part of the law, so surely there'd be a protection)

Has anyone given the motivation behind this yet? They acquire a Slack competitor and then shut it down, to what, help Slack?

Are Quill developers that good that this was the only way to get talent?

I must know, truly.

Twitter DM’s

News like this should really be followed by something along the lines of...

Quill users leaving Twitter with others following suit - largest loss in active users in the history of the service, loss of network effect spells disaster for the bird's future

Alas, the sheep remain docile as long as they get their daily servings of outrage-in-200-characters-or-less.

Why does anyone use Twitter? What is the appeal, other than the named outrage factor? As far as I can see it is the modern equivalent of the stockade where the populace gets to throw rotten tomatoes against heretics and dissenters, patting each other on the back for their perceived loyalty to The Cause™. Just ditch the damn bird, that thing don't fly.

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