Slackmoji has been sunset due to cease and desist (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Slackmoji has been sunset due to cease and desist (2018)

slackmoji.com

54 pointsrising-sky34 comments

Oh hi! I'm the creator of this.

Slack doesn't deserve any hate here... also, it happened in 2018!

I created this manyyyy years ago, since finding/uploading new emojis was so clunky. It's so weird to see it here now. This whole thing happened in 2018, so this isn't new. They just wanted me to change the name (fair enough!). I always meant to redo it with their new emoji API (so it didn't need a Chrome extension) and rename it; I just never got around to it.

Plus, their emoji support got better (they used to reject large emojis rather than resize, didn't have newer emojis, they didn't have an API for adding emojis, etc), so a lot of the features became much less important :)

The email from their lawyer had a bunch of scary legalese, but here's the friendly part from him:

"Please understand that we are not interested in squelching creativity or stopping people from encouraging the use of our platform. However, our name and our brand are very important symbols of trust for our customers and we need to make sure that trust is not violated, even inadvertently, by non-Slack products."

I'm a huge Slack fan (hence why I built this) and built this to fix a need I had, but it's their brand and I don't blame them at all!

Their emoji support is not that good, they lack the latest melting[1] and saluting[2] emojis. I particularly miss the saluting face at work.

[1] https://emojipedia.org/melting-face/

[2] https://emojipedia.org/saluting-face/

Those were added last year in Unicode 14. Slack probably just hasn't updated to the new standard.

When I first read this, I thought "melting face" was a reference to the famous climactic scene from the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark", where the Nazi goon's face melts down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcR9k8o4I0w

Every company should behave this way. At least in the US, trademark requires active enforcement to not become generic and useless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark#Avoiding_gen...

Copyright doesn't work the same way. You can selectively enforce it, at your discretion, without risking loss of the copyright.

For a trademark like this, one way that Slack can "enforce" their trademark is for slackmoji to acknowledge Slack's trademark in slackmoji's webpages.

Oh man... sometimes I wonder how the HN anger machine manages to find new things to be outraged about.

A testament that emotions sell: anger, sadness and outrage are heavily upvoted even for things that happened way back.

I mean, GP was kind, the lawyer was kind. the language of "cease and desist" sounds strong and is strong, but is a requirement for protect of trademark or whatever.

in this case it's no harm no foul really, or at least maybe not much.

the kernel of truth is there though, this kind of stuff happens a lot, usually from big corps to little guys doing virtually no damage. in some cases really quite damaging, I don't know if any of you remember the Backcountry (outdoor gear retailer) saga from a few years ago. almost all of my friends still refuse to purchase from them because of their legal departments overzealous protection of an extremely common word "backcountry"

I like how Atlassian allows you to use their product names in your own as long as you structure it like ‘[my product] for [atlassian product]’

I kinda find it hard to not use the product name if it’s something specifically made for that product e.g. slackmoji

For me, “Emoji for Slack” sounds like an add-in, but “Slackmoji” sounds like something Slack made themselves. Probably because of the “for” separating word.

Salesforce sure is firing on all cylinders today... /s

EDIT: I was confused about the timeline of this, this post is from 2018 (before Salesforce bought them. Salesforce still sucks but this isn't something they were responsible for)

This was from before Salesforce bought them (2018).

Edited, thank you for the clarification. With the Heroku stuff and the Salesforce/Slack PTO/vacation stuff from a few months ago I just assumed this was something new.

Are there any details?

Was the C&D sent by slack, if yes why? Trademark violation?

Or perhaps by the copyright holder of some emoji that were used without permission?

Here's a snippet from the email, which quotes their Brand Guidelines: "You're entitled to say that your website or application is integrated with Slack (we like people integrating with Slack!), but please don't use the Slack marks as part of the name of your company, application, product, or service, or in any logo you create."

Looks like you can still use https://discordmojis.com/ (at least for now) which was always mostly a mirror of Slackmoji.

Slackmojis.com still works. This was Slackmoji.com, which is different. It was an app that made it easier to upload custom emoji to Slack, rather than using their interface.

Why do this? Slackmoji just improves the platform for free. If it's branding just change the name.

what about this? https://slackmojis.com/

I was worried that’s what this post was about! phew :)

Sunsets are gradual...

This is from 2018

Plug for Mattermost. Easy, self-hosted and no disruption from groups fighting over profit/property.

Threads are pretty OK, for those that use them (I don't)

if discord launched a business version slack would be gone in a weeks time. not sure why people can't use IRC anyways unless they have ADHD when their screen isnt full of random colours and pictures and cant work without it

gosh, simply cannot agree w/ this take. perhaps I'm a discord luddite, but there's just no way the Average Business User will ever figure out discord.

I mean, thread replies in the main conversation by default? Come on.

> I mean, thread replies in the main conversation by default? Come on.

Personally I'm a huge fan of this and I hate Slack's threads, it's where discussion goes to die. If you need to break off then just create a group for the people who need to have input and take it out of the main channels. I use Discord replies almost daily while I avoid Slack's threads like the plague.

For us and our clients it's the other way around. Slack's threads work, everyone else's threads suck (Teams and Discord included, but Teams is even worse than Discord).

Isn't the whole point of threads to "create a group for the people who need to have input?"

are you talking about a private IRC server or using a public one?

Discord has a significant malware problem. Threat actors use their CDNs for malware storage and Discord has been very lax in addressing this. A lot of companies don't allow it to be installed and block Discord and its CDNs because of it.

This is my first time hearing anything like this. Do you have any articles or citations that show this?

Some examples:

https://threatpost.com/discord-malware-researchers/168096/

https://news.sophos.com/en-us/2021/07/22/malware-increasingl...

https://thenewstack.io/roblox-and-discord-become-virus-vecto...

I bet Compliance is the #1 thing preventing a corp from adopting IRC.

I really don't think discord has any advantage over slack. I still can't log into multiple discords in the same client (for when I want completely separate use cases).

Also the spread of Teams has proved that the product can be... bad... and still used by everyone because its free or bundled with something they pay for.

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