Why we’re dropping Basecamp
blogs.library.duke.edu
blogs.library.duke.edu
https://www.thefire.org/colleges/duke-university#:~:text=Duk...
I guess we'll see in 30-90 days what happens (if anything).
I donate a reasonable portion of my profits to FIRE so I guess I'll find out where my dollars go :) That said they seem to support mostly noble causes so I'm not gonna stop giving them money.
This is a good point. 37signals has the right to associate with any organization it wants, even those that do not wish to do business with them.
FIRE should do more to punish organizations that make the choice not to associate with others, that’s not what freedom of association means. It’s the right to associate, not the right to choose not to associate.
Freedom is when you get punished for not doing business with an entity that you would prefer not to
So much good opensource software has come from university funding and university-originated projects and you'd kinda hope that that culture pervades. I guess Duke isn't quite Stanford or Berkeley, though.
I neither know Basecamp nor To Do that well, so I might be completely wrong. But I think Basecamp plays in a different league than To Do, doesn't it?
This is just one department within the university. It's not uncommon to see small groups paying for some software only to eventually replace it with a site licensed enterprise alternative.
See also: MS Teams replacing Slack at big organizations
It's not like the university is digging into the closets of vendor executives.
Almost seems gauche, really. Mainstream liberalism has distanced itself from the 2020 moral panic era.
We'd never been huge fans of 37signals or its leadership, but Basecamp was genuinely the only real choice, for years, for a shared workspace between an agency and its clients, so we kept using it.
Eventually, other software just got better at doing the things we needed it to do. Basecamp 3 was not something we, or our clients, liked. We stayed on Basecamp 2 until the end.
Jason and David had always been controversial figures – especially in Chicago, where we and they are based. It felt good not to be validating their egos with our money anymore.
However, we found that Asana was a much better match for us.
I've never heard anyone decry "vice signalling" and surely humans do that at least as much.
It makes complicated issue shallow, and it is divisive instead of constructive as a method of affecting.
Most importantly, the goal is moral grandstanding, i.e. lifting yourself above others, possibly without any merit.
- Call it a "discussion" when it's a unilateral demand with only one acceptable, pre-determined outcome
- Give favorable treatment to some groups based on race, demand that others do the same, and adjust language rules and writing style to enforce this top-down
- Try to control the frame of a political event ("mostly peaceful protests") instead of acknowledging the plain reality of arson, looting, crime and murder.
- Completely misrepresent and misunderstand the very real critique that people have against the DEI movement as a parasite on and disruptor of tech companies.
- Pretending to be even-handed and objective while accusing others of "mendacious language of extremists" to refer to a riot as a riot.
It is just never ending projection with these people. They are intellectual midgets who don't understand the first thing about the enlightenment they pretend to defend. They think of themselves as empathetic, well-informed listeners, but they are surrounded by an ideological bubble that runs on gossip epistemology, bullying, forced consensus and shoddy social "science" that isn't.
And it all gets heaped and mashed together into one big pile of crud where race, tech, climate and god knows what else is claimed and defined by them as Good, whereas the other people are doing Evil.
At best they will grant you are "unknowingly" or "naively" collaborating with it, in which case they regard you with self-assured pity and a sense of moral superiority.
The possibility of being wrong does not occur to them and they think they are on the side of civilization.
What cunts.
This is just a longer version of the "I'm leaving twitter" tweet.
1. people who commit crimes -- even heinous ones -- deserve a second chance and reintegration with society (except, perhaps, for a select few crimes which may not even be especially heinous in the broader context)
2. people who hold unacceptable opinions are irredeemable
Regardless of what you think about DHH's opinions, it strikes me as magnificently childish to cause this kind of organizational disruption because of an opinion. The guy isn't funneling money to Nazi concentration camps. He has an opinion, and it's different from yours. Grow up.
In this context, you're looking at the "hold him accountable" phase of that process.
Also, this kind of thing may be a net benefit for DHH. It's publicity. Time will tell.
We all do it. Some hills are worth dying on some are not.
I came of age in the technical space in a generation that felt that it didn't matter if you had a secret shrine to Hitler as long as you could code a performant file system. It's refreshing to have seen the pendulum swing away from that extremism. Perhaps because too many of us have borne witness to the monsters taking those performant file systems and using them to coordinate violent attacks on innocent people.
But perhaps more importantly... He's not just espousing an opinion. A chief officer is speaking as an executive of a company. Always.
Something being uncomfortable and something being harmful are very different.
1. Freedom of speech and self-determination are sacred and fundamental rights, and in the economic market that means that everyone is free to make purchase decisions based on closely-held personal beliefs. Private schools have the right to exercise their freedom to make their own curriculum without government intervention.
2. People and private organizations who choose not to buy a product based on closely held personal beliefs that are the wrong ones are childish cancel culture warriors.
Why should you care about Duke’s organizational disruption anyway? It’s a private school and you don’t work there.
To address your point, I am not disputing Duke's _right_ to make purchasing decisions for any reason they like.
But it is still stupid and childish. I'm calling that out.
> Why should you care about Duke’s organizational disruption anyway? It’s a private school and you don’t work there.
Because Duke is attempting to normalize toxic behavior. They think this is going to help. It won't.
This behavior might achieve "compliance" but it doesn't actually move the needle. It's why places like San Francisco appear to support underserved communities, but when push comes to shove they blockade housing initiatives.
This is almost certainly some liberal, white woman's way of looking like a good person without having to risk anything. After work it's back to the gated community!
We will finish the discussion here with your final key points:
1. Duke’s behavior is more societally acceptable because the libs agree with it
2. San Francisco is bad and run poorly by the libs
3. This is probably something a lib white woman thought of
I totally agree, you definitely aren’t anything like the a mainstream conservative. Perhaps you identify as a libertarian-leaning independent instead.
Conservatives: We shouldn’t send tax dollars to woke private universities who are biased against conservatives.
Also conservatives: We support publicly funded private charter schools because the government can’t be trusted to run public schools efficiently and I’d rather send my child to a religious grade school. https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-ba...
I think the difference here is 37Signals was hard on its people.
But I'll reiterate a basic fact everyone has in these threads: Duke University obviously has the right to choose their service providers on ideological basis. It might not be smart, but that's another thing.
Imagine buying a condo in Trump Tower and thinking that that you can separate Trump’s personal life away from his real estate business. If you do that in 2023 you have to know that your house guests are going to think about that in some way every time they step foot inside.
I doubt the harm caused to their users migrating project management is less than whatever harm they think 37signals is creating. So by their own logic, they shouldn’t cause this harm, or whatever.
Tl;dr; duke tech leadership seems incompetent
If I worked there and relied on Basecamp and had to migrate to something new, for these reasons, I would be frustrated. And I would trust my tech org less because they aren’t making decisions to make it most efficient for me to build things.
As a developer, I don’t want to worry about whether my company is going to arbitrarily decide to switch technologies to something inferior.
Like, I know people who hate Ticketmaster but still use them because they have no other choice. It’s hard to replace.
How hard is it to replace Basecamp? Alternatives are aplenty. Some might even be cheaper and better.
This is a big reason to carefully manage your image as a company leader. It’s so a big reason DEI is financially beneficial in the: because you aren’t shutting out your best employees and customers by being unwelcoming to them.
Don’t make negative waves and unforced errors that give your customers a reason to explore alternatives.
Personally, I think basecamp is ok. But they definitely aren’t Ticketmaster.
“Initiating churn for no user value” that doesn’t mean anything. Basecamp was acting a fool and pissed off a group of purchase decision makers. And unlike companies like Ticketmaster or Apple/Google/Amazon, their product has a wide variety of alternatives.
I am aware of a company that switched away from AWS to GCP just because Jeff Bezos did something specific that personally annoyed the CEO. There was no significant cost savings and the effort to switch was relatively large.
> Initiating churn for no user value
What I meant by this is that changing tools is work. I do this when it helps me. Making me change part of my workflow is disruptive and I usually do this when it brings some value.
> switching off AWS because Bezos annoyed the CEO
I would probably plan on leaving a company that chose their cloud stack based on the ex-CEO’s actions. That’s a signal of complete stupidity or at least unpredictable chaos. I guess some people are good with this, but that drives me crazy as someone who builds things with tech. It’s a dumb thing to choose tech based on superficial things.
> acting the fool
Some people think this, some people don’t. Personally, I have no issues with what he said but typically don’t really care what CEOs say about affirmative action or whatever. I want to hear from people’s competence areas, not just common prerogatives. I don’t care their favorite flavor of ice cream either.
But buying or not buying their products based on what they say is not a good way to make decisions. As people will say many things over the years and I don’t want to be changing frequently.
I don't know the root cause, but I do know from my own experience that a librarian is a very specific "type" of customer—extremely helpful in diagnosing any technical problem, generally positive and friendly, but God have mercy on you if you step on their politics.
What... they speak like DHH is running around raping women and curb stomping people. The dude wanted people to stop talking about politics at work and made it a rule and he wasn't pro-race weighing for college admissions.... so? He's suddenly anti-minority? When in fact it's asian and white people that seem to be discriminated most for admissions.
> Hansson certainly is entitled to his opinion, and to publish his own blog. We are not in the habit of running “ideological enforcement” to ensure “quick compliance” from beleaguered corporate executives or whatever it is that he’s talking about in his posts. We simply have our own opinions and our own blogs, and in some cases, we have good choices available to us regarding the companies to which we give our business.
certainly isn't "[speaking] like DHH is running around raping women and curb stomping people".
And then you cherry pick some of the less problematic issues. Perhaps one more problematic is: "When we as employees of my company spend time mocking and expressing amusement at non-English names and that's disclosed to the public, be clear, my problem is with the disclosure, not the mocking".
Wait what? According to Wikipedia the damages from the allegedly-not-riots is 1-2 billion. Surely then the most damaging protest (that the record shows is totally not riots) in history.
If you burn over 1,000 buildings in one city, and then 99 other cities have mostly-peaceful protests, it seems weird to launder one with the other. If that's the criteria then the only thing needed to claim something is not a riot is more smaller protests.
From Wikipedia:
> research ... estimated that by the end of June, 96.3% of 7,305 demonstrations involved no injuries and no property damage. However, arson, vandalism, and looting ... caused approximately $1–2 billion in insured damages nationally, the highest recorded damage from civil disorder in U.S. history
So 97% of the demonstrations were peaceful -- "overwhelmingly peaceful" is _technically_ accurate, but obviously extremely misleading.
Those referring to these events as "riots", assuming good faith (which to be fair cannot always be assumed), are referring specifically to the NON-peaceful portion that -- while a small fraction of the total -- combined to cause the largest recorded damage from civil disorder in US history at $1-2 billion.
I'm not saying DHH's drawn conclusions are correct, but this is not the right angle of argument against his position.
There’s so much emotional language about violence and oppression.
It’s a library changing todo apps? Not everything is a statement. Vote with your wallet and all of that, but don’t expect people to care?
Despite my ideals (I think) aligning with their ideals, I still find myself annoyed that they want to force me to “feel” something. I have enough things to be riled up about in my life.
Have you read the article? It's a statement. The todo app part is just a context.
But you had time to write a 20 paragraph post? Sounds like you can't actually debate the merits of the argument. Sounds more like you're being "intellectually dishonest."
It seems “intellectually dishonest” to leave out their next sentence.
“Instead, we will focus on a few emblematic statements that stand in for a pattern of rhetoric that runs counter to our own values”
The mission of DEI is exactly the opposite, so it should come as no surprise they hate this stuff.
If they are willing to sacrifice education and research on their altar, you think they would blink an eye on killing off productivity software in their eyes created by blasphemous hereticts?
“Client” accounts that can float across projects with limited access, warnings above text fields about which clients will be able to see a post/comment, files can be updated and a full history is kept with it, Gantt (ish) chart project planning, etc etc.
I also doubt a library would have much use for much of JIRA’s features anyway.
It seemed like the big big thing at one time and then seemed to vanish almost overnight, maybe just the publicity ceased.
It's nice to know, in a way, that these things keep on ticking even though nobody's talking about them as much as they used to.
He just can't help himself and his need to share his opinions.
A lot of people feel Basecamp's products are outdated, but many kept using them out of goodwill, loyalty, and just like the company and its customer service. DHH is tanking the one thing they have going for them.
It's just that your feelings are so fragile that you can't stand having different points of view. And this react childishly
The opposite can also be true. For reasons they don’t want to use the product anymore, and they want it to be known (they mention they’ve been using it for over a decade).
The reasons themselves have been debated here on the DHH posts themselves, so how about we ask the bigger question.
How can you join the political debate publicly, without risking customers? Or should you risk loosing customers?
How do we talk politics at work? Because sometimes it’s needed. I don’t have the answers, suffice to say starting from a position of respect and a high-trust environment is important.
This is what free markets are all about. I’m not going to buy my apples from the market stall with the confederate flag. And Bob Iger doesn’t want his movies advertised next to posts spewing white supremacy.
This ability of the market to moderate behaviour is a good thing. It is, after all, entirely peaceful and non-coercive.
To move out of hypotheticals, I was a long-time fan of Kanye West. When it turned out he was an antisemite, I decided I would no longer stream his music. I know each stream is worth less than a penny but I'm not comfortable putting any amount of money in his wallet. When I learned that Adidas was fully aware of his antisemitism and tolerated it to make a buck, I decided I'd be buying Nikes instead.
Every time Musk opens his mouth these days, he damages the brand of the companies he owns/is associated with. That's because it's his choice to speak his mind, and it's the choice of consumers to put their dollars elsewhere. This fact is not new. When you sell a business, some amount of the value is attributed to "goodwill". Musk, DHH and West have all damaged their brands and in the process, diminished the goodwill and thus the value of their companies.
Duke: btw we don’t like working with people different to ourselves
1. DHH is against race based admissions. For context, so are 62% of Americans [1]
2. DHH used the term "riots" to describe events following the passing of George Floyd. For context, the term "riot" appears 60 times in the wikipedia article on the topic [2].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/most-americans-think-colleg...
That should go over really well with the university community where pretty much most of my professors and their TAs weren’t from America originally.
Also, just because a word appears frequently in a Wikipedia article doesn’t mean that the thing it is describing is that word. The word “debt” appears 11 times in Donald Trump’s Wikipedia article but that doesn’t mean he’s poor.
One more example: on Family Fued [3] the person whose name was funny found it funny, his family found it funny, and the host/audience found it funny. Do you not laugh or at least see the humour in it?
Last one (promise). This Monty Python sketch [4] has been viewed 30M times on YouTube alone, it’s by the troupe of comedians that the python programming language is named after, and it’s all about people finding other people’s names hilarious.
Regarding “riots” you miss the point. Duke is upset DHH uses the word riot, but Wikipedia also does. So they should be equally upset with Wikipedia.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inherently_funny_word
[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G-LtddOgUCE
If your argument is that the non-Anglo nature of the “funny names” isn’t a form of xenophobia or ethnic discrimination, you lost me.
I’ve got certain Thanksgiving table members who have made fun of people named Patel for being named Patel and being Indian. That’s racist. That’s bigoted. Nobody at Basecamp was getting on the funny name list for having the last name Johnson (and that name even has a phallic connotation!)
I repeat: the funny name list was specifically non-Anglo.
I was bullied for my name as a kid. It wasn't a very common name and it and it was easily turned into a less than pleasant English word.
I would hate to think that middle school children never grow up and continue to be dickwads as founders of a sophisticated technology platform. Grow. The. Fuck. Up.
The workplace isn’t Family Feud. If people are persistently making fun of your name at work you’ve now got to decide if you fight it with HR or find another job. That’s called a hostile work environment. Family Feud is a semi-scripted TV game show where all the jokes and situations are pre-planned and edited for entertainment. If we are supposed to derive our workplace manners from television then your conclusion has to be that everything you see on Game of Thrones or The Handmaid’s Tale is work appropriate.
And again regarding the Python sketch, if your argument for acceptability in the workplace is a comedy troupe from 50 years ago, you’re gonna have a bad time. Why don’t you write an email to your CEO with the subject line “Biggus Dickus?” Right now. Like you said: it’s hilarious. I’ll make their day and get you a promotion. Let me know how that goes.
Wikipedia isn’t a Duke vendor, and the Wikipedia article for the George Floyd protests makes it very clear that most of the protests were peaceful. We don’t call hockey games “fights on ice” nor do we call American football “kickoff and extra point contest” because most of the game isn’t those things. That’s why calling broadly calling the George Floyd protests “riots” is disingenuous.
Did Fox News ever call the January 6th Capitol attack a riot?
Hmm, when I google and click the most relevant result off the top couple, it says: "Many of the names were of American or European origin. But others were Asian, or African"
Let me keep searching... https://world.hey.com/dhh/let-it-all-out-78485e8e#:~:text=In...
Are you sure you're right about the name list? I'll believe a better source if you have one...
> If people are persistently making fun of your name at work you’ve now got to decide if you fight it with HR or find another job. That’s called a hostile work environment.
These weren't worker names.
Also people who are "intolerant to the intolerant" are, by definition, be intolerant to themselves.
I’m sure that nobody working for a university would have a problem with that, since basically no professors or TAs or students paying full tuition have foreign-sounding names, right?
Some reading material for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
> We also know all too well the very worst of what humanity can create, because we collect it.
There was a lot of acknowledgment of not working in anything close to a perfect system. The whole article had a lot of self-awareness that is hard to find in most institutions.
Duke libraries doesn’t have to have a perfect moral high ground to decide to quit using Basecamp. This isn’t “cancel culture,” this is a project management product that is easily replaceable and probably not even that amazing considering the competition it is up against.
Something Elon Musk should probably learn is that organizations consider it to be risky to work with other companies who can’t maintain professional behavior. Having your senior leadership team keeping a list of funny sounding ethnic names of employees is far away from being professional behavior, and that was only one of the unprofessional pieces of behavior out of many by Basecamp leadership.
Basecamp rejects DEI but DEI is all about reducing risk and increasing innovation and financial performance. It’s already been proven as numerical fact that organizations embracing true diversity financially outperform ones that don’t. DEI is a concept that benefits literally everyone. Bigoted buffoons who don’t believe in it throw their money away by alienating employees and customers.
There’s also another saying: trust is hard to gain and easy to lose. I know people who have had one bad experience and refuse to buy another product again. As an example, I know someone who will never buy a Kia/Hyundai again because of the immobilizer scandal. Same deal with VW and dieselgate. It doesn’t have to be a fully dollars and cents choice. This company pissed me off one time, I’m done with them. Again, not cancel culture.