Shopify is acquiring the Threads team | Hacker News Reader

Shopify is acquiring the Threads team

framer.threads.com

69 pointsmeiraleal58 comments

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Even after clicking around a bit, I still can’t tell what this “threads” is. Can anyone offer a summary?

Apparently a slack competitor.

I found this: https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/15/threads-a-slack-alternativ...

The login page is enlightening:

> A Slack replacement, not a social app from Instagram

Wish I noticed this before reading the whole announcement!

I wonder if Shopify bought the wrong one on accident.

The title should be: 'Shopify is acquiring a Threads team'

"Threads is a Slack replacement designed for makers," from https://www.linkedin.com/company/threadsgroupinc/

Is it a pun, hinting that Slack is for slackers?

"... and made by makers!"

If they were bought by a bread company, they would have been bade by bakers.

Faked by fakers or created by creators.. hahaha

Tautology

Is it even a tautology if it's the same word being reused?

The Tau of Tautology.

It's Taus all the way down!

I thought it was Tautols all the way down.

By designers, rather.

There is a video here that might help. It was a workplace communications tool.

https://youtu.be/_gKXA4kMLJY?si=yEFNlD385T1Xw5FG

Threads must have had very little meaningful usage from customers to be able to shut down and delete all data within 2 weeks of the announcement with hardly a mention of how this might impact their userbase

According to their Twitter posts, they have been working directly with their heavier users for a while longer to get them migrated off.

> According to their Twitter posts, they have been working directly with their heavier users for a while longer to get them migrated off.

Props to them, but this is why I have a dislike for cloud software. Companies wouldn't even need to do that in the first place, if they had just used self-hosted Mattermost or Rocket.Chat, or something else, since those are usually good enough for like 80% to 90% of the use cases anyways. Possibly with some other software thrown in the mix as well, like OpenProject.

In a perfect world... Unfortunately with each update of Rocket.chat and Mattermost they've begun to limit or cripple the self-hosted, open-source, non-paid versions.

At some point the community will likely need to create on-going forks to maintain the nice features we take for granted today. For example, I'm working on alternative Mattermost SSO compatible out of the box with the latest open-source version. Mattermost self-hosted, with an alternative (non-paid per user) SSO is good for 99% of use cases, but then again, they'll start to see that and cripple away bit by bit.

I've recently heard good things about Campfire Once, may ultimately be better option compared to rundle everywhere.

Though Mattermost really is nice... sigh.. can't have nice things.

Heavy its a huge pain to set that up and maintain it though. Rocket chat, last time I checked required building your own android app and pushing it to the store.

No need to build your own android app for rocket.chat. They have their own apps that work well with your own self-hosted instances out of the box.

Mattermost previously had some weird thing in regards to your own app for native app notifications, but haven't seen the issue in the most recent versions.

Yeah, I read that thinking it was Instagram Threads... and was confused to the cheery tone of the announcement.

Note: this is not Instagram Threads

Hahah! I was confused too. Maybe now Meta can acquire the threads.com domain

> It all started with the rise of Instagram Threads, which presented us with the opportunity to sell our domains.

Sounds like yes lol

Maybe Shopify can get ROI from the domain sale to Meta?

But what is it exactly?

"A Slack replacement, not a social app from Instagram" according to the login page (https://threads.com/login)

The fact that that disclaimer is on the login page itself sounds really problematic.

It was billed as a slower paced Slack alternative. More forum and less IRC iirc.

Survey says:

Sell threads.com to Meta

Jesus it even mentions Instagram Threads in it

so.. cotton threads?

If you are looking for an alternative that’s even more async than Threads, check out https://twist.com/

We (Doist) have been developing it since 2015.

Genuine question - what makes it "more async"? From what I can gather, it has no notification dots or "online" status. Is there also something inherent to the conversation structure that makes it "more async"?

I remember using it at a startup around 2017-18. At the time, I thought it was just another tool they were experimenting with. But after moving on to another job, I found myself missing it.

I love twist.

It’s so underrated. More should check it out.

Note: I’m not affiliated in any way.

For even more async check out email - or even regular post!

Well, Meta paid 10m for fb.com (and had to promise not to ever get into farming), so I guess threads.com is probably worth the same ballpark to them.

Edit, I'm remembering wrong, it was 8.5m.

Interesting quote on that one:

"The farm bureau has agreed to give us FB.com and we in return have agreed to not sell Farm subsidies."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-pays-85-million-for-fb...

That's one way to exit.

11 days to get your data out and into a new tool. Must’ve been a fire sale where Shopify wants no part of running or supporting the product.

With Shopify shutting down threads so quickly, what’s the play here?

Use the talent to build chat functionality, so that merchants can add that as a feature to their website?

LLM-based support chat probably. It's a pretty ripe opportunity to build something analogous to Amazon's support experience, especially when combined with Shop Pay. Putting payment provider, retailers, potentially suppliers, customers and documentation into a single conversational interface will be quite convenient for the end user.

I doubt there's a play. Shopify is just hiring a team of smart developers who have a track record of working well with each other, without needing to go through a long recruiting process.

What talent? Luck? Whatever need Shopify has requested to chat they can develop easily

Interesting how all data will be deleted within two weeks (June 18), that seems a bit fast. I guess it prevents rollerover costs for data store.

There was also an attempt on improving office communication from the makers of the Monica crm: https://www.officelife.io/

It seems like they have also given up?

I guess emails and excel are really enough for most.

Why is Shopify buying random companies? Their strategy seems off for a while.

Anyone have a guess on how much they agreed to sell the domain to Meta for?

Zuck is surely buying up the domain, and I’m sure those negotiations helped instigate this acquihire. Seems they didn’t have many customers anyway.

These acquihire posts read so cheery. Why? You’re killing a product that at least 1 person depended on. Why are you pretending that this is exciting for them?

It’s exciting for the people getting paid

Clearly, but who is the post for? Is it for their parents, or their customers? It reads like the former.

https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

Not to be confused with Threads software that was in conflict with Meta when it started the Instagram-related Threads platform 7 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38072495

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