Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2019/06/19/734095998/putting-a-price-on-chat-slack-is-going-public-at-16-billion-value <comment><USER2> Well deserved.

Their product-vision was clear, their execution focused on what mattered... and they didn't need to bend or break laws to succeed.

It's easily my favorite unicorn of the past decade.

<comment><USER3> I don't know about "well deserved". They did it by holding people's data hostage. It's one thing to make your messages unsearchable or otherwise available in the UI until your pay, but holding your data completely hostage until you pay up isn't exactly a noble way to go about things. Even _Facebook_ isn't this obnoxious about getting you a copy of your message history.

<comment><USER4> Nah, this is a super slanted view of things. Their business succeeds because they've made a best in class amazing thing, not because everyone begrudgingly wants to see their history, lol

<comment><USER5> Slack is still inferior to IRC overall. Don't know what you're talking about.

<comment><USER4> What? Slack is objectively better in every way except the open source part

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >>> More than 88,000 Paid Customers, including more than 65 companies in the Fortune 100; and

>>> We had 575 Paid Customers >$100,000 of ARR as of January 31, 2019, which accounted for approximately 40% of our revenue in fiscal year 2019.

If my math is right, 40% of their revenue is concentrated in <1% of their paid customers. Is this normal in the corporate SaaS market ? I can only think of this as a huge risk.

I also saw that this is a direct listing and not an IPO. Again, I can only see this as a risk, basically because no underwriter will push the stock to investors. Is this so ?

<comment><USER7> Most of the places I worked had 2 or 3 whales. 55 whales is actually pretty good.

<comment><USER8> Interesting... I guess you could see a lot of SaaS companies as outsourced software development teams for the whales.

<comment><USER9> yep, if you owe someone a little money they have control. If you owe someone a lot of money, you have control. The whales use SaaS companies to develop things they dont want in house and demand features because they know they're one of the biggest customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Slack is great. The valuation makes sense and I wish them continued success.

All the integrations, and workflows that Slack has enabled for our company make us more productive.

I would hate to go back to what came before it.

IRC is complete trash and I don't know why anyone would use it in the same sentence as Slack. UX matters. It matters A LOT.

<comment><USER11> What's wrong with the UX of IRC? IRC is a protocol, not a specific client, and it supports a wide variety of server and client plugins. We had a really nice IRC going productively for a year or two, but we scrapped it because only our software developer used it and other people in the company preferred something else (they used a mix of email, Google chat/hangouts, and text).

The nice thing about IRC is that everyone can use whatever client they like and it will just work. I preferred command-line UX (irssi) because most of my job is based around the terminal, others prefer desktop clients, while others prefer web clients, and all were available for our IRC server.

Our problem was that management wanted everyone on the same thing, and neither side (IRC vs Google chat) wanted to switch (they liked integration with web Gmail, we liked extensibility, and had already built useful plugins, like "run a build"). In the end, they didn't like our "less professional" plugins (Chuck Norris facts, gifs, etc), and we ended up compromising on Slack (we rebuilt some of our custom integrations).

We went through a year or so of adjustment, and now we're reasonably productive with it. However, morale is a bit lower, and I think we're a bit less productive than before, but that's really hard to judge. Honestly, I just wish there was some nicer looking IRC client. I don't like trusting Slack and would prefer the tried and true protocol that we can tweak and just pay for a flashier client for those who like such things. However, it's better than the previous situation where teams just didn't communicate in text because they couldn't agree on a medium, which led to more interruptions than the annoying Slack notifications (non developers tend to always @ the tech lead instead of letting it be answered by whomever happens to be looking at the channel).

I think it's wrong to blame IRC here. The UX of IRC is fine, it just doesn't have a flashy client (pidgin is really easy to use and available everywhere, but it's kind of ugly).

<comment><USER12> Can you log on to IRC from your phone and then instantly search through all of your company's chat history through the last couple of years?

<comment><USER13> Sure, that's exactly what I'm doing all the time.

I can search my logs easily [https://i.imgur.com/nTpoYs0.png](https://i.imgur.com/nTpoYs0.png) (soon with even better integration, the prototype is a separate web app), and I can just open the web client or app on any device on this planet and instantly have all my logs and channels, and just chat: [https://i.k8r.eu/54BPMQ.png](https://i.k8r.eu/54BPMQ.png)

Of course, I use self-hosted quassel and quasseldroid.

Many other projects such as weechat and IRCCloud are also working on making IRC better than slack at everything it does — IRCCloud has a web client, mobile client, hosted team servers, a slack bridge, reactions, threads, emoji, attachments, and all you'd want from slack, natively.

Other projects such as IRC.com are also working on bringing the feq advantages Slack has back to IRC to make it more attractive.

The one single real advantage of Slack is marketing. They can call companies and spend a lot on money on getting more customers, due to the VC funding.

<comment><USER14> "The one single real advantage of Slack is marketing."

Respectfully, NO.

Providing a very useful turnkey set of features out of the box that are technically possible but fiddly and hard to use in IRC is in and of itself a huge advantage. This is why they're successful. This is why people use it. This is why people use it who barely know what a command line IS.

<comment><USER13> If you want that, you can just use IRCCloud, it has all that in a single solution. Just like Slack.

IRCCloud can even connect to Slack workspaces.

The only advantage Slack has over IRCCloud is marketing.

It's relatively ironic that I have to end up praising IRCCloud here, considering I'm contributing to a competing IRC client.

<comment><USER15> But when you use IRCCloud you don't use the IRC protocol anymore, you use the IRCCloud protocol. Which is the same as using the Slack protocol. Your features aren't available outside IRCCloud. Your account, your data, your history, everything is tied to IRCCloud. You haven't gained anything compared to Slack. You're advocating for the _exact_ same model and you don't realize that the only way to have the same features as Slack in an easy way is to basically do what Slack does. You're just agreeing with what the parent is saying.

<comment><USER13> IRCCloud can connect to normal IRC servers, and normal IRC clients can connect to IRCCloud servers — and you can export your logs and import them elsewhere.

That makes it much closer to the open ideal than Slack is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Happy for the people that built it, with the idea of improving what the chat was. Sad for the internet, because we were better in the 1980s with an open standard like IRC, and gradually the internet community lost the ability to adapt their old open protocols for the future.

<comment><USER17> The death of the protocol.

People no longer release protocols, they release products. The open net, the open web has truly died.

I wonder sometimes what we're missing because the conditions that let the web grow out of the internet have disappeared. What next leap are we missing?

<comment><USER18> There's no money to be made in creating and building on open protocols. Without money to be made there's no funding. Without funding there's no way to create great experiences. Without great experiences nobody will use the thing.

Pretty straightforward, really

<comment><USER19> On the other hand, I don't think anyone accused slack, with multi-megabyte webpages and even worse mobile app, of being a great experience. I think I used it once, and said no more.

<comment><USER20> I've met only a few programmers IRL that complained about slack, and even then it was for ideological reasons, not user experience reasons. Everyone else, most programmers and all non-programmers I know like the user experience.

I haven't had any real issues with desktop or mobile apps either.

<comment><USER21> I use Slack for work, and while it was an order of magnitude better than the dumpster-fire of Hipchat (which it replaced for our team), I still think that the interface is kind of "meh".

Custom emojis are fun, inline markdown is useful, but it takes a lot of memory for something that, to me, seems like it should be lightweight. We've had IM since the 80's, after all. There's a part of me that has a visceral reaction to seeing an IM client taking more than 100mb of memory (though to be fair they seem to be getting improving that a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Next >$16B opportunity: bring something close to Slack, but that actually works, to China.

China is chat-first culture, but neither DingDing, nor Wechat Work achieved the status that Slack has in the US/EU.

Problems with Slack in China: it's often blocked, it's unbearably slow, the apps are not in the stores, it's Chinese search is lacklustre, it's UI is centered on "longer" messages but Chinese language is very short so it could be optimized somehow.

<comment><USER23> You'd probably need it to be very efficient in order to run on some of the cheaper mobile devices, and of course only a Chinese company would ever be allowed to succeed at that scale in China.

I could easily imagine a Chinese company coming up with Slack-but-fast-and- easily-monitored, making that >$16B in Asia, and then coming at the US/EU markets with it.

<comment><USER22> In the age of 8-core Snapdragon 660 phones that cost barely north of a hundred dollars this is not much of a concern. Besides, most "office" types update their phones every major release.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I agree they're a great product org, but not sure I agree they're a $16B company — messaging apps tend to be cyclical, so I'm not sold on their long term viability. It's just too easy for new IM platforms to take root inside a company once the old one gets too noisy.

Given the growing grassroots backlash against the entire Slack Way, I'm not convinced they have a long enough runway to pivot to a stickier product before something shinier comes along.

<comment><USER2> Their moat is sticky enough and they know it. They can decide what verticals they want to compete it, but their company mission to make business- communication more effective is still as open a field as it was when they were founded.

They may have to acquire their Instagram equivalent some time in the future, but I can easily imagine that their Enterprise Customers are here to stay.

<comment><USER25> The enterprise customers are the least likely to stay. What happens when Microsoft Teams gets "good enough" and it's already given away with the Office subscription that most enterprise customers have and it integrates with Microsoft's other options.

Look no further than YC darling Dropbox. For the same price you pay for Dropbox, you can get the entire Microsoft Office suite plus 6 TB of storage.

<comment><USER26> You think enterprise companies switch a product they're already using with all the integrations to another (possibly inferior) product just because of price? That's not usually been my experience

<comment><USER27> No, the switch to a product that is fully integrated with another more important product that they already use.

<comment><USER28> And with Flow adding integrations all the time Microsoft are real close to a killer Business product.

Seriously, Flow is good stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The thing that really struck me about Slack was its level of polish, esp compared to other software around the time of its release.

The overall level of polish on similar apps has risen since then so that's less of a differentiator, but I still refer to Slack as a great example of polish and consistency in product, with mostly great UX as well

</comment><comment><USER29> Congrats to them. I used to be an avid user (loved the way some integrations could help productivity), but since then moved on to Discord, which feels superior in every aspect, especially since it's free.

I'm not sure how I feel about the valuation. I'd like to see how the user base, especially the ratio of paying users, has been growing. It feels likely that most of the companies that would have been easy to convert have already been converted. I expect CAC to go up and payer conversion to stagnate at best. I don't see how they can 2-3x their revenue this year (unless there are drastic, risky changes).

In addition, the slow iterations on the mobile and desktop clients, and the meteoric rise of Discord are enough cause for concern. I don't see how this investment would have legs.

<comment><USER30> How is Discord superior? I haven't really used it but my first impressions are that it seems very tailored to the gaming community. I have used Slack extensively and it appears more professional. And if Discord is free, how do they make money / keep the lights on?

I do worry about Slack's pricing since there is a vast chasm between their free plan and their paid plans. I use Slack to run some open source and hobbyist communities with thousands of members and if for any reason we were forced to switch to a paid plan (at $x per user) we'd be forced to go elsewhere immediately.

<comment><USER31> Discord has much better performance for large communities, and I've found it to be perfect for remote collaboration with its intuitive and super low friction voice channels.

But the issue around professionalism that you bring up is certainly valid. I don't want to have to maintain separate accounts for work vs play (unless there's a seamless way to switch between them, like for Google, but currently there isn't), but currently there's no way to present different personas to different communities from the same account. Some examples:

\- Can't change avatar based on server: [https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en- us/community/posts/3600...](https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en- us/community/posts/360029341852)

\- Real account name shows up on profile even if you provide a different nickname to the server: [https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en- us/articles/219070107-S...](https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en- us/articles/219070107-Server-Nicknames)

I think they're still super laser focused on their core demographic of gamers rather than trying to expand into professional use and compete with the likes of Slack. You can certainly still use it in a professional capacity and it generally works great, and is better than Slack in some areas, but the lack of effort put into catering to those use cases definitely shows.

FWIW, I currently work around the issues around multi-account management using Firefox's excellent containers feature (using 1 work container to segregate all of my work accounts from personal ones without also having separate views of history).

<comment><USER30> For me, the voice channels are actually off-putting. I've never been a gamer and don't like the idea of feeling like I'm chatting on the phone with strangers. Text feels much more comfortable.

Thanks for your response. It is good to get feedback from somebody who has used Discord as I am just about to launch a new community on Slack. I will stick with Slack for now.

<comment><USER31> It's definitely not for everyone (or every kind of community), but I've had reasonable success with it in a mostly-remote workplace where voice channels can help emulate desk-to-desk interactions with your immediate team, but as a purely opt-in process compared to a real open-office where you open yourself up to disruptions by anyone at any given moment all the time, and have no opt- out mechanism outside of leaving your desk and camping in a conference room.

Not sure what sort of community you're launching, but if it's for coding definitely check out Spectrum. The Apollo team made a great post about their search for a new community platform and landed on Spectrum due to a couple of reasons that might apply to you as well: [https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello- spectrum-...](https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello- spectrum-8fa6b979645b)

TL;DR: The product itself is open source, it has a mechanism for longer-form discourse like traditional forums as well as real-time chat, and is fully index-able by search engines.

Wish you the best on your launch!

<comment><USER30> I will check it out and thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Anybody who thinks they know for sure that slack can't possibly be worth $16B should go back and read some threads from around the Facebook IPO (like this one [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4320585](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4320585)). It's very easy to write reasonable sounding things - making accurate predictions about the future is much harder.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, I'm going to go out on a limb here and venture a guess that Slack is going to do very well for itself, though it may dip and swoon over the next couple years before it reaches that point.

An even more applicable comparison is the HN thread about the Dropbox announcement. "What? This is just [IRC|rsync] with gimmicky bells and whistles."

<comment><USER34> I think it's telling that I've seen that Dropbox comment mentioned (and here distorted to the whole thread) probably >100 times yet can't remember the threads it was mentioned in.

<comment><USER33> I don't understand what you mean about "distorted"

<comment><USER35> Actual comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's pretty hilarious that first Stewart Butterfield tried to make an MMO (Game Neverending), failed at that, and ended up making a fortune on the spinoff, Flickr. Then he tried to make another MMO (Glitch), failed at that, and ended up making a fortune on the spinoff, Slack.

I hope he tries to make another MMO.

<comment><USER37> I feel naive for asking: how would you come up with Flickr as a spinoff for an MMO? A chat application, yea seems fair, but Flickr?

I am seriously withholding my urge to spam question marks on this page as they are dancing around my head.

<comment><USER38> Is it so hard to imagine a photo sharing feature inside the game? MMOs can be anything.

<comment><USER39> Yes. Can you please explain or give an example of an MMO where photo sharing is a major mechanic or important MVP feature?

<comment><USER38> Why does it need to be a major mechanic? It was a feature in Game Neverending and they used that to build Flickr.

<comment><USER39> I was replying to somebody who was annoyed that somebody was surprised there was a photo uploading and sharing feature. It's a surprising feature because it isn't a major mechanic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> My experience with Slack has been the mixed bag of "I love this", "Turn it off", "I couldn't be global without it".

What makes me long on this stock is their position as leader of the Work Graph.(0) SAP and Salesforce have strong positions as trailing indicators of workplace knowledge (this is the information/ process that matters most to us) but Slack and to a lesser extend MS Teams are leading indicators of WHY the information/ process matters.

(0) -- [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609319/slack-hopes-its- ai...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609319/slack-hopes-its-ai-will-keep- you-from-hating-slack/)

</comment><comment><USER41> I wish them all the best. But I do hope they stay small in spirit and nimble.

One of my favourite things about slack is /feedback and the fact that someone will get back to me within 24hrs. There is no product of this scale that has such a low barrier to feedback/questions/bug report.

<comment><USER42> Except in my experience they don't actually fix the bugs. For literally years the Slack app would get into a zombie state if your network changed in any way: switched WAPs, got on/off the VPN, switch from wifi to ethernet, etc. The app would still think it had a network connection but it actually didn't. The only way to fix it was with a hard refresh. To this day I still reflexively do a ctrl-r whenever my network changes. Because after reporting this bug to them over and over and over I got fed up and just moved on. I honestly have no idea if the bug has actually been fixed, ctrl-r has just become complete muscle memory for me now.

<comment><USER41> Interesting, I'm on MacOS and in a similar environment (switching vlans etc.) and the socket just reconnects fine both on the web version and the 'app'.

<comment><USER42> It's possibly fixed now. I first encountered this in 2016. Many coworkers complained of it and Slack always acknowledged it was an issue they were looking into whenever I reported it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Mattermost raises $50 million to advance its open source Slack alternative

[https://venturebeat.com/2019/06/19/mattermost- raises-50-mill...](https://venturebeat.com/2019/06/19/mattermost- raises-50-million-to-advance-its-open-source-slack-alternative/)

<comment><USER44> Here's another one.

[http://www.ircd-hybrid.org](http://www.ircd-hybrid.org)

You don't even need a client because you can read [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2812](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2812) and then use telnet. Just remember to respond to PINGs.

<comment><USER45> Is your cynicism targeted at Mattermost?

Because I find it to be already better than Slack. Took a few commands to set it up at work on our own server. Convenient, fast, and has the good bits from the Slack UI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Their valuation stems from MAUs and majority are on the generous free tier. Do investors really think they can monetize the free users?

<comment><USER47> 2018 revenue was $400 million, ~doubled the previous year - Slack isn't a company with just a ton of free users and no monetization

<comment><USER48> 40x still seems like an insane multiple.

<comment><USER49> Assuming they have a margin of 50%, their EBITDA multiple is 80. For comparison, Facebook had an EBITDA multiple of ~50 at IPO time.

<comment><USER50> Slack isn't a consumer company, they are an SaaS enterprise company. Most SaaS enterprise companies trade at far lower multiples. A decent comp for Slack would be Dropbox, which has $1.4B and rough valuation of ~$10B

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Aha! If you were wondering "What's Slack useful for?" this is the answer.

</comment><comment><USER52> The obligatory "but they have massive losses",

> For the fiscal year ending January 31, 2019, the company reported losses of > $138.9 million on revenue of $400.6 million. That's compared to a loss of > $140.1 million on revenue of $220.5 million the year prior. [1]

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/slack-first-quarter- financ...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/slack-first-quarter-financials/)

I don't understand valuations.

<comment><USER53> My question is where the _hell_ is that money going?

That money is all the cash flow in some entire minor industries. It's the GDP of some minor lower/mid-economy nations' cities. Their losses are equal to half the entire GDP of Palau.

Maybe I'm detached. But I don't understand the cash flow in chat apps today. It's absolutely bizarre amounts of money for something that can and _will_ easily be replaced in a few years, as always happens.

<comment><USER54> Overpaid executives. I worked for a darling in the security space that has not posted a profit ever in it's 7 years post-IPO (they could at this point, but choose not to). Yet the company paid the CEO, multiple years I was there, over $300M annually. The current CEO makes a "base" $128M and has incentives of over $400M dangling in front of him. Yet any time the company misses guidance do you know what they blame? Paying the "field" (sales and field engineering) too much in commission and stock grants. Yet if you roll up all executive and board grants on an annual basis you're north of a Billion (with a B) in pay. Yet... No analyst has the nerve to ask that question point blank on the earnings call.

Beyond executives and the board? Marketing. I'm now at a much smaller F round startup that blew $350k+ on the RSA conference and another $150k+ on expenses for said show. The return on that is miniscule.

Where does the money go? I feel like most startups I've been in have been very good at funneling the funds exactly where they want it. Profitable doesn't seem to be the goal anymore, but more of to sink as much cash into executive pockets as quickly as possible.

<comment><USER55> That can't be right... according to this [https://www.investopedia.com/highest-paid- ceos-2019-4687532](https://www.investopedia.com/highest-paid- ceos-2019-4687532)

Musk was the highest paid (and that was incorrect, he was not paid that much - that was the max.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> It's just crazy to many of us that a reinvented IRC is suddenly "not dead" and in vogue again. Not unbelievable, just kind of surprising how quickly text chat on a channel format was cloned, rebranded, and valued for billions.

<comment><USER57> I never understood what Slack did better than Hipchat, and not in a nerd sense of "well Dropbox could be replaced with rsync, a VPS and some shell scripts, m'glayven". I never understood how they killed Hipchat, IRC, or anything else. I don't know if they have a strategy to deal with things like Microsoft Teams that is very attractive to companies who already work with Office 365/Active Directory or if they can really do anything about it. So, I congratulate them on their success but I, too, am utterly mystified.

<comment><USER58> Slack and IRC are incomparable. Slack has authentication, message retention and search, multimedia attachments, mobile application with notifications, conversation threads, etc.

You could try and cobble together something similar from an IRC server plus ten different programs, but most companie would rather pay Slack a wee amount than maintain a Frankenstein's monster.

<comment><USER13> Except for message retention and search, IRC already has all that, and even that is possible with bouncers.

Mobile applications with notifications, conversation threads with +draft/reply (IRCv3 draft), multimedia attachments (IRCv3 idea), authentication with SASL and standardized account management (IRCv3 draft), etc.

Look at what IRCCloud provides, and what IRCv3 is doing.

<comment><USER59> > Except for ##2 killer features##, IRC already has all that, and even that is > possible ##if you implement it yourself##.

That's what normal people see when they read your message.

<comment><USER13> Going to irccloud.com, creating an account, and connecting is "implementing it yourself" how again? And IRCCloud has all that in a single solution.

Even if you want to self-host, there are solutions — get any server, run

        docker run \
      -v /path/to/folder/where/you/want/to/store/the/config:/config \
      k8r.eu/justjanne/quassel-docker:v0.13.1

and connect with quassel or quasseldroid to that server (the setup wizard guides you through everything else). It's about as simple as it can get for selfhosted. (Quassel gets you message retention and search immediately, and the other features are already being worked on).

<comment><USER59> Well, irccloud.com must be doing something wrong if they're using a pre- existing protocol, have solved its problems and yet Slack is the company worth billions.

<comment><USER13> That's the part where VC money comes in. 99% of the VC funded companies worth billions weren't the first, or the best — they just managed to get VC money and out-spent everyone else on advertising, or used the money to give away their product until they were the largest.

Uber is still making losses in almost all markets it's active in. Slack is making a 380'000 $ loss per day. Amazon hasn't made a profit a single time in their entire history.

The Silicon Valley model of "let's gain a monopoly by giving away a product and outspending everyone on advertising, then monetizing it" doesn't reward the best product. Never has, never will.

And companies grown the traditional, honest way, making actual profits of course can't compete with that. If I opened up a supermarket giving away everything for free, of course I'd have more customers than the supermarkets who have to make money.

<comment><USER59> Amazon has made a tiny profit for several years before AWS, when it started having larger ones.

But it was never too much in the red. It shouldn't be placed together with Uber.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Does anybody have any idea how pricing of this will open up compared to an IPO? They are doing a direct offering (DPO), which essentially means no new shares are being allocated and there is no underwriter which typically means the price can be way more volatile on opening day since no underwriters to control and establish pricing. DPO as I understand you are buying shares directly from people who already have them.

</comment><comment><USER61> To me the succes of Slack also shows how invaluable it is.

Companies jumped to it very easily. Everybody just started using it. And the moment something better comes along Slack will be forgotten.

I think this is different from Facebook. Company employees come and go so they don't value what they put on Slack very much. And for companies the history on slack is also not very important.

Well that's how I see how Slack is being used inside different companies.

<comment><USER62> I don't necessarily think Slack is worth $16B any time soon, but I actually do feel like my searchable Slack history stretching back ~5 years is one of the most valuable resources I have at my fingertips on a dailt basis. The search quickly pulls up stuff from years ago even stuff from before we changed the subdomain for the org.

<comment><USER63> Before Slack, that history might have been contained in email. Which has always been available and goes back decades in my case. Slack worries me in the sense that when it's gone so is my data, but email I've always got my copy.

<comment><USER64> "Might". There's a lot slack channels that I'm somewhat privy to, but otherwise would be out of the loop on if it were an e-mail. It gives me access to a lot of institutional knowledge in my organization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Slack did not kill IRC. It seems like a few people here are saying that.

AOL IM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Chat, SMS...all killed IRC. Sure, there's a small niche of users out there but it's a deserted island for the most part.

</comment><comment><USER66> It's still crazy to me that a $16B company can't make the financials of a true native app for Windows and macOS work. Microsoft has some real soul searching to do to fix up Windows development and make it easier and more attractive to companies. Thankfully it seems like both Microsoft and Apple are at least trying to make things easier. Apple will probably do the best with Project Catalyst (I mean, they already got Twitter!), but Microsoft is investing in React Native for Windows which could prove really interesting. Hopefully Microsoft doesn't settle for just making Electron better.

<comment><USER67> Maybe because the real future is web apps and has been for more than a decade now.

<comment><USER68> If it's been the future for a decade, and that future isn't here ... is it really the future of applications?

<comment><USER69> I would replace "the future" with saying that it's much more profitable for vendors and less convenient for users, so it's being adopted as fast as vendors can overcome users's resistance.

<comment><USER67> It is actually much more convenient for users. They can switch computers/phone/OSes and have the same experience. The same is not true with native apps.

<comment><USER25> I don't _want_ the same experience cross platforms. I don't want the "Mac experience" when I am using Windows (see iTunes) or the "Windows experience" when I am using a Mac (old versions of Office).

<comment><USER67> No, what you want is the same experience. Which is what the web gives you. What you are describing is native apps trying to replicate the same experience and failing because they are native.

Edit: Native apps require more maintenance which adds to the delta in experience. If a single app is created (web) there is no delta.

<comment><USER68> Are you seriously trying to tell someone what they want, when they clearly and rationally laid out specifically what they actually want?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> This valuation depends on the continued incompetence of Google and Microsoft, who both offer Slack competitors as part of their productivity packages that most of Slack's paying customers already subscribe to. Their offerings are so bad that people pay money to Slack _not_ to use them.

<comment><USER71> This has been my experience. Every few months or so we sign in to Google Hangouts Chat in hopes it has made some progress so we can stop paying for Slack, but it is always a disappointment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Is this another one of those companies whose S1 says "We're not profitable and may never be"?

Why is that the right time to go public? Once the company has an obligation to move towards profitability, doesn't that expose its investors to the risk of another startup subsidizing the same product or service with VC money, undercutting the new established brand?

Like if slack wants to become profitable they probably need to push more people to the paid version of the app, but then won't another company just make a clone and convert some VC cash into a runway with which to poach slack's userbase, and eventually file an S1 saying "we're not profitable and may never be"?

I'm struggling to understand _why_ this keeps working, because no one seems to have a problem with it _at all_.

<comment><USER73> Teams bundling will hold back wider adoption by the large co's who use office365. How will the userbase continue to grow?

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Off topic. Didn't know NPR had text only version of the site. [https://text.npr.org](https://text.npr.org)

<comment><USER75> Link to current story: [https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=734095998](https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=734095998)

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> There is no way Slack is worth $16 billion dollars.

That's over 40x current revenue for a company that lost almost $400,000 a day last year.

<comment><USER77> Dude, when you see the valuations of other unicorns you're gonna be soo pissed...

<comment><USER76> Well, you aren't wrong. But I think there are unicorns that are good investments, particularly cloudflare and juul. There are other unicorns I view as highly speculative but potentially viable. But slack? No way. Not at this valuation. If it ever makes this much money, let alone this much profit, I'll eat a hat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Just throwing out there but has Slack genuinely improved the work lives of anybody? I've used it for my past two jobs and have yet to find a way of using it that doesn't destroy my productivity or make me genuinely afraid of receiving a message and being thrown off what I was doing.

<comment><USER79> Yes. Working in a fully distributed team, irc+pictures is great.

It's on you to manage your interruptions (it's easy to kill them totally, or to customize what you see). If you just take it all, then yeah, I can see that being a living hell. So like, don't do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> I miss Screenhero.

That was an amazing implementation of an application.

<comment><USER81> And now they're dropping its functionality from Slack!

Would LOVE for someone to buy Screenhero back from Slack and bring it back to life. Truly a shame as it is.

<comment><USER82> I'm working on it! :)

<comment><USER83> That's good to hear. Good luck! The world needs ScreenHero!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> I think Slack is a bit undervalued more than over valued. The market is big enough for Slack + Microsoft, Amazon Chime, G Suite and so many other players to coexist. Also Slack to me feels like a good enough messaging apps. P.S: I hate it's knock-knock chime when engrossed in work and the fact that i have to keep the app running to get notifications.

<comment><USER85> You do know you can change the chime?

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> Slack is a great product (vs email or public chat alternatives). I wish them the best expanding their user base.

Are they worth 16B? None of the armchair investors here know their financials (addressable market size, user growth rate, expected ARPU etc). Until a careful analysis done, I would caution you against coming to a quick conclusion.

<comment><USER87> Why do you say that it's good vs email? In my mind they're for different purposes.

Slack for urgent matters, email for asynchronous communication that isn't quite as urgent. Email is also better for things that the recipient may want to refer back to in the future.

Regardless, I wish that my co-workers would stop sending a message only saying "hi, name" and then waiting for me to stop working to respond before they type their actual question. "not only am I going to interrupt you, but I'm going to make you acknowledge the interruption before making you wait while I SLOWLY type the actual incomplete question".

<Grumble, grumble, I hate when people misuse Slack>

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> Crazy, sometimes I picture the creators of HipChat laying in bed staring the ceiling mumbling: 'but, but, we did thi..'

<comment><USER89> We tried HipChat for a whole day before bouncing. It was so bad. Had hilariously poor UX, using commands like \code to get a single line of monospaced text, iirc.

<comment><USER90> Weirdly enough, I had heard that HipChat used to scale better than Slack. Supposedly Uber used to use the former rather than the latter because once an org hit a certain threshold in thousands of users, Slack was no good. This was years ago, however.

<comment><USER91> Uber did use HipChat instead of Slack, but mostly because Slack was uninterested in standing up servers for Uber. My understanding is that Slack basically ran a single server instance for each Slack team.

Atlassian bent over backwards for Uber, but just enough to make it functional. It was incredibly bad. Notifications would sometimes never arrive, or arrive hours delayed. Chats would take minutes to load. Messages would sit, spinning, waiting to be sent. It was like using 2G on your phone.

Uber eventually replaced it with a (forked) Mattermost cluster.

<comment><USER77> " It was incredibly bad. Notifications would sometimes never arrive, or arrive hours delayed. Chats would take minutes to load. Messages would sit, spinning, waiting to be sent. It was like using 2G on your phone."

That was my hipchat experience a few months ago. Thankfully I don't have to use it anymore

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> Slack usability has steadily been decreasing over time.

On desktop I am not getting the "unread" grouping but mobile I do.

The drafts feature is on both and can't be disabled.

Both of them break habits of where my channels are. It is terrible UX.

The "threads" feature on the sidebar allows you to reply to a thread but if you get a counterreply you need to click to see it. A better flow can be found if you click the channel name on top of the thread -- there's no indication like a timestamp or anything this jumps you to the thread in the channel -- and then click the thread link in-channel and then answer in the sidebar -- now the conversation flows without further clicks. Do I need to mention how terrible UX this is?

<comment><USER93> I agree that the usability has been declining.

The threads feature is pretty close to useful, but it still buries information and it isn't clear to other users in a channel when a thread becomes "live" again unless they explicitly follow the thread or make a comment. Both of those actions require excessive clicking on the desktop client (at least for Ubuntu).

The most frustrating part for me is that keyboard navigation for threads is nonexistent, and it forces you to weave in and out with your mouse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> Maybe now they have some money they can finally afford make video chat work on mobile.

We ended up switching to zoom for video chat because it worked on phones as well as computers and handled slow connections (US<->Australia) much better than Slack's electron chat.

<comment><USER95> I believe they announced a partnership with Zoom rather than competing against them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> Slack should make a phone/device.

The fb foray into a phone market with that device was an utter disaster and a joke.

The fb phone basically introduced one "feature" 'the circle profile pic' and the physical phone was chintsy and lame....

Go back in time to the danger device. The hiptop was cool, and all, but even then there was a miss. Regardless of the fact that danger became android... there was still a miss.

We beed a messaging only platform device.

This need has not been solved.

If a slack-first device existed where i have topical channels for things and branch channels, but i can dm and pm and mm people.... thats the device i want.

Just give me a slack-first os on a device and ill be ok.

</comment><comment><USER97> >net loss of nearly $139 million

Even that seems like a lot to spend, and that is just the loss...

I wonder where the money goes.

Granted it is a big impressive product but still it would be interesting to track expenses for a company as they approach unicorn status.

<comment><USER98> > I wonder where the money goes.

Cost of Revenue: $51M

R&D: $157M

Sales & Marketing: $233M

General & Administrative: $112M

[Source: their S-1]

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> I never used Slack. Given a $16B valuation, I wanted to see what it is about.

But Slack seems to actively prevent me from using it on Safari on my iPad.

It keeps trying to make me install their app.

Is there a way to try their web interface it on an iPad?

</comment><comment><USER100> I hope this gives Stewart the resources to build his next amazing game.

</comment><comment><USER23> I like the human story: Stewart Butterfield co-creates Flickr, revolutionizing online photo sharing; sells it for what at the time was "real money" but quickly discovers he could have held out for a whole lot more; burns through some VC failing at games; and then has that Eureka! moment when he realizes the Enterprise will eat any damn thing you feed it, and he hatches his plan to join the nine-zeroes club he missed out on in 2005, software quality be damned!

<comment><USER101> It's like software quality is sometimes irrelevant to monetary success or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> These declarations of valuation should be followed by a little note explaining what multiple of earnings (or, failing that, sales) this represents, and how fast it is growing.

Is that high? Low? about right?

Well, it depends if Slack made $100 million in sales and is flat, or if it did $2B in sales and is doubling every year.

(I assume that it doesn't have earnings because its still growing and plowing all that money back into the business)

</comment><comment><USER103> Awesome. Now their developers will be able to afford the new Mac Pro, with 1.5Tb of RAM, just so that they can run the Slack client! :-)

</comment><comment><USER104> So they are worth $1,600 per user? I don't understand how that is possible at all.

<comment><USER105> My company is in the middle of switching from Slack to Microsoft teams. The water cooler talk is that we're paying Slack $1000-$2500 per year per user.

It sounds like their business model thus far is that of p2w mobile games. Nearly all of your users are minnows, but some are whales.

I don't know if any of this is true. It doesn't really sound believable that we're paying that much, tbh.

<comment><USER106> Slack is nowhere near 1000 a user.

<comment><USER107> Well they work out their own deals per business. Their standard rate is 180$/user/year (without pay-up-front discounts) but that doesn't include SSO or terabyte storage per user. I'd be curious to know what add-ons a corp might stretch the budget for, I can't find details for what they charge for SLA

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER108> Even after nice runup in recent months, Atlassian with its diverse portfolio of products is only worth $32B.

Which one is overvalued?

<comment><USER109> Probably Atlassian. It's not the quantity of products so much as the desire to use them and their establishment as _the_ product to use for a given purpose. Slack doesn't have that many competitors that are as useful. Whereas Atlassian has a lot of products no one has ever heard of and a lot of competitors other people have heard of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER110> For those curious, their symbol is $WORK

<comment><USER111> Stealing WeWork's thunder... A smart move, though perhaps a little painful for all the existing plans the WeWork marketing department had.

<comment><USER47> WeWork is rebranding as "The We Company", so the word WORK is probably not their #1 choice

[https://www.fastcompany.com/90289512/exclusive-wework-to- reb...](https://www.fastcompany.com/90289512/exclusive-wework-to-rebrand-to- the-we-company-in-wake-of-disappointing-funding-news)

<comment><USER77> That's terrible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER112> CNBC's interview with Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield ahead of direct listing:

[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Stewart+Butterf...](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Stewart+Butterfield%2C+Slack)

</comment><comment><USER113> With all these IPOs coming to market at nearly 50-60 times their earnings remind me of the dot com era. Bond yields are inverting just like before the previous crash in 2008. I see another wealth transfer on the horizon. The smart money is securing the bag.

</comment><comment><USER114> Crazy. I can't stand the software.

Experiment for slack fans: Start talking about something in a channel with ~20 people. Then ask a friend to ask _another_ question in the same channel. What happens? A mess. You now have 2 conversations modeled with a single stream of single-line messages, with no context. One someone starts a conversation in a channel every single other user in that channel now has to wait. (or risk being pushed up past the fold, which people never scroll to)

Chat just isn't how work gets done. Or how knowledge is transferred and, most importantly, retained.

<comment><USER115> Isn't this what threads are for?

<comment><USER116> I've only used discord -- do threads exist on slack? Or is GP right and lack of threads is a major downfall of chat apps, including slack?

<comment><USER115> Slack does have threads. Everyone at my company is quick to remind those who don't use them.

<comment><USER117> Slack threads feel very much like an afterthought though. They never get used at my company (and for good reason).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER118> Does that mean Zulip is worth $16B? Cos it is awesome and self-hostable if you want it to be.

<comment><USER46> Rocket.chat and Mattermost are also great open source alternatives. I was surprised I couldn't find an open source plugin for live chat with Slack. Rocket.chat has that built-in and I host it on a VPS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER119> Congrats and all. But the app still sucks. Since last update, on windows, randomly quits but leaves an invisible process behing consuming 25% cpu. Changing organizations the first time in the day takes ages (imagine when you have a dozen).

</comment><comment><USER120> I think they have to thank Google for that one, i.e. for completely messing up hangouts.

</comment><comment><USER121> One aspect of many SaaS companies that I am concerned about is their exposure to economic downturns. Slack charges on a per-user basis, so if their average customer reduces their workforce by 10%, Slack's revenue reduces by 10%.

</comment><comment><USER122> Congratulation to them. I think what they did is absolutely amazing and will be seen retrospectively as one of the biggest fads of history.

\- They managed to disturb millions of worker to an attention-driven work culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate.

\- They managed to change chat from a set of open protocols to a single closed app terribly written in JS.

\- They managed to make a lot of people absolute convinced advocate of Slack so that a lot of hyped startups have now to use Slack de facto or risk mutiny and have people create Slack channels on behalf of the company without any oversight.

So yeah I don't blame them but I blame every company that falls for this. I'm convinced that we will see Slack retrospectively as something that destroyed productivity. I will agree that Slack can be useful when used correctly but I never saw a place that used it without it becoming that "attention driven" growing monster.

<comment><USER123> > _So yeah I don 't blame them but I blame every company that falls for this._

While I understand where your complaints are coming from, I encourage you to think about the fact that _so many_ companies are "falling" for them.

You and I might care about disturbances, "attention driven" work culture, open protocols, etc., but not everyone is a software engineer. The world is bigger than that. Clearly, _some people_ quite enjoy Slack. I'm not saying it's the most optimal product, but perhaps being optimal is not as important as it seems.

<comment><USER124> Many people enjoy candy too, doesn't mean it's good for you. Not everyone is a software engineer, but everyone has limited attention.

Slack's chat nature as the OP points out favours instant messaging over batching up replies, which, like many bad habits, appeals to the reward portion of our brain but is genuinely unhelpful in structuring work. There's a reasonable (and increasing amount) of evidence that multitasking and context switching can lower your working IQ by 10 to 15 points. Deep Work by Cal Newport does a good job of going into the detrimental affects that distraction from workflows has on people.

<comment><USER122> you put it better than I did in my initial post. They managed to hack that reward part of the brain with immediate interaction at the expense of deep meaningful work that require long periods of reflection before producing anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER125> I wonder how startups come up with valuations. In this climate it seems the market is ready to fill in any valuation and convince itself that it was the right one. Seems like they could easily have gone higher

</comment><comment><USER126> That's incredibly overvalued for a glorified chat client.

</comment><comment><USER127> Just moved to Workplace by Facebook from Slack. Love it. Async communication via posts is way better than incentivized real-time for everything.

edit: lol, this is downvoted? nice.

<comment><USER128> I am not sure exchanging one walled garden for an even higher walled garden is good practice.

<comment><USER127> Everything is a walled garden, if you're that paranoid just pipe everything into your own DB through API capture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER129> Slack can eat into Zoom very easily. Massive room for growth

<comment><USER130> Zoom works perfectly every single time. I've managed to make Slack's audio call feature work only rarely. I wish Slack had decent shared whiteboard, screenshare, and audio/video conferencing but that is a hard problem and they are currently not able to deliver. Zoom does flawlessly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER131> So given a required rate of return of 5% - $16B is how much you would pay for consistent risk free, net inbound cash flows of $800m per year, in perpetuity.

One way of getting that would be 800m users generating _profit_ after expenses of $1 each every year.

This is a chat app that is completely and totally replaceable with irc. No really it is. $800m per year in clear profit.

Is that really feasible in any way? How? What's the bait and switch here? (With facebrick it was the surveillance nobody knowingly agreed to. Is there something like that here?) Can anyone do a back of the envelope calculation to make this price make sense?

</comment><comment><USER132> > Forrester analyst Michael Facemire says it's hard for people to understand > why the platform is more useful than other chat applications without trying > it for themselves.

It isn't.

I know Slack probably needs to justify its valuation in front of some people, but Slack is not different from Facebook and Instagram in this regard: They offer nothing unique or technologically superior. The whole point of their business is hoarding users to the point that it's the "default" app in their given context.

I'm not saying it's bad. If they didn't do it, someone else would have done it anyway.

<comment><USER133> Eh, maybe I'm in the minority here, but I've been forced to work on MS teams for a project and it's atrocious compared to Slack. Not to mention the lack of a client for linux, their web app doesn't work in chromium for no reason (it does in chrome), and the UX is just shit.

Slack _just works_ and their UI/UX is on point, everything is intuitive. Their client is slow and eats RAM, but I totally see that it's more useful than other chat applications.

<comment><USER134> MS Teams works well enought for me at work. All I want is having a chat window with the old messages on top to be able to send copy pasted variable names and chat abit.

Skype for Business doesn't save the conversation and is useless (it mails it to you ...), for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER135> It is interesting to remember that slack was built as an outsourced product in its early days.

</comment><comment><USER136> Well done! :aussie_conga_parrot:

</comment><comment><USER137> Slack made minus 139 million dollars profit. They clearly deserve a higher valuation.

</comment><comment><USER138> This is one the best news in years and congrats for them!

</comment><comment><USER139> $16B on $400m of revenue? Is this high or not too bad?

</comment><comment><USER140> Slack macOS application is without question the worst performing software I use. Launching slack causes my cpu usage to skyrocket to 100% for 5 or so seconds.

</comment><comment><USER141> I shouldn't have turned down that offer.

</comment><comment><USER142> Is anyone here buying shares?

</comment><comment><USER25> They will be "successful" once they become profitable. Until then, they still haven't proven that they have a business model where they can charge customers enough to cover expenses.

<comment><USER143> They could be profitable tomorrow by decreasing their advertising spend. Their current customers are absolutely profitable, they're just choosing to use some of that money investors are throwing at them to keep growing.

<comment><USER25> You're making the assumption that they have no churn and that they don't need to acquire new customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER144> Goodness me, can I IPO off the back of an electron app too?

</comment><comment><USER145> It's a web based IRC client, I don't get it...

</comment><comment><USER146> Venture capitalists are cashing their investments by IPOs - sure sign that the next financial crisis is starting soon :) Dotcom Bubble 2.0 is ready to burst.

EDIT: I do not imply that venture capitalists poses some insider knowledge. It is not necessary. It's just the fact that when bullshit companies with bullshit product, that generate losses instead of profit get valued at $16B (other recent examples include Lyft and Uber) it means that economy is in crazy state, and it does not take much to induce panic. My guess is one of these unicorns will fill for bankruptcy soon, thus pushing the market over the edge.

<comment><USER147> I keep hearing this take!

Yet, I have no real evidence that points me to its truth. The thinking seems to be predicated on VCs having inside knowledge or excellent speculative skills. That might be true, but presumably they're not the only strong speculators.

Are we seeing other major players move out of tech? We're certainly not seeing massive liquidation in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER148> I love the software, though this kind of feels like the Dot Com bubble all over again.

<comment><USER149> I would encourage people to read the Pets.com 10-Q to understand what the dot com bubble was like from a corporate finance perspective, because there are deeper lessons than "Some companies with substantial Internet operations IPOed."

[https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1100683/000089161800...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1100683/000089161800004394/e10-q.txt)

Pets.com paid $10.5M for pet food then sold it for $8.7M, while needing $23M to keep the lights on that quarter.

Compare to [https://sec.report/Document/0001628280-19-004786/](https://sec.report/Document/0001628280-19-004786/) :

Slack, unsurprisingly because it sells software, has positive gross margins rather than negative gross margins; they're healthy at ~80%. They appear to be able to turn $1 of sales and marketing spend in Year 1 into > $1 of software revenue in year 2. Their churn rate on a dollar basis is 43%. Excuse me, -43%; a cohort of SaaS customers paying $100M in year 1 will pay $143M in year 2 due to growth in number of seats more than offsetting churning accounts.

There is no price at which a rational person should want to own Pets.com. There is, very clearly, a price at which a rational person should want to own Slack.

<comment><USER150> > a price at which a rational person...

This price is not that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER151> I hear people mention Slack once in a while on various forums but I have no clue what it is. I do not know anyone who uses it so it's not something I, or anyone I know, feels a need for--otherwise we would be searching it out. And therein lies a problem. $16B for something few people need or want? I guess I have to look up Slack and see what it is.

EDIT: So I looked it up and it looks like something useful for a lot of remote workers that need constant, instant contact with people working on the same stuff at the same time. To me that's a pretty niche market. If I thought the phone or email wasn't good enough, I might pay $5/month for such a service. But irc works pretty good still today.

IRC isn't worth $16B

<comment><USER152> There's a venn diagram with an intersection of people who use Hacker News and people who don't know what Slack is, and it's literally just you. It's bizarre to me that you feel the need to share your opinion on the valuation of something you knew nothing about a half an hour ago.

That said, $16B seems to be about 4x more than I would have expected.

<comment><USER151> That I've been deeply involved in the design and implementation of both hardware and software for 40 years and know nothing about it, and don't know anyone in the industry who does either, is a comment on the $16B evaluation. Companies thrive on the needs and wants of people which is why Coke and Google and Microsoft stock prices are so high and maintain those levels. I don't find want and need for Slack among anyone I know. A small space but the same people have heard of and use Coke, Microsoft and Google.

<comment><USER153> On the contrary, I literally don't know anyone who doesn't know what Slack is. I'm not sure if it's a generational gap, corporate gap, or what, but I've used it at multiple organizations both in and out of tech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER154> Is 16B really too high of a valuation when Atlassian is double the market cap at 32B? Both have similar products (collaboration/productivity) and are extremely sticky.

<comment><USER46> Atlassian has a wider suite of products. I would say HipChat is the Slack alternative. Slack has nothing like Jira, BitBucket, or Trello. And Atlassian is more developer centric whereas Slack is monetizing enterprise users.

<comment><USER155> HipChat is awful, and only an alternative in a very charitable sense of that word.

> Slack has nothing like Jira, BitBucket, or Trello.

And thank goodness for that, because those are awful as well.

<comment><USER156> Trello is a decent product! (but not created by Atlassian)

Jira I've always hated... gawd. Just something about the way it does thing... so complicated. Hated that product.

BitBucket is what it is - almost never used the web interface.

Confluence is their other product... also not great and just a bit annoying to use for some reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER157> It makes no sense for me. It's just a web frontend on top of an irc chat. $16B for that is a complete insanity.

This is an insubstantial business, doing an even more insubstantial product, with a sole criteria of it being a "big thing" being some smart banker analyst saying so — that's a hello from dotcom bubble era

At such valuation, it will take them ~100 years just to earn its price from ads sales

<comment><USER158> What a complete nonsensical comment. Is Facebook just a frontend on top of a user DB?

<comment><USER150> Nailed it

<comment><USER159> Is MySQL just a frontend on a filesystem?

<comment><USER160> Remove the pejorative 'just' and the answer is an obvious uncontroversial yes.

MySQL is a nicer alternative to managing really big CSV flat files on a filesystem.

Facebook is an RSS, address book, message share.

Etc.

<comment><USER161> Sure but if you keep following that analogy then nothing is worth anything

<comment><USER160> I mean remove the value judgement.

>nothing is worth anything

Very zen, worth rethinking the value of this statement too.

Take away the shallow value judgements like 'just' and you better get to the real quality differences.

Take away the shallow value judgements like 'just' and you start conversations about the depth of a thing instead of emotional discussions defending your positions.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Three-Day Expedition To Walk Across Paris Underground - <AUTHOR> https://longreads.com/2019/03/13/a-three-day-expedition-to-walk-across-paris-entirely-underground/ <comment><USER2> And the 8-minute above-ground version: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WJYOMFayruw](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WJYOMFayruw)

<comment><USER3> I've always kinda admired the French disregard for red traffic lights. Seems for feasible for pedestrians than cars, though^^

<comment><USER4> This is a stunt though, and people had been posted at junctions with little visibility.

But otherwise, it's not the first time I hear a comment similar to yours but I'm always surprised because I have never ever seen anyone willfully disregard a red traffic light in France. It seems to me that they are taken much more seriously than they are in for example the US (where it's not rare to see one or two cars getting through after the light has turned red, or just before it turns green) or neighbouring countries like Belgium.

To me, red lights are the one traffic rule that is taken as an absolute thing to respect in France. Maybe it's different in the south or Paris though, I don't really know these places that well when it comes to driving.

<comment><USER5> Only one, apparently, and their radio broke: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%27%C3%A9tait_un_rendez- vous#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%27%C3%A9tait_un_rendez- vous#Production)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have been down there, and not in the tourist section. There is some interesting stuff, especially where cataphiles have excavated new sections. The diverse array of art down there is also really nice. Unfortunately the bone rooms have pretty much all been desecrated and a vastly different from their original state. You can see a sort of 'high tide' mark on the walls where the level of the bones were, and the current level which in many places is at least one meter lower. This is for example in a radius 2m circular pit (which I crawled through). Apparently people just take bones home for fun (?). There is also a big throne made from long bones that have been tied together, there are many photos online. All in all a pretty cool place, I will visit again. Highlight was definitely my host cooking cheese fondue in an excavated dining hall.

<comment><USER7> I'd guess most "new sections" are just part of the Mines/Catacombs of Paris whose access was previously blocked by the official organisation in charge of them, the Inspection générale des carrières.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspection_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspection_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_des_carri%C3%A8res)

<comment><USER6> Maybe. I definitely saw people digging though, and I went through large sections that were newly dug. This was in 2014. Also, sometimes new building foundations are cut into the existing tunnels, and new tunnels are also dug into building foundations. Interestingly, the cataphiles I spoke to strongly 'discouraged' theives from entering buildings in this way. Something about not drawing undue attention from authorities.

<comment><USER7> I heard that story of authorities blocking some tunnels and cataphiles removing the blocks from someone who went down there; I don't know how widespread it was.

<comment><USER8> It's a common game of cat and mice, still "played" to this day. When they can be bothered enough, authorities will fill a section of a gallery with concrete. And, in turn, when cataphiles can be bothered enough, they tear down a piece of an adjacent wall and dig through the dirt on the other side to go around the blocked section. I've also seen crawl holes dug under 1m-or-2m-thick rubble walls.

Amazing to see the length people will go to :')

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The underground theatre sounds like something UX (Urban eXperiment) would do.

[https://www.wired.com/2012/01/ff_ux/](https://www.wired.com/2012/01/ff_ux/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I treasure my copy of Atlas du Paris Soutterain. A second edition came out in 2016--check out amazon.fr

</comment><comment><USER11> I had the chance to go in an underground party in Paris and this was really awesome. Despite being winter it was warm inside the tunnel network. Without our artificial lights we could experience total dark like. The room we stay at had been expanded and decorated by a group of cataphiles and was designed to handle candles which gave an even more great ambiance.

<comment><USER12> I have always wondered about the fire safety of these events, gathering large numbers of people in spaces not originally intended for that and with (I imagine) unusual constraints on planning mass exits. Do you happen to know whether the fire safety aspect gets scrutinized?

<comment><USER8> Nothing gets scrutinized - it's illegal to go down there anyway. Folks down there are not always safety conscious or very responsible :o)

Sometimes there are parties with tens or over a hundred people in a big room that only has two crawl holes to exit it.

About fire safety, well it's pretty damp down there, mostly with rocks and dirt. Can't picture a whole room catching fire... But I'm no expert in fire safety.

<comment><USER13> In a place with sufficiently tight exits like the crawl holes you mentioned, it is enough if there is a little smoke to cause a panic. People will die from being trampled even if there is no actual danger from the fire.

<comment><USER8> Home-made smoke bombs are a classic (and annoying) prank in the underground. Fills an entire gallery in less than a minute: [https://www.loupiote.com/photos_l/catacombes-de-paris- cataco...](https://www.loupiote.com/photos_l/catacombes-de-paris-catacombs- off-limit-area-508705416.jpg)

Parties I was talking about look like this: [https://youtu.be/6E-F- cVqubU](https://youtu.be/6E-F-cVqubU)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


My Internet Mea Culpa: I'm sorry I was wrong. We all were - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@RickWebb/my-internet-mea-culpa-f3ba77ac3eed <comment><USER3> >I don't think anyone saw coming that we'd have to actually be explaining to American children why racism and fascism are bad in the 21st century.

For me, this is the most damning sentence in the whole piece.

Before Eternal September, there were exactly as many racists and fascists in America, it's just that the mainstream media had done a fairly good job of hiding them. If you lived in San Francisco or New York, you'd have to make a real effort to see the level of racism that was still prevalent in many parts of the US. The sort of people who built the internet didn't know what they'd unleash, because they had been born and raised in a bubble.

The internet hasn't fundamentally changed human nature, it has just exposed what already existed. The average person is pretty awful and half of them are worse than that. Timothy McVeigh wasn't radicalised by the internet - he was radicalised by photocopied zines, small-press books and conversations at gun shows. The internet may have accelerated that process, but it has also brought it to light. It has shown liberals that they have been utterly complacent, that for decades they contemptuously ignored most of America, that they lived in a fantasy of their own making.

A mea culpa from the pioneers of the internet is missing the point entirely. The problem isn't that we built a communications platform and learned that a lot of people held abhorrent views, it's that for decades we ignored the rot at the heart of American democracy.

<comment><USER4> That sentence stood out to me as well, and my reaction was: why would we _ever_ stop teaching children why those things are bad?

If we stop having that debate then people will forget the lessons of history and why we fought those things. And you can't have a debate without having both sides represented.

It's toxic and shameful for fascist, racist Internet trolls to make personal attacks against people and my sense is that the main solution needs to be better tooling for helping victims block their attackers (this might conflict with the DNA of today's social platforms). But we can and should consider this stuff a teaching opportunity.

As well as an opportunity to engage the other side--the majority of people who post hateful messages online aren't latent McVeighs, they're immature, frustrated about something, and acting out.

As always the best antidote is to engage with the ones who are willing to have a rational conversation, and ignore the ones who aren't until they cool down. If someone is espousing racist ideas the best outcome is for everybody to take a chill pill, discuss their point of view and why you don't share it, and agree to disagree.

Suppression will lead to echo chambers and radicalization. Communities live or die based on their ability to sustain civil discourse between divergent opinions.

In my opinion no communications platform should suppress speech of any political persuasion, but personal attacks and hostility should be discouraged on all of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This point makes me wonder whether Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other such sites are simply fundamentally unworkable ideas:

> We are biological organisms with thousands of years of evolution geared > towards villages of 100, 150 people. What on earth made us think that in the > span of a single generation, after a couple generations in cities with lots > of people around us but wherein we still didn't actually know that many > people, that we could suddenly jump to a global community?

The reason so many problems occur on them (brigading, uneven rule enforcement, the feeling that Nazis/antifa/whoever aren't being banned, etc)comes from the fact they're a million communities built on a platform run by a single organisation, and attempt to have groups of people who simply can't work together use the same platform and interact with the same user accounts.

They're trying to be a 'global city' inhabited by millions or billions of people, and are encountering the same issues every country or organisation does at that scale. On the other hand, old school internet forums and separated communities were like human villages of a few hundred people, self contained instances that could be run according to their inhabitants wishes and meant that those that couldn't interact civily for some fundamental belief difference didn't have to.

That seems to be a case where Zuckerberg and co were wrong, and where that's caused huge amounts of people to numerous people.

<comment><USER6> I think this is what mastodon/the fediverse is doing right

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm having trouble with this article... where is the lesson they learned? No offering of what the newest generation is pursuing with naive and reckless abandon? What about what they believe currently about how a global world can be structured? How would they have done it differently if they could do it again?

Sounds like they got relatively wealthy and powerful by building this internet they're disappointed in. If they feel guilty, are they working toward redemption?

I appreciate the willingness to admit when one has been wrong, but this sounds to me like the person who has too much to drink, spills their cup all over your floor and goes "whoops, my bad, watch out for that punch, it's strong stuff..." and then walks away to get another drink while their spilled one soaks through the rug.

</comment><comment><USER8> I very much dislike the whole mindset of "we" as this single, uniform society. There are 7.6 billion humans in the world today, we're not all going to agree with everything all the time, and to say that "we" are generally unhappy because of things that "we" deem unsuitable for public discourse is rather arrogant, myopic and naive.

I agree with the author's realization that we probably won't all be able to get along. I think it's a harsh truth that you can either choose to accept or spend a long time trying to fight, and I think much of Silicon Valley falls into the latter. Because of the huge reach and influence of the internet, Silicon Valley (and other areas of large influence) have a bad habit of developing a messiah complex where they see themselves as world ambassadors of peace and justice, striving for an egalitarian world free of 'hatred'. The problem is that the people that get pushed out of this utopia don't just vanish; you end up with people inside the utopia and people outside the utopia. You now have two different groups. So much for the idea of a world of unity and singularity.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been going through this for maybe 5+ years, as regular readers may have noticed. What surprises me is that apparently mystified 'good' ideologies' don't automatically displace 'bad' ones. I'd have thought that someone with his experience and insight would have engaged with the science of group dynamics and so on.

As a leftie, I think part of the problem is that when the USSR went down to defeat, instead of the internet being developed as a tool of democracy it was developed as one of commerce instead, and much of the developed world reacted to the (apparent) failure of socialism by declaring victory and going shopping. Turns out that people find the idea of consumption as the end of society meaningless and unsatisfying.

</comment><comment><USER10> The alternative to kicking racists and facists off of reddit is not, "racists and facists no longer exist." It's, "a massive swath of the population feels manipulated and ostracised," and "we further cement population divides in the country because we've prevented people from opposite sides of the issue from seeing each other." Imagine the backlash when that situation resolves.

I feel like the author is suffering from the one sided fallacy (I'm sure there's a better name for it). We had two choices, we choose one and now we're grappling with the consequences of it. But that doesn't mean that the other option doesn't have consequences just as bad or worse. This is a classic case where, as a society, we're forced to make a major decision with very little hard data. Based on what I know of history, I'm more willing to err on the side of more speech rather than less speech. We have very recent examples in the US where a desire for sanitized civil discourse led to an inappropriate application of the "Safe Spaces" concept, and repeated instances of internet lynch mobs thought policing in an effort to make sure people are only engaged in good speak.

Trump did not create racism. Trump has simply taken advantage of a problem that has been festering for a while. Banning them from the internet doesn't get rid of the problem, it only makes it fester worse. The quiet problems have now become loud and that's a good thing. With these issues in the open, it lets us address them instead of bury them. Blaming the internet for racism is like blaming camera phones for police brutality. The problem has been there all along, and now we see it in ugly detail.

The author is arguing that there should be an end to history. That there just has to be a time when racism is dead and we can stop talking about it. This is baloney. The very definition of racism changes as our culture evolves and that changing definition will always be a point of contention. Worse yet, racism is almost certainly something that is biologically ingrained in people. We are a deeply tribalistic species and we're always looking to associate ourselves with those most similar to us. The war against racism is a war against our own biology and it's a war we can win. Childhood is all about training children to appropriately manage their biological impulses, maybe someday we'll treat racism like we treat potty training; a phase that every child goes through while raising them.

</comment><comment><USER11> Yes, there are wayward children who need an education about fascism. But not because they are in some vacuum of senae. What has also happened since WWII is there are now wayward adults who are labeling things fascist that aren't. So children are confused because there are some legitimate points of confusion. "Anti-fascism means burning cars?" "Voting for Trump means someone is a fascist?" These are not trivial ideas that appear neatly resolved to the mind of a child. They are things we must give children space to understand.

And the existence of those conversations on the internet with innocent children taking either side is not a sign of the downfall of civilization—or even the downfall of the internet. It's the kids racing ahead through Hegelian dialectics, deconstructing ideas that many adults are either too smart or too afraid to deconstruct.

But the internet is deconstructing everything, fractally painting and repainting the universe inside every idea. A whole universe inside My Little Pony. A whole universe inside Planetary physics. And yes, a whole universe within facism. With fascist candy canes. It is splintering and cataloging all of human consciousness, and then every idea will be animated in AI form.

That should terrify you, but not because fascism will be back. It should terrify you because all culture will be detached from its embodiment like a crab from its shell.

</comment><comment><USER12> Silicon Valley is trapped. Its narrative has basically moved from - why are ppl criticizing our magic, to telling regulators right now as we speak - <USER2> we screwed up, but if we make the fixes for all these unintended consequences playing out -

1\. We loose revenue.

2\. Somebody in China or Russia or wherever will step in with alternatives

So guess what shitheads - we are too big to fail. Silicon Valley is not going to fix jack until regulators protect them.

So expect things to get worse.

<comment><USER13> Silicon Valley is a whole lot more than Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.

<comment><USER14> But who is a whole lot more than Facebook, Twitter and Reddit in Silicon Valley? Meaning, their voices and choices have power in creating change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> if you listen closely you will hear the world's tiniest violin as musical accompaniment... the internet is more than the media companies that are currently dominating people's attention, it is up to each person to tune that out and pursue their own interests and contribute to their own community.

</comment><comment><USER16> "What if we were fundamentally wrong?"

It's never a good sign when you've gone this long without questioning your own beliefs. Yes, it's possible to be wrong.

</comment><comment><USER17> I dont like how he dodges the money question.

We have let financial concerns warp our utopian into a money driven ad dopamine hacking dystopia for a money.

</comment><comment><USER18> Theoretically there is a contradiction at the core of the issue. How does a tolerant society deal with intolerance? Tolerance of intolerance clearly won't work, but then what?

Practically, by default people ought to be able to do as they wish except as proscribed by law. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms takes a pretty good stab at setting the boundaries.

</comment><comment><USER19> If the Internet, unbeknownst to most of us, is actually _supposed_ to bring about a uniform world culture, or world peace, or no more secrets/privacy... well, who's to say it isn't succeeding? You wanted your idea of utopia on your schedule?

</comment><comment><USER20> I think when we see racists claiming their voice on the internet, we remember, "Oh, yeah — those people who are shamed, isolated, and oppressed in the real world, who find their voice on the internet, some of them are the people _we 're_ shaming and isolating _for a good reason!_ "

But we should also remember that the mechanisms of shaming and silencing that we apply to racists are exactly the same mechanisms that have been used to silence people we think deserve a voice and a refuge. The mechanisms are the same. The motivations are the same. The difference is _who is right_ and that isn't something technology can detect.

When we lament our inability to shut up racists, what we're rooting for is more effective mechanisms of control. We wish for ourselves to have the power to decide who can speak and who cannot. But do we really want such effective mechanisms to exist in the world? Do we want each society's elite to have complete ideological control over its citizens? How do ideas spread, then? By violent revolution? By one society overpowering another and assuming ideological control over its citizens? If ideas can only spread by violence, then violence is the inevitable result.

The alternative is to keep engaging with our fellow humans and trust the direction that history has taken. It's funny: we were a hair's breadth from a reality in which progressives would eagerly assent to this suggestion. An ever-so-slightly-different chain of events would have put Hillary Clinton in the White House, and instead of chastising ourselves for not being sufficiently aggressive and effective censors, we would be celebrating the inevitable progress of tolerance and equality in an open society. Such a huge difference in attitude, and it comes down to a slim and strange victory. Donald Trump and his supporters are a real phenomenon. However, he won the presidency with 46% of the vote, less than John Kerry got when he lost in 2004, less than Al Gore got when he lost in 2008, just 0.4% more than Michael Dukakis got when he got trounced in 1988. The last time a Democratic presidential candidate got less than 47% was in 1992 when Bill Clinton won a three-way race. Also, a lot of the erosion of Hillary Clinton's support came from the left, not only because of her connections to Wall Street but also because even before #MeToo people were starting to realize how awful it was that the establishment Democratic machine, including Hillary Clinton, rallied around Bill Clinton to shame and discredit the women he victimized. (I voted for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the primary and Donald Trump in the general election. My point is only that her support was eroded from both sides, not by an overall shift rightward.)

I think we're thinking about the visibility of racism and misogyny online all wrong. Racist and misogynistic Twitter trolls are functioning like cell phone videos of police brutality. You can't address a problem when it's plausible to deny that it even exists. Decades ago it was possible for people of good faith to question whether there even existed a significant number of avowed racists in the United States, just like it was possible to believe that police didn't really treat black people differently. Now we know. What Twitter has done is turned on the lights in the GOP kitchen at 2am and proved that yes, there is a cockroach problem. Yes, if you leave that racist garbage in the sink until tomorrow, you are feeding avowed racists.

It's counterintuitive to equate open racism and misogyny on Twitter with cell phone videos of police violence against people of color. One is proudly broadcast. The other is a furtive activity revealed against its will. Their eruption into the public eye functions the same way, though. Twitter racists, by their inability to stay quiet and work in the shadows, are bringing unwelcome scrutiny to a phenomenon that has escaped scrutiny for decades. We can use them just like we use cell phone videos of cops beating black motorists. Now that it's impossible to deny that this stuff exists, people are forced to take sides in a way that they haven't had to take sides in a long, long time.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is a sobering article. We definitely aren't where I thought we would be. Especially on the social justice front. Some websites you aren't even allowed to talk about it, such as HN.

<comment><USER22> Mind to elaborate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Still not sure what he thinks "we" were wrong about. Reading between the lines, since I missed it if he ever said outright what he means, it seems like he means "we" were wrong about a free exchange of ideas on the Internet necessarily leading to only positive developments.

I'm not sure he can speak for Brand and Kelly and others on this. Perhaps they realized, unlike him apparently, that things will be a little messy along the way, a kind of imperfect muddling toward maturity for society. That doesn't make their cheerleading for it something to apologize for.

</comment><comment><USER23> >I don't think anyone saw coming that...

Any article that says any statement of this form immediately loses a lot of credibility in my book.

Plenty of people saw plenty of things coming.

You (the writer) really have no way of knowing what other people have seen coming. Perhaps if the only people you pay attention to are the famous rock stars of whatever area you're talking about, you could think you know. But even then, you don't know what private thoughts they are having.</comment>


Walken on Rails - <AUTHOR> http://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2012/04/01/walken-on-rails/

<comment><USER2> Sicilians are great programmers. The best in the world. I'm sicilian. My old man was the world heavy weight champion of sicilian programmers. And from growing up with him, I learned the errors.

Now there are seventeen different things a guy can do to give himself away when he programs. A guy has seventeen errors. A woman's got twenty but a guys got seventeen. And if you know em, like you know your own face, they beat a compiler all to hell. What we've got here is a little game of show and tell. You don't wanna show me nothing but you're telling me everything. Now I know you know what this function does, so tell me before I do some damage you wont be able to unit test your way out of.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm generally an April-Fools-in-tech hater, but man, that guy does a great Christopher Walken. I most liked Javascript and MongoDB. Fantastic writing.

</comment><comment><USER4> Thats not funny, man! I was really lookin' forward to it!

</comment><comment><USER5> never thought I'd see a rails cast by walken. Really funny stuff guys.. Loved the mongodb one.

</comment><comment><USER6> I was a little disappointed to see this today, so it got my hopes up of it being real. But the JavaScript frameworks one more than made up for it.

"That's why I don't buy cream, I just microwave cheese"

</comment><comment><USER7> try mongodb. its like a polo shirt for your ideas

<comment><USER8> Try it on. Or don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> <http://memecaptain.com/026289.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER10> "A Ruby on a Rail" - funny stuff.

</comment><comment><USER11> Hi-fricken-larious</comment>


First weeks in Palo Alto feel like another world… - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-startup/first-weeks-in-palo-alto-feel-like-another-world-ea837218a483

<comment><USER2> "One thing is pretty clear, even though investors look interested in European startups, they don't get serious unless you're also based here. I wanted to invite a very knowledgeable investor to our startup showcase and he didn't even blink while telling me with a big grin "I'm not interested". I found it really funny...'

Comment a little more on that if you would. Do you think it's because of the tax and legal complications or concern about the potential to attract future talent? I've heard similar comments quite a few times now and it adds to my existing curiosity. You kind of need a first person narrative to be able to get a good picture. Thanks</comment>


Ask HN: Why does HN punish new users? - <AUTHOR> Recently I wrote a blogpost and decided to share it on HN. So created a new account and submitted a post. I am surprised to see that the post doesn't show up anywhere on hacker news except in the list of posts on my profile page. <comment><USER2> That's an anti-spam measure for new accounts. I think it measures the time between creating an account and doing the first post. It needs an initial upvote (vouch) from another user. I've done that now. The [https://news.ycombinator.com/newest](https://news.ycombinator.com/newest) is pretty full and sometimes not enough users look at it, even blatant spam is sometimes not marked because it needs multiple users to flag it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I see one submission from you thats visible perfectly fine? (although it is possible that it was hidden and a user vouched for it, can't tell that from the outside)

It can happen that new accounts trigger the spam detection, in such cases you can e-mail the mods and ask them to fix it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I see that the post is now visible to everyone.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What can be done to protect/restore a Twitter account of a dead person? - <AUTHOR> Harris Wittels was a comedian and writer who passed away in 2015.  He was the person who originally who coined and popularized the term "humblebrag" from his @humblebrag Twitter account (User ID 214680621).  Both the account and term became a viral hit in the early 2010s and now "humblebrag" is simply part of our common vernacular.
It seems on or before June 6th someone hijacked his old account, deleted his old tweets, renamed the account to @micropicss and then to @differlanguages (there might have been other name changes in there too), and setup a spam bot.  It also seems someone setup new accounts to sit on the @humblebrag and @micropicss names.  The @differlanguages now has a few hundred thousand legitimate Twitter followers including lots of high profile users.
I have no relation to Wittels or his estate (which would seem to prevent me from opening an official complaint with Twitter according to their help bot), but I hate to see part of his legacy, Twitter's history, and the lexiconic record destroyed like this.  Is there anything that can be done to get the old account restored in some way or at the very least stop a spam account from taking advantage of his account's followers? <comment><USER2> This may point you in the right direction:

[https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/contact- twitt...](https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/contact-twitter- about-media-on-a-deceased-family-members-account)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, but that requires action from the head of the estate. There doesn't seem to be anyway for an unrelated individual to request anything regarding a notable account like @humblebrag.</comment></comment>


Weirdest Bug Bounty – Getting PII from Office365 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@omaidfaizyar/my-weirdest-bug-bounty-getting-pii-from-o365-b4477f4739e <comment><USER2> I'm confused about the ntlm hashes - so it sounds like there is some service that contacts the auto-generated guid domain and sends legit SMB traffic to it? That seems really odd? I'd be curious to hear more about that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow. That's textbook bad engineering. Could've done guid.nonexistanttld but they just had to do guid.com!

<comment><USER4> Well, history has shown that you can't expect a non existing TLD to keep not existing. The design industry got burned using .xxx as a placeholder in designs, when that suddenly started resolving people's placeholders all linked to porn.

<comment><USER5> The TLD 'invalid' is guaranteed to remain, well, invalid.</comment></comment></comment>


Behave for Chrome and Firefox warns you of port scans and local attacks - <AUTHOR> https://www.ghacks.net/2020/07/05/behave-for-chrome-and-firefox-warns-you-of-port-scans-and-local-attacks/ <comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/mindedsecurity/behave](https://github.com/mindedsecurity/behave)</comment>


Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and the Origins of Religion - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@sumdepony/obsessive-compulsive-disorder-and-the-origins-of-religion-9a5b2bdf0436 <comment><USER2> OCD is likely genetically coded. Religion likely evolved differently. Although some electrical activity, some forms of epilepsy can give one 'religious rapture'.

I can't subscribe to this article's premise.</comment>


ANN: HTTP a Little Book - <AUTHOR> https://leanpub.com/httplittlebook <comment><USER2> How does leanpub allow a book description with such awful spelling and grammar?</comment>


Privatized prisons lead to more inmates, longer sentences, study finds - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-09-privatized-prisons-inmates-longer-sentences.html <comment><AUTHOR> _The authors found two potential reasons for the effect of private prisons. The first is corruption, where judges or legislators may be influenced to give out harsher sentences or write laws with harsher penalties.

The most prominent corruption example is the 'kids for cash' scandal in Pennsylvania, where two judges were bribed by a private prison company to give harsher sentences to juvenile offenders instead of probation to increase occupancy at for-profit detention centers.

The other potential reason for the findings is increased capacity._

</comment><comment><USER2> Link to paper: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09275...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0927537120301123)

Link to recent preprint: [http://ses.wsu.edu/wp- content/uploads/2019/09/Revised-Prison...](http://ses.wsu.edu/wp- content/uploads/2019/09/Revised-Prison-LE-draft-fin.pdf)</comment>


California Thinks Your Time is Worthless - <AUTHOR> http://www.cato.org/blog/california-thinks-time-worthless

<comment><USER2> Shorter Cato: "CA thinks your time is worthless. As libertarians, we think its value should be decided on the open market, where it is currently valued at... zero."

Seriously. Managing the effects on existing residents of traffic congestion caused by new development is a CLASSIC example of a situation where the free market utterly falls down.

You'll note a conspicuous absence of any actual _solutions_ suggested in the piece. Cato could have shortened the whole article to "California is run by commies!! BLEEECH!!"</comment>


Thought experiment: survival tips if you were sent back 1000 years - <AUTHOR> http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/06/time-travel-bac.html

<comment><USER2> I am scandinavian, I would just call my fellow countrymen the vikings and they would chop all your heads off, take your money and your women and that would be the end of that.</comment>


Boxee: WebTV That Makes Sense. Is That Good or Bad for Big Cable? - <AUTHOR> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090112/boxee-webtv-that-makes-sense-is-that-good-or-bad-for-big-cable/ <comment><USER2> Boxee rocks. As a user, I am excited with the product. As a fellow entrepreneur, I am gratified to see someone else also pursuing a dream and turning it into a game changer. Like many of us who had experienced economic downturns in the past, we are convinced that recovery will come. But when it does, it would have a lot more to do with genesis of the new than reborn of the old. This one is worth watching.</comment>