4 ms·

Huh, I can only assume slack is going to remove this api very soon after this, nothing makes companies clamp down on openess sooner then syphoning off users.

smaili 10y ago
Shouldn't developers have the freedom to create whatever they like with "open" APIs made available?
- diyorgasms 10y ago
  Absolutely they should. But I don't think a rational self-interested company would continue to allow those APIs to be used in order to facilitate a competitor siphoning off users.
  - ErrantX 10y ago
    I think a completely rational company should try to understand the problem. This is a relatively "known" problem with Slack and other realtime chat (i.e. the timesink issue). It's one reason I'm always cautious every time someone at work gets excited about "soon we'll have Slack!!!" based on experiences at my last employer where it sucked up productivity like a black hole. I've seen a growing number of people actively moving away from Slack or complaining about it due to these issues. How can Slack fix that? Close off an API to stop hiving off users? Well the explicit intent of this approach is to use both tools so it doesn't seem like they lose much. Either way; I'd argue that a rational company would look at why it's customers were doing these things and then either a) add that feature to the product or b) let things alone. Slightly different if it's an "export your Slack chat to A.N.Competitor".
- overcast 10y ago
  Open API's are basically, have others keep trying ideas until one sticks, then we'll consume the project and roll it up into our product.
kefka 10y ago
That's fine. Their potential killing of the APIs won't affect if I use Sikuli to automate it.
- Moru 10y ago
  A letter from a lawyer might though
  - kefka 10y ago
    Perhaps true. But Sikuli automates the keyboard, mouse, and the screen using OpenCV/Tesseract for object and OCR detection and programming logic. The only way you'd be able to detect that is by measuring the amount of ms between clicks. And that's defeatable by adding in a random range of 0-300 ms per click. And send the data to a private IRC room. Node-Red can easily handle the data from there. Now, it looks just like a human.
yoz-y 10y ago
I do not think that this particular extension will have enough impact on Slack for them to feel threatened.
yoz-y 10y ago
I do not think that this particular extension will have enough impact on Slack for them to feel threatened.
tlrobinson 10y ago
I was going to say that's unlikely since the API is part of what makes Slack Slack, but I would have said the same thing about Twitter 6 years ago... That said, Twitter and Slack are very different beasts. There is not nearly the same network effect to keep teams from switching to a competitor... except to the extent that 3rd party products integrate with Slack's API...

smaili 10y ago

Shouldn't developers have the freedom to create whatever they like with "open" APIs made available?

diyorgasms 10y ago
Absolutely they should. But I don't think a rational self-interested company would continue to allow those APIs to be used in order to facilitate a competitor siphoning off users.
- ErrantX 10y ago
  I think a completely rational company should try to understand the problem. This is a relatively "known" problem with Slack and other realtime chat (i.e. the timesink issue). It's one reason I'm always cautious every time someone at work gets excited about "soon we'll have Slack!!!" based on experiences at my last employer where it sucked up productivity like a black hole. I've seen a growing number of people actively moving away from Slack or complaining about it due to these issues. How can Slack fix that? Close off an API to stop hiving off users? Well the explicit intent of this approach is to use both tools so it doesn't seem like they lose much. Either way; I'd argue that a rational company would look at why it's customers were doing these things and then either a) add that feature to the product or b) let things alone. Slightly different if it's an "export your Slack chat to A.N.Competitor".
overcast 10y ago
Open API's are basically, have others keep trying ideas until one sticks, then we'll consume the project and roll it up into our product.

kefka 10y ago

That's fine. Their potential killing of the APIs won't affect if I use Sikuli to automate it.

Moru 10y ago
A letter from a lawyer might though
- kefka 10y ago
  Perhaps true. But Sikuli automates the keyboard, mouse, and the screen using OpenCV/Tesseract for object and OCR detection and programming logic. The only way you'd be able to detect that is by measuring the amount of ms between clicks. And that's defeatable by adding in a random range of 0-300 ms per click. And send the data to a private IRC room. Node-Red can easily handle the data from there. Now, it looks just like a human.

yoz-y 10y ago

I do not think that this particular extension will have enough impact on Slack for them to feel threatened.

yoz-y 10y ago

I do not think that this particular extension will have enough impact on Slack for them to feel threatened.

tlrobinson 10y ago

I was going to say that's unlikely since the API is part of what makes Slack Slack, but I would have said the same thing about Twitter 6 years ago... That said, Twitter and Slack are very different beasts. There is not nearly the same network effect to keep teams from switching to a competitor... except to the extent that 3rd party products integrate with Slack's API...