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Twitter acquires Quill

116 points by Alex3917 5y ago

queuebert 5y ago
Pure speculation: I wonder if Agrawal got the CEO job because he brought this deal in. The timing seems very suspicious.
- pl0x 5y ago
  You are right, this was likely an insider deal.
- dewey 5y ago
  That doesn't really sound like the deal size that makes you a CEO.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  LOL. You don't become CEO of a $35 billion company by shepherding a $10m acquisition.
darkteflon 5y ago
This is really poor behaviour. We almost went with Quill as they offer a great message threading model - one of the few in the space to do so, along with Zulip (which is open source). Thankfully, we did not. Feel very sorry for sysadmins who have to drop everything and handle this in the run-up to Christmas.
selfer564 5y ago
To announce their closure and leave only 4 days for existing customers to migrate is a joke.
- chunkyguy 5y ago
  Good luck if you’re currently on a holiday
- hidden-spyder 5y ago
  Yeah, this is the shortest export window I've ever seen by a long margin. There's a high chance that there will be customers who won't notice this before the end date.
  - _bohm 5y ago
    My company uses Quill. They've added a big yellow banner announcing the shutdown to the top of the UI.
    - jeromegv 5y ago
      4 days is still a joke, in the middle of December on top of that.
    - vestrigi 5y ago
      Since when?
      - _bohm 5y ago
        Showed up when I logged in this morning
    - brailsafe 5y ago
      Thank god it's yellow so you can migrate faster.
      - wewewwewewe 5y ago
        no, red goes fasta
- tech234a 5y ago
  Last year, Twitter acquired an app called Squad and shut it down with just 24 hours’ notice on a weekend[1]. [1]: https://twitter.com/squad/status/1337398991210725379 https://twitter.com/squad/status/1337398991210725379
  - breakingcups 5y ago
    Wow, almost exactly a year ago.
hidden-spyder 5y ago
Why is this company being bought by Twitter? Trying to enter a new market? HN, will they succeed?
- rvz 5y ago
  I had high hopes for Quill and their high quality messaging app, but there is no way I am going to use it given that it is going to be locked and transformed into a Twitter product in the future. No thanks and no deal to that. But it seems very obvious that Twitter is competing with Discord, and Slack. So that has been admitted.
  - AndrewHayes 5y ago
    Seems it won't just be locked. Looks like it's going to be gone in about 4 days.
  - indymike 5y ago
    > But it seems very obvious that Twitter is competing with Discord, and Slack. So that has been admitted. I'm not sure how they would even begin to compete with Slack. The only similarity is they have messages in the data store.
- skrebbel 5y ago
  Looks like company tanked and this is an acquihire, hopefully getting some investors some money back. No way there's any product/customer value here if they turn it all off 4 days after the announcement.
- nsx147 5y ago
  Not a new market, twitter dm's are terrible. hopefully they just make that experience better. increase retention guaranteed
- brailsafe 5y ago
  > We started Quill with the goal of increasing the quality of human communication. I'm sure Twitter also had that goal on their first day.
seaghost 5y ago
Such a shame.
Gentil 5y ago
Power move by the new CEO. Haha. I have read about this, but only recently have I started noticing this. Acquisitions are expected after a new CEO.
- garettmd 5y ago
  Although the new CEO has only been in place for about a week. I bet this acquisition has been in the works for longer than that.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    But what we don't know is how long Jack and Parag have been thinking of Parag as the new CEO. It's perfectly possible that he had significant influence here if Jack has been grooming him as CEO for a while.
    - wpietri 5y ago
      On the other hand, I just saw that "Quill was founded by the former creative director of Stripe, Ludwig Pettersson". [1] And who was Stripe's CEO, but Jack. So this could easily have been Jack arranging an acquihire for a pal. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/23/the-new-new-slack-quill/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/23/the-new-new-slack-quill/
      - davish 5y ago
        Stripe was founded by Patrick and John Collison. I’m guessing you’re confusing it with Square, another payments company, which was co-founded and still run by Jack Dorsey.
        wpietri 5y ago
        Sorry. My mistake absolutely. Thanks for the correction. Not the first time I've accidentally mixed up the two finance companies named for common one-syllable words starting with s and ending with e. I'll be more careful next time.
ntauthority 5y ago
It's interesting to see that 'joining' is apparently a modern-day euphemism for 'murdered by'.
- skrowl 5y ago
  > Quill is joining Twitter! > Quill will be shutting down Seems more like Quill's staff is joining Twitter than anything. Clearly Quill itself isn't joining anything as it's getting turned off and all data deleted.
- ljm 5y ago
  On the plus side, I Ctrl+F'd for the words 'incredible' and 'journey' and got no results for either.
  - klik99 5y ago
    That blog has also completely broken me
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  Join the afterlife
- duxup 5y ago
  "Oh I mean WE are joining ... not you. You are dead to us now or at least will be in a few days."
s17n 5y ago
Another product killed by Google!
4eleven7 5y ago
First Sphere (https://www.sphere.me https://www.sphere.me), now Quill. Twitter is obviously planning something in this space, but to me, Twitter's magic is in the ability to really consume a lot, from experts, in a short space of time (240 character brevity!). In depth conversation, spaces, voice, don't really belong on Twitter in my opinion, but I'm sure Twitter knows better than me... I have no skin in that game!
- dsizzle 5y ago
  A lot of people use Twitter DMs and complain about that experience having room to improve (e.g. being able to search DMs). Maybe some of these acqui-hires (and that's what they seem to be) will be toward improving DMs?
  - SemiNormal 5y ago
    Well not letting people export and purging all Quill DMs is not a good start.
    - mst 5y ago
      Choosing not to let your manager see your DMs seems like a strict improvement over Slack.
  - JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
    I guess I’m just horrified at the thought that Twitter needs to acquire a company to figure out how to search DMs.
    - boplicity 5y ago
      My thoughts exactly. I'm a customer of a company where I recently requested a relatively basic feature. They said they were putting together a team to implement it. That was bad. Twitter, on the other hand, seems to need to buy a company in order to improve a basic feature. That's horrible! What's up with management culture in tech companies!?
Kinrany 5y ago
>> Can I export my team’s Direct Messages (DMs)? > No, we do not allow the export of Direct Messages. >> If I don’t export, will you delete my data? > Yes. On 1pm PST, Saturday, December 11th 2021 we will delete all user data, whether or not you’ve exported it. Fantastic service.
- dsizzle 5y ago
  That's a really short window to salvage your data.
  - meitros 5y ago
    This happened with another Twitter acquisition Smyte, where in that case they shut down the api immediately [1]. It seems like it’s some property of Twitter’s acquisition process? [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/21/twitter-smytes-customers/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/21/twitter-smytes-customers/a...
    - esjeon 5y ago
      So the Twitter lead engineer said "We're gonna learn from this". So they gone from 15 minutes (Smyte) to 4 days (Quill) - a 38400% improvement. /s
    - breakingcups 5y ago
      Apparently also happened with an app called Squad, exactly a year ago. https://twitter.com/squad/status/1337398991210725379 https://twitter.com/squad/status/1337398991210725379
    - atdrummond 5y ago
      I feel bad whenever I read about this because I’m friends with a Smyte founder and I know they absolutely didn’t want things to play out the way they did. I had hoped Twitter learned their lesson.
    - Alex3917 5y ago
      > It seems like it’s some property of Twitter’s acquisition process? What if there are serious security vulnerabilities though? I could see having a process where founders don't turn over their source code until midnight when the deal closes, and then the acquiring company gets the option to shut it down immediately if there are serious and unfixable security vulnerabilities discovered between midnight and 10am when the press release goes out. I'm not saying this hypothetical process is a good one, much less that this is what happened, but I could certainly imagine things playing out this way.
fassssst 5y ago
So quill was like Slack, but it forced every new message to be a new thread or a reply to a thread?
- esjeon 5y ago
  Uhm, isn't it still true for Slack? Every message to the channel itself is kinda a thread.
- SemiNormal 5y ago
  So it was basically a message board?
- aniforprez 5y ago
  Not really. You could enforce that as an option on certain threads but you could simply have it be open with a single switch I tried it out and it was a weird Slack alternative that was just that little bit of clunky where you couldn't use it on a daily basis. I actually feel some of the ideas were sound. I wouldn't have minded a thread-only topic where people post a bug at the top and discuss that particular bug below. It's hard to explain but there was just something about navigating all of it that made it just slightly more painful than was bearable. I'm sad to see it go because it could have made for a decent alternative to slack but it's so dumb that it shuts down so soon
fraktl 5y ago
I'll translate the text to honest one. > We started Quill with the goal of increasing the quality of human communication We started Quill with hope someone buys us one day. > Together with Twitter, we will continue to pursue our original goal — to make online communication more thoughtful, and more effective, for everyone. We sold our data to Twitter so they can make more money. > We’d like to thank everybody who has used Quill — if you came on board during our beta, or if you just sent your first message last week. We can’t wait to show you what we’ll be working on next. We can't wait to use the data you supplied us for free to get even more money from Twatter.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  CCPA doesn't let you do that. Their data probably is more toxic than valuable which is why they're getting rid of it.
wpietri 5y ago
I hadn't heard of it. In case that's the case for others, "Quill is messaging for people that focus.": http://web.archive.org/web/20210301003300/https://quill.chat/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210301003300/https://quill.chat... Looking at that page, I guess it's Slack with some small twists? And this seems to confirm that: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/23/the-new-new-slack-quill/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/23/the-new-new-slack-quill/ Which may help explain why they're shutting down less than a year after launching. 10% improvements aren't enough to drive switching, especially against network-effect products like Slack. But having taken $14.5m in investment, you'd think they'd try a little harder.
- coldpie 5y ago
  > But having taken $14.5m in investment, you'd think they'd try a little harder. I thought this was how startups work? Rake in some VC cash with empty promises, sell off to some big company, execs retire, everyone's happy.
  - chongli 5y ago
    everyone's happy. Everyone but the users who need to scramble to export their data -- without tools -- by Saturday.
- spoiler 5y ago
  I have no idea what makes people use Slack. We demoed it at our company, and most people hated it. I guess it's one of those things people start using when there's a handful of employees and then they just get stuck with it. The worst feature about Slack is its "threads" feature. You're effectively manically thread chasing or you just have to learn to not care about past conversations. The other annoying thing was input lag when typing sometimes. It was completely unpredictable when it happens (wasn't pc load, browser wasn't that busy, but i didn't check the profiler; internet was fine). It would come and go on its own. Not everyone had it either, and it seemed to be isolated to Linux machines. We demoed Zulip, but some people didn't like that one because the UI is... It looks like brutalist design applied to UI. Most of us were ok with it even if it's a bit "ugly" (it's not ugly, but I'd call it an acquired taste). Quill was supposed to fill this gap for us, but the CTO said that the $15/user/month price is too steep. Lol. We settled for the mediocre of both worlds: Mattermost. It's not great, but it's not shit either. You can't scroll in it (well you can, but you don't want to because it's buggy) and the search is crappy, bite you can usually find what you're looki for after a few tries.
danpalmer 5y ago
Lots of criticism of the short export window, but no one knows how many customers they have. Quill was early stage, trying to get into a competitive market, and they've exited in what looks like an acquihire. From this I'd interpret that they had low enough traction that the business couldn't continue. They may only have 10s of active teams, and it's fairly possible that they are in good contact with all of them and helping them do manual exports. >> Can I export my team’s Direct Messages (DMs)? > No, we do not allow the export of Direct Messages. As for this, this is very much in the "feature" category rather than the "bug" category. As much as communication on a company provided platform may not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, people still use these chats for private communication that they don't necessarily want all their coworkers knowing. Well done to Quill for taking this design approach. It may not even be technically possible if they're doing E2E encryption with DM participants.
- duxup 5y ago
  >but no one knows how many customers they have Let's say they have a couple customers... that should be even easier to maintain for a while.
  - danpalmer 5y ago
    I suspect at their scale it depends more on their cash and terms of their acquisition than the number of customers.
- bilkow 5y ago
  > Lots of criticism of the short export window, but no one knows how many customers they have. Even if they had only 1 single customer, that's not an excuse to close the service and allow exporting with just a 4 day notice. People and companies have lots of priorities, and now they've been forced to focus on this instead of whatever they were planning on doing. There should be at least 30 more days of service running, with another 30 days with the service offline but data exporting still available.
  - mritchie712 5y ago
mrzool 5y ago
Jesus… I'm glad I didn't get my team to switch to Quill when I was evaluating Slack alternatives.
rdiddly 5y ago
What does Twitter even get out of this? There's no unique technology. It's not a competitor. And there are easier ways to hire people. Is it the data?
- feifan 5y ago
  Presumably, people who understand messaging
  - backoncemore 5y ago
    Which Twitter needs because they're chat absolutely blows.
- paxys 5y ago
  > And there are easier ways to hire people Nope, there really aren't. Picking up an entire established team that has a hierarchy, works well with each other and are subject matter experts is easily worth the savings in recruiting time and money.
  - rdiddly 5y ago
    Yeah I guess that sounds about right. So it's almost a pure acqui-hire.
duxup 5y ago
>We started Quill with the goal of increasing the quality of human communication. We believe the tools we use to communicate today are not the best they can be. Together with Twitter, we will continue to pursue our original goal — to make online communication more thoughtful, and more effective, for everyone. That's the OPPOSITE of what I feel Twitter is ... and what draws people to it.
Cyphase 5y ago
I find it amusing that the page title is, "Twitter + Quill - Quill - Messaging for teams that focus". So the result is just Twitter, without Quill or messaging for teams that focus? That seems to be accurate.
al_be_back 5y ago
wow - it's 20months from they first showed quill on HN (April 2020) - let's say it it had taken them 4 months prior to dev first version (Beta) - that's ~2 years to startup. Giving user 4-days to export data, it's it's pretty similar to pulling the power cable on the server to shut it down ... unless they just had friends & family (piloting) using it, it's very odd. that's also not taking into account data protection / retention periods that business have to comply with local/regional jurisdiction laws. having said that, concrats on exiting - acquhire or not, it's no mean feat.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
Twitter on an acquihire roll
pl0x 5y ago
Quill was never going to work to begin with. This is an easy way for the VCs to get some kind of return. Just another day in silicon valley insider dealing.
ngrilly 5y ago
Good for Quill’s team, but not great for competition in the team collaboration space. I’d really like to see Discourse and Zulip get a much better UI to compete more directly with Slack.
sandofsky 5y ago
We have a small team, and chose Quill over Slack because it seemed like the client felt more lightweight, and the product team would actually solicit feedback from us in DMs. It very much sucks that I have to drop everything to move to an alternative. We'll probably go with Slack. I'm hoping you can still sideload their iPad app on an M1 Mac. In the end, I don't think Quill was significantly better. Search in chat history was nearly useless, and a reason we were already reconsidering alternatives. But those issues aside, it was never better enough that I'd go out and tell people, "You need to try Quill! It's so much better than Slack!" It's a shame that people will draw the wrong lesson from this. They'll think that Slack and Teams have deeply entrenched network effects, which might be true at large enterprises, but small teams like mine will gladly use a competitor that provides a significantly better experience. There might not be enough of us to justify raising $14.5 Million, but I suspect you could bootstrap something quite nice.
- cyberpunk 5y ago
  Why would you use the iPad version? I’m using the desktop one on a m1 and it’s fine..
  - sandofsky 5y ago
    Maybe something has changed in the last few years, but the last time I used it, I found their Electron app to be a resource hogging pile of garbage. But that's just my opinion.
    - Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
      It was. They made improvements with their election app. Few years ago, it is resource hog and eat up batteries like it is candy while idling. It went from 100% to 30% within two hours. Now, it barely used up much resource and very light on battery. I recommend trying it out again, it is much better now than it was before.
      - IMcD23 5y ago
crossroadsguy 5y ago
Everybody is blaming Quill. Fine. But they’re gone. Blame Twitter if you must.
adrianmsmith 5y ago
Here was their Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22760155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22760155
nikolay 5y ago
Another acquikill?!
scottmessinger 5y ago
We had looked into Quill but decided to use Threads.com. Considering how inconsiderate Quill's shut down was, it was a good decision for that reason alone. For anyone looking at alternative for threaded messages and find Slack's threads insufficient, our team loves Threads. We looked at a few others (Zulip, Twist) and landed on Threads about 2 years ago. Since then, the product has gotten better and better. Also, haven't posted to HN much -- is this an appropriate thing to post on a thread like this?

116 points by Alex3917 5y ago

Pure speculation: I wonder if Agrawal got the CEO job because he brought this deal in. The timing seems very suspicious.

pl0x 5y ago
You are right, this was likely an insider deal.
dewey 5y ago
That doesn't really sound like the deal size that makes you a CEO.
spoonjim 5y ago
LOL. You don't become CEO of a $35 billion company by shepherding a $10m acquisition.

darkteflon 5y ago

This is really poor behaviour. We almost went with Quill as they offer a great message threading model - one of the few in the space to do so, along with Zulip (which is open source). Thankfully, we did not. Feel very sorry for sysadmins who have to drop everything and handle this in the run-up to Christmas.

selfer564 5y ago

To announce their closure and leave only 4 days for existing customers to migrate is a joke.

chunkyguy 5y ago
Good luck if you’re currently on a holiday
hidden-spyder 5y ago
Yeah, this is the shortest export window I've ever seen by a long margin. There's a high chance that there will be customers who won't notice this before the end date.
- _bohm 5y ago
  My company uses Quill. They've added a big yellow banner announcing the shutdown to the top of the UI.
  - jeromegv 5y ago
    4 days is still a joke, in the middle of December on top of that.
  - vestrigi 5y ago
    Since when?
    - _bohm 5y ago
      Showed up when I logged in this morning
  - brailsafe 5y ago
    Thank god it's yellow so you can migrate faster.
    - wewewwewewe 5y ago
      no, red goes fasta
tech234a 5y ago
Last year, Twitter acquired an app called Squad and shut it down with just 24 hours’ notice on a weekend[1]. [1]: https://twitter.com/squad/status/1337398991210725379 https://twitter.com/squad/status/1337398991210725379
- breakingcups 5y ago
  Wow, almost exactly a year ago.

hidden-spyder 5y ago

Why is this company being bought by Twitter? Trying to enter a new market? HN, will they succeed?

rvz 5y ago
I had high hopes for Quill and their high quality messaging app, but there is no way I am going to use it given that it is going to be locked and transformed into a Twitter product in the future. No thanks and no deal to that. But it seems very obvious that Twitter is competing with Discord, and Slack. So that has been admitted.
- AndrewHayes 5y ago
  Seems it won't just be locked. Looks like it's going to be gone in about 4 days.
- indymike 5y ago
  > But it seems very obvious that Twitter is competing with Discord, and Slack. So that has been admitted. I'm not sure how they would even begin to compete with Slack. The only similarity is they have messages in the data store.
skrebbel 5y ago
Looks like company tanked and this is an acquihire, hopefully getting some investors some money back. No way there's any product/customer value here if they turn it all off 4 days after the announcement.
nsx147 5y ago
Not a new market, twitter dm's are terrible. hopefully they just make that experience better. increase retention guaranteed
brailsafe 5y ago
> We started Quill with the goal of increasing the quality of human communication. I'm sure Twitter also had that goal on their first day.

seaghost 5y ago

Such a shame.

Gentil 5y ago

Power move by the new CEO. Haha. I have read about this, but only recently have I started noticing this. Acquisitions are expected after a new CEO.

garettmd 5y ago
Although the new CEO has only been in place for about a week. I bet this acquisition has been in the works for longer than that.
- wpietri 5y ago
  But what we don't know is how long Jack and Parag have been thinking of Parag as the new CEO. It's perfectly possible that he had significant influence here if Jack has been grooming him as CEO for a while.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    On the other hand, I just saw that "Quill was founded by the former creative director of Stripe, Ludwig Pettersson". [1] And who was Stripe's CEO, but Jack. So this could easily have been Jack arranging an acquihire for a pal. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/23/the-new-new-slack-quill/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/23/the-new-new-slack-quill/
    - davish 5y ago
      Stripe was founded by Patrick and John Collison. I’m guessing you’re confusing it with Square, another payments company, which was co-founded and still run by Jack Dorsey.
      - wpietri 5y ago
        Sorry. My mistake absolutely. Thanks for the correction. Not the first time I've accidentally mixed up the two finance companies named for common one-syllable words starting with s and ending with e. I'll be more careful next time.

ntauthority 5y ago

It's interesting to see that 'joining' is apparently a modern-day euphemism for 'murdered by'.

skrowl 5y ago
> Quill is joining Twitter! > Quill will be shutting down Seems more like Quill's staff is joining Twitter than anything. Clearly Quill itself isn't joining anything as it's getting turned off and all data deleted.
ljm 5y ago
On the plus side, I Ctrl+F'd for the words 'incredible' and 'journey' and got no results for either.
- klik99 5y ago
  That blog has also completely broken me
cblconfederate 5y ago
Join the afterlife
duxup 5y ago
"Oh I mean WE are joining ... not you. You are dead to us now or at least will be in a few days."

s17n 5y ago

Another product killed by Google!

4eleven7 5y ago

First Sphere (https://www.sphere.me https://www.sphere.me), now Quill. Twitter is obviously planning something in this space, but to me, Twitter's magic is in the ability to really consume a lot, from experts, in a short space of time (240 character brevity!). In depth conversation, spaces, voice, don't really belong on Twitter in my opinion, but I'm sure Twitter knows better than me... I have no skin in that game!

dsizzle 5y ago
A lot of people use Twitter DMs and complain about that experience having room to improve (e.g. being able to search DMs). Maybe some of these acqui-hires (and that's what they seem to be) will be toward improving DMs?
- SemiNormal 5y ago
  Well not letting people export and purging all Quill DMs is not a good start.
  - mst 5y ago
    Choosing not to let your manager see your DMs seems like a strict improvement over Slack.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  I guess I’m just horrified at the thought that Twitter needs to acquire a company to figure out how to search DMs.
  - boplicity 5y ago
    My thoughts exactly. I'm a customer of a company where I recently requested a relatively basic feature. They said they were putting together a team to implement it. That was bad. Twitter, on the other hand, seems to need to buy a company in order to improve a basic feature. That's horrible! What's up with management culture in tech companies!?

Kinrany 5y ago

>> Can I export my team’s Direct Messages (DMs)? > No, we do not allow the export of Direct Messages. >> If I don’t export, will you delete my data? > Yes. On 1pm PST, Saturday, December 11th 2021 we will delete all user data, whether or not you’ve exported it. Fantastic service.

dsizzle 5y ago
That's a really short window to salvage your data.
- meitros 5y ago
  This happened with another Twitter acquisition Smyte, where in that case they shut down the api immediately [1]. It seems like it’s some property of Twitter’s acquisition process? [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/21/twitter-smytes-customers/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/21/twitter-smytes-customers/a...
  - esjeon 5y ago
    So the Twitter lead engineer said "We're gonna learn from this". So they gone from 15 minutes (Smyte) to 4 days (Quill) - a 38400% improvement. /s
  - breakingcups 5y ago
    Apparently also happened with an app called Squad, exactly a year ago. https://twitter.com/squad/status/1337398991210725379 https://twitter.com/squad/status/1337398991210725379
  - atdrummond 5y ago
    I feel bad whenever I read about this because I’m friends with a Smyte founder and I know they absolutely didn’t want things to play out the way they did. I had hoped Twitter learned their lesson.
  - Alex3917 5y ago
    > It seems like it’s some property of Twitter’s acquisition process? What if there are serious security vulnerabilities though? I could see having a process where founders don't turn over their source code until midnight when the deal closes, and then the acquiring company gets the option to shut it down immediately if there are serious and unfixable security vulnerabilities discovered between midnight and 10am when the press release goes out. I'm not saying this hypothetical process is a good one, much less that this is what happened, but I could certainly imagine things playing out this way.

fassssst 5y ago

So quill was like Slack, but it forced every new message to be a new thread or a reply to a thread?

esjeon 5y ago
Uhm, isn't it still true for Slack? Every message to the channel itself is kinda a thread.
SemiNormal 5y ago
So it was basically a message board?
aniforprez 5y ago
Not really. You could enforce that as an option on certain threads but you could simply have it be open with a single switch I tried it out and it was a weird Slack alternative that was just that little bit of clunky where you couldn't use it on a daily basis. I actually feel some of the ideas were sound. I wouldn't have minded a thread-only topic where people post a bug at the top and discuss that particular bug below. It's hard to explain but there was just something about navigating all of it that made it just slightly more painful than was bearable. I'm sad to see it go because it could have made for a decent alternative to slack but it's so dumb that it shuts down so soon

fraktl 5y ago

I'll translate the text to honest one. > We started Quill with the goal of increasing the quality of human communication We started Quill with hope someone buys us one day. > Together with Twitter, we will continue to pursue our original goal — to make online communication more thoughtful, and more effective, for everyone. We sold our data to Twitter so they can make more money. > We’d like to thank everybody who has used Quill — if you came on board during our beta, or if you just sent your first message last week. We can’t wait to show you what we’ll be working on next. We can't wait to use the data you supplied us for free to get even more money from Twatter.

renewiltord 5y ago
CCPA doesn't let you do that. Their data probably is more toxic than valuable which is why they're getting rid of it.

wpietri 5y ago

I hadn't heard of it. In case that's the case for others, "Quill is messaging for people that focus.": http://web.archive.org/web/20210301003300/https://quill.chat/ http://web.archive.org/web/20210301003300/https://quill.chat... Looking at that page, I guess it's Slack with some small twists? And this seems to confirm that: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/23/the-new-new-slack-quill/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/23/the-new-new-slack-quill/ Which may help explain why they're shutting down less than a year after launching. 10% improvements aren't enough to drive switching, especially against network-effect products like Slack. But having taken $14.5m in investment, you'd think they'd try a little harder.

coldpie 5y ago
> But having taken $14.5m in investment, you'd think they'd try a little harder. I thought this was how startups work? Rake in some VC cash with empty promises, sell off to some big company, execs retire, everyone's happy.
- chongli 5y ago
  everyone's happy. Everyone but the users who need to scramble to export their data -- without tools -- by Saturday.
spoiler 5y ago
I have no idea what makes people use Slack. We demoed it at our company, and most people hated it. I guess it's one of those things people start using when there's a handful of employees and then they just get stuck with it. The worst feature about Slack is its "threads" feature. You're effectively manically thread chasing or you just have to learn to not care about past conversations. The other annoying thing was input lag when typing sometimes. It was completely unpredictable when it happens (wasn't pc load, browser wasn't that busy, but i didn't check the profiler; internet was fine). It would come and go on its own. Not everyone had it either, and it seemed to be isolated to Linux machines. We demoed Zulip, but some people didn't like that one because the UI is... It looks like brutalist design applied to UI. Most of us were ok with it even if it's a bit "ugly" (it's not ugly, but I'd call it an acquired taste). Quill was supposed to fill this gap for us, but the CTO said that the $15/user/month price is too steep. Lol. We settled for the mediocre of both worlds: Mattermost. It's not great, but it's not shit either. You can't scroll in it (well you can, but you don't want to because it's buggy) and the search is crappy, bite you can usually find what you're looki for after a few tries.

danpalmer 5y ago

Lots of criticism of the short export window, but no one knows how many customers they have. Quill was early stage, trying to get into a competitive market, and they've exited in what looks like an acquihire. From this I'd interpret that they had low enough traction that the business couldn't continue. They may only have 10s of active teams, and it's fairly possible that they are in good contact with all of them and helping them do manual exports. >> Can I export my team’s Direct Messages (DMs)? > No, we do not allow the export of Direct Messages. As for this, this is very much in the "feature" category rather than the "bug" category. As much as communication on a company provided platform may not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, people still use these chats for private communication that they don't necessarily want all their coworkers knowing. Well done to Quill for taking this design approach. It may not even be technically possible if they're doing E2E encryption with DM participants.

duxup 5y ago
>but no one knows how many customers they have Let's say they have a couple customers... that should be even easier to maintain for a while.
- danpalmer 5y ago
  I suspect at their scale it depends more on their cash and terms of their acquisition than the number of customers.
bilkow 5y ago
> Lots of criticism of the short export window, but no one knows how many customers they have. Even if they had only 1 single customer, that's not an excuse to close the service and allow exporting with just a 4 day notice. People and companies have lots of priorities, and now they've been forced to focus on this instead of whatever they were planning on doing. There should be at least 30 more days of service running, with another 30 days with the service offline but data exporting still available.
- mritchie712 5y ago

mrzool 5y ago

Jesus… I'm glad I didn't get my team to switch to Quill when I was evaluating Slack alternatives.

rdiddly 5y ago

What does Twitter even get out of this? There's no unique technology. It's not a competitor. And there are easier ways to hire people. Is it the data?

feifan 5y ago
Presumably, people who understand messaging
- backoncemore 5y ago
  Which Twitter needs because they're chat absolutely blows.
paxys 5y ago
> And there are easier ways to hire people Nope, there really aren't. Picking up an entire established team that has a hierarchy, works well with each other and are subject matter experts is easily worth the savings in recruiting time and money.
- rdiddly 5y ago
  Yeah I guess that sounds about right. So it's almost a pure acqui-hire.

duxup 5y ago

>We started Quill with the goal of increasing the quality of human communication. We believe the tools we use to communicate today are not the best they can be. Together with Twitter, we will continue to pursue our original goal — to make online communication more thoughtful, and more effective, for everyone. That's the OPPOSITE of what I feel Twitter is ... and what draws people to it.

Cyphase 5y ago

I find it amusing that the page title is, "Twitter + Quill - Quill - Messaging for teams that focus". So the result is just Twitter, without Quill or messaging for teams that focus? That seems to be accurate.

al_be_back 5y ago

wow - it's 20months from they first showed quill on HN (April 2020) - let's say it it had taken them 4 months prior to dev first version (Beta) - that's ~2 years to startup. Giving user 4-days to export data, it's it's pretty similar to pulling the power cable on the server to shut it down ... unless they just had friends & family (piloting) using it, it's very odd. that's also not taking into account data protection / retention periods that business have to comply with local/regional jurisdiction laws. having said that, concrats on exiting - acquhire or not, it's no mean feat.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

Twitter on an acquihire roll

pl0x 5y ago

Quill was never going to work to begin with. This is an easy way for the VCs to get some kind of return. Just another day in silicon valley insider dealing.

ngrilly 5y ago

Good for Quill’s team, but not great for competition in the team collaboration space. I’d really like to see Discourse and Zulip get a much better UI to compete more directly with Slack.

sandofsky 5y ago

We have a small team, and chose Quill over Slack because it seemed like the client felt more lightweight, and the product team would actually solicit feedback from us in DMs. It very much sucks that I have to drop everything to move to an alternative. We'll probably go with Slack. I'm hoping you can still sideload their iPad app on an M1 Mac. In the end, I don't think Quill was significantly better. Search in chat history was nearly useless, and a reason we were already reconsidering alternatives. But those issues aside, it was never better enough that I'd go out and tell people, "You need to try Quill! It's so much better than Slack!" It's a shame that people will draw the wrong lesson from this. They'll think that Slack and Teams have deeply entrenched network effects, which might be true at large enterprises, but small teams like mine will gladly use a competitor that provides a significantly better experience. There might not be enough of us to justify raising $14.5 Million, but I suspect you could bootstrap something quite nice.

cyberpunk 5y ago
Why would you use the iPad version? I’m using the desktop one on a m1 and it’s fine..
- sandofsky 5y ago
  Maybe something has changed in the last few years, but the last time I used it, I found their Electron app to be a resource hogging pile of garbage. But that's just my opinion.
  - Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
    It was. They made improvements with their election app. Few years ago, it is resource hog and eat up batteries like it is candy while idling. It went from 100% to 30% within two hours. Now, it barely used up much resource and very light on battery. I recommend trying it out again, it is much better now than it was before.
    - IMcD23 5y ago

crossroadsguy 5y ago

Everybody is blaming Quill. Fine. But they’re gone. Blame Twitter if you must.

adrianmsmith 5y ago

Here was their Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22760155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22760155

nikolay 5y ago

Another acquikill?!

scottmessinger 5y ago

We had looked into Quill but decided to use Threads.com. Considering how inconsiderate Quill's shut down was, it was a good decision for that reason alone. For anyone looking at alternative for threaded messages and find Slack's threads insufficient, our team loves Threads. We looked at a few others (Zulip, Twist) and landed on Threads about 2 years ago. Since then, the product has gotten better and better. Also, haven't posted to HN much -- is this an appropriate thing to post on a thread like this?