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This sort of "mana from heaven" success that Zulip has been seeing reminds me of the time Google Reader announced that it was closing and Feedly was just sittin

This sort of "mana from heaven" success that Zulip has been seeing reminds me of the time Google Reader announced that it was closing and Feedly was just sitting there with a product that was exactly like Google Reader and could import your subscriptions from Google Reader with one click. I wonder how often people succeed with these sorts of business models, which seem to be summarizable as "copy something extremely successful exactly, wait for them to fuck up sufficiently badly, and make sure migrating is really easy."

sdwr 4y ago
That casts Google shutting down dozens of products in a different light!
insightcheck 4y ago
> "I wonder how often people succeed with these sorts of business models, which seem to be summarizable as "copy something extremely successful exactly, wait for them to fuck up sufficiently badly, and make sure migrating is really easy." It definitely happens: another example that seems fitting was with LastPass. A lot of users (at least a few I know personally) migrated to Bitwarden after they changed its free plan, and many other long-time premium users also switched services due to bugs. Switching between password managers is a lot easier than one might expect (due to standardized database formats). I'm not sure if many companies follow this plan intentionally, as it's not a given that the market leader(s) will eventually fail, but companies certainly benefit when former market leaders slip up.
pygy_ 4y ago
Digg vs Reddit also comes to mind. https://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/d78wi/digg_loses_roughly_13rd_of_its_audience_overnight/ https://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/d78wi/digg_loses_... https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2005-01-01%202011-12-31&q=%2Fm%2F0b2334,%2Fm%2F07fydk https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2005-01-01%202... https://mashable.com/archive/reddit-digg-traffic https://mashable.com/archive/reddit-digg-traffic
- samstave 4y ago
  DIGG blew its userbase by fucking up the UX. Reddit is on path to do same. If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen. - But seriously, a designer should be thinking about the consumption/participation model as opposed to just the eyeballs/adwords-please-kill-me-now model... The consumption and participation of a site is direct to the UX - and when DIGG basically made it a 100% consumption push, while also making participation weird/hard/less-desirable, that shit was dead. Reddit is becoming a weird corporate bot colony and they are actively killing their UX.
  - xtracto 4y ago
    > Reddit is on path to do same. If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen. I use Reddit exclusively in the "old" mode, but I wonder how impactful would this be. The Reddit redesign was basically done to cater to a wider audience (9gag, TikTok, etc). I feel that either at this point or in the near future the number of people that use old.reddit.com exclusively will be a small percentage of the whole lot of people using the new design. Particularly because Reddit is "strangling" out users of old.reddit by leaving them out of the new features (I normally see comments with stuff like :4222: which I assume are emoticons only available in the new reddit).
    - samstave 4y ago
      I've posted a lot about this in the past, and one of the things about 'old./r/' that is overlooked by the massive mobile consumers, is that information density is super high with old.reddit and RES. I posted a bunch of tips on how to set them up for speed - Like I said, as a daily redditor for 15 years, uhm I have the 1,000 Karma Stare.
    - tux1968 4y ago
      > I normally see comments with stuff like :4222: which I assume are emoticons only available in the new reddit For what it's worth, someone posted this Tampermonkey script that converts those codes to the proper custom Emoji's, on Old Reddit. It works well with Firefox at least: https://justpaste.it/6624t https://justpaste.it/6624t
mritchie712 4y ago
Slack has actually caused this same situation before. Tuple benefited when Slack shut down ScreenHero. https://medium.com/codingzeal/tuple-the-new-hero-of-pair-programming-ffedfed9099c https://medium.com/codingzeal/tuple-the-new-hero-of-pair-pro...
lebaux 4y ago
To a degree, our current company exists because Yoast SEO made enough bad decisions that people switched to our WordPress SEO plugin. My friend wrote it only because he disliked Yoast and as every programer, he thought "I can code this in a weekend and it will work better". It was never ment to become a project. Anyway Yoast eventually made a big enough mistake and 5 years later my programmer friend is working on this full time. I am the only other guy working with him. Transport of data was at that time trivial.
deadbeef57 4y ago
Zulip didn't just "copy [Slack] exactly". The UX is much better than Slack, in my opinion. It's faster, and it puts the conversations center stage. With Slack I always felt that I had too click too much to get to a certain thread, and then it only used < 50% of my screen to show the conversation. Zulip > Slack, even without this new change that Slack is dumping on users.
YetAnotherNick 4y ago
Is it? The only customers who would would put pain to migrate are the customers who would never pay. If I were Zulip and I didn't aimed to run just on VC's money, I wouldn't prefer hoard of people who I know for almost certainty that they won't pay.

sdwr 4y ago

That casts Google shutting down dozens of products in a different light!

insightcheck 4y ago

> "I wonder how often people succeed with these sorts of business models, which seem to be summarizable as "copy something extremely successful exactly, wait for them to fuck up sufficiently badly, and make sure migrating is really easy." It definitely happens: another example that seems fitting was with LastPass. A lot of users (at least a few I know personally) migrated to Bitwarden after they changed its free plan, and many other long-time premium users also switched services due to bugs. Switching between password managers is a lot easier than one might expect (due to standardized database formats). I'm not sure if many companies follow this plan intentionally, as it's not a given that the market leader(s) will eventually fail, but companies certainly benefit when former market leaders slip up.

pygy_ 4y ago

Digg vs Reddit also comes to mind. https://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/d78wi/digg_loses_roughly_13rd_of_its_audience_overnight/ https://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/d78wi/digg_loses_... https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2005-01-01%202011-12-31&q=%2Fm%2F0b2334,%2Fm%2F07fydk https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2005-01-01%202... https://mashable.com/archive/reddit-digg-traffic https://mashable.com/archive/reddit-digg-traffic

samstave 4y ago
DIGG blew its userbase by fucking up the UX. Reddit is on path to do same. If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen. - But seriously, a designer should be thinking about the consumption/participation model as opposed to just the eyeballs/adwords-please-kill-me-now model... The consumption and participation of a site is direct to the UX - and when DIGG basically made it a 100% consumption push, while also making participation weird/hard/less-desirable, that shit was dead. Reddit is becoming a weird corporate bot colony and they are actively killing their UX.
- xtracto 4y ago
  > Reddit is on path to do same. If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen. I use Reddit exclusively in the "old" mode, but I wonder how impactful would this be. The Reddit redesign was basically done to cater to a wider audience (9gag, TikTok, etc). I feel that either at this point or in the near future the number of people that use old.reddit.com exclusively will be a small percentage of the whole lot of people using the new design. Particularly because Reddit is "strangling" out users of old.reddit by leaving them out of the new features (I normally see comments with stuff like :4222: which I assume are emoticons only available in the new reddit).
  - samstave 4y ago
    I've posted a lot about this in the past, and one of the things about 'old./r/' that is overlooked by the massive mobile consumers, is that information density is super high with old.reddit and RES. I posted a bunch of tips on how to set them up for speed - Like I said, as a daily redditor for 15 years, uhm I have the 1,000 Karma Stare.
  - tux1968 4y ago
    > I normally see comments with stuff like :4222: which I assume are emoticons only available in the new reddit For what it's worth, someone posted this Tampermonkey script that converts those codes to the proper custom Emoji's, on Old Reddit. It works well with Firefox at least: https://justpaste.it/6624t https://justpaste.it/6624t

mritchie712 4y ago

Slack has actually caused this same situation before. Tuple benefited when Slack shut down ScreenHero. https://medium.com/codingzeal/tuple-the-new-hero-of-pair-programming-ffedfed9099c https://medium.com/codingzeal/tuple-the-new-hero-of-pair-pro...

lebaux 4y ago

To a degree, our current company exists because Yoast SEO made enough bad decisions that people switched to our WordPress SEO plugin. My friend wrote it only because he disliked Yoast and as every programer, he thought "I can code this in a weekend and it will work better". It was never ment to become a project. Anyway Yoast eventually made a big enough mistake and 5 years later my programmer friend is working on this full time. I am the only other guy working with him. Transport of data was at that time trivial.

deadbeef57 4y ago

Zulip didn't just "copy [Slack] exactly". The UX is much better than Slack, in my opinion. It's faster, and it puts the conversations center stage. With Slack I always felt that I had too click too much to get to a certain thread, and then it only used < 50% of my screen to show the conversation. Zulip > Slack, even without this new change that Slack is dumping on users.

YetAnotherNick 4y ago

Is it? The only customers who would would put pain to migrate are the customers who would never pay. If I were Zulip and I didn't aimed to run just on VC's money, I wouldn't prefer hoard of people who I know for almost certainty that they won't pay.