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Grammarly will discontinue the Text Editor SDK
- lionkor 3y agoI switched to LanguageTool after Grammarly decided to block people who paid for a subscription from using their tool just because they were located in Russia ;)
- malfist 3y ago> just because You realize that russia is sanctioned right? That's like saying "X stopped selling parts to nuclear reactors just because the customer happened be to in north korea"
- jfim 3y agoIs it the whole country or only some individuals of concern? I haven't really followed the news on sanctions, but I thought it was the latter.
- AlotOfReading 3y agoIt was both. There were targeted sanctions against powerful individuals, the government, and certain Russian industries, but lawmakers and public opinion also explicitly urged sanctions/private withdrawals from Russia from organizations that were providing service to the country to protest the war.
- ryandrake 3y agoI'm sure that preventing average everyday Russians from using Grammarly is going to have a material impact on Vladimir Putin's executive decisions.
- Timon3 3y agoI mean, yeah? He wants to stay in power, so he needs the population to support him and his supporters enough that they don't violently overthrow him. Objectively, do you think him being overthrown is more likely if: a) there are no sanctions against stuff like this b) there are sanctions against stuff like this
- ryandrake 3y agoI honestly don't think it matters to an autocrat whether the largely powerless people he doesn't care about can or can't access a web site. But judging by the votes, this is an unpopular opinion. The HN Tribe Has Spoken though and I accept its verdict.
- jabroni_salad 3y agoYou basically can't send or receive money with any russian person or institution right now.
- nradov 3y agoIt's not the whole country, but as a practical matter it's difficult for small companies like Grammarly to determine whether any customers are on the official list of sanctioned entities. Since they probably receive very little revenue from Russia it's safer from a legal compliance standpoint to just block the entire country. There are also some practical problems with getting payments out of Russia. This reminds me of an old Russian saying: "It's like trying to shear a pig: too much squealing, not enough wool."
- op00to 3y agoAs an American entity or an entity that does business with the US Government, you are required to get a license to transfer goods of almost any sort within Russia. [1] The current recommendation from the American Bar Association is to destroy any goods remaining in Russia instead of trying to liquidate them for cash. If you're an American business leaving an office behind, smash the computers and the phones before you leave because you'll need a license to transfer them. If you leave them behind, that's considered a transfer too. It's a very easy way to make sure your company is bankrupt and you're blacklisted from ever importing or exporting anything ever again. Likely you will get extra super special secondary screening at the airport just for fun. [1] https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/policy-guidance/country-guidance/russia-belarus https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/policy-guidance/country-gu...
- postsantum 3y agoTotally legit comparison
- rafaelrc 3y agoGrammarly compared to nuclear reactor parts. Now that's some gold medal mental gymnastics
- true_religion 3y agoMy country has sanctioned Russia. I can't even sell a t-shirt if it's being delivered to Russia. I can't accept a credit card if the address terminates in Russia. It's not nothing personal, it's just the law. I'm used to this. My country has sanctioned many people before: Cuba, North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, etc. Once the war is over... the sanctions will be removed. Until then, I accept sanctions as a resonable alternative to actually going to war, and drafting 18-20 year olds to go die in a foreign land.
- pbronez 3y agoITAR restricts exports of Nuclear parts, weapons and other Scary Stuff all the time based on what they are. Sanctions restrict all economic interactions with specific entities (countries, businesses, individuals) based on official displeasure with those entities. So Grammarly is almost certainly NOT subject to ITAR restrictions (IANAL). Exporting software like this (ie selling it to someone in another country) is usually governed by EAR, which is a rule set like ITAR but for normal civilian stuff and thus not very strict. So you are correct, Grammarly is not export-restricted the same way nuclear parts are. Both nuclear parts and SaaS (and everything else) are restricted from sale to Russia because of sanctions. Those sanctions were put in place when Russia invaded Ukraine for basically no reason and started committing war crimes. …I’m very content with the sanctions on Russia.
- dimmke 3y agoThe comment makes it sound like they were still taking the money, but no longer offering the service. If that’s the case, they’re in the wrong.
- lionkor 3y agoThat was the case, yeah. Of course a business can decide where to do business, but if you accept customer's money, its simply not right to not give them the service just because they're stuck in the wrong country.
- acedTrex 3y agoOhh ya there's no possible reason they could have done that, just a completely random act.
- stronglikedan 3y agoNo good reason anyway.
- schnebbau 3y ago[flagged]
- jxf 3y agoIf they're taking OP's money but denying them the service, that's not okay. You don't have to do business in Russia, but you shouldn't get to take money from regular Russians and then turn around to block them.
- Zanfa 3y agoGlad to see a company take the moral way, not the most profitable one. It’s disgusting how many companies happily keep conducting business with/in Russia.
- Andrew_nenakhov 3y agoYes, punishing people that have nothing to do with the invasion is totally the moral way. Not as moral as preventing people fleeing the military draft from crossing the border, but close.
- Timon3 3y agoIt's not about punishing those people, but about not supporting the government which is currently invading another country. You can't stop supporting the government without "punishing" the people, and it's not acceptable to keep supporting the government. Ultimately the people who are being punished are responsible for stopping the punishment by removing their government.
- alex_smart 3y agoAren't the two of you saying the same things?
- Timon3 3y agoI don't think so. GP is saying that "punishing" Russian citizens by not doing business with them is immoral. I'm saying that doing business with Russian entities is immoral.
- Andrew_nenakhov 3y ago> Ultimately the people who are being punished are responsible for stopping the punishment by removing their government. Yes, all of Ukraine with an actual army, drones, rockets, tanks, artillery and zillions of cash from NATO countries struggles to contain Putin's gang, and Russian people must remove him from power barehanded, while the EU help comes mostly in a form of sanctions, visa bans and cancellations of service by such companies as Grammarly.
- justrealist 3y ago[flagged]
- paddim8 3y agoI'd say it's even more important for them to be able to use English now, in order to be able to communicate with the rest of the world to see other perspectives
- justrealist 3y agoThey don't need to say much. They can read and look at pictures. If that's not enough, the country is unsalvageable.
- Andrew_nenakhov 3y agoThis statement is very naive and also casually racist.
- tristanb 3y agoIm fine with that. Most of their dev is in Ukraine. F#ck Russia.
- lionkor 3y agoRussia the government, or Russia as in every person in Russia including those opposing their government, those stuck there, children, and so on?
- ipqk 3y agoTwo of the founders are Ukrainian, and they have a major office in Kyiv.
- vorpalhex 3y agoBusiness depends on people following the rules of business. Countries engaging in unprovoked invasions of their neighbors aren't the right people to do business with.
- Andrew_nenakhov 3y agoSooo was that 2003 invasion to Iraq provoked? Or we give it a pass because Iraq wasn't a 'neighbor' to the invading country?
- Fordec 3y agoHuh, not the OPs intent I'm sure, but this actually makes me want to give Grammarly a second look.
- opudalo 3y agoComment of the normal person: - I'm russian, and I'm sorry my country invaded neighbor. I understand that my lack of actions partially lead to this happening. I also carry responsibility, and I'm ok with the fact that company denied service to me. Your whining comment: - Oh, I'm so oppressed, grammarly punishes good russia. oh my. Buddy give me your crypto wallet so I can refund you personally and gtfo.
- sbjs 3y agoThis is such a shame. One of the most powerful features of the SDK is now exclusive to the site itself. I can see the incentive to make this decision, but it's also going to have counterproductive results for the same reason.
- goerz 3y agoYeah, Grammarly is moving in the wrong direction for me. What I’d like to see is better integration with text editors etc, especially in a plain text environment. 99% of what I write is Markdown, LaTeX, or some other markup language, which Grammarly does not deal well with at all. LanguageTool is much better in this respect, although it doesn’t find nearly as many mistakes as Grammarly
- SoftTalker 3y agoI can see something like Grammarly being quite helpful to a non-native speaker, but if English is your native language, do you still find that Grammarly improves your writing?
- carteazy 3y agoI’ve found that it does. It’s easy to forget some of the more nuanced grammar rules, or if you’re spending more time building a sentence it can be easy to lose track of things like maintaining prior tenses. It probably fulfills a slightly different use case than non-native speakers.
- goerz 3y agoAlthough I'm technically not a native speaker, I consider myself completely fluent, and a competent writer. I still find Grammarly or similar services quite useful, even if just to catch stupid "grammatical typos" that a traditional spellchecker would miss. I basically treat it like autocorrect.
- cheerioty 3y agoI hope this will at least allow them to focus on their own app again. It went from “works great” to “garbles my text”, “text markers are wrongly placed or not showing at all” and a gazillion other issues it feels like :-/
- rickcarlino 3y agoThe availability of LLMs and the lack of good VSCode markdown support is why I canceled my subscription this year. It’s not adding enough value in 2023 to justify the cost.
- matthall28 3y agoWhat have you switched to using? I have the same pain point with Markdown support. I've played with a few of the ChatGPT integrations and haven't loved any.
- rickcarlino 3y agoI’m in the same boat. I have been manually copy pasting stuff from ChatGPT.
- bhouston 3y agoI assume that LLMs leapfrog Grammarly's technology? So basically they need to double down on a moat?
- op00to 3y agoGrammarly integrated some sort of LLM into their browser plugin offering. In addition to the normal grammar suggestions, you can now ask Grammarly to rewrite your text according to certain "styles". This is new as of, say, 3-4 months ago. It feels like it's using something like GPT 3.5 under the covers. FWIW, I love Grammarly and its use has helped my career by toning down my asshole emails.
- jamil7 3y agoWouldn’t specialised models for spelling/grammar outperform general purpose ones?
- CodeWriter23 3y agoCan someone please help me read this situation? What are the potential benefits to Grammarly of removing support of this form of the Marketing by Tech channel?
- yaroslavyar 3y agoI speculate that it was cannibalizig their own product by providing the relatively same quality of service at places where users already get stuck rather to forcing them to migrate to their products. Like myself, I’m pretty ok with the weary rough grammarly plugin for Sublime Text implementation and therefore I’d tried and deleted their iOS keyboard app, haven’t installed any of their browsers plugins and so on.
- dvngnt_ 3y agodoes this mean grammarly will stop working in slack/google docs or is that using the first party sdk which would be unaffected
- ARandomerDude 3y agoReading old books (1800s and earlier) has done much more for my writing than apps like Grammarly. Much of the style is obviously dated but there was a cultural care and precision for language that remains invaluable for learning. I'm sure there's some survivorship bias here, which is a feature in my opinion.
- zxie 3y agoFor what it's worth, Sapling.ai (a Y Combinator startup) offers an SDK with grammar/spell checking as well as other LLM-powered functionality. Disclaimer: I'm on the team.