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Why we’re dropping Basecamp
- data_Is_Raciss 3y ago[flagged]
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- dr_faustus 3y agoOne might call it: first world problems…
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- gregatragenet3 3y agoTL;DR - Duke is dropping Basecamp due to 37 signals policy of people at work focusing on, you know, writing software that provides customers value, while having a policy that ppl at work not be spending their work time on causing distractions with ideological side-quests.
- Kye 3y agoIt sounds like they're actually dropping it because of DHH's ideological side quests.
- hackerlight 3y agoYou should read the actual article because it's clear you didn't.
- el_sinchi 3y ago[flagged]
- PeterStuer 3y ago"people at work focusing on, you know, writing software that provides customers value, while having a policy that ppl at work not be spending their work time on causing distractions with ideological side-quests" The mission of DEI is exactly the opposite, so it should come as no surprise they hate this stuff. If they are willing to sacrifice education and research on their altar, you think they would blink an eye on killing off productivity software in their eyes created by blasphemous hereticts?
- prepend 3y agoIt’s nice they wrote this post, but this seems like a really dumb reason to change project management. I doubt the harm caused to their users migrating project management is less than whatever harm they think 37signals is creating. So by their own logic, they shouldn’t cause this harm, or whatever. Tl;dr; duke tech leadership seems incompetent
- Kye 3y agoMaybe they know their situation and have a better view into what their librarians think than you do.
- prepend 3y agoIt’s quite possible and very likely they do. But this post doesn’t describe their rationale and it just seems like a waste of effort. If I worked there and relied on Basecamp and had to migrate to something new, for these reasons, I would be frustrated. And I would trust my tech org less because they aren’t making decisions to make it most efficient for me to build things. As a developer, I don’t want to worry about whether my company is going to arbitrarily decide to switch technologies to something inferior.
- brailsafe 3y agoAfter all, they are "world-weary and sophisticated"
- ipaddr 3y agoHow would you have enough information to make that statement? Maybe they do have a better understanding. You'd be surprised by the types of people who visit hn. This isn't your fav reddit sub
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- el_sinchi 3y ago[flagged]
- Ecstatify 3y agoDHH 101: be slightly controversial to get free publicity.
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- Kye 3y agoI wonder what the process of choosing a new platform looked like and how they landed on Microsoft To Do. Hopefully they do a followup post.
- prepend 3y agoTheir follow up post will be about what they switch to as Microsoft To Do is absolutely horrible, in my experience. We jokingly call it “To Don’t.”
- 15457345234 3y agoI'm not going to get into the ideology, but it's disappointing to see a university, of all places, switch from a relatively small provider to a massive megacorp. So much good opensource software has come from university funding and university-originated projects and you'd kinda hope that that culture pervades. I guess Duke isn't quite Stanford or Berkeley, though.
- deafpolygon 3y agoI rather like Microsoft To Do.
- pvorb 3y agoMaybe they didn't choose Microsoft To Do as a replacement for Basecamp, but they are using Microsoft products anyway and this is just one individual's to do list for the sake of this screenshot? I just want to state the possibility, because they didn't say anything about their new tool. I neither know Basecamp nor To Do that well, so I might be completely wrong. But I think Basecamp plays in a different league than To Do, doesn't it?
- bifrost 3y agoThey're going to be BigMad(tm) when they find out what MSFT does...
- JeremyNT 3y agoI have no insider knowledge but I suspect that the university's existing contact with Microsoft already included Microsoft To Do. This department might have started using it because it was "free" (to them) and decided it was good enough at that price point. This is just one department within the university. It's not uncommon to see small groups paying for some software only to eventually replace it with a site licensed enterprise alternative. See also: MS Teams replacing Slack at big organizations
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y agoFeaturing the classic rhetoric of: "Have a different opinion from the one true opinion? You're causing harm". It's "think of the children" for upper middle class people with college degrees.
- hitpointdrew 3y agoPeople still use basecamp? I thought everyone was in Jira now.
- graypegg 3y agoBasecamp has a lot of features built for agencies. I’m sure lots of agencies use JIRA, but basecamp is definitely more focused on that niche out of the box, where JIRA requires lots of configuration. “Client” accounts that can float across projects with limited access, warnings above text fields about which clients will be able to see a post/comment, files can be updated and a full history is kept with it, Gantt (ish) chart project planning, etc etc. I also doubt a library would have much use for much of JIRA’s features anyway.
- 15457345234 3y agoI'm quite happy to see that the rails ecosystem is still alive, I saw the big 'shopify/rails' post the other day and was pleased for it. It seemed like the big big thing at one time and then seemed to vanish almost overnight, maybe just the publicity ceased. It's nice to know, in a way, that these things keep on ticking even though nobody's talking about them as much as they used to.
- reducesuffering 3y ago> We’re not going to address each of the many falsehoods and distortions in the blog posts by David Heinemeier Hansson. But you had time to write a 20 paragraph post? Sounds like you can't actually debate the merits of the argument. Sounds more like you're being "intellectually dishonest."
- djohnston 3y ago[flagged]
- op00to 3y ago> Sounds like you can't actually debate the merits of the argument. Sounds more like you're being "intellectually dishonest." It seems “intellectually dishonest” to leave out their next sentence. “Instead, we will focus on a few emblematic statements that stand in for a pattern of rhetoric that runs counter to our own values”
- duck 3y agoThey must have an entire team dedicated to this as I can't imagine how you would do this with every vendor you use.
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- paulryanrogers 3y agoSome vendor executives are louder about their opinions than others. Even as they ask their subordinates to shut up about politics and get in line at the office. It's not like the university is digging into the closets of vendor executives.
- woooooo 3y agoGiven how late they are to the punch on this, my money is on a recent hire who got really mad about it 2 years ago and found an opportunity at their new gig. Almost seems gauche, really. Mainstream liberalism has distanced itself from the 2020 moral panic era.
- kondro 3y agoDHH hasn't stopped digging down though.
- iseeracepeople 3y ago[flagged]
- tptacek 3y agoThey don't purport to do so. 37signals went way out of their way to confront their customer base with their political takes, and did so not as individual statements of people who happened to be in leadership roles at the firm, but as the firm itself. I don't know that it's going to cost them many customers in the long run, but with respect to the customers they do lose, the saying holds: play stupid games...
- djohnston 3y agoLol because the guy thinks race based admission policies are dumb? This makes me want to start using basecamp tbh.
- el_sinchi 3y agoYep. Free market and all. It's just that your feelings are so fragile that you can't stand having different points of view. And this react childishly
- kweingar 3y agoThat’s totally valid—you can base your usage of a product on your view of the vendor’s values. So why are so many people blasting Duke’s library for doing the same thing…
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- meowtimemania 3y agoThe vendor’s stated position is that they are apolitical. Duke dropped the vendor because of what a founder posts on his personal website. People are blasting duke because they think it’s a dumb thing to do. Duke is of course free to do what they want.
- silexia 3y agoDoes Duke receive substantial public funding? Is Duke using this funding to force their political views on others? Seems wrong.
- mortallywounded 3y ago> We came to this decision after weighing the level of its use in our organization, which is considerable, against the harms that we see perpetuated by the leadership of Basecamp What... they speak like DHH is running around raping women and curb stomping people. The dude wanted people to stop talking about politics at work and made it a rule and he wasn't pro-race weighing for college admissions.... so? He's suddenly anti-minority? When in fact it's asian and white people that seem to be discriminated most for admissions.
- FireBeyond 3y agoThat hyperbole is absolutely unneeded. > Hansson certainly is entitled to his opinion, and to publish his own blog. We are not in the habit of running “ideological enforcement” to ensure “quick compliance” from beleaguered corporate executives or whatever it is that he’s talking about in his posts. We simply have our own opinions and our own blogs, and in some cases, we have good choices available to us regarding the companies to which we give our business. certainly isn't "[speaking] like DHH is running around raping women and curb stomping people". And then you cherry pick some of the less problematic issues. Perhaps one more problematic is: "When we as employees of my company spend time mocking and expressing amusement at non-English names and that's disclosed to the public, be clear, my problem is with the disclosure, not the mocking".
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago[flagged]
- ctvo 3y ago[flagged]
- iseeracepeople 3y ago[flagged]
- em-bee 3y agoexactly what do you expect to learn? there should be no racial bias coming from evolution because mixing of of people of different skin colors is a very recent phenomenon in terms of human history. i believe evolutions influence takes longer than that to work. and culture? if you grow up in an open community with open minded parents, that's all you need to not learn to judge people by their color. it's as simple as that. if you didn't have that privilege, then it helps to seek out friends from various colors and backgrounds and let that help you open your mind. my grandmother grew up with racial bias, and she occasionally expressed that, yet whenever me or one of my cousins brought over an african friend, she loved them, and i hope that one by one it made her realize that her prejudice was based on ignorance.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoMelatonin due to different sun exposure, that is all skin color is. Once you understand that, I don't see any reason to consider it any more than I pay attention to the callused fingertips of a guitarist. Cultures are different everywhere, varying across families too. Have you seen how differently everybody raises their kids? That we are used to. Now there is an argument that what happens if someone's culture is violence, in that case I think it's a legal issue and the legal system can deal with that. I don't know what else you want to learn. Focusing on these things is not as useful as focusing on increasing the size of the pie, making scientific education as well as the dissemination of scientific news (which has historic low amounts of trust now in the general populace) better and just making the world a better place for HUMANS and other sentient beings. It's really not that hard.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lijok 3y agoCute, they even included a strong punching screenshot of a ticket to “let basecamp subscription lapse” in their new ticket management tool. Reads like someone is very proud of the morally superior decision they made and just spent 4 hours typing up a big pat on their back. Switching from 37signals to MICROSOFT on grounds of morality is actually impressive as far as mental gymnastics go.
- shadowgovt 3y agoMicrosoft is hard on competitors. I think the difference here is 37Signals was hard on its people.
- novemp 3y agoA university switched from one webshit to another. Hacker News eagerly shared their opinions on race and politics. No technology was discussed.
- ojkelly 3y agoThe comments here from the first hour are depressingly predictable. Just because you don’t take issue with something doesn’t mean someone else won’t. Brands have always been bigger than their main product. People wear branded tshirts, put stickers on their laptops to show some kind of affinity with a brand. The opposite can also be true. For reasons they don’t want to use the product anymore, and they want it to be known (they mention they’ve been using it for over a decade). The reasons themselves have been debated here on the DHH posts themselves, so how about we ask the bigger question. How can you join the political debate publicly, without risking customers? Or should you risk loosing customers? How do we talk politics at work? Because sometimes it’s needed. I don’t have the answers, suffice to say starting from a position of respect and a high-trust environment is important.
- adriand 3y agoAbsolutely. This is an organization with a set of values, whose members are thoughtful and highly educated, and they don’t want to help enrich someone whose values they find problematic. This is what free markets are all about. I’m not going to buy my apples from the market stall with the confederate flag. And Bob Iger doesn’t want his movies advertised next to posts spewing white supremacy. This ability of the market to moderate behaviour is a good thing. It is, after all, entirely peaceful and non-coercive.
- nxm 3y ago[flagged]
- el_sinchi 3y ago[flagged]
- meowtimemania 3y agoWould you buy apples from someone who has a personal blog and posted on that blog that they don’t like affirmative action?
- philip1209 3y agoOut of curiosity, I pulled up Duke’s FIRE rating and it’s overall “green”: https://www.thefire.org/colleges/duke-university#:~:text=Duke%20University%20has%20been%20given,policies%20nominally%20protect%20free%20speech https://www.thefire.org/colleges/duke-university#:~:text=Duk...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bifrost 3y agoEntirely possible they'll be dropped down after this.
- tptacek 3y agoNot so much. FIRE promotes freedom of association. If the library was disciplined for making this decision, you might expect to see FIRE get involved.
- bifrost 3y agoThe Library seems to not support freedom of thought/association. I guess we'll see in 30-90 days what happens (if anything). I donate a reasonable portion of my profits to FIRE so I guess I'll find out where my dollars go :) That said they seem to support mostly noble causes so I'm not gonna stop giving them money.
- tptacek 3y agoThere's no such thing as "freedom of thought/association". There is freedom of association, though, which dictates that people are free to choose who they do business with.
- jrflowers 3y ago> The Library seems to not support freedom of thought/association. This is a good point. 37signals has the right to associate with any organization it wants, even those that do not wish to do business with them. FIRE should do more to punish organizations that make the choice not to associate with others, that’s not what freedom of association means. It’s the right to associate, not the right to choose not to associate. Freedom is when you get punished for not doing business with an entity that you would prefer not to
- dolni 3y agoOne of the things that has always tickled me about this bent of "liberal thinking" is that they generally believe two things at once: 1. people who commit crimes -- even heinous ones -- deserve a second chance and reintegration with society (except, perhaps, for a select few crimes which may not even be especially heinous in the broader context) 2. people who hold unacceptable opinions are irredeemable Regardless of what you think about DHH's opinions, it strikes me as magnificently childish to cause this kind of organizational disruption because of an opinion. The guy isn't funneling money to Nazi concentration camps. He has an opinion, and it's different from yours. Grow up.
- shadowgovt 3y agoPeople who commit crimes and are held accountable deserve a second chance. In this context, you're looking at the "hold him accountable" phase of that process.
- dolni 3y agoYou are implying here that having and expressing an opinion on social policy is worth "holding someone accountable" for. Be careful with that hammer. It feels righteous to wield until the acceptable opinion changes in a way you don't agree with. Also, this kind of thing may be a net benefit for DHH. It's publicity. Time will tell.
- shadowgovt 3y agoYes, I agree. I believe accounting for the prevailing attitudes of the times is called "living in a society." We all do it. Some hills are worth dying on some are not. I came of age in the technical space in a generation that felt that it didn't matter if you had a secret shrine to Hitler as long as you could code a performant file system. It's refreshing to have seen the pendulum swing away from that extremism. Perhaps because too many of us have borne witness to the monsters taking those performant file systems and using them to coordinate violent attacks on innocent people. But perhaps more importantly... He's not just espousing an opinion. A chief officer is speaking as an executive of a company. Always.
- stevenicr 3y ago[flagged]
- adriand 3y ago[flagged]
- twisteriffic 3y ago[flagged]
- _v7gu 3y agoPosting discriminatory comments in support of fighting against discrimination, oh the irony
- twisteriffic 3y agoFailing to see what's discriminatory about a time of day, but whatever floats your boat.
- stevenicr 3y agoI read the article twice before commenting, not sure why you say I "obviously didn't" I still wonder the same after you pointed out that chunk - are the people currently in vogue there at the library making decisions on what to carry and what to highlight and what to down-display based upon their ideology stretching? In fact pointing out this chunk makes it more of a concern. I personally believe library people have a very important and very tough job, and much like paramedics if you can't do it fairly you should step into a different role. I have immense love for libraries, and books, and evolving discussions and thoughts. I even noticed that the author has posts dating back to 2012, which makes me more curious about decisions they may have been involved in since then, and what classes or other ideology may have shifted, perhaps a big shift occurred after 2016 or 2020 - I find it very interesting. My main concern is that they hold a position of power in the library. I also believe moves like this tend to reflect on the brand of the school, and those who have said school on their resumes / linkedin, etc. If this person was posting this as part of their liberal arts dei studies dept it would not be the same concerns. Anyhow, I did read it - admittedly I paused and eyes glazed over for moments when I got to the part about "protests of 2020 were overwhelmingly peaceful" - and then when they said "We here in the libraries are world-weary and sophisticated." So yeah - like I said before, "Glad to see openness like this." as far as "you’re not even going to read the post? To earn upvotes or something? " - I actually believed I'd get more brigaded downvotes than upvotes - and at the moment that rings more true than the opposite. I'm not on HN for votes, I don't have any way of monetizing them, no one I know knows what hn votes are about. I occasionally offer another view point to add to a discussion, not trying gather the likes of any tribe. I hope to add a view that others may not have considered before, and I enjoy reading others for the same.
- graypegg 3y agoEh, ok. This feels like something that’s written with the intention to either get me cheering on their side to some comical degree (good job! Down with the fascist!) or to make me seethe in anger. (what snowflakes! I actually WANT to use basecamp now!) There’s so much emotional language about violence and oppression. It’s a library changing todo apps? Not everything is a statement. Vote with your wallet and all of that, but don’t expect people to care? Despite my ideals (I think) aligning with their ideals, I still find myself annoyed that they want to force me to “feel” something. I have enough things to be riled up about in my life.
- PeterStuer 3y ago"Not everything is a statement" Have you read the article? It's a statement. The todo app part is just a context.
- mardifoufs 3y ago[flagged]
- mips_r4300i 3y agoI suspect they wanted to change off Basecamp anyway maybe for legitimate technical reasons, but couldn't resist trying to score some brownie points with their sophisticate librarian cohorts.
- nomilk 3y agoDuke: here’s an essay on diversity Duke: btw we don’t like working with people different to ourselves
- brianwawok 3y agoIsn’t that a dishonest argument? Maybe they are saying they prefer to work with people who promote diversity to be in line with their values.
- ordinaryradical 3y ago[flagged]
- dangus 3y agoA commitment to diversity doesn’t include tolerating people who are intolerant.
- meowtimemania 3y agoHow was DHH being intolerant?
- nomilk 3y agoI don't think he is intolerant, but here are two instances cited in the article: 1. DHH is against race based admissions. For context, so are 62% of Americans [1] 2. DHH used the term "riots" to describe events following the passing of George Floyd. For context, the term "riot" appears 60 times in the wikipedia article on the topic [2]. [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/most-americans-think-college-admissions-should-not-consider-race-reutersipsos-2023-02-15/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/most-americans-think-colleg... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests
- sebastianconcpt 3y ago[flagged]
- el_sinchi 3y ago[flagged]
- op00to 3y agomicro economic warfare? is that like warfare involving a single person's decisions?
- sebastianconcpt 3y agoIn this case is waged by "the collective" inside Duke's university against a private business by aligning the decision making parts using ideology and, confessed, done not by utilitarian grounds (features/value/convenience) but purely by also ideological grounds. It's a culture battle becoming an economic battle.
- kweingar 3y agoYou are allowed to stop doing business with a vendor for ideological reasons. What is the issue?
- sebastianconcpt 3y agoCovert subversive action towards your civilization (effectively slowly doing it while preserving plausibility of denial).
- lrvick 3y agoIf organizations want to use software hosted by people that share their values, the solution is obvious: Self host. There are endless seelf-hostable basecamp alternatives, and I am sure there are people at Duke that would gain valuable experience helping host and maintain such services.
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- JCharante 3y agoThis makes me feel young. I'd never heard of Basecamp. At first I thought they were referring to Bandcamp and wondered if they published their university's orchestra recitals on it.
- dudul 3y agoThis post is more embarrassing for Duke University than for Basecamp.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoWhy?
- darthrupert 3y agoBlatant virtual virtue signaling, perhaps?
- maxehmookau 3y agoWhat's wrong with signalling your virtue? As long as you follow through on your virtue signalling with actions, what's the problem?
- objectivetruth 3y agoGood point. I feel people who use the phrase "virtue signal" are usually signaling something themselves. "Well, I think all XYZ people are bums, and I bet everyone secretly agrees with me and just doesn't have the guts to say it!" I've never heard anyone decry "vice signalling" and surely humans do that at least as much.
- darthrupert 3y agoGood question! A few reasons: this can be done only when the virtue being signalled is the same as one the majority holds in that clique. It's easy in the worst way. It makes complicated issue shallow, and it is divisive instead of constructive as a method of affecting. Most importantly, the goal is moral grandstanding, i.e. lifting yourself above others, possibly without any merit.
- unconed 3y agoThey're pretending to safeguard objective knowledge, and that Basecamp is following some kind of sinister "playbook", while blatantly singing from the woke songsheet, and following the established woke playbook. - Call it a "discussion" when it's a unilateral demand with only one acceptable, pre-determined outcome - Give favorable treatment to some groups based on race, demand that others do the same, and adjust language rules and writing style to enforce this top-down - Try to control the frame of a political event ("mostly peaceful protests") instead of acknowledging the plain reality of arson, looting, crime and murder. - Completely misrepresent and misunderstand the very real critique that people have against the DEI movement as a parasite on and disruptor of tech companies. - Pretending to be even-handed and objective while accusing others of "mendacious language of extremists" to refer to a riot as a riot. It is just never ending projection with these people. They are intellectual midgets who don't understand the first thing about the enlightenment they pretend to defend. They think of themselves as empathetic, well-informed listeners, but they are surrounded by an ideological bubble that runs on gossip epistemology, bullying, forced consensus and shoddy social "science" that isn't. And it all gets heaped and mashed together into one big pile of crud where race, tech, climate and god knows what else is claimed and defined by them as Good, whereas the other people are doing Evil. At best they will grant you are "unknowingly" or "naively" collaborating with it, in which case they regard you with self-assured pity and a sense of moral superiority. The possibility of being wrong does not occur to them and they think they are on the side of civilization. What cunts.
- dangus 3y agoI thought the area of the article that was most interesting surrounded this statement: > We also know all too well the very worst of what humanity can create, because we collect it. There was a lot of acknowledgment of not working in anything close to a perfect system. The whole article had a lot of self-awareness that is hard to find in most institutions. Duke libraries doesn’t have to have a perfect moral high ground to decide to quit using Basecamp. This isn’t “cancel culture,” this is a project management product that is easily replaceable and probably not even that amazing considering the competition it is up against. Something Elon Musk should probably learn is that organizations consider it to be risky to work with other companies who can’t maintain professional behavior. Having your senior leadership team keeping a list of funny sounding ethnic names of employees is far away from being professional behavior, and that was only one of the unprofessional pieces of behavior out of many by Basecamp leadership. Basecamp rejects DEI but DEI is all about reducing risk and increasing innovation and financial performance. It’s already been proven as numerical fact that organizations embracing true diversity financially outperform ones that don’t. DEI is a concept that benefits literally everyone. Bigoted buffoons who don’t believe in it throw their money away by alienating employees and customers. There’s also another saying: trust is hard to gain and easy to lose. I know people who have had one bad experience and refuse to buy another product again. As an example, I know someone who will never buy a Kia/Hyundai again because of the immobilizer scandal. Same deal with VW and dieselgate. It doesn’t have to be a fully dollars and cents choice. This company pissed me off one time, I’m done with them. Again, not cancel culture.
- twisteriffic 3y agoTrust arrives on foot but leaves on horseback
- etchalon 3y agoWe made the same call as an agency, but back in 2018, moving from Basecamp to Asana. We'd used Basecamp for over a decade at that point. We'd never been huge fans of 37signals or its leadership, but Basecamp was genuinely the only real choice, for years, for a shared workspace between an agency and its clients, so we kept using it. Eventually, other software just got better at doing the things we needed it to do. Basecamp 3 was not something we, or our clients, liked. We stayed on Basecamp 2 until the end. Jason and David had always been controversial figures – especially in Chicago, where we and they are based. It felt good not to be validating their egos with our money anymore.
- tptacek 3y agoIn what way do you perceive them to have been controversial here in Chicago?
- etchalon 3y agoMaybe it's more "within the creative community in Chicago". The Chicago digital creative community felt fairly small back in the early 2000s and everyone kinda had stories and opinions on everyone else.
- silexia 3y agoBasecamp is the best tool out there, I used it for fourteen years to build an org from one person to two hundred and seventy employees.
- etchalon 3y agoBasecamp 2 was good, and we also used it to scale our company. However, we found that Asana was a much better match for us.
- camdenlock 3y agoIdeological takeover. Sad to see.
- lawgimenez 3y ago[flagged]
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- tptacek 3y agoI do not love the ideological turn 37signals took after the DEI blow-up. But this piece is as ideological and blinkered as DHH's affirmative action posts have been. It's nice to want things, I know, but: I wish I could have had this piece just as a dry list of ways in which 37signals has waded, unbidden, into culture war topics, without the piece itself staking out the opposite sides of all those issues.
- meowtimemania 3y agoIn what ways has 37signals become ideological? My understanding is that the company is apolitical. All the DHH come from his personal blog
- darthrupert 3y agoIn modern times, leaders are not allowed to have mainstream opinions. The service they're changing to will also have leaders who have opinions that they don't like, they just have larger HR/PR institutions to protect themselves from "problems" like these. But I'll reiterate a basic fact everyone has in these threads: Duke University obviously has the right to choose their service providers on ideological basis. It might not be smart, but that's another thing.
- maxehmookau 3y agoThere's no such thing as being apolitical. Only being wilfully ignorant of the politics that is happening around you and opting to do nothing.
- hollerith 3y agoThere's also accurately noticing when your employees are engaged in political activism that is harming your company.
- maxehmookau 3y agoAgreed. Which is why 37signals ended up losing a bunch of its best employees.
- tetrisgm 3y agoOh god, I read the whole thread with Bandcamp in mind (I work in music) because of the recent drama and was utterly confused with the replies. Wonder if this happened to others!
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- penguin_booze 3y agoTrivia: Firefox was once at the receiving end of similar kind of treatment once. Story here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CEO_and_resignation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE....
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- mardifoufs 3y ago[flagged]
- petercooper 3y agoI'm not commenting on the actual topic of the post, but "We here in the libraries are world-weary and sophisticated" just tickled me, so I had to seek out more gems. It turns out Duke University Libraries' digital projects team has a blog and the quality of posts is extremely high and worth a browse: https://blogs.library.duke.edu/bitstreams/ https://blogs.library.duke.edu/bitstreams/ – the effort put into each post reminds me of the yesteryear of blogging.
- simonsarris 3y ago> Research and the documentary record show that the protests of 2020 were overwhelmingly peaceful [...] The characterization of these events as “riots” followed as part of a deliberate disinformation campaign by right-wing groups, media’s distorting focus on isolated incidents, and biased framing by political campaigns. Wait what? According to Wikipedia the damages from the allegedly-not-riots is 1-2 billion. Surely then the most damaging protest (that the record shows is totally not riots) in history. If you burn over 1,000 buildings in one city, and then 99 other cities have mostly-peaceful protests, it seems weird to launder one with the other. If that's the criteria then the only thing needed to claim something is not a riot is more smaller protests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests
- hollerith 3y agoAnd a murder of a counter-protester by an Antifa supporter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_of_Aaron_Danielson_and_Michael_Reinoehl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_of_Aaron_Danielson_an...
- redhale 3y agoYeah, this is a pot/kettle situation as far as deliberate disinformation. From Wikipedia: > research ... estimated that by the end of June, 96.3% of 7,305 demonstrations involved no injuries and no property damage. However, arson, vandalism, and looting ... caused approximately $1–2 billion in insured damages nationally, the highest recorded damage from civil disorder in U.S. history So 97% of the demonstrations were peaceful -- "overwhelmingly peaceful" is _technically_ accurate, but obviously extremely misleading. Those referring to these events as "riots", assuming good faith (which to be fair cannot always be assumed), are referring specifically to the NON-peaceful portion that -- while a small fraction of the total -- combined to cause the largest recorded damage from civil disorder in US history at $1-2 billion. I'm not saying DHH's drawn conclusions are correct, but this is not the right angle of argument against his position.
- none_to_remain 3y agoSelf-labelling as a sophisticate is self-refuting
- pwthornton 3y agoDHH has become the textbook definition of needs to touch grass. He just can't help himself and his need to share his opinions. A lot of people feel Basecamp's products are outdated, but many kept using them out of goodwill, loyalty, and just like the company and its customer service. DHH is tanking the one thing they have going for them.
- silexia 3y agoSuper scummy to drop a very good platform like Basecamp that your whole org loves because you personally disagree with the politics of someone there... Especially when you are spending the public's money. I would never donate to Duke again or recommend anyone go there now based on this.