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Superhuman user and former Grammarly user here. I'm a big fan of Superhuman as an email client and happily pay the premium price for it. I really hope they don

Superhuman user and former Grammarly user here. I'm a big fan of Superhuman as an email client and happily pay the premium price for it. I really hope they don't change what makes it great. I used to love Grammarly until they essentially ruined their product - much like Dropbox did. They took an app that worked perfectly and deprecated it, replacing it with an invasive keyboard replacement that was supposed to work everywhere but performed poorly across most programs and included functionality I wasn’t interested in that is kept nagging me to use. When I complained about the issues, instead of addressing my concerns, they sent form letter responses about their commitment to privacy rather than fixing their intrusive software. This reminds me exactly of Dropbox's transformation from simple, reliable file storage into bloated software that cluttered my computer with pop-ups and background processes. When users complained, their team never seemed to understand why we were frustrated. Then they started acquiring other services I eventually cancelled as they tried to integrate them into their core service. I eventually moved to iCloud and never looked back. I hope Superhuman keeps their current excellent email client that I gladly pay for, rather than replacing it with some "next generation" product that nobody asked for and that would likely be inferior to what we have now. I genuinely love Superhuman as it is.

overfeed 1y ago
> Then they started acquiring other services I eventually cancelled as they tried to integrate them into their core service I was struck by a snippet I read recently - I can't remember the organization being discussed - that I'll paraphrase as "The company is the product, and it's being sold to shareholders", and currently, it is very fashionable to sell the story of unceasing growth, so companies will do anything, including turning away existing customers, just to have a shot at growth so the share price can keep rising.
- digital_voodoo 1y ago
  > unceasing growth As someone with a finance background and job, this deeply annoys and irritates me. Even made me quit a market finance path for something more realistic. As the saying goes, "you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet". I don't know why we need to explain something so obvious to people who (1) have the power to make and (2) are making decisions with large scale impact, every minute. Unless there's something (pure evil, maybe?) I haven't uncovered yet.
ryandrake 1y ago
So much software keeps repeating this pattern: they gain their initial success by finding something users want to do, and then building software to enable users to do it. Users love it and are happy! Then, after they’ve enjoyed some amount of success, they try to flip the script: now they start with what they want users to do, and build software that encourages, annoys, cajoles, or insists that users do that thing, even if they don’t want it! So much software falls down this pattern and just endlessly begs the user to change their behavior, rather than simply addressing the users’ actual needs.
rcleveng 1y ago
I think the phrase you are looking for is called enshitification. Coda has some great folks leading it, so let's hope that now they are really running grammarly, they can hold out against this. The answer will depend on how well they do at taking care of the $1B line of credit used for the purchase.
noname120 1y ago
What do you like about Superhuman that Spark Mail doesn't have?
- daft_pink 1y ago
  So my work is client based and it really makes sense to divide almost all the email into client folders. Superhuman lets me quickly move stuff from my inbox into the client’s folder. It’s just very very quick. I actually used spark mail for a while, because it would export to my crm, but eventually I wrote a script that converts all my emails to pdf to drop into my crm.

overfeed 1y ago

> Then they started acquiring other services I eventually cancelled as they tried to integrate them into their core service I was struck by a snippet I read recently - I can't remember the organization being discussed - that I'll paraphrase as "The company is the product, and it's being sold to shareholders", and currently, it is very fashionable to sell the story of unceasing growth, so companies will do anything, including turning away existing customers, just to have a shot at growth so the share price can keep rising.

digital_voodoo 1y ago
> unceasing growth As someone with a finance background and job, this deeply annoys and irritates me. Even made me quit a market finance path for something more realistic. As the saying goes, "you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet". I don't know why we need to explain something so obvious to people who (1) have the power to make and (2) are making decisions with large scale impact, every minute. Unless there's something (pure evil, maybe?) I haven't uncovered yet.

ryandrake 1y ago

So much software keeps repeating this pattern: they gain their initial success by finding something users want to do, and then building software to enable users to do it. Users love it and are happy! Then, after they’ve enjoyed some amount of success, they try to flip the script: now they start with what they want users to do, and build software that encourages, annoys, cajoles, or insists that users do that thing, even if they don’t want it! So much software falls down this pattern and just endlessly begs the user to change their behavior, rather than simply addressing the users’ actual needs.

rcleveng 1y ago

I think the phrase you are looking for is called enshitification. Coda has some great folks leading it, so let's hope that now they are really running grammarly, they can hold out against this. The answer will depend on how well they do at taking care of the $1B line of credit used for the purchase.

noname120 1y ago

What do you like about Superhuman that Spark Mail doesn't have?

daft_pink 1y ago
So my work is client based and it really makes sense to divide almost all the email into client folders. Superhuman lets me quickly move stuff from my inbox into the client’s folder. It’s just very very quick. I actually used spark mail for a while, because it would export to my crm, but eventually I wrote a script that converts all my emails to pdf to drop into my crm.