from Hacker News

Why we’re dropping Basecamp

by kondro on 11/30/23, 9:27 PM with 141 comments

by petercooper on 12/1/23, 1:34 PM
I'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/ – the effort put into each post reminds me of the yesteryear of blogging.
by philip1209 on 12/1/23, 12:31 AM
Out of curiosity, I pulled up Duke’s FIRE rating and it’s overall “green”:
https://www.thefire.org/colleges/duke-university#:~:text=Duk...
by Kye on 11/30/23, 11:21 PM
I 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.
by duck on 11/30/23, 11:45 PM
They must have an entire team dedicated to this as I can't imagine how you would do this with every vendor you use.
by etchalon on 12/1/23, 3:09 AM
We 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.
by dudul on 12/1/23, 2:43 AM
This post is more embarrassing for Duke University than for Basecamp.
by dolni on 12/1/23, 12:40 AM
One 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.
by lijok on 12/1/23, 12:18 AM
Cute, 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.
by tptacek on 12/1/23, 3:19 AM
I 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.
by 8f2ab37a-ed6c on 11/30/23, 11:24 PM
Featuring 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.
by prepend on 11/30/23, 11:15 PM
It’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
by mortallywounded on 11/30/23, 11:58 PM
> 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.
by simonsarris on 12/1/23, 3:01 PM
> 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
by novemp on 12/1/23, 12:27 AM
A university switched from one webshit to another. Hacker News eagerly shared their opinions on race and politics. No technology was discussed.
by none_to_remain on 12/1/23, 4:45 PM
Self-labelling as a sophisticate is self-refuting
by graypegg on 12/1/23, 12:55 AM
Eh, 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.
by reducesuffering on 11/30/23, 11:44 PM
> 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."
by silexia on 12/4/23, 3:18 PM
Super 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.
by gregatragenet3 on 11/30/23, 10:54 PM
TL;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.
by hitpointdrew on 11/30/23, 11:43 PM
People still use basecamp? I thought everyone was in Jira now.
by pwthornton on 12/1/23, 7:27 PM
DHH 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.
by djohnston on 11/30/23, 11:53 PM
Lol because the guy thinks race based admission policies are dumb? This makes me want to start using basecamp tbh.
by ojkelly on 12/1/23, 12:31 AM
The 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.
by penguin_booze on 12/1/23, 8:06 AM
Trivia: Firefox was once at the receiving end of similar kind of treatment once. Story here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE....
by leshokunin on 12/1/23, 3:47 AM
Oh 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!
by lrvick on 12/1/23, 1:28 AM
If 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.
by nomilk on 12/1/23, 1:11 AM
Duke: here’s an essay on diversity
Duke: btw we don’t like working with people different to ourselves
by JCharante on 12/1/23, 1:32 AM
This 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.
by Ecstatify on 11/30/23, 11:16 PM
DHH 101: be slightly controversial to get free publicity.
by dr_faustus on 11/30/23, 10:54 PM
One might call it: first world problems…
by camdenlock on 12/1/23, 3:15 AM
Ideological takeover. Sad to see.
by dangus on 12/1/23, 2:52 AM
I 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.