Why we’re dropping Basecamp

https://blogs.library.duke.edu/blog/2023/11/30/why-were-dropping-basecamp/

by kondro • 3 years ago

164 130 3 years ago

blogs.library.duke.edu

dr_faustus• 3 years ago

One might call it: first world problems…

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.

Kye3• 3 years ago

It sounds like they're actually dropping it because of DHH's ideological side quests.

hackerlight• 3 years ago

You should read the actual article because it's clear you didn't.

PeterStuer2• 3 years 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?

prepend5• 3 years ago

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

Kye3• 3 years ago

Maybe they know their situation and have a better view into what their librarians think than you do.

prepend5• 3 years ago

It’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• 3 years ago

After all, they are "world-weary and sophisticated"

ipaddr• 3 years ago

How 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

dangus12• 3 years ago

What if Basecamp isn’t that good?

Like, I know people who hate Ticketmaster but still use them because they have no other choice. It’s hard to replace.

How hard is it to replace Basecamp? Alternatives are aplenty. Some might even be cheaper and better.

This is a big reason to carefully manage your image as a company leader. It’s so a big reason DEI is financially beneficial in the: because you aren’t shutting out your best employees and customers by being unwelcoming to them.

Don’t make negative waves and unforced errors that give your customers a reason to explore alternatives.

prepend5• 3 years ago

It’s not that basecamp is great or terrible. It’s that Duke is initiating churn for no user value.

Personally, I think basecamp is ok. But they definitely aren’t Ticketmaster.

idlewords2• 3 years ago

It's librarians; this is what they are like now.

jwx48• 3 years ago

Could you expand on this? I'm genuinely curious because I'm a former academic librarian, emphasis on 'former'.

Ecstatify• 3 years ago

DHH 101: be slightly controversial to get free publicity.

Kye3• 3 years ago

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.

prepend5• 3 years ago

Their 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.”

154573452342• 3 years ago

I'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• 3 years ago

I rather like Microsoft To Do.

pvorb• 3 years ago

Maybe 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?

bifrost3• 3 years ago

They're going to be BigMad(tm) when they find out what MSFT does...

JeremyNT• 3 years ago

I 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• 3 years ago

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.

hitpointdrew• 3 years ago

People still use basecamp? I thought everyone was in Jira now.

graypegg2• 3 years ago

Basecamp 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.

154573452342• 3 years ago

I'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• 3 years 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."

op00to• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

They must have an entire team dedicated to this as I can't imagine how you would do this with every vendor you use.

paulryanrogers2• 3 years ago

Some 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• 3 years ago

Given 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.

tptacek7• 3 years ago

They 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...

djohnston2• 3 years ago

Lol because the guy thinks race based admission policies are dumb? This makes me want to start using basecamp tbh.

el_sinchi• 3 years ago

Yep. 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

djohnston2• 3 years ago

Me or the university trying to part ways because of someone with a different view?

kweingar• 3 years ago

That’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…

meowtimemania4• 3 years ago

The 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.

dangus12• 3 years ago

If you read the article fully, that was only a small part of the reason. Company leadership demonstrated a repeated pattern of poor taste. In short, racist, anti-worker, and discriminatory toward their own employees.

mortallywounded• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

That 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".

lijok• 3 years ago

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.

shadowgovt3• 3 years ago

Microsoft is hard on competitors.

I think the difference here is 37Signals was hard on its people.

novemp• 3 years ago

A university switched from one webshit to another. Hacker News eagerly shared their opinions on race and politics. No technology was discussed.

ojkelly• 3 years ago

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.

adriand2• 3 years ago

Absolutely. 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.

meowtimemania4• 3 years ago

Would you buy apples from someone who has a personal blog and posted on that blog that they don’t like affirmative action?

philip1209• 3 years ago

Out of curiosity, I pulled up Duke’s FIRE rating and it’s overall “green”:

https://www.thefire.org/colleges/duke-university#:~:text=Duk...

bifrost3• 3 years ago

Entirely possible they'll be dropped down after this.

tptacek7• 3 years ago

Not so much. FIRE promotes freedom of association. If the library was disciplined for making this decision, you might expect to see FIRE get involved.

dolni5• 3 years ago

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.

shadowgovt3• 3 years ago

People 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.

dolni5• 3 years ago

You 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.

TheCleric3• 3 years ago

The difference you’re missing is contrition. Among those advocating for second chances one of the key steps is the party acknowledging the harm they’ve done so as not to do it again.

dolni5• 3 years ago

As this applies to DHH, are you suggesting that having and expressing an opinion can cause "harm"?

dangus12• 3 years ago

One of the things that’s always tickled me about this bent of “conservative thinking” is that they generally believe two things at once:

1. Freedom of speech and self-determination are sacred and fundamental rights, and in the economic market that means that everyone is free to make purchase decisions based on closely-held personal beliefs. Private schools have the right to exercise their freedom to make their own curriculum without government intervention.

2. People and private organizations who choose not to buy a product based on closely held personal beliefs that are the wrong ones are childish cancel culture warriors.

Why should you care about Duke’s organizational disruption anyway? It’s a private school and you don’t work there.

dolni5• 3 years ago

I don't label myself conservative. Conservatives also exhibit this behavior, but it is seen as more "socially acceptable" to do this under the banner of liberal values.

To address your point, I am not disputing Duke's _right_ to make purchasing decisions for any reason they like.

But it is still stupid and childish. I'm calling that out.

Why should you care about Duke’s organizational disruption anyway? It’s a private school and you don’t work there.

Because Duke is attempting to normalize toxic behavior. They think this is going to help. It won't.

This behavior might achieve "compliance" but it doesn't actually move the needle. It's why places like San Francisco appear to support underserved communities, but when push comes to shove they blockade housing initiatives.

This is almost certainly some liberal, white woman's way of looking like a good person without having to risk anything. After work it's back to the gated community!

orhmeh09• 3 years ago

It's a private school but it annually receives almost $650 million from the federal government as of 2021: https://governmentrelations.duke.edu/research/

graypegg2• 3 years ago

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.

PeterStuer2• 3 years ago

"Not everything is a statement"

Have you read the article? It's a statement. The todo app part is just a context.

mips_r4300i• 3 years ago

I 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.

nomilk3• 3 years ago

Duke: here’s an essay on diversity

Duke: btw we don’t like working with people different to ourselves

brianwawok• 3 years ago

Isn’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.

dangus12• 3 years ago

A commitment to diversity doesn’t include tolerating people who are intolerant.

meowtimemania4• 3 years ago

How was DHH being intolerant?

bad_username• 3 years ago

Want to obtain free, rapid, socially approved intolerance? Just declare something else intolerant. And feel free to immediately become proudly intolerant yourself. This of course cannot reduce the total amount of intolerance in the world, only increade it. But who cares?

Also people who are "intolerant to the intolerant" are, by definition, be intolerant to themselves.

lrvick• 3 years ago

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.

JCharante• 3 years ago

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.

ecshafer• 3 years ago

Basecamp is like 20 year old software, they invented Ruby on Rails. Basecamp is imo better than Jira, but not as widely used.

TheCleric3• 3 years ago

Better than Jira is not exactly a high bar.

dudul2• 3 years ago

This post is more embarrassing for Duke University than for Basecamp.

paulryanrogers2• 3 years ago

Why?

darthrupert3• 3 years ago

Blatant virtual virtue signaling, perhaps?

dudul2• 3 years ago

I always find this kind of "break up post" really cringe. Do they publish something like that every time they change provider for a service? Do they vet every company they deal with to make sure everyone there thinks like them on all topics? Does it go beyond? Do people at Duke check that whoever makes their food, clothes, cars, etc thinks like them on every topic?

This is just a longer version of the "I'm leaving twitter" tweet.

dangus12• 3 years ago

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.

twisteriffic• 3 years ago

Trust arrives on foot but leaves on horseback

etchalon3• 3 years ago

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.

tptacek7• 3 years ago

In what way do you perceive them to have been controversial here in Chicago?

etchalon3• 3 years ago

Maybe 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.

silexia3• 3 years ago

Basecamp 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.

etchalon3• 3 years ago

Basecamp 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• 3 years ago

Ideological takeover. Sad to see.

tptacek7• 3 years ago

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.

meowtimemania4• 3 years ago

In what ways has 37signals become ideological? My understanding is that the company is apolitical. All the DHH come from his personal blog

darthrupert3• 3 years ago

In 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.

maxehmookau3• 3 years ago

There's no such thing as being apolitical. Only being wilfully ignorant of the politics that is happening around you and opting to do nothing.

dangus12• 3 years ago

There is no separation of “it’s my personal blog” when you are in senior leadership of a company. When you’re SLT/founder/owner you represent that company on a personal level.

Imagine buying a condo in Trump Tower and thinking that that you can separate Trump’s personal life away from his real estate business. If you do that in 2023 you have to know that your house guests are going to think about that in some way every time they step foot inside.

tetrisgm• 3 years ago

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!

penguin_booze• 3 years ago

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....

petercooper• 3 years ago

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.

simonsarris• 3 years 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

hollerith2• 3 years ago

And a murder of a counter-protester by an Antifa supporter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_of_Aaron_Danielson_an...

redhale• 3 years ago

Yeah, 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• 3 years ago

Self-labelling as a sophisticate is self-refuting

pwthornton• 3 years ago

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.

silexia3• 3 years ago

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.

Why we’re dropping Basecamp

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