[HN Gopher] The death of Glitch, the birth of Slack
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       The death of Glitch, the birth of Slack
        
       Author : ramimac
       Score  : 57 points
       Date   : 2024-12-22 10:20 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (buildingslack.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (buildingslack.com)
        
       | greyface- wrote:
       | Glitch was such a gem. Stewart's Salesforce exit made him a
       | billionaire. I'm rooting for a fully-endowed Game Neverending 3
       | that doesn't need to be profitable to survive.
        
         | wslh wrote:
         | > Stewart's Salesforce exit made him a billionaire
         | 
         | He also co-founded Flickr.
        
           | chowchowchow wrote:
           | The Flickr acquisition didn't make anyone close to a
           | billionaire, the whole deal was for $25 million.
        
       | fidotron wrote:
       | The part of this that never ceases to amaze me is the Butterfield
       | playbook for accidentally successful startups seems to involve
       | making an online games company of some kind, which fails, and
       | then pivoting it into something quite different.
       | 
       | Doing this once is mad enough, but twice? He should be made to
       | try again purely for science.
        
         | wmf wrote:
         | Ev Williams has a similar playbook.
        
           | srpablo wrote:
           | My favorite thing said about Ev Williams: with Twitter then
           | Medium, he managed to kill blogging _twice._
        
         | astrospective wrote:
         | For me it's not even just the pivot, but the internal tool they
         | built incidentally that's the product they pivot too.
        
       | daemonologist wrote:
       | :dusty_stick:
        
       | egypturnash wrote:
       | "And that's what this game is/you're inside their thoughts/go and
       | make them bigger/and you'll play for a long while"
       | 
       | - the video advertising Glitch contained in this post; "their"
       | refers to the eight giants that imagined this world.
       | 
       | That's... that's the best they could do? "You'll play for a long
       | while?" I _think_ that 's what the narrator's saying, she kinda
       | mumbles that line, it's all delivered kinda half-heartedly like
       | she's ashamed of the lack of anything to really _do_ in this so-
       | called  "game".
       | 
       | It's over a bunch of screenshots of crafting mechanics. And
       | crowds of layer avatars. Was there anything else here? If there
       | was any actual _building_ they sure were not advertising it;
       | there 's been a lot of multiplayer games that have less in the
       | way of actual game mechanics but usually there's room for a ton
       | of player-created content, and Glitch sure does not look like it
       | had that, despite the fact that the previous attempt at this
       | thing is what Flickr grew out of.
       | 
       | How the heck did they spend three years on making this thing
       | without ever finding something more compelling to advertise than
       | "uh multiplayer and crafting and some pretty art, I guess"?
        
         | jameskilton wrote:
         | It turns out, there's a huge market for this! Had Glitch not
         | been stuck on Flash and was able to pivot to mobile it may have
         | been a success.
         | 
         | My daughter, her friends, her cousins, are all obsessed with
         | Toca Boca (https://tocaboca.com/) which is nothing more than
         | digital "barbie", a game you can play forever, fully powered by
         | your imagination.
         | 
         | It's also the reason Minecraft is still so popular: it's a
         | platform for creativity. Games don't always have to have an
         | end-goal.
        
           | michaelwilson wrote:
           | Thanks to the generosity of Stewart and Tiny Speck releasing
           | all the artwork and other assets for the game into public
           | domain, a few non-Flash versions of Glitch showed up. One,
           | Odd Giants (https://oddgiants.com/) is particularly
           | successful and worth checking out if you're a Glitch Fan.
        
           | pm wrote:
           | I hadn't seen Toca Boca. My friend's niece plays on
           | Everskies, which I believe is something similar.
        
       | vichle wrote:
       | Anyone know what Butterfield's next thing might be?
        
         | anyfoo wrote:
         | Doesn't seem well thought out to me.
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5pWqpPCy7c
        
       | droideqa wrote:
       | This was mentioned in "Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk
       | Away"[0].
       | 
       | [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Quit-Power-Knowing-When-
       | Walk/dp/B09PV...
        
       | d3VwsX wrote:
       | There is a mention of the Glitch assets, but I did not see any
       | link? Looks like this is a good place to look:
       | https://archive.org/details/glitch-public-domain-game-art
       | 
       | I remember downloading everything when it was released, adding it
       | to my hoard, never using it for anything. The old Glitch site
       | that hosted the content now just redirects to slack.com. It
       | looked like this in 2013:
       | https://web.archive.org/web/20131209034741/http://www.glitch...
        
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       (page generated 2024-12-23 23:00 UTC)