
Bye - aloukissas
https://bye.fyi/
======
throwawaygh
I understand that this is art. That said, I don't understand the hate for
email. Especially post-Slack.

Email seems to put my interlocutors in the mindset that results in paragraphs
of coherent text that clearly describe an idea. Slack does exactly the
opposite.

I receive a lot of one-off Slack messages that border on inscrutable because
of lazy spelling/grammar/composition. I then have to engage in a costly
conversation to tease out the meaning.

I also receive a lot of Slack messages that border on inscrutable because a 4
or 5 sentence paragraph is delivered one sentence at a time. The messages do
not make sense individually, but also do not make sense when read together as
a paragraph. People seem incapable of thinking more than one sentence ahead
when using Slack. This is particularly bad among the crowd who didn't learn
how to use channel-based chat well (e.g., by using IRC).

I get that "hell is other people", but compared to the alternative, email is
great. Especially with a good search feature and some basic filters and some
auto-replies. And especially compared to modern Slack messaging behaviors.

~~~
darau1
I love email because everybody has it. I'd love it if all my clients, friends,
colleagues, family members _all_ used the same platform, or that all those
platforms could communicate with each other.

Email is the _only_ communications tool that can communicate between servers
that already has the critical mass required to make it useful and not just a
cool toy for enthusiasts.

That said the only people I ever email are clients or my girlfriend. Feels
bad, man.

~~~
camehere2saydis
My personal "scapegoat" for this is Skype. In my timeline, it was the first
messenger to grow big among non-techies all over the world (not in the least
because of its quite functional voice and video integration.) It basically set
the bar for "instant messaging" UX; developers have been building in terms of
that paradigm ever since.

It's important to note that siloing users within a proprietary namespace is
also part of that UX. As usual, users come to demand what they've been force-
fed long enough: so now you have the media complaining about privacy with a
tone of learned helplessness while absolutely unable to wrap their heads
around federation.

Delta Chat ([https://delta.chat/en/](https://delta.chat/en/)) is an
interesting project that provides a IM-like experience on top of email
infrastructure. However all levels of the stack have become so bloated that it
is nigh impossible to release anything that users won't perceive as shoddy
without VC-scale funding.

~~~
darau1
Re: Delta Chat, I've often wondered if a solution existed like this, because
in my eye the "problem" with email is that it's long-form. Nobody wants to
compose an email just to send a one or two liner (good morning, what's up,
etc). I'll check this out, thanks!

Re: Skype I agree, my parents use Skype, and even though I never use it,
if/when I log in there's _always_ someone I haven't spoken to in the better
part of a decade, still online as if they've been using it every day since.

------
atoav
I don't get the hate for email. Like at all. I'd rather have people send me
_one_ well phrased coherent email than:

\- 3-5 fragmented chat messages where I have to search for meaning

\- one infinitly long speech message where someone else basically forces you
to witness their attempts of focusing their thoughts

\- a @-mention in a group timeline where you have to Ctrl+f a smalltalk-filled
timeline to figure out what they actually want from you

What I like about email (and letters) is that people have to formulate
coherent thoughts if they want something from you. They have to write a
_subject_ and that alone pauses them to think about what they want.

Every form of communication that moves the burden of decyphering meaning to
the receiver should be avoided IMO.

~~~
hombre_fatal
Something I don't like about email is that often has this "always online"
assumption about it. At some times in my 20s I was taken advantage by this.
Get a 9am email on a Saturday to fix something even though I was never on
call, it would encroach like that.

There definitely was a turning point of sorts in my career when things like
Slack became common place. I just cmd-q the app when work is over. The green
light is off next to my name. The default assumption of boundaries seems
slightly healthier. Send a PM to my username without the green light next to
it at 9am on Saturday and you aren't asking me how I didn't see it Monday
morning.

As for longer form work discussion, I prefer Github issues or an internal
forum. I don't like the privacy of email with work discussion. That's for
friends and family. I want all work matters to have an audience in the open.

As for friends and family, there's a place for both email and chat.

~~~
andrewflnr
This is quite interesting. Email is much more strongly async for me than chat.
I only check work email a couple times a day, and ignore it over the weekend.
But people's main complaint about slack is that it _is_ always online.

FWIW, I only use Slack per se for fun social groups.

------
thereyougo
"Fuck apple This website was made in Microsoft Publisher on Windows 95."

I like Bye logo much more than Hey's one

[https://imgur.com/a/GhjBjGY](https://imgur.com/a/GhjBjGY)

~~~
ehsankia
Also at the bottom:

> Questions? Need help? Email us at no-reply@bye.fyi

Honestly it would've been funny even if it wasn't no-reply.

~~~
runawaybottle
It would be funnier if they didn’t eat their own dog food and had a
support@gmail.com, or a 800 number.

------
kostarelo
For those that are wondering about HEY and if it will change the world: I
myself have been using GTD for Gmail as written in this brilliant guide[1].

Basically, I've split my inbox into three inboxes with a Gmail native plugin:
Needs action, Waiting Reply, Scheduled and the default inbox.

Every other day I will skim through my default inbox and categorize every
email in each bucket by applying a star to it. My inbox remains zero most of
the time.

I would highly suggest giving this a read.

1\. [https://dansilvestre.com/gtd-gmail/](https://dansilvestre.com/gtd-gmail/)

------
dpflan
Cheeky. The “Enterprise Feature” is hilarious, but it did make me wonder about
such a thing: having disposable/specific email addresses for different
“personalities” with automated personalized communications. What I’m
imagining: an email address for <insert cause here> that can be used to
actually email, SMS, call your congressperson(s) in your own style based upon
its contents. I’m on mobile and being lazy and not researching what is already
possible and/or legal, but the current waves and momentum for social movements
now are rising and my experience in software development is making me connect
the two.

~~~
cjsawyer
Anything automated is disingenuous and missing the point.

------
andrewzah
I don't really understand the point of this. Yes, hey.com is yet another
reinvention of email. So what? Email has a lot of pain points. I don't see the
need to mock someone for trying to improve the current state of email.

I say this as someone who vastly prefers email to say, slack.

~~~
akkshu92
Ah, is there a reason why you don't prefer Slack?

~~~
andrewzah
In my experience, slack has a poor signal to noise ratio. Important
information gets lost as people post gifs, memes, or banter in the same
channel.

Search has gotten better, but it's still not great.

Some people expect you to respond immediately, defeating the purpose of
asynchronous communication for non important / non blocking matters.

The format (like IRC) encourages multiple fragmented sentences instead of one
long, cohesive message.

Slack isn't that bad by itself; it's mostly how people use it compared to say,
email.

~~~
akkshu92
Ah, I agree. Not sure if people have completely given up on email to use
Slack. It's an excellent collaboration software, though.

------
lioeters
Quirky caricature of the web we inhabit. After my mind settled from the shock
of hilarity, I realized it's a spoof of Hey.

The creator of this nonsensical satire is an animation studio called Thinko.
They do some cool stuff, with tools developed in-house.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l9V7DJ3jZ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l9V7DJ3jZ8)

------
usaphp
I honestly don't really get the "Imbox" idea of Hey email, they say you will
get a separate tab to show all emails coming from unverified addresses, but
isn't that going to be full with spam just like your spam folder in gmail? I
don't want to dig through hundreds of spam messages to find important ones. I
don't know, maybe I don't understand something

~~~
nxc18
It feels like Hey is trying to solve a bunch of problems already solved by
other email services. If anything, the problem with gmail and the like is they
try to be too smart and end up getting it wrong. It feels unreliable when an
important email ends up in the wrong category.

Outlook and the like have the sweep feature which makes managing email quite
easy. The built in unsubscribe tool works very well.

I think maybe the premise is that people don’t know how to use their existing
tools well, but then I don’t have confidence Hey will do a better job. They
tried to get me to watch their CEO explain it for 37 minutes.

The other thing I find questionable is how this would work with third-party
email clients. Anytime the service tries to ‘reinvent’ email, it ends up
breaking standard features, like being able to use your own email client. Look
at gmail and how their tags concept translates to e.g. imap

Edit: I assumed DHH was running Hey because he’s been complaining about it so
much lately.

~~~
riking
Gmail killed bundles (Google Inbox) though.

------
dijksterhuis
An older site they put together -- from 1998 apparently

[https://scamdaddy.net/](https://scamdaddy.net/)

~~~
goldenchrome
This is not from 1998 lol. It’s just made to look that way. The people behind
Thinko are designers.

~~~
dmix
Indeed, it uses modern HTML5 + CSS, nothing about the site itself is old other
than the design and using a <marquee> tag.

------
akkshu92
Haha. Certainly the best thing on the internet today!

------
miguelmota
Announcement tweet:

> Today we are thrilled to announce a new solution to an age old problem.

> Overwhelmed by your e-mail inbox? Say HI to BYE

[https://twitter.com/jcb/status/1274735488650412034?s=21](https://twitter.com/jcb/status/1274735488650412034?s=21)

------
lbj
I'd love to see some revenue numbers from this business :)

------
prepend
I tried to pay 99 cents to see who else paid 99 cents, but sadly got an error
message that their api key was temporarily disabled.

------
imagetic
I'll happily take a gmail alternative with custom domains and great spam
filtering. I've yet to see anyone able to compete with how little I want to
care about this topic.

But it's going to be hard to pull people away from the g-suite bundle when the
money is going to be at the enterprise level.

------
xwowsersx
The page is filled with tweets from people saying they're going to report this
app to Apple...

------
Someone
Often, companies holding a trademark will want to create an account on a
popular service to prevent others from hijacking it.

Here, that wouldn’t work. Could companies holding a trademark force a company
to never create an account with that name?

------
buboard
from their video, Hey.com is more like an asynchronous chat system that
happens to use SMTP as the communication protocol, they just store your
contact list for you. It s got some good ideas, but those had better be
implemented as extensions to smtp servers. Would be neat to be able to control
our contacts list without siloing them behind a private company.

in any case glad to see hey.com continuing to get more attention

------
Andrew_nenakhov
The only thing I hate about the email is the way people quote previous
messages, putting all their answer above original text.

I was so accustomed to the way FIDO conferences used to reply to messages (I
guess it is called Usenet Quoting), that I still use it now, and I wish email
clients would use it y default, down to the original sender initials.

------
bhdzllr
There are a few more funny links at the bottom of the page.

------
awillen
What's the thing in the top right corner, though?

------
holler
Is this affiliated with Hey in some way?

~~~
wrnr
No, it's a brilliant pease of irony by an animation studio making fun of Hey
for being full so of themeless for "reinventing" email. Look at the bottom for
more of their work. I'd love to see them tackle HN.

~~~
holler
ahh gotcha lol, that’s pretty hilarious!

------
kgraves
what did I just read?

~~~
jjoergensen
Looks like an alternative to hey.com :-)

------
tandav
mind == blown

~~~
monokh
And the result is?

------
ykevinator
This is outstanding, I wish you could monetize satire products, hey deserves
mocking and this is just a brilliant implementation

------
runawaybottle
Did this page really need Javascript?

It’s like people never read JavaScript: The no parts

Most of that page could have been done with image maps, shrugs.

Edit: Don’t downvote me just because I like text.

I will say this, Hey.com is getting some awesome free marketing lately.

