I doubt you're the only one, but that's a very narrow-minded view of the world. Do you also feel that eyeglasses, hearing aids, and other personal assistance devices are 'useless' just because you personally don't need them?
Someone who is capable of using autocode - who has the technical capability to write code - may not need something like Zapier.
On the other hand, it took me 5 minutes with Zapier to set up a fully automated system that takes a line from a spreadsheet and populates a calendar, sends a calendar invite, and sends some follow up emails for a charity thing I run. It saves me tons of time, and I never have to think about it, nor did I have to write a single line of code against an API that will change shortly for I forget how all of my code works.
I think if you said they're useless for you nobody would've batted an eye, but I think saying they're useless in general is just wrong considering how many users they have.
What does it matter how many people think these platforms are useless? Even if 7 billion think they're useless, that leaves them with quite enough of a market segment.
A quick search shows that Zapier has over 3M users and IFTTT has 18M users, so they got that going for them.
IFTTT recently introduced a pro pack which quite heavily impacts a large portion of its userbase, which is why I personally think that their current number of users is pretty useless as a metric.
They also charge services for supporting them and want the services to make a special API for them (as opposed to plugging into existing ones), which is why I find them relatively scummy.
That being said, Zapier is just expensive. From my memory it's like $20/month if you want more than 3 automations running, and can easily rise to $50/month. I like it as a service, but that price is fairly unreachable for me.
I've only just found it but try out Integromat. So far it feels like the middle ground between IFTTT and Zapier in terms of features and price.
It also handles processing earlier data which won me over. Want GitHub tasks to get into your Todoist workflow? Easy enough to do on all 3 for future issues.
Integromat lets you process issues that already exist.
They are personally useless for me. On many occasions I wantied a no-code no-hassle "point and click" automation and I have tried them a few dozen times over last 5 years and never had any success even once - they had always lacked something and were unable to do things I wanted. And I wanted nothing extraordinary, typically something like a proper bidirectional synchronization between two services (say, Alexa todos and iOS reminders)
They seem to work for many people though, so they aren't useless in the general sense.
My brother uses Zapier to automate a lot oft the processes in bis company. Especially the backoffice processes. He is is not a tech savy Person. If you ask him what an API is, he has no idea.
It obviously only works if you use SaaS pltaforms for everything but, sadly, thats the default in a lot of companies anyway.
Interesting. I personally would never use those services for production/work. And even for personal it’s iffy at best. I wasn’t aware they had so many users.
I don’t understand your consistent personal attack here. Do I really need to explain why I would never use those services for production? They’re not reliable and you don’t have control over them. Building an entire business on top of these services come with significant risks.
It's not personal, nor is it an attack. As far as consistent - my apologies, I didn't realize this comment was made by the same person that I had replied to earlier.
Read up on the whole no-code thing. Zapier (along with the API-based services it plugs into) has essentially enabled an entire philosophy around startups that does not require the use of a code editor.
I think that we're going to see a rejection of no-code in a few years. Whatever the new word for visual programming is, it comes in cycles and the visual programming tools adopt more scripting integration and then we come back full circle.
This may be a failing of those who develop visual programming interfaces, honestly. These tools are often built for non-technical users and to build in more scripting integration harms the original value proposition … which then leads to the next generation of visual programming tools.
You can place the origin at any offset in a circle and rotate 360 degrees to get back to it. One paradigm adopts features from the other to better express complexity or lack thereof, and the cycle transitions when someone decides "there's a simpler way to do this, I shouldn't need to hold all this in my head."
And at the end of the day these tools are competing with Excel, which supports both visual and textual programming for the same reasons.
Basically, the idea is that you can build a full-on app without having to dip into code, allowing you to develop an idea and prove it works before committing to it with more in-depth development.
I personally find IFTTT useful for a few basic home automation things. I probably could write some code to do it myself, but it's much faster so for things that aren't super important to me, I might not do them at all if I didn't have IFTTT. Now that they allow multiple triggers and filter code, it does most of what I want without having to run anything myself.
I have actually tried Integromat and have found it interesting, though I haven’t taken a deep enough dive to decide if it’s for me. (It’s cheaper than Zapier, which is a big plus.)
I honestly find the pipes-based interface kind of a turnoff, admittedly, but functionally it’s not bad.
Never used Zapier, but IFTTT is too simple to really be useful as you can't do much with it. I had a few actions, but not after they announced it's not really free anymore.
Totally agree. I imagine work politics will take over and people will be more or less forced to come back into office. To be fair, I think it’s a big part of work culture that will be very hard to formulate in virtual settings.
There’s no discussion to be had when you’re FOR equality and the other side is arguing against it. There’s equality and fairness. The rest is garbage. There’s no need to meet in between and compromise. If you compromise with shtty ideas you are gonna get sht on your shirt.
>There’s no discussion to be had when you’re FOR equality and the other side is arguing against it.
Kind of like how there's a subset of a certain political party that believes fetuses have the same right to life as infants.
Or how some people believe someone who comes from a statistically high crime demographic, has $120 in their checking account and face tattoos has the same right to own a gun as someone from a low crime demographic who can take a weekend class, pay $200 and ace an interview with the police chief?
My point is that it's not as simple as you are stating it is. Whichever side of an issue you are on the other side believes that they are right and you are wrong and that you are the oppressors. They have good logical reasons to reach this conclusion and if you peel back the logic you get to fundamentally incompatble differences of opinion.
What is a "statistically high crime demographic"? Men? It's men, right? Statistically speaking the vast majority of violent crime is committed by men [0].
Interesting. According the FBI data in my previous reply, white men are far more likely to be driving drunk, statistically speaking. I guess we should teach cops to pull them over far more often than everyone else, right? That would be a similarly logical conclusion based on the statistics.
I think it's hilarious that you're downvoted so heavily for this when it's the exact same logic that's used against young black men.
If you look at these statics and think to yourself, "the fact that 87% of murders, 99% of forced rapes, and 77% of assaults are committed by men is terribly misleading because as a category it doesn't make sense to lump all men together when they're so different" then why the hell does "black men" make any more sense?
Sure, “kind of like” how the Nazi Party usurped Germany a hundred years ago. Why don’t you have a civil discourse with people who believe in slavery? Give me a break.
People will disagree about the definition of equality.
Good advice is to spend a reasonable amount of time on defining precisely what is meant by equality. You will likely find you are arguing past each other because your life experience has given you a different definition than someone else.
This is more true over internet communication, because most human-human communication is non-verbal, and text compresses this communication to oblivion.
I agree. Early on, people were blaming Trump because the CDC was caught with their pants down on their one job--I argued that Trump (for all his incompetence) can't be blamed for this--CDC should have had plans for this after SARS and MURS (well before his presidency). But that defense no longer applies after 7 months. Trump has earned his criticism, as he is apparently determined to do (however, there are also many in the media who are determined to beclown themselves by using misleading metrics to exaggerate the impact of his incompetence, which of course doesn't constitute valid criticism).
Not that it did much before that, since it lacked funding. Just like the IRS, CFTC, and FinCEN. And it lacked funding mostly because regulatory capture / special interest groups successfully lobbied to keep them "simple", to keep costs down. Of course keeping them simple sounds great but they are all very much in need of reforms, serious investment to modernize and to catch up with the market, which became very complex.
This so much. He did it out in the open and admitted repeatedly that everything is outsourced. I mean anyone with a million or two can put together a hydrogen fuel cell truck that “runs”. No science/engineering background or even passing interest in learning the tech he sells.
You realize this is exactly how short sellers in the market are supposed to operate, right? It will give everyone confidence the market is operating correctly.
Disagree. This is yet another sign that there’s enough shenanigans happening in the market. If something this blatant can happen in the wide open imagine what other companies are hiding in the dark.
Not saying they shouldn't do it, but in a company with finite resources dedicated to the needs of 100,000,000 users, <1% of whom would ever look at such a thing, not getting around to that feature would make a non-zero amount of sense.
Reminder, this company you are saying can't possibly spend a few hundred thousand dollars to add a feature their underlying OS most likely already supports and is a definite net good for security researchers and industry watchdogs at a minimum is worth Two Trillion Dollars and has absurdly high profit margins.
