13 comments

  • meerita27 minutes ago
    Grammarly was a great idea in the pre-AI era. Now I bet they&#x27;re losing a lot with so many AI solutions that are better integrated across every ecosystem.<p>Some people will argue that Grammarly still has a better suggestion system, but models have become increasingly good at writing. I think this product and its revenue model will become obsolete pretty soon.
    • LiamPowell11 minutes ago
      I suspect they&#x27;re also losing a lot of university subscriptions after they started advertising how they offer a service to make LLM-written text look human-written, if I recall correctly they even explicitly advertised that you could use it to cheat. I don&#x27;t know what they were thinking with that marketing campaign given that universities are probably one of their biggest market segments.
  • pjmlp1 hour ago
    For those in Europe, this kind of behaviour usually is taken care by consumer protection agencies, fill in a complaint &#x2F;report them, in you jurisdiction.
    • edwcross1 hour ago
      Unless you&#x27;re in country A and ordered from country B (both in Europe), in which case the consumer protection agency from country A may just tell you &quot;well they&#x27;re not in our country so we can&#x27;t do much, try contacting the European consumer agency, which after spending 30 minutes finding their form, and checking that you do qualify (which you won&#x27;t, for some stupid reason like &quot;did you try calling them nicely and sending a letter and waiting for 30 days?&quot;), they will just say &quot;ok cool we sent them an e-mail, we&#x27;ll tell you how all of this will work out&quot;.<p>Or maybe I&#x27;m just in a bad European country who pulls this kind of demotivating stints every time I have this kind of problem.
      • pjmlp45 minutes ago
        Sure, I don&#x27;t say it is easy, it is also a matter of perseverance, in most cases.
        • snottynose23 minutes ago
          Sometimes you really hit a dead end. Some orgs just don&#x27;t respond, or say they don&#x27;t have the resources to process your complaint, or lie. The codified consumer protection laws are nice, in principle. Multinationals know they can get away with pretty much anything.
    • alexaholic1 hour ago
      Consumer protection applies to individual consumers, not businesses. OP looks like a business.
      • alibarber38 minutes ago
        Yes - unfortunately this looks to be completely irrelevant to consumer protection.<p>&quot;A contractor of my employer asked me to contact another member of my organisation to persuade them to do something commercially advantageous for them&quot; - at no point is anyone here a consumer.<p>Business emails are subject to fairly different rules by the looks of it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tietosuoja.fi&#x2F;en&#x2F;faq-direct-marketing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tietosuoja.fi&#x2F;en&#x2F;faq-direct-marketing</a> (&quot;Can a person working in a company be sent direct electronic marketing&quot;) - it appears there&#x27;s a fair bit of an exception that doesn&#x27;t require consent.
        • mjmas19 minutes ago
          Here in Australia unless that particular user that received the emails gave consent to receive marketing emails (and the emails have identification + unsubscribe) it would be violating our Spam act.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.acma.gov.au&#x2F;publications&#x2F;2024-07&#x2F;guide&#x2F;consumer-consent-expectations-businesses-conducting-telemarketing-and-e-marketing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.acma.gov.au&#x2F;publications&#x2F;2024-07&#x2F;guide&#x2F;consumer-...</a>
    • dataengineer5642 minutes ago
      Good luck actually getting them to do something. Also &quot;Europe&quot; is an entire continent with many different countries and laws, you might want to be more specific.
  • Aeolun2 hours ago
    Displaying a full page warning in an app where grammarly is just an integration is... not a good look.
    • rawling1 hour ago
      Doesn&#x27;t appear to be what&#x27;s happening though.<p>&gt; We let them know we weren&#x27;t going to renew and they sent these unsolicited emails and popups in their app to all of the users who had licenses<p>Not &quot;our app&quot;.
  • ShinyLeftPad1 hour ago
    You know it&#x27;s bad when you make your user switch to <i>Microsoft</i> faster.
  • ras1k4 hours ago
    I never liked grammarly. It feels like spam.
    • Walf1 hour ago
      It&#x27;s a keylogger.
  • lapinovski1 hour ago
    They must be desperate
  • thih92 hours ago
    This is extreme short sightedness.<p>We have no proof but it feels like someone asked Claude how to reduce churn and picked an option.<p>I guess consumers are going to have to “push back” often in the near future.
  • epihelix51 minutes ago
    Just wait until the emails threaten to reveal all the compromising messages that users unwittingly sent to Grammarly&#x27;s servers ...
  • sublinear2 hours ago
    I&#x27;m more surprised that anyone was still using grammarly in the first place.
    • exe342 minutes ago
      I have a rule, if I hear an advert that I didn&#x27;t search for on any video site, I say &quot;fuck off &lt;company name&gt;&quot; to ensure I form a negative association with the brand. I&#x27;ve definitely heard &quot;grammarly&quot; far too many times to ever spend a penny on them.
  • krautburglar1 hour ago
    Their whole operation seems like some sort of five-eyes information proboscis. If AI is putting them out of business, good.
    • idle_zealot36 minutes ago
      They <i>are</i> an AI business, just a more focused one. The creepy information gathering, the way it blandifies output and encourages reliance over building communication and language skills, it&#x27;s all the same problems frontier companies have writ small. Their lunch is being eaten by bigger fish and they&#x27;re shamelessly trying to remain relevant. This will not result in any less spying or bad behavior.
  • dmitrygr1 hour ago
    That is ... bold.
    • snottynose17 minutes ago
      I&#x27;m surprised people get worked up about this. I&#x27;ve felt like folks have learned to tolerate much worse and manipulative behavior from companies in the last two decades of personal computing... Not that I like it. I believed that society kind of accepted dystopia. Is it just that people are more sensitive because this happened in a corporate setting?
  • alexkkoo932 hours ago
    ngl respect the hustle ig. Maybe there&#x27;s some dude in the company that uses grammarly everyday that leadership could otherwise care less about..<p>But why are we giving sys admins grammarly lmao
    • technion2 hours ago
      It&#x27;s in the sysadmin sub because we are routinely the people told buy and manage Grammarly deployments, and we&#x27;re the people generally cancelling those services now given everyone is being pushed to use their flavor of AI instead. And those emails from users upset that we&#x27;re doing what management told us to do (following this Grammarly advice)? They go from end users to sysadmins.
  • londons_explore2 hours ago
    Doesn&#x27;t look that unhinged to me.<p>An in-app notification saying &#x27;your access ends on X date and here is who you should contact if that isn&#x27;t what you want&#x27; is exactly what I&#x27;d expect.
    • progval2 hours ago
      They also send an email with a template to send to the IT department
      • alexkkoo932 hours ago
        Lmao sucks that it had to be the IT dept