casq's comments

I just wanted to jump in as Hack Club cofounder and say Hack Club acknowledges this post-- it’s written by a young person we are familiar with: they were banned from Hack Club for harassing transgender kids, and they then recently tried to extort Hack Club for money, threatening to create problems and drama like this after we refused.

This post should not be taken seriously because the implication is wrong: Hack Club is compliant with data protection rules and is very careful with student data; Unlike almost every where else teenagers hang out on the internet, Hack Club does NOT monetize or sell student data or allow advertising to young people.

During one of our many summer programs, we had a situation where some students’ info was accessible publicly by mistake, and as soon as it was reported, we fixed it. No one accessed it and we apologized. You GOT us, ok? It happens and the young programmer responsible feels really badly about the fact that it keeps getting brought up in new and twisted ways.

We work around the clock with a fully trained staff to make sure that there won’t be any problems and to address them immediately if they come up. As I’ve stated in the past, this original post is from a disgruntled student was banned for really ugly behavior and yet they continue and it's sad to see it getting amplified here.

Thank you Denise! Christina (Hack Club cofounder)

Hi, update here (this is Christina, Hack Club cofounder): looks like Hack Club is staying on Slack.

Thanks to all of you for the appreciation and support for Hack Club, and for listening to what we were going through. The support has been amazing. Hack Club has so many cool teenagers coding awesome projects, making friends and solving problems together, and it's great to see so many people championing them. We are glad to stay on Slack and want to do so much more with them together going forward.

Thanks to Denise and the Slack leadership team for reaching out here on hn, and in a call directly with me and Zach today. And thank you for restoring Hack Club's terms with improvements. We really appreciate it, and we're glad to be able to stay on Slack.

I just want to add that it was great to get to know Mattermost and the team- and the hack club engineers were actually pretty excited to move there. It's an amazing product and for it to be open source is awesome.

Hi, I’m Christina, cofounder of Hack Club. We just announced this news to our community, and this post is from one of the teenagers in Hack Club. It’s an accurate description of what’s happened, and we’re grateful to them for posting. Slack changed the terms of a special deal we were given last year to charge us for staff and volunteers (not for every teenager coding), and we built programs around that special rate. Then this spring they changed the terms to every single user without telling us or sending a new contract, and then ignored our outreach and delayed us and told us to ignore the bill and not to pay as late as Aug 29

Then, suddenly, they called us 2 days ago and said they are going to de-activate the Hack Club Slack, including all message history from 11 years, unless we pay them $50,000 USD this week and $200,000 USD/year moving forward (plus additional annual fees for new accounts, including inactive ones)

For anyone reading this, we would really appreciate any way to contact people at Salesforce to discuss time to migrate because deactivating us in 5 days destroys all the work of thousands of teen coders at Hack Club and alum unnecessarily. We are not asking for anything for free. This was an underhanded process by the sales team to raise our rate exorbitantly from a qualified educational 501(c)(3) charity serving young developers or destroy all their projects, DMs and work forever. If Salesforce’s goals have changed- ok. Give us a reasonable amount of time to migrate- and don’t club us over the head like this. We have had an 11 year great relationship with Slack- and have introduced the company to many many future engineers and founders. My email if you can help us: [email protected]

Hi, I'm Christina, (Hack Club cofounder). In addition to all of Hack Club's hackathons, technical challenges and afterschool clubs, we also run a fiscal sponsorship and that $11.4m includes the funds of all the groups that we sponsor.

Our actual budget in 2023 was more like $5m, and we usually raise between $3m-$7m a year in donations.