What makes it better than slack?
Show HN: Quill – Messaging for teams that focus
51–60 of 79 posts
Re: Show HN: Quill – Messaging for teams that focus
#522 cents...
I think you should call it QwertyQuill. Better suits the colour scheme, tone of the copy, product, market etc.
the logo should be a keyboard button with a quill on it.
(as you know) This is a very competitive market. You should lean into being the good-times-vibe-work-chat-app choice, be genuinely counter-culture, I don't mean put a gay flag on your social media profile. Get those eco-groups (the weird ones) using your app, get alt-right groups (not the ones that have killed people) using your app, fandoms, femdoms etc. Be proud of it, broadcast it, make sure you are the weird chat app people.
Re: Show HN: Quill – Messaging for teams that focus
#53"We grew up with IRC" So your protocols are open and anyone can write a client and view the server source code? You know, like the spirit of IRC and the open internet? Or is it a bloated webkit "app", hosted on private servers?
>So your protocols are open and
You're right but in this case, I don't think your criticism is relevant to why they mentioned "IRC". Maybe I misread their webpage but it sounds like they're criticizing IRC. The full blurb immediately after "We grew up using IRC" is about "message fatigue" and "pain of having to skim thousands of messages":
>We grew up using IRC. We’re a team of engineers and designers that hit message fatigue. We’ve felt the pain of having to skim thousands of messages, and we’re building Quill to solve it.
So it's like they're actually saying, "We grew up using IRC and know all its faults really well and we're trying to fix it."
Re: Show HN: Quill – Messaging for teams that focus
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
(I work at Quill.) We're on all platforms! Can't have a team chat app unless the entire team is able to use it :)
So is it safe to assume you're using electron, then?
Based on their job listing it looks like native apps for each platform: https://quill.chat/jobs/
Re: Show HN: Quill – Messaging for teams that focus
#55Am I missing something here? It talks about focus but has an extremely busy UI with colors and icons in your face all the time. Maybe it's better to actually use it than see the screenshots?
(I work at Quill.) Everything in Quill is a thread -- which is quite a big shift from an IRC-like firehose (even with optional threading.) We've found the shift to have threading by default creates a behavior where you opt into just the conversations you care about, and don't have to skim through hundreds of messages to find what's relevant (or, say, replies to an earlier conversation.) May be hard to get across the…
Sounds like Usenet, or mailing lists.
Re: Show HN: Quill – Messaging for teams that focus
#56Am I missing something here? It talks about focus but has an extremely busy UI with colors and icons in your face all the time. Maybe it's better to actually use it than see the screenshots?
I had the same reaction. It may be misleading so I'd suggest if the primary selling point is better focus, not to have the first screenshot be so jarring (I couldn't even count how many different colors there are, etc.). It actually looks worse than my average slack situation (which is pretty bad ...).
Re: Show HN: Quill – Messaging for teams that focus
#57I consider Threads to be among Slack's worst features, so 'everything is a thread' sounds like a dealbreaker.
Re: Show HN: Quill – Messaging for teams that focus
#58I consider Threads to be among Slack's worst features, so 'everything is a thread' sounds like a dealbreaker.
I think you're confusing the implementation of threads with the feature itself. Emails (and mailing lists), forums, reddit, HN, etc has shown us that threads are great. IMO they make discussions less ephemeral which is a good thing for slower communication methods. So hopefully the use of this tool is less "chatty" and less stream-of-consciousness.
Re: Show HN: Quill – Messaging for teams that focus
#59I consider Threads to be among Slack's worst features, so 'everything is a thread' sounds like a dealbreaker.
I think you're confusing the implementation of threads with the feature itself. Emails (and mailing lists), forums, reddit, HN, etc has shown us that threads are great. IMO they make discussions less ephemeral which is a good thing for slower communication methods. So hopefully the use of this tool is less "chatty" and less stream-of-consciousness.
I haven't used Quill, but judging from the screenshots, the implementation looks nearly identical to Slack's. So when they say "everything is a thread", it seems safe to assume they mean "we like Slack threads so much that we made our entire app behave like them". I'm not here arguing against the concept of nested reply structures in all cases.
Re: Show HN: Quill – Messaging for teams that focus
#60Sorry to be that guy but there are two big players in the chat industry, and this page does nothing to convince me that this product is superior. There are lots of smaller competitors, including Zulip and Twist, that already do what they claim to be their innovation. There's no product, just an "opportunity" to give your email to someone you've never heard of.
There were always big players in the Chat Industry, AOL, MSN, ICQ, Mig33, Yahoo Chat, GChat, Wave (oh the nostalgia), Hangouts, Skype, Lync and now there's Slack, Teams.
But communication is essential to humans so there'll always be space to do more, or doing more by doing less. I really welcome the competition in this space.
At first I loved slack, now I have a love/hate relationship with it. I'm sure I could easily be swayed with a more performant product focused on basics and good integration with other services.