341–350 of 499 posts
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So what you are saying is that the client software is not intuitive. You do know that all that needs to occur is to make a nice client?
Sure. "all that needs to occur" is pretty useless if it hasn't occurred.
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> In many cases, things are popular because they are better/easier for a given audience. Which is the horse and which is the cart? Slack is easy because it got resources to be easy. Those same resource could have invested time to make IRC just as easy. There is no inherent reason why IRC cannot be just as simple. The reason slack is popular is because it got pushed hard and lots of money went into making it easy and…
This is like saying Apple products are popular because Apple has a great marketing team, as opposed to because said products are genuinely easier to use (they "just work") than their alternatives.
The entire sports drink industry.
The supplement industry.
Slack's interface is not very impressive, very messy in my opinion, but that's me. There are businesses out there offer IRC as a service, so that's another option.
Final point: I really don't care about FOSS vs OSS vs Proprietary. As long as the company truly respects my data privacy and security, and is easy to use, I can give zero damn about either of three. It's 2015, we need to stop arguing and actually make things better. Business needs to focus on improving product experience and security. But you know what, some people do, that's fine, none of my business anyway.
This seems to be similar to the argument of "don't use Github or Bitbucket, use your own hosted Gitlab". Some of the complaints are a bit petty (really, an extra browser tab per project is a burden?) IRC is better for occasional participants that wish to remain anonymous and/or use less screen real estate, but Slack is generally a better experience for regulars and way less hassle than hosting your own server/bots. Y…
>really, an extra browser tab per project is a burden? Spoken like someone who has never been a serious IRC user.
Completely agree! I see free software projects depend on proprietary tools all the time and it is very frustrating. I often see projects using JIRA or asking companies like JetBrains for gratis licenses to proprietary development tools, and now I'm seeing Slack more frequently. I will not participate in your free software project if you depend on SaaSS or proprietary software to get work done. The company I work for…
SaaSS? Seriously? The FSF's use of that is about as childish as Microsoft with a dollar sign. Is getting your taxes done by another party Accounting as a Calculator Substitute? Is taking your car to a shop Mechanic as a Toolbox Substitute? Slack has a lot of useful parts that go beyond just chat. Having a simple way of sharing snippets, saving history, using shared file repositories, all of which are easier if you do…
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3r3m6q/please_...
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If you gave "IRC" a quarter of a billion dollars, we'd have the world's most complex ncurses UI, and a security ACL system whose complexity would rival X509. And normal people would still use Slack, because Slack was able to make simple design decisions that benefit the overwhelming majority of users but piss off Unix nerds like us.
don't be naive, IRC was the simplest solution to a problem 25~ years ago, now systems have changed and things must be thrown away. that's just the nature of the beast, x.509 is also very old- but old things should be fixed or replaced with better alternatives, slack just fixes a usability problem.. but trades all privacy and freedom for that. Personally it's not enough, but google has a massive market share because n…
2. Using cloud services in exchange for contributing to aggregate data seems like a pretty clear understanding of personal value.
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IRC is used by many projects small and big and I've used it in a few companies as well, it's not like it's an absurd concept. I don't know if Slack is better or worse (I've never used it, I thought the title was talking about Slackware linux which seemed odd) but you draw a much bleaker portrait of IRC than what I experience day to day using it extensively. Now if you want to talk about mailing lists I might side wit…
What people here aren't getting is that IRC and a listserv aren't still used because they have the most features or are the most brilliantly designed pieces of software for the job, it's the best because it's a standard. I have IRSSI always running in a remote screen session. I read many mailing lists. It's not just my personal preference, it's part of my workflow. When I hit a problem, my immediate reaction after co…
I completely disagree with you. My entire team is ~30 or older, and we all used IRC "back in the day". Slack is simply better for communicating with your team because of all the features mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
To suggest ignorance is the only reason Slack and HipChat have taken off is offensive to the people using it because they like it better.
I still use IRC for open source projects I use or contribute to. For the record, I agree with the article insofar as that OSS projects should probably continue to use IRC rather than Slack despite the persistence and team based features. Purely because it's unfair to expect all of your users and contributors to use yet another system for communication that isn't relatively open.
If you don't want to use Slack for open source projects because it's closed-source, fine. That's a reasonable argument. If you don't want to use Slack for open source projects because Slack is in fact pretty bad at those workloads, fine. I agree! I think Slack does a pretty bad job at any group application where most of the people communicating don't already know each other. Where you go off the rails is in suggestin…
The free version of Slack only has a 10k message limit, which runs out very fast with a user count in the 3-figures range. So if you want history, you need to shell out $8/user/mo, which is ridiculously expensive for chat. And not something a FOSS project should be spending it's limited funds on.
Slack has been successful because it's onboarding process is buttery-smooth. They've put a lot of work into making everything easy, from signing up to installing integrations. Unfortunately those integrations also waste a ton of space in the chat window. I use Slack at a couple of companies, and each of them got excited, installed a couple of integrations... and then abandoned the channels with integrations, because they waste so much screen space and you can't follow the flow of a conversation. It's a pity Hipchat got caught napping - they did displaying integrations well.
Another FOSS-specific problem with Slack is that they don't have a linux client, so you have to use the web app, which is terrible when you have to track more than one Slack team - you have to manually switch teams to check for updates, which takes a non-trivial amount of time (and the 'switch' control is right next to the 'sign out' control, which I've accidentally hit a couple of times)
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Absolutely. My company uses it (among other things) for handling production issues. We'd rather not manage that ourselves. It's just one more thing we can screw up. This is different than the FOSS subject of the article, but it true that convenience is compelling.
If it's just infra management you want, then use Hipchat. It does the same things Slack does, at $2/user/mo instead of $8. Slack is ridiculously expensive.
I think we migrated to Slack for connectivity reasons, fonts and general user interface, and the bigger list of integrations. Are these worth $6 per user per month? If you've got the money then maybe. But it's by no means a given.