Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects • Hacker News Board

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#401

Post by digitalpacman » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 12:59 AM UTC

I've used IRC a lot. For work and for projects. The experience is always horrible, and the clients always suck. We switched over to using slack for projects and for work and everything got instantly better. It takes seconds to setup and destroy places to chat that are private. It also takes seconds to search your entire history, on any device, and find what you talked about 3 weeks ago. Sharing code that doesn't get removed is amazing. It's a pain in the ass when the IRC client removes code and tells you nothing. I've sent entire messages to people which "get blocked" because the message is too long or contains code, and it never gives feedback.

I agree account creation in slack sucks though, and the author is correct that slack is not built for FOSS projects.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#402

Post by kbenson » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 1:10 AM UTC

thegeekpirate wrote: post #394

_xhok wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they're all IRC users inadvertently. That doesn't add to IRC's popularity. If Twitch disabled IRC and switched its chatrooms to some ghetto socket.io app, most of its users wouldn't know. > Of course they wouldn't, you're already speaking with them. Slack is fine for trusted networks of peers (businesses), but not much else. I won't start chatting with any my friends using it, nor would I bother to sign up…

Again, your definition of popularity is different than mine, but either way my post still refutes his point about the declining userbase. > No, what I meant was, people no longer think of IRC as the tool to use to talk about projects and communities. They used to. That was its primary use case. That use case is shrinking, so IRC is becoming less popular. There's plenty of other avenues to use these days, so the numbe…

> Obviously this is going to be anecdotal, but with the ~20 people I know who aren't technologically savvy, they'd only be able to tell you if they're using an Apple phone or not. My mother, for instance, has no clue that she's using a Windows phone.

I think this has quite a bit to do with what class of phone they buy. Android is marketed very heavily in certain contexts when buying a phone, just as iPhone is. Walk into Best Buy and ask for help on buying a smartphone that isn't basic and Android or iPhone (or Windows phone even) will be part of the pitch. Similar to how if you buy a sports car you are probably going to know something about the engine, if not when going into it, you probably will by the time the salesman is done. If you are buying a commuter car, they may or may not distinguish the engine, and you may or may not care enough to remember.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#403

Post by kbenson » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 1:13 AM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #330

njharman wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that is why Apple is so popular. They are a marketing monster! They sell a "lifestyle" and they do it extremely well. They tell you to "Think Different" (as long as it means buying an apple product). They tell you one button is easy and the best. They tell people what to think and (some) people think that.

Yet they spend less on marketing then most major tech companies. One could just argue they spend their marketing budget well, but you have to wonder.

Less as a percentage of gross income, or less in total dollars?

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#404

Post by Estragon » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 1:13 AM UTC

stephenitis wrote: post #309

mbillie1 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If IRC were good enough to handle the needs of small software company communication, people would use IRC. Sitting here pretending everyone just doesn't know about a 20+ year old technology is comical. I'd just like to point out that this argument ("if were so great, everyone would already use/do ") is just a slightly different form of the ancient appeal to popularity argument and is entirely fallacious.

It is a open market of tools out there... if IRC fulfilled the need and developed features that people really wanted they would be there. Why does gchat, snapchat, whatsapp, fb messenger exist if AIM had been fulfilling the need of the market?

> Why does gchat, snapchat, whatsapp, fb messenger exist if AIM had been fulfilling the need of the market?

gchat & fb messenger are backed by huge companies trying to sew up the communications of a large community for the purposes of selling marketing services. The need they were created to fill is a corporate need, not a popular one.

Whatsapp was primarily popular because it made it cheap to text on your phone. I don't know the history of snapchat, never used it.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#405

Post by vjeux » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 1:14 AM UTC

emp_ wrote: post #398

vjeux wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For context, we've always promoted IRC for real time communication on React. I encouraged people to setup other mediums for communication and many people attempted but only one took off: Reactiflux on Slack. The official way is still IRC on the website but most people are using Reactiflux which is pretty incredible. Now, we got the bad news a month ago that we've been kicked off of Slack :( So, I started looking at a…

It also seems the Discord web client is built on React, which is oddly satisfying. Having trouble finding more info on their stack.

"@discordapp: @DenisIzmaylov Our backend is a mix of Python+Elixir/Erlang+C++ depending on which piece of the infrastructure.

@discordapp: @DenisIzmaylov do you mean our encryption? If so, it varies by which version of DIscord you use. TLS, DTLS, and xsalsa20.

@discordapp: @DenisIzmaylov TokuMX and Redis, moving some things to Cassandra"

https://twitter.com/denisizmaylov/status/656181143205773313

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#406

Post by pyre » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 1:14 AM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #374

Killswitch wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But decentralized is the best thing ever! I hate that argument. If decentralized was so great, then it'd be more popular, but it's not. More and more centralized stuff is exploding in popularity.

Centralized is generally easier to implement a given feature in, so it's easier to support more features.

It's also harder to base a business atop decentralized network, and when building a new network there is less of a business case in spending the extra time, stress and expertise to make it decentralized (vs. centralized).

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#407

Post by dang » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 1:16 AM UTC

KirinDave wrote: post #238

rando289 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If IRC were good enough to handle the needs of small software company communication, people would use IRC. Given A and B, if A were good enough, people would use A... What if B is better? What if both are good enough? You go on as if your first sentence stands up on it's own. It makes no sense at all.

It's an observation in the context of the article in question, not a statement in an argument, you buffoon. The article acts as if we just don't know the "benefits" of IRC and then proceeds to list a bunch of very questionable benefits. I know all about IRC. I think it's a tire fire that won't go out. Sort of like perl, UNIX signal handlers, and systrace.

> you buffoon

Personal attacks are not allowed on HN, regardless of whether someone has misunderstood you. Please don't do this again.

Some of your other comments have crossed into incivility as well. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#408

Post by vonklaus » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 1:18 AM UTC

BoxFour wrote: post #61

vonklaus wrote: post #33

It is reasonable to raise the point that building FOSS software while using a closed piece of software as a core tool bears consideration. However, I am 25 and largely missed the boat on irc. I decided to start using it ~1 year ago. It is hard to use, but we will look at that in a minute. Often, we assume people have as clear an idea of what we are talking about as we do. That is often not the case. Let's explore IRC…

Ehh, as someone your age (a couple years younger even), I have a completely different take on IRC. It's incredibly intuitive because it's so similar to all the other chat clients we grew up with (presumably because they're based on IRC). Sure, figuring out bouncers and build bots is a little tricky at first, but so what? That's the fun part. It's kinda fun digging into the IRC protocol and figuring out how it works.…

I meant that software can be a philosophy or a project, and where you land on this concept will inform your decision making process. I agree with your above comment and don't find it contradictory to mine above.

Some great tools for software development:

* Microsoft * OS X * Linux * Free BSD

To some degree that represents a spectrum and I don't fault the author for having strong beliefs about how software should be built, and agree with them for the most part. I think he could have made a stronger point generally from a philosophical and technical angle, i.e the regular arguments for open source tools, and highlight Slack as an example.

IRC is quite similar to Slack, but for the reasons the author suggests, it is different.

tl;dr Stallman wouldn't use Slack.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#409

Post by paulddraper » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 1:18 AM UTC

vacri wrote: post #336

paulddraper wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And that's what I meant by "among other things".

Originally, we were using Campfire.

As needs grew beyond just putting out fires, we looked at Hipchat, Flowdock, and Slack. We probably would have gone with Hipchat (because of the price), if they had SSO, or better JIRA integration. Slack had both.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#410

Post by pyre » Mon, Nov 02, 2015, 1:19 AM UTC

nodamage wrote: post #351

enraged_camel wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sadly, a lot of people (generally die-hard nerd types) genuinely believe that marketing was the sole reason for the iPhone's meteoric rise in 2007. They don't place any importance on user experience and therefore can't tell the difference between the iPhone and the early-gen smartphone predecessors (Palm/Nokia/etc). These are the same people that are now confused as to why Slack has risen in popularity despite the ex…

To be fair, (as a Slack user) I'm not sure off-hand what Slack has that couldn't have been done on top of IRC. Almost everything could have been done with an IRC Server + Backend Services + Fancy Client model.