71–80 of 226 posts
I used Slack for a few months this year. A customer didn't use email, preferring Slack. Slack is an awesome platform, but I missed the asynchrony of email. When I code I like to have 30 to 40 minute uninterrupted work periods and I found an always on Slack took me out of the flow. Using Slack with specified "turn it off" quiet times would solve that issue however.
Every program attempts to expand until it has an app store. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
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Genuine question -- how how is it been a revelation? It seems to be very similar to HipChat, which was just an iteration on previous chat systems.
For me, by far the biggest difference is the notifications. In HipChat, notifications are both buggy and almost completely unconfigurable[0]. If I sent a message to a colleague while they were offline, they would never get notified of it[1]. Slack notifications always work how I expect and are configurable to the degree I desire. Slack also has a nicer UI and better integrations for us, and generally just always work…
I first used HipChat more than 2 years ago, and the notifications worked perfectly and were as configurable as I wanted them to be. Offline notifications worked well.
We tried Slack when it came out and couldn't figure out why anyone would use it over HipChat, since it had no native client at the time.
[0]: https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/launch-platform-1147...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me, by far the biggest difference is the notifications. In HipChat, notifications are both buggy and almost completely unconfigurable[0]. If I sent a message to a colleague while they were offline, they would never get notified of it[1]. Slack notifications always work how I expect and are configurable to the degree I desire. Slack also has a nicer UI and better integrations for us, and generally just always work…
Everything you said about notifications in HipChat is false. I first used HipChat more than 2 years ago, and the notifications worked perfectly and were as configurable as I wanted them to be. Offline notifications worked well. We tried Slack when it came out and couldn't figure out why anyone would use it over HipChat, since it had no native client at the time.
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"Their goal, from what I've read, is to be a giant log for everything in your company..." Why would you ever want to entrust a log of everything in your company to a third party service? Honestly curious.
Because the expected loss from a malicious actor with access to those logs cloning your product (without any access to the actual people who thought up your product!) is often more than balanced by the expected benefit from getting everyone on a knowledge base with a brilliant UX. Sure, you wouldn't have wanted to host the Apollo Program's lab notes on Soviet servers, but your cat selfie startup isn't quite as high-s…
I find this to be a pretty interesting comparison. To the best of my knowledge, the entire stakes of the space race were "we might lose face".
2 points: 1. Remember when Dropbox was dumb, because rsync? (Bunch of naysayers here citing fee alternatives). From what I'm seeing, bots and integrations are great and here to stay. Businesses will gladly pay money in exchange for time and complexity not spent rolling your own. 2. This seems like a boon for us happy slack users!
Will somebody please explain the use cases for slack bots to me? If they are basically glorified command line scripts, the I get it. But are there genuine and important use cases that require/can benefit from a richer dialogue?
Can someone who uses slack comment on the value over skype for example? It seems like text chat is hard to get wrong, and with so many options, I wonder why (real) people choose slack specifically.
Slack builds upon a lot of core concepts that IRC had but differs in a few ways. 1) Simplicity, you can get up and running in a few minutes and have your whole team connected. 2) Managed hosting, maintenance and client updates 3) Excellent UX, features are intuitive and new features are introduced with guidance 4) Cross platform support and fast mobile clients 5) Integrations, being able to push and pull data across you apps from the place your entire team can communicate is incredibly powerful. The discoverability and ease of deployment (some can be deployed in a few minutes).
I think they have a great position in the SMB market. Surprisingly some enterprise organizations still use IRC internally due to the control they have over server/data etc. There is probably an opportunity for Slack to develop an on-premise solution for enterprise.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me, by far the biggest difference is the notifications. In HipChat, notifications are both buggy and almost completely unconfigurable[0]. If I sent a message to a colleague while they were offline, they would never get notified of it[1]. Slack notifications always work how I expect and are configurable to the degree I desire. Slack also has a nicer UI and better integrations for us, and generally just always work…
Everything you said about notifications in HipChat is false. I first used HipChat more than 2 years ago, and the notifications worked perfectly and were as configurable as I wanted them to be. Offline notifications worked well. We tried Slack when it came out and couldn't figure out why anyone would use it over HipChat, since it had no native client at the time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Genuine question -- how how is it been a revelation? It seems to be very similar to HipChat, which was just an iteration on previous chat systems.
For me, by far the biggest difference is the notifications. In HipChat, notifications are both buggy and almost completely unconfigurable[0]. If I sent a message to a colleague while they were offline, they would never get notified of it[1]. Slack notifications always work how I expect and are configurable to the degree I desire. Slack also has a nicer UI and better integrations for us, and generally just always work…
A pattern I have seen in Slack that never happened in Hipchat is "Let's put notifications into the channel" > "ugh, this channel is impossible to talk in because of the notifications! let's create a new channel with no notifications". Kind've kills the point of notifications.
Aside: does 'notifications' need to become 'n10ns'?