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Slack Platform Launch

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Re: Slack Platform Launch

#201

Post by rv77ax »

wstrange wrote: post #174
cromwellian wrote: post #104

Facebook F8 all over again in the sense of startups throwing the success or failure of their company onto a proprietary centralized system that can block or cut them off for any reason. Or rather, another incarnation of IRC chat bots, email listservs, and stuff that's been around forever as commodity autoresponders, only now it's worth millions in investments to write the equivalent of a weekend hack IRC bot because…

I see Google using Slack for things like the Dart and Kubernetes projects. I understand the ease of use aspect (Slack is quite nice) - but one thing that concerns me is that the discussion that happens is no longer (easily) searchable. Mailing list archives are handy when you are looking for a solution to a problem. With Slack, a lot of that knowledge disappears.

Do you even use Slack? I don't work for Slack but your comment is so misleading.

> but one thing that concerns me is that the discussion that happens is no longer (easily) searchable.

No it is not. Look at the top right and type your words. If you use free plan, only 10k message will be archived, other than that it will be deleted.[1]

> Mailing list archives are handy when you are looking for a solution to a problem. With Slack, a lot of that knowledge disappears.

Its a tool for direct communication for group, not for documentation. I think you miss a hammer for screwdriver.

[1] https://myabuy.slack.com/pricing

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#202

Post by djhn »

Evernote had a developer conference. They wanted an ecosystem, and kind of had a platform. They bought sucessful apps.

Past tense! Much better/realistic parallel, than Facebook F8.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#203

Post by amatix »

halostatue wrote: post #31
radlad wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is people like using it. UX counts for a lot. The massive amount of integrations for it helps a lot too. Their goal, from what I've read, is to be a giant log for everything in your company, not just a chatroom service.

I moved my company off Slack to Hipchat as the latter has more useful integrations for us, and does not have the same limitations (you are not limited to ten integrations on the free version of Hipchat) or the stupidly high price of Slack. There are parts we don’t like about Hipchat (the shortcuts for the emoticons are just weird ), but we are using it company-wide where Slack was just used by developers (and Hangout…

> the stupidly high price of Slack.

really? $7 per active user per month? How little do you pay your staff? At the median wage, save an average of 90 seconds a day per person through better communication and it pays for itself. And it's pretty likely any team members using slack are at a 2-10x salary multiplier on that, a $100K engineer only needs to save 24 seconds a day...

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#204

Post by amatix »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #125
stephengillie wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack is one of my most annoying and least-effective tools because every single message has a pop up that blocks off a corner of my screen. Slack's notifications lack customization which makes them annoying. Either you get the whole package, intrusive desktop pop up and all, or you get no notification. Where's the option to have sounds but no pop ups? Where's the option to lump notifications so you don't get spammed?

Yeah after we started hooking it up now I get all these notifications for builds, etc. I don't need any of this notifying me but I need notifications for other types of messages. Right now I'm not seeing a difference between this and HipChat but everyone seems to love it so I'll use it I'm just kinda indifferent and unimpressed with it thus far.

you can do quite a lot of customisation if you split out automation messages into channels - each channel has per-user-device notification preferences

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#205

Post by lewisl9029 »

oddvar wrote: post #183
1stop wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... Did you just make that up? Slack could still have an awesome UX and be open, people would use it out of choice because it has the best UX.

I agree. We're building https://matrix.org (a free and open communication protocol) and we've realised that until we have a client with better UX than proprietary offerings, people just won't switch. We hope that a Matrix-enabled client ( https://vector.im is looking promising) will get the UI/UX right - and thus actually offer an open and free solution where you can run your own server (should you choose) and own an…

Wow. Vector is progressing along quite nicely! This new build has none of the rough edges that I remember from the last time I saw it. Congrats to the team for the awesome work!

My biggest issue with Matrix still has to do with its privacy properties though. Homeservers simply know too much about their users. End to end encryption from clients to homeservers appears to be optional in Matrix (and even with e2e encryption, metadata will still be fully exposed to homeservers), and message histories are stored in plaintext at rest.

Now, this probably won't be a huge problem in the ideal scenario where the Matrix network would be composed of a large number of small independent homeservers, but history has shown that decentralized systems that aren't fully decentralized tend to eventually converge towards centralization as it becomes more popular (just look at what happened to email). And in a world where Google, Facebook and Microsoft's homeservers might eventually have a combined market share of over 90%, the privacy aspects of Matrix leave a lot to be desired.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#206

Post by BinaryIdiot »

stanleydrew wrote: post #127
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not making fair comparisons. FB and Slack are platforms in which you write directly for it and it cannot be used or moved elsewhere. AWS provides many things but, unless you're directly integrating with them, you can move onto another service if you need to (and even direct integration you can later abstract and move away from many of their services to alternatives). Same with Twilio; they provide SMS and othe…

Fair enough. See my sibling comment about Salesforce and Github which I think are better examples. Or the iOS and Android platforms. My point is that we have certain implicit biases (I too hate FB and Salesforce as platforms) but those biases aren't really based on some kind of general principle that "proprietary platforms are always bad and dangerous". Proprietary platforms run by untrustworthy companies are bad and…

> Proprietary platforms run by untrustworthy companies are bad and dangerous.

But do proprietary platforms run by trustworthy companies exist? If so, what happens when a new CEO, product owner, etc takes over and makes changes that could ruin existing relationships? Seems inevitable for every platform to evolve to some degree; what if the evolution is simply not compatible with what you built? Does that make them untrustworthy?

It all seems kinda nebulous to me and I'm not sure I'd want to put all my cards in one basket :)

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#207

Post by the_ancient »

stanleydrew wrote: post #127
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not making fair comparisons. FB and Slack are platforms in which you write directly for it and it cannot be used or moved elsewhere. AWS provides many things but, unless you're directly integrating with them, you can move onto another service if you need to (and even direct integration you can later abstract and move away from many of their services to alternatives). Same with Twilio; they provide SMS and othe…

Fair enough. See my sibling comment about Salesforce and Github which I think are better examples. Or the iOS and Android platforms. My point is that we have certain implicit biases (I too hate FB and Salesforce as platforms) but those biases aren't really based on some kind of general principle that "proprietary platforms are always bad and dangerous". Proprietary platforms run by untrustworthy companies are bad and…

>>Proprietary platforms run by untrustworthy companies are bad and dangerous.

Where is this unicorn proprietary platform that is run by trustworthy company?

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#208

Post by niutech »

cromwellian wrote: post #104

Facebook F8 all over again in the sense of startups throwing the success or failure of their company onto a proprietary centralized system that can block or cut them off for any reason. Or rather, another incarnation of IRC chat bots, email listservs, and stuff that's been around forever as commodity autoresponders, only now it's worth millions in investments to write the equivalent of a weekend hack IRC bot because…

The biggest problems of Slack are: being closed source, transferring internal communication to external servers and loading very slow. Here you can find the alternatives solving all problems: http://browsingthenet.blogspot.com/2015/05/slack-is-so-slow-...

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#209

Post by [deleted] »

arca_vorago wrote: post #197
oskarth wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you are right that it's very similar to IRC etc you are completely missing the fundamental reason Slack et al are popular: user experience, especially for non-technical people. Not everyone grew up on IRC with bouncers, irssi on a remote server, and their own server where they could upload attachments to in a single keystroke. Now it's true that there are new alternatives for non-technical people such as IRCClo…

My problem is that instead of building FOSS tools to improve the interface to the tools we love and use daily (irc, gpg, irssi/erc, emacs/vim, screen/tmux, usenet, etc) what has happened is people like slack take advantage that the FOSS interface suffers and gives the standard user an easy interface in a proprietary system. There is no reason for slack to not be fully open and still offer the same stuff, my main conc…

[deleted]

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#210

Post by SanDimasFootbal »

amatix wrote: post #203
halostatue wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved my company off Slack to Hipchat as the latter has more useful integrations for us, and does not have the same limitations (you are not limited to ten integrations on the free version of Hipchat) or the stupidly high price of Slack. There are parts we don’t like about Hipchat (the shortcuts for the emoticons are just weird ), but we are using it company-wide where Slack was just used by developers (and Hangout…

> the stupidly high price of Slack. really? $7 per active user per month? How little do you pay your staff? At the median wage, save an average of 90 seconds a day per person through better communication and it pays for itself. And it's pretty likely any team members using slack are at a 2-10x salary multiplier on that, a $100K engineer only needs to save 24 seconds a day...

I cost justified a tesla that way. How much I spent on gas gong to mountain view, plus time in the carpool lane, but time I rent it in getaround. Blah Blah Blah. Doesn't mean it is right or worth it.
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