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Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

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Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#261

Post by lossolo »

ironjunkie wrote: post #165

When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? It is a chat application with a slightly improved UI like it existed 30 years ago. This is a step in corporate IT that I really cannot fully understand. It seems that every company//startup has to use slack nowadays to pretend to be cool again. Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it…

We do not use Slack, we use IRC for direct and fast communication. We do not use it for things that need RFCs and technical specifications, for that we use gitlab and other tools.

IRC is great and I am using it for 14+ years already. It's stable, fast, efficient and secure with lots of options. I've written a lot of IRC bots in many languages because protocol is so easy and every language have library/bot for IRC that can be easily expanded with your logic/code.

Before there was a cloud and big data, we used IRC for handling distributed services as high availability central orchestration to which many services/servers connected that had IRC bots running on them. We had control over many machines and services from IRC channels, with full authorization/authentication, logging channels, you could run commands on one server or on many same time, you've seen real time error reporting or when node went down.

It worked great and still works great.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#262

Post by komali2 »

GuiA wrote: post #244
slededit wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few months ago slack's early plan was posted here. From day one this was the goal - they knew it was just a chat app so they had to make it feel like something different. Its one of the best marketing coups in recent history and I'd love to see more analysis on how it was pulled off.

> Its one of the best marketing coups in recent history and I'd love to see more analysis on how it was pulled off Steward Butterfield pushed private beta invites to his well connected Silicon Valley social media friends, who then imposed it in their startups because “it’s what everyone else is doing, it’s going to revolutionize communication”. Rinse, repeat. Source: a social media ninja wizard friend of Butterfield…

To be fair, it now has actual useful zero setup functionality like screen sharing and file sharing.

Before that though yea I didn't get the point.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#263

Post by wuliwong »

slededit wrote: post #179
ironjunkie wrote: post #165

When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? It is a chat application with a slightly improved UI like it existed 30 years ago. This is a step in corporate IT that I really cannot fully understand. It seems that every company//startup has to use slack nowadays to pretend to be cool again. Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it…

A few months ago slack's early plan was posted here. From day one this was the goal - they knew it was just a chat app so they had to make it feel like something different. Its one of the best marketing coups in recent history and I'd love to see more analysis on how it was pulled off.

I think it's far less about marketing and more about lowering the barrier to entry. I work at a real estate company. They were using Slack before I got here and did not have a single technical person on staff. This company would have never considered IRC if Slack didn't exist.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#264

Post by ebiester »

philwelch wrote: post #200
mmanfrin wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. You fall in to the former, and I would bet that a lot of people here fall in to the former. However, many people fall in to the latter, and Slack handily beats the competition there. There is also an element of having nice and polished features baked in that appeals to many people. Want it on your phone? There's an app. Want to…

> There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp, but ever since we got the bandwidth and CPU necessary for the internet to not be a primarily text-based medium, the illiterates took over and that was the end of that.

Email: Two use cases.

With email, how can I subscribe to conversations I'm interested in? Mailing lists are nice, but we have no real way to make mailing lists that start and stop on the fly like a chat channel in a way that is searchable to the entire organization during or after the fact.

What email list system allows for quick creation and the ability for everyone in an organization to know that a conversation is happening and how to join with the ability to get all the context necessary in a chronological order? (Reading threads can get really repetitive in a mailing list, especially when trying to get up to speed on an issue.)

You get to all the requirements, and you end up with a discussion board instead or a new product that is to email lists what slack is to chat.

Email is great for some things, but there's a reason people use slack instead even when they already have email.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#265

Post by wuliwong »

karlkatzke wrote: post #213
ironjunkie wrote: post #165

When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? It is a chat application with a slightly improved UI like it existed 30 years ago. This is a step in corporate IT that I really cannot fully understand. It seems that every company//startup has to use slack nowadays to pretend to be cool again. Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it…

We use HipChat. It’s terrible, and it has been a frequent comment that having Slack would help us build better communication culture, because people avoid using hipchat (and use Skype or other platforms instead).

I don't think I've ever used HipChat. What don't you guys like about it?

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#266

Post by Arathorn »

ReverseCold wrote: post #236
Arathorn wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix also has migration paths from Slack, eg https://github.com/lampholder/concorde edit: also https://github.com/Cadair/skill-matrixslack

The matrix homeserver is... suboptimal. I'm running it for a personal instance (two users), and it's using insane amounts of RAM (4-8 GB) and still managing to lag (even though I gave it 4 cores on a Ryzen 2700X). Forget talking in a matrix.org room, even talking to people on other personal/single user servers isn't fully stable. There is a replacement homeserver ( https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite ) but it's no…

Disclosure: i work on Matrix.

We're basically doing nothing but fixing Synapse's performance problems currently, and improvements are on the horizon. We're late because we got sidetracked fixing flaws in the protocol, but as of the last few weeks we're back on perf again. So far we've sped up /sync by 2x and reduced CPU by about 20%, but the RAM improvements should land over the coming weeks unless we have further distractions.

Meanwhile, on Riot, we're busy landing performance fixes which should make it much less resource hungry than Slack. These are literally landing as we speak: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/2970, https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/3331 etc.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#267

Post by solatic »

__sr__ wrote: post #171
__sr__ wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setup an old faishoned IRC server?

There is also Zulip ( https://zulipchat.com )

Zulip actually seems to tick a lot of boxes for us, I'll see about bringing it in and spinning it up on a box. Thanks for the recommendation!

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#268

Post by wuliwong »

insertnickname wrote: post #203
bluedino wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Persistence can be created the the right proxy/helper and clients

As much as I love IRC, this argument seems to me to not be that different from the "just use rsync/ftp" Dropbox argument. There is this IRCv3 extension proposal, though: https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/pull/292

I agree. I think it's just normal, human self-centeredness. Because it's easy to them it's easy. I work with 95% non-technical people. They aren't going to tackle the problem of IRC persistence on mobile devices when they can just use Slack. :)

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#269

Post by worldsayshi »

tomnipotent wrote: post #225
philwelch wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp, but ever since we got the bandwidth and CPU necessary for the internet to not be a primarily text-based medium, the illiterates took over and that was the end of that.

Email is crap for many types of workflows that Slack excels in.

Email is crap because there is no agreed on way to structure old and new content, quotes, references and links, everyone insists on bloating with html signatures and crap that isn't part of the discussion.

Additionally, all this bloat and lack of structure makes it hard to search the text for both humans and machines.

Not saying that Slack is better, it addresses some of the structuring and some bloat problems, but adds distraction and encourage discussion bloat instead.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#270

Post by sokoloff »

ebiester wrote: post #264
philwelch wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp, but ever since we got the bandwidth and CPU necessary for the internet to not be a primarily text-based medium, the illiterates took over and that was the end of that.

Email: Two use cases. With email, how can I subscribe to conversations I'm interested in? Mailing lists are nice, but we have no real way to make mailing lists that start and stop on the fly like a chat channel in a way that is searchable to the entire organization during or after the fact. What email list system allows for quick creation and the ability for everyone in an organization to know that a conversation is…

> Mailing lists are nice, but we have no real way to make mailing lists that start and stop on the fly like a chat channel in a way that is searchable to the entire organization during or after the fact.

Isn’t that what subject lines and mail archives are useful for?

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