Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian • Hacker News Board

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#331

Post by linuxftw » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:52 PM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #309

gregmac wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm firmly in the "email has no place in internal discussions whatsoever" camp. Tasks belong in tickets, long-term documentation/policies/meeting notes/etc belong in shared space (wiki), and discussions are faster and more productive in realtime (in-person, video call, or chat). E-mail might kick some of this off, or be used to schedule, but that should be it. The problem I think most people run into with the realtim…

"discussions are faster and more productive in realtime" Real-time discussion is great if you don't have to think about what you're going to say before you say it. Unfortunately, that places a very, very low upper limit on the level of depth and consideration that a discussion can reach. Some decisions are hard enough and some situations are nuanced enough that you need to take your time with them, enough that the ad…

I agree with you and I feel your points are well articulated. I especially like how you summarized the internet as 'the illiterates took over.' Very poignant, indeed. So much of the average person's internet usage boils down to memes and videos, it's quite unfortunate.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#332

Post by hadrien01 » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:52 PM UTC

rb808 wrote: post #277

solatic wrote: post #107

Huge problem for on-prem Hipchat customers. Plenty of customers out there not willing to put all their internal communications on the other side of their firewall, and now have to migrate. Slack doesn't have an on-prem option. Microsoft Teams doesn't have an on-prem option. What are enterprises supposed to use, RocketChat? Matrix? With no clear migration path? Really poor move on Atlassian's part. It would be one thi…

Skype for Business, works on prem. Matrix is probably good too. Confluence can be installed on prem already.

S4B works with our VoIP infrastructure and is on-premise but the client is awfully slowly and badly needs to be reworked. But with Microsoft is abandoning on-premise services...

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#333

Post by madeofpalk » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:52 PM UTC

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #226

brightball wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The different in the Linux/OSX comparison is that Linux is constantly improving. IRC hasn’t changed much in years.

IRCv3 has some great features it’s trying to standardize: https://ircv3.net

Mean while, every single chat and IM application has steamrolled straight past.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#334

Post by it33 » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:53 PM UTC

JeremyNT wrote: post #280

jawilson2 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We moved from Slack to Mattermost, and Mattermost is garbage. Messages are delivered late (by hours), if ever. You don't get notifications correctly. It takes seconds (more than 10 sometimes) to load a page. Sometimes the page goes blank. Much of our office has reverted to email and phone calls for many things that would have worked fine with Slack.

I'll counter that anecdote with an observation that I have never observed any of those issues. In our deployment Mattermost is reliable and I've never heard any complaints like those from my colleagues. It could be a question of scale; we only have probably 50 or so regular users. That said, even though it works as advertised the product is not perfect. The Mattermost UI is bare bones and some things like conversatio…

Thanks @JeremyNT! Mattermost team here. May I ask which Mattermost version you're running? Also, what features would you like to see?

We ship new improvements monthly, so if you're on an older release you could quickly add a lot of features: emoji reactions, GIF selector, custom emojis, Slack-compatible keyboard shortcuts, hashtags, slash comments, Slack-compatible integrations, etc.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#335

Post by madeofpalk » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:54 PM UTC

mdeeks wrote: post #279

komali2 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some inexplicable reason, in the absurdly big Hack Reactor alumni slack, it's considered cool to scoff at people asking for conversations to be taken into threads. There's like 3000 people in there. Sometimes shitloads of conversations are happening at once. The people that refuse to use threads aren't cool, they're just co-opting literally the entire channel for just their conversation. I see it as a forum, wher…

Ask, don't scoff? Also to be fair, Slack's implementation of threads is awful. Probably their most poorly done feature in my mind. If there is already a lively topic ongoing in a room and I need to jump in with another topic, I write a message and say "Hey I have a question, can someone help me?" and then I immediately start a thread with myself so people see that it is a thread and click it to respond rather than ju…

I've definitely found that preemptive threading is a lot more successful than hoping others will cooperatively thread the conversation

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#336

Post by acoard » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:56 PM UTC

jawilson2 wrote: post #258

apple4ever wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use Slack now, and are looking to migrate to Mattermost (since we run GitLab already). We don't want to pay the price we'd need to pay to keep Slack, and plus we want to host our own.

We moved from Slack to Mattermost, and Mattermost is garbage. Messages are delivered late (by hours), if ever. You don't get notifications correctly. It takes seconds (more than 10 sometimes) to load a page. Sometimes the page goes blank. Much of our office has reverted to email and phone calls for many things that would have worked fine with Slack.

Approx how many users?

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#337

Post by 7ewis » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:56 PM UTC

We've been waiting a long time to move to Slack, and recently started migrating over ~2,000 users from HipChat.

Everyone is desperate for the migration to be complete, and to get rid of HipChat. A large majority had already moved their own team over.

Can't say I'll be sad to say goodbye to HipChat, it worked well for the 6 years we had it, but Slack is superior in many ways (other than price...).

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#338

Post by linuxftw » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:57 PM UTC

strictnein wrote: post #62

joeblau wrote: post #26

I've never really gotten into any of Atlasssian's products. It seems like they make tools for managers with bolt on functionality for engineers (which may be why I never caught onto their products). I hope this is good news for Slack, but as a software engineer today, Atlasssian's products are not the first ones I would recommend in any category.

Jira was great, ~15 years ago. It was a tool that actually helped development, especially with the GreenHopper plugin Now almost the entirety of its functionality is to help various middle managers track things that are important to them, while continuously making development slower. Manager 1 wants to track Metric A? Add a drop down. Manager 2 wants to track Metric B? Add a new form to fill out. And tie them all tog…

> Those that haven't experienced this probably just haven't worked in a medium or large corporation.

So true, though I expect that of the HN crowd (given it's hosted by YC).

Everytime I hear someone praise Jira, I think "Do you have more than 100 people using the same instance?" Middle manage needs charts and reporting, and that's Jira's strength. It's an absolute disaster to use on a daily basis.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#339

Post by dasil003 » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:57 PM UTC

prlambert wrote: post #245

tomnipotent wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm curious as to how that breaks down? Which kind of workflows are best in email, which in Slack?

Featured specifications work better in email, live debugging/forensics work better in Slack.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#340

Post by philwelch » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:58 PM UTC

pm90 wrote: post #217

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.

That's a little too harsh. Not everyone is good at expressing themselves through an email chain; doesn't mean they're illiterate though.

Not everyone is good at expressing themselves in a real time conversation, either. Any medium of conversation excludes people who aren't good at that medium.

But if you have to choose a medium of conversation, are you better off choosing one that excludes introverts, non-native speakers, and people who aren't loud and obnoxious enough to command the room? Or would you rather exclude people who lack the patience or intellectual ability to read or write more than two or three lines of text at a time? Which choice allows deeper and more thoughtfully considered ideas to enter the discussion?

I'm loud and obnoxious enough to thrive either way, but I really don't want important professional decisions to be made by the "rofl tl;dr" crowd.