471–480 of 730 posts
Slack is unfortunately thought by some people I work with as a replacement for email... When it's almost impossible to discuss certain things in a chat app, and it's search is just not as good, and it's organizing messages almost non-existent.
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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…
> With email, how can I subscribe to conversations I'm interested in? There's always newsgroups, which use NNTP (which isn't that dissimilar to email). They have existing groups in a hierarchy that can be subscribed to. It doesn't really give users the ability to create new newsgroups in the fly though.
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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?
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…
Because just about every technical team needs the ability to do some sort of real-time communication, and Slack's UI is obviously better polished than the products that predate it (HipChat/IRC/etc). If you're looking for a product built by top MIT engineers who spent years thinking about how to make chat actually productive, check out Zulip. I'm one of those MIT engineers, and I agree that Slack is a huge waste of ti…
But the flat thread model is still limited, particularly for complicated topics even a thread starts having the same problem as a channel where there is too much going on; have you thought about tree-structured threads, or some way of branching threads when there is a bunch of discussion happening on different topics?
I haven't really used Slack much, but one of the other places with lots of space for improvement in Flowdock was search, and Slack does seem to be investing there significantly, and I hope Zulip is as well.
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…
So, the tens of thousands of teams paying for Slack either aren't having serious conversations or have decided the opposite. Here are some things I think you are undervaluing about team chat:
- It replaces many meetings and phone calls that are more interruptive. - It helps distributed teams with legitimate needs for casual collaboration. - It reduces an enormous cost of people being blocked waiting for email answers to simple questions that could not be anticipated.
The disadvantages of team chat can be avoided by discipline, but the benefits above require an assistive tool.
While we are at it, if you can't distinguish Slack from other team chat solutions, here are some things I think you are undervaluing:
- ease of onboarding for teams and individual users - scalability to large, active teams - Enterprise IT management - automatic refunds for inactive users - integration and third party app community - Dev community supporting custom integrations - strong mobile and desktop experiences
All of the above are super important for companies adopting, even though they're not about the core channel-messaging interaction you experience day to day. None of the alternatives check all of these boxes, and only teams is close.
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…
I am regularly Cc'd into conversations that have 10 or so people and multiple topics lasting a week.
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…
Things we were looking for:
- Separate work / personal accounts (i.e. not just Skype, Telegram, etc.)
- Decent native apps for macOS, Android and iOS, bonus points for Linux and Windows
- Reliable notifications across those platforms
- Tracking unread messages across platforms (i.e. you get the whole history everywhere, everywhere knows what the last message you read on any device is)
- Some basic niceties like the ability to drop images into a chat and have them show up across all devices
That's it, really. Aside from the last one, that's almost the definition of group chat. It doesn't sound hard. All self-hosted alternatives failed.
Things that couldn't hack it:
- Jabber
- IRC
- Rocket.Chat
- Mattermost
- Zulip
- Matrix / riot.im
It seems mostly the Achilles' Heel is apps and reliable notifications. This seems like it shouldn't be that hard, but almost everything fails there. Most platforms couldn't reliably have message show up punctually on all platforms. Sometimes the clients took 15% of a laptop's CPU idling. Often messages just wouldn't show up until you explicitly opened the app on mobile.
So, like I said, now we use Slack. And we're mostly happy. I had to fight the dork impulses to start writing my own version of this and get back to work that mattered.
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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…
Hipchat actually outperformed Slack for my team in every respect, with three exceptions (all of which were supposed to be solved by Stride): 1. No markdown support and half-assed code highlighting support. 2. No (real) message editing. 3. Silly parenthesis based emoji. Its search is better than Slack’s; its performance is better than Slack’s; its integrations are better than Slack’s; its client memory and CPU usage a…
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…
(I lead the Zulip project, one of the main open source alternatives to Slack.) The writing's been on the wall for HipChat for a long time; e.g. the user experience has been stagnant for many years (e.g. they never added emoji reactions). And even back in 2013, every HipChat customer I've encountered was unhappy or at best unenthusiastic about the product. So we've seen plenty of folks migrate from HipChat to Zulip. I…
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Email has a lot of problems, but the dealbreaker for my company is that it isn't secure.
The security model for internal email on a corporate email server is pretty similar to a corporate slack instance.
Part of this is a UI problem, but it's still a problem.
I didn't say Slack is the answer, either. Just that email isn't a serious competitor to Slack.