Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–638 of 638 posts

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#631

Post by winrid »

SamWhited wrote: post #581
winrid wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to propose running your own chat server at any medium to large company. No VP of engineering or CTO wants to worry about that and the possible security risks. If Slack messes up they can blame Slack but if you mess up and expose some Healthcare data to the outside world because of your chat server they are screwed.

I've had the opposite experience; at my last job (a medium sized tech company that you've heard of and probably use tangentially on a daily basis) they wouldn't hear of using anything cloud based because then someone else could potentially leak their data.

Interesting. Even something like AWS?

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#632

Post by jackvalentine »

u801e wrote: post #629
rootkea wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's correct. Because it's the FLOSS devs who need to learn to empathize with the ordinary user. Disclaimer - A FLOSS dev here.

> Because it's the FLOSS devs who need to learn to empathize with the ordinary user. If you were talking about using these protocols over a telnet session, then I would be more inclined to agree with that statement, but just installing an application, entering a server name and account credentials (the latter of which aren't needed for IRC), and connecting isn't any more difficult than creating an account on slack an…

Have you ever worked a support role for an application?

Regular users have amazing blind spots. Also you’re not giving slack enough credit for their smooth onboarding process.

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#633

Post by gsich »

jackvalentine wrote: post #628
gsich wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing to learn there.

I don’t think you realise how well you just made the case for using Slack instead of IRC or XMPP with that comment.

No. I expect a certain competence when using a computer. If this level of competence is not enough to even install a piece of software and configure the most basic settings, then this person should not own a PC, yet use one.

It's amazing that when it comes to computers, it is somehow acceptable to be dumb. It's acceptable to not learn new stuff. It's acceptable to not read in order to understand stuff. As can be read in the comments here.

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#634

Post by antiphase »

winrid wrote: post #631
SamWhited wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had the opposite experience; at my last job (a medium sized tech company that you've heard of and probably use tangentially on a daily basis) they wouldn't hear of using anything cloud based because then someone else could potentially leak their data.

Interesting. Even something like AWS?

Is AWS not cloud-based any more?

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#635

Post by u801e »

jackvalentine wrote: post #632
u801e wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because it's the FLOSS devs who need to learn to empathize with the ordinary user. If you were talking about using these protocols over a telnet session, then I would be more inclined to agree with that statement, but just installing an application, entering a server name and account credentials (the latter of which aren't needed for IRC), and connecting isn't any more difficult than creating an account on slack an…

Have you ever worked a support role for an application? Regular users have amazing blind spots. Also you’re not giving slack enough credit for their smooth onboarding process.

> Regular users have amazing blind spots.

Of course, but I don't think that Slack has done a better job with this compared to previous solutions. In a lot of ways, it's worse given its performance issues. For example, I never experienced UI lag in a chat application until I used Slack (comparing it with UIs like a GUI IRC application, AIM, ICQ, MSN messenger, Yahoo messenger, Skype, etc). Second, auto-completion and search do not work like they do in previous chat applications (or other applications in general) due to infinite scroll and the default of doing a global search instead of just limiting it to the chat or group. Third, the fact that you're forced to join some channels because you were invited or can't leave a channel because you're the last one in it are other issues that come to mind.

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#637

Post by jackvalentine »

gsich wrote: post #633
jackvalentine wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you realise how well you just made the case for using Slack instead of IRC or XMPP with that comment.

No. I expect a certain competence when using a computer. If this level of competence is not enough to even install a piece of software and configure the most basic settings, then this person should not own a PC, yet use one. It's amazing that when it comes to computers, it is somehow acceptable to be dumb. It's acceptable to not learn new stuff. It's acceptable to not read in order to understand stuff. As can be read…

Do you want to be ‘right’, or actually have users?

The whole ethos of startups and Silicon Valley has been around finding a market for your product. If people don’t want to use it then you can’t blame anyone but yourself.

Feel free to chat with yourself using an ideologically pure system... it’ll be lonely though.

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#638

Post by jackvalentine »

u801e wrote: post #635
jackvalentine wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever worked a support role for an application? Regular users have amazing blind spots. Also you’re not giving slack enough credit for their smooth onboarding process.

> Regular users have amazing blind spots. Of course, but I don't think that Slack has done a better job with this compared to previous solutions. In a lot of ways, it's worse given its performance issues. For example, I never experienced UI lag in a chat application until I used Slack (comparing it with UIs like a GUI IRC application, AIM, ICQ, MSN messenger, Yahoo messenger, Skype, etc). Second, auto-completion and…

Slack’s performance issues have nothing to do with the people using it’s abilities.

As much as it annoys me too, it appears that people actually using it have enough tolerance for it that it doesn’t matter.

Post reply on HN