Slack plunges after posting first earnings report since going public • Hacker News Board

Re: Slack plunges after posting first earnings report since going public

#11

Post by okabat » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 12:16 AM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #6

Can someone please enlighten me? I am having trouble understanding the myriad communications/chat apps out there that don't seem to do much more than what we older folk used to do on USENET. Then there's all the clones of more modern platforms. Things like Whatsup. It just seems to me there are, as a friend of mine used to say, "too many useless duplicates". Meaning, most of it is a huge waste of time. So, what am I…

Slack is great at managing "read/unread" state across my 4 devices even in messy mobile networking situations. Good threading tools allow conversations to remain sandboxed and not gum up entire channels. Do these improvements justify the valuation? Maybe not, especially given how many other comms apps have a similar feature set. But for the vast majority of realtime modern workplace communication use-cases, IRC or a bulletin board will not cut it

Re: Slack plunges after posting first earnings report since going public

#12

Post by crb002 » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 1:59 AM UTC

Haven't used slack for a while. Too spammy.

Re: Slack plunges after posting first earnings report since going public

#13

Post by writehappycode » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 2:09 AM UTC

Desktop only applications that allow you to chat in rooms/channels/teams but just as, if not more buggier/slower/featureless than irc/aol on a computer and modem i had over 10 years ago. Can someone explain to me why anyone would use this outside of work or was it simply not designed for personal use?

Re: Slack plunges after posting first earnings report since going public

#14

Post by writehappycode » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 2:22 AM UTC

okabat wrote: post #11

robomartin wrote: post #6

Can someone please enlighten me? I am having trouble understanding the myriad communications/chat apps out there that don't seem to do much more than what we older folk used to do on USENET. Then there's all the clones of more modern platforms. Things like Whatsup. It just seems to me there are, as a friend of mine used to say, "too many useless duplicates". Meaning, most of it is a huge waste of time. So, what am I…

Slack is great at managing "read/unread" state across my 4 devices even in messy mobile networking situations. Good threading tools allow conversations to remain sandboxed and not gum up entire channels. Do these improvements justify the valuation? Maybe not, especially given how many other comms apps have a similar feature set. But for the vast majority of realtime modern workplace communication use-cases, IRC or a…

I’ve missed important messages at critical times due to their mobile app not providing me notification as configured (ios). Syncing across devices is handled nicely though.

Re: Slack plunges after posting first earnings report since going public

#15

Post by pmart123 » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 2:44 AM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #6

Can someone please enlighten me? I am having trouble understanding the myriad communications/chat apps out there that don't seem to do much more than what we older folk used to do on USENET. Then there's all the clones of more modern platforms. Things like Whatsup. It just seems to me there are, as a friend of mine used to say, "too many useless duplicates". Meaning, most of it is a huge waste of time. So, what am I…

Some smaller companies essentially run customer service directly through Slack. It can be pretty nifty in that a customer support message thread can easily be rerouted to a developer if it involves a bug, attached to an issue, which then notifies the customer service team that the bug is resolved once the code branch is pushed to master and deployed.

Other use cases can be simple things like notifying teams when you get new subscribers, reporting metrics/charts that are displayed in a thread versus pushed via email (allowing newly joined channel members, etc. to scroll through.

I'm not saying any of these are game changes by themselves, but they each bring incremental value.

Re: Slack plunges after posting first earnings report since going public

#16

Post by robbyt » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 2:46 AM UTC

someonehere wrote: post #9

As someone who tracks system outages of Saas for my company, Slack has been really bad the last few months. I’m consistently seeing problems on the back end that manifest to users of the service. Critical functions like direct messages, search, mentions, app integration, app approvals are always popping up in their system status feed. The only reason Slack caught on was businesses prior to that had AIM, Skype, or Han…

I assume their code/infra was in a holding pattern prior to IPO, and now they're dealing with tech debt.

Re: Slack plunges after posting first earnings report since going public

#17

Post by hackernewsrocks » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 6:24 AM UTC

I just don’t understand investing in chat app companies. Throughout my life the popular chat app has totally changed every few years: ytalk, aim, icq, msn messenger, yahoo messenger, gtalk, bbm, skype, fb messenger, sms, group me, iMessage, whats app, slack, discord

What is the chance that people will still be using slack in a few years. Esp considering mattermost is free and discord people argue is better today.

It’s great they tried to build a biz on office chat, but it seems overpriced considering it’s just another chat app

Re: Slack plunges after posting first earnings report since going public

#18

Post by empath75 » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 11:04 AM UTC

someonehere wrote: post #9

As someone who tracks system outages of Saas for my company, Slack has been really bad the last few months. I’m consistently seeing problems on the back end that manifest to users of the service. Critical functions like direct messages, search, mentions, app integration, app approvals are always popping up in their system status feed. The only reason Slack caught on was businesses prior to that had AIM, Skype, or Han…

> The only reason Slack caught on was businesses prior to that had AIM, Skype, or Hangouts at their disposal.

At least in the case of AIM, that’s not true, as aol switched to using slack from aim internally quite a bit before aim was decommissioned. Aim was absolute garbage for work communication and pretty much every team started using slack organically before the company bought an enterprise license.

Adding chat history and search was game changing.

Re: Slack plunges after posting first earnings report since going public

#19

Post by empath75 » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 11:05 AM UTC

writehappycode wrote: post #13

Desktop only applications that allow you to chat in rooms/channels/teams but just as, if not more buggier/slower/featureless than irc/aol on a computer and modem i had over 10 years ago. Can someone explain to me why anyone would use this outside of work or was it simply not designed for personal use?

It’s a mobile app.

Re: Slack plunges after posting first earnings report since going public

#20

Post by writehappycode » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 8:51 PM UTC

empath75 wrote: post #19

writehappycode wrote: post #13

Desktop only applications that allow you to chat in rooms/channels/teams but just as, if not more buggier/slower/featureless than irc/aol on a computer and modem i had over 10 years ago. Can someone explain to me why anyone would use this outside of work or was it simply not designed for personal use?

It’s a mobile app.

On mobile it’s essentially a chat application that you’re forced to use for work, most likely on your personal cell phone. I’m willing to be convinced of the enormous valuation.