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

Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

quuxplusone.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 1001 posts

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#181

Post by lonelappde »

haberman wrote: post #73
jakebasile wrote: post #19

Reading their non-replies on Twitter feels like I'm reading something specifically designed to piss me off. Smarmy apologies, low empathy, cocksure of how correct their vision of a chat service should be. This one in particular[1]: > The goal is for workflows to evolve, but we realize change can be a bit of a pain. "Stupid peasant, we are only here to help you. Once you see the glorious vision we have you will thank…

Is there any way that tweet could have been written that would have satisfied you, without actually agreeing to change course right away? To me the tweet's tone says that they honestly care and don't want people to be inconvenienced, but also want to at least see if people will warm to it. There has to be some kind of healthy balance between listening to user feedback and never changing anything. The extreme version…

They dishonestly care, because they didn't bother to spend any of their billions of dollars to help their existing paying users.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#182

Post by gkoberger »

chx wrote: post #114

The exact same happened with the draft feature. The importance of habit forming UI is very well documented, going back at least as far as Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface and the draft feature completely breaks it -- if you as much as accidentally leave a character in there, you can't find the channel/DM at its normal place. Despite repeated calls to make it optional, nothing. Threads are also broken, has always bee…

I actually love that drafts are brought to the top; it keeps things from getting lost for me. I even sometimes will write one character as a reminder I need to finish. But still, I understand your frustration.

That being said, search makes it really easy to solve this. I rarely do anything other than Cmd+K/Ctrl+K, and type a character or two. For me, it's become second nature, and I never find myself searching around for where to go. For me, the left sidebar is more of a status report, while Cmd+K is how I navigate.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#183

Post by freedomben »

ncmncm wrote: post #148

Slack's everything is terrible. At MongoDB, we were supposed to be on it at all times. It was a continuous source of stress and broken concentration. It is what I left behind most eagerly. Curiously, Google Chat has not become similarly stress-inducing. Yet. Gmail has become moreso lately, though. At least once a week it manages to conceal an important message. Since Google Chat works, I expect them to drop it soon.

Google Chat is quite stress-inducing for me as well. Maybe I don't know how to use it properly, but when I get a notification it is so hard for me to find the message that triggered it. Our Google Chat has a lot of messages, so sometimes I could have to scroll through hundreds of messages and thread to find it. It's not highlighted or anything to make it easy, either.

Because I often can't find the message that pinged me, it's extremely stressful. I worry people think I ignored them, when in reality I never saw their message, despite actively looking for it.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#184

Post by dang »

sloum wrote: post #65
dang wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't cross into personal attack in HN comments. It breaks the site guidelines ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ). Note this one: Be kind. It's hard enough for people to hear criticism or fix mistakes without their head, or a colleague's head, being called for.

The OP said they felt the person should be reassigned. This is hardly a call for termination. It was also accompanied by constructive points about productivity software relevant to the post at hand. I do not believe there was anything unkind in suggesting that maybe the person was in over their head.

I agree it's much better than saying explicitly they should be fired or (as internet users often do) worse. Still, there's no need to get personal. Organizational failures are almost never one person's doing, and having an indignant thread sitting at #1 talking about how ugly your baby is is punishment already.

The rest of the GP comment was fine.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#185

Post by superbaconman »

tbabb wrote: post #111

This reminds me of Atlassian's god-awful WYSIWYG editor. In both cases, I get that some users can't or don't like to use a machine grammar/markup, however simple. For some people markup is bad UX. Give them a WYSIWYG; that's fine. But don't remove the markup editor if your WYSIWYG editor is anything but a perfect one-two-one replacement for markup (and I have never seen one that satisfies that). IIRC there was a time…

I stopped using confluence the moment I realized the markdown editor was removed. I don't care so much about the flavor, but there's something very annoying about needing to get fancy with the way I edit text to preserve formatting.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#186

Post by cortesoft »

hazz99 wrote: post #171
ghostcluster wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This attitude to their rollout reminds me of the recent rollout of Twitter's maligned new desktop UI, the new YouTube Studio Beta, and reddit's new UI. There is almost a meme of online platform service providers not understanding their users and their workflows, and rolling out new revisions that hamper or outright remove functionality that those users rely on. I guess the canonical example would be that one Digg red…

> online platform service providers not understanding their users and their workflows In regards to the Reddit redesign, I think the people complaining that "they ignore their users" are stuck inside a bit of a bubble. I have a lot of friends who recently discovered the site, and they much prefer the redesign to the old one. I forgot where I read it, but I vaguely remember stats backing this up, or at least increase…

Reddit also let's you still use the old version, which is great

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#187

Post by somebodythere »

jdoliner wrote: post #155

I've been suffering from this one too so I'll share the most annoying part for me. I frequently have reasons to type out glob patterns generally in backticks. The interface for this is completely broken in the new WYSIWYG editor. Here's what happens when I try to type: `/ / `, things work normally up until the second " " at which point the "/" between them becomes gets bolded, which makes no sense, because you can't…

There's some delicious irony in those slashes getting swallowed by HN's markdown parser.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#188

Post by freedomben »

duderific wrote: post #133
ajkjk wrote: post #47

The funny thing is that I am sure most of the people who work at slack know it's terrible, but no one asks them. There is a small cohort of product managers who probably have a plausible-sounding reason to do it, and they need to do something to justify their jobs, so they alienate everybody else because no one stops them. I am, to put it lightly, familiar with this in other companies.

I mean, it's probably not bad feature for a lot of people. But for goodness sake, why not make it optional?

This is exactly why I hate it. I think for the average person it's probably great, but it should be easy to disable for those who don't want it.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#189

Post by swader999 »

stavros wrote: post #40
Arathorn wrote: post #35

Amusingly, for https://riot.im we just shelved our WYSIWYG editor efforts after trying two completely separate implementations over the years (one via Draft.js, the other via Slate.js) because: a) it's a nightmare to get right, b) nobody used it anyway (it was optional), c) chat isn't a wordprocessor, d) markdown (commonmark) + floating formatting toolbar is good enough. Our current editor was written from scratch (c…

Thank you for adding the feature of not adding WYSIWYG. I can't believe how frustrating Slack's new editor is.

So true, I was annoyed all day and didn't know why. Had no idea they had "upgraded". I thought I had inadvertently hit a toggle that put it out of adult mode. I was too busy to fuss with it. Every time I went into that box I came out a little more angry, a little older, and farther from the feeling of good flow that Wednesday typically brings.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#190

Post by NoodleIncident »

haberman wrote: post #73
jakebasile wrote: post #19

Reading their non-replies on Twitter feels like I'm reading something specifically designed to piss me off. Smarmy apologies, low empathy, cocksure of how correct their vision of a chat service should be. This one in particular[1]: > The goal is for workflows to evolve, but we realize change can be a bit of a pain. "Stupid peasant, we are only here to help you. Once you see the glorious vision we have you will thank…

Is there any way that tweet could have been written that would have satisfied you, without actually agreeing to change course right away? To me the tweet's tone says that they honestly care and don't want people to be inconvenienced, but also want to at least see if people will warm to it. There has to be some kind of healthy balance between listening to user feedback and never changing anything. The extreme version…

"Not writing it at all" is already miles ahead. Just like this comment, actually
Post reply on HN