261–270 of 1001 posts
I suppose a new acronym would be suitable for this situation: WYSIWYGBNWYW, What You See Is What You Get But Not What You Want. With the availability of detailed API documentation ( https://api.slack.com ) that seems to make it relatively easy to write your own client (and they even link to some thirdparty clients as an example of what you can do), their refusal to change could almost be interpreted as "no, you fix i…
It is infuriatingly terrible. A regression. So many times I've had similar woes with the code block and quote block mechanisms too. Another truly bizarre feature I noted and sent a bug report about was that when adding an image to an "Action" the _minimum_ size requirement is 512px by 512px. For an image that is never rendered larger than 64x64.
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…
Hmmm... It might be worth making a Slack-style interface for Matrix. It already supports replies, these could be flavoured as threads instead.
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Another thing in Slack that has annoyingly changed (without an option to toggle off) is: its "Drafts" feature - where leaving a channel with an unfinished message means that the channel itself gets moved to the top of the left sidebar. This completely breaks my flow, because 1.) you can no longer use up/down hotkeys to reliably go between specific channels, and 2.) I frequently have to do a double take and ask, "wher…
I use Slack very often, and I also get annoyed that Drafts features often tugs a frequently-used channel to a different spot in sidebar. "Where did that channel go?"
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…
Did their engineering team not dogfood this change? What Slack engineer or product manager tried to share a `snippet of code` with a peer and thought, "yes, that was a pleasant experience. we should ship that."
The responses are kind of repetitive/grating in that they're non-replies and kind of stonewalling, but I couldn't help but picture some poor soul fighting against the gratuitous negativity. Some (Most?) people were being constructively negative, which I do appreciate, but the Slack employee on Twitter essentially can't give anyone any closure or solution, and is just generally powerless against the whims of the designers or whoever it was that pushed for this change.
I like all my tools just so and have gotten used to them over many years, so I definitely agree with a lot of the sentiment here. It's just that for some reason the human sitting on the other side of the Twitter account was 'visible' to me in this instance.
EDIT: just to say that for the above reason, comments like this one:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21590681
make me a little sad. It's one thing to rail on a company, but in the case of Twitter, it's another person. Maybe a team of people; I'm not sure, but I'd say the same in that case too.
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> The goal is for workflows to evolve This exchange is a pretty good summation of one of the biggest purely practical reasons why I'm so obsessive about tools, and why I'm so willing to put up with the initial cost of learning systems like Linux and Vim/Emacs. Outside of fundamentally better workflow improvements, most professional fields don't randomly change their tools. If you gave a professional artist a new penc…
Another thing in Slack that has annoyingly changed (without an option to toggle off) is: its "Drafts" feature - where leaving a channel with an unfinished message means that the channel itself gets moved to the top of the left sidebar. This completely breaks my flow, because 1.) you can no longer use up/down hotkeys to reliably go between specific channels, and 2.) I frequently have to do a double take and ask, "wher…
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 would bet a lot of money I already know the pitch. It's the same one that the Confluence PM I'm sure made. "We have done very well selling to technical programmers and hip startups, but the market is so much bigger. shows Office 365 revenue numbers vs Slack revenue numbers . We have an opportunity to take this to the next level. We need to make this the goto office communication platform. cheers . Markdown may seem…
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The infuriating thing is that these would be some of the easiest possible features to add a toggle for. There's nothing wrong with liking drafts that float to the top, or rich text editing, but when a significant portion of your users is extremely upset about a tiny UX behavior like this, even if they end up being a minority, there's no excuse to not add an opt-out.
The real problem is that companies seem to think that users hate toggles. It's extremely hard for me to understand how valid this might be since I have techy people around me most often, but even when I don't, I've never heard someone complain about excess toggles. Ever. Is this a thing people do? I hear orders of magnitude more complaints about lack of toggles.
You can tell that this is the Chrome team's philosophy when you go onto their bug tracker and see the vast ocean of WONTFIXes. You might even extend the philosophy to all of Google, when I think of things like "ignoring" "even" "words" "in" "quotes" come to think of it...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The goal is for workflows to evolve This exchange is a pretty good summation of one of the biggest purely practical reasons why I'm so obsessive about tools, and why I'm so willing to put up with the initial cost of learning systems like Linux and Vim/Emacs. Outside of fundamentally better workflow improvements, most professional fields don't randomly change their tools. If you gave a professional artist a new penc…
Another thing in Slack that has annoyingly changed (without an option to toggle off) is: its "Drafts" feature - where leaving a channel with an unfinished message means that the channel itself gets moved to the top of the left sidebar. This completely breaks my flow, because 1.) you can no longer use up/down hotkeys to reliably go between specific channels, and 2.) I frequently have to do a double take and ask, "wher…