Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible • Hacker News Board

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#291

Post by t34543 » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 3:45 AM UTC

ben174 wrote: post #147

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've had these exact same problems with Slack and every application that evolves and makes decisions for you. Usually they have the right idea, but sometimes they take decisions way too far and don't let us as users decide for ourselves. I understand the concept of continual updates but these are some breaking changes and it scares me that they just show up overnight with no warning.

At some point the product is no longer about pleasing users, it’s about the product managers getting kudos and promotions.

I believe this is what we’re seeing now. Someone at Slack has a strong incentive to change things for changes sake and they will spin this as being wildly successful and get a bonus.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#292

Post by _asummers » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 3:45 AM UTC

paulddraper wrote: post #277

guessmyname wrote: post #46

This is funny because I work across the street of Slack’s office in Vancouver, Canada and two Slack engineers who I frequently chat with during our daily commute already told me they —and a handful of other employees— hate the WYSIWYG input box too, but were afraid to express their feelings because their role is irrelevant compared to the people who made the decision to ship it.

For the life of me, I cannot figure out how to create two adjacent but separate code blocks. ``` one ``` ``` two ``` I've tried and tried.

If you add a blank line between them, then it won't combine them.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#293

Post by thsowers » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 3:47 AM UTC

baby wrote: post #275

_jal wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad sign. If the rank and file are afraid to give honest internal feedback, they have a management problem. At least for me, that's a time-to-leave signal.

And this ladies and gentlemen is the over reaction of the year!

While I can appreciate some healthy skepticism on how widespread the practice is, welcoming honest input from rank and file members of any company can be extremely valuable to improving the quality of products, and many successful companies realize this and encourage such feedback

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#294

Post by timcederman » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 3:50 AM UTC

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…

If you hit ctrl/cmd-z after it automatically changes something you can keep going like you used to. e.g. try typing `foo`, and then hit ctrl-z, it'll revert it to plain text. I've found that useful for getting around the autoformatting.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#295

Post by wpietri » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 3:51 AM UTC

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.

Yeah, I was excited by Slack initially, but now I see it as a menace. It's the open-office plan of the virtual office.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#296

Post by cwilkes » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 3:51 AM UTC

hunter2_ wrote: post #237

_bxg1 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most of the time toggles are done poorly in that I can’t tell if they are on or off. There’s no consensus on if that is left or right. Or lit up or darkened. It is maddening.

In my opinion the right way to do toggles is to have area below it that is either enabled / expanded for On or grayed out / collapsed for Off. That way I can also read what the toggle implies. I suppose that can be done in mouse over if there are space constraints.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#297

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 3:53 AM UTC

jonstewart wrote: post #287

Hell yes, it’s awful. I am going to convey to Slack tomorrow I will cancel our account if they don’t fix it in a reasonable timeframe. For my dev team I t has gone from a valuable tool to actively harmful, overnight.

[deleted]

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#298

Post by austinshea » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 3:53 AM UTC

It is driving me absolutely nuts.

The changes are so obviously ill considered, and, without having the data to prove this, I believe it’s trying to solve a problem that very few people had with the previous solution.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#299

Post by imglorp » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 3:54 AM UTC

vailripper wrote: post #99

nerdponx wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what else has a terrible WYSIWYG editor? Microsoft Teams. It's kind of sort of like Markdown, except when it isn't, or when it breaks. At least it's a step up from Lync.

Sounds like Atlassians approach with Jira - "it supports markdown, except when it doesn't!"

Preach it.

It seems every text input box across the product line has a different input method: BB, Jira, and Confluence. You'd think they might standardize with one to be less user hostile.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#300

Post by sethhochberg » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 3:54 AM UTC

iandanforth wrote: post #282

Oooh I hope they try to support bulleted lists. There is nothing more painful than trying to implement that correctly. Every time it works in Google docs I am god damn amazed .

They do, and it infuriatingly looks worse than

- just

- a

- simple

- list

If I needed anything more complex that that, Slack was already the wrong tool