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

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#311

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 4:08 AM UTC

To be fair, at least one of the most annoying features reported in the blog post (not respecting closing backticks) appears to be fixed, at least for me.

But in general I agree with the sentiment that this feature should have been easy to make optional (none of the underlying data changes, it's just a UI control), so I think Slack deserves the scorn for this one.

Related, rhe absolute one saving grace feature that I commend reddit for is old.reddit.com. It may be "ugly", but it also lets me be extremely fast when browsing (not a ton of extraneous whitespace like I can't stand in the new interface). IMO lots of "designer-led redesigns" killed many a previous chat forum (looking at you Slashdot). A common thread is many of these redesigns are built to appeal to a less expert-level user. But by doing this in a way that is not optional, you are guaranteed to piss off the folks who are the biggest users of your product. It is no wonder they are vocal!

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#312

Post by master-litty » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 4:09 AM UTC

nerdponx wrote: post #69

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…

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.

Oh man, Lync. The re-skin of MSN Messenger that nobody wanted.

I remember when I couldn't change my status from "Away" for some reason. On my computer it would always show me as "Online," but to everyone else I had been away for 300+ days.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#313

Post by wpietri » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 4:10 AM UTC

rmsaksida wrote: post #284

exogeny wrote: post #38

I'm going to take the opposite of this argument, and for bonafides, I run the product team for a 1000+ person company. I'm going to assume that this thing was tested out the wazoo, both qualitatively and behind enough feature-flags and buckets to keep Optimizely in business for a year. So I have no doubt that this wasn't just a hunch on their part, but something that they meticulously tracked. If I'm wrong, definitel…

As someone who runs the product team for a 1000+ person company, the concept of intransigent minorities should be of interest to you. [1] The gist of it is that an intransigent minority can often dictate the choices of a flexible majority. It is unwise to make decisions based solely on majority rule, as stubborn minorities can affect complex systems in ways that you do not expect. The phenomenon can be verified in a…

And I'd add that inclusion is especially important for a tool that's supposed to connect everybody in the company. Thinking that one can ignore a chunk of the audience because they have no choice but to keep using your product is at best confused, and at worse displaying enormous arrogance. It's the sort of enterprise-grade nonsense that Slack was initially seen as an antidote to.

I get that things that want to be popular quite often shiv the early adopters as they become mainstream, as a) that particular orange has been well juiced, and b) satisfying early-adopter needs really can get in the way of that holy grail, maximizing revenue.

But here I don't think there's a big conflict. There are a bunch of ways this could have been done to make everybody happy. It could have been opt-in for a while and then opt out. Or as others point out, there are apparently good WYSIWYG experiences already out there. With a market cap of $12 billion, Slack could afford to buy one, or at least the team behind it.

The only explanation I see is that it was rushed out the door to meet some executive's goals. Which suggests that Slack is becoming the sort of clueless, sales-driven, user-contemptuous company the initially aimed to overthrow.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#314

Post by rbavocadotree » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 4:11 AM UTC

p1necone wrote: post #306

StefanKarpinski wrote: post #288

Slack’s old formatting syntax was Markdown-like but not exactly Markdown, just similar. In case anyone from Slack is paying attention to their technical users here, this is a great opportunity to move to CommonMark formatting for technical users and wysiwyg for non-technical users: just make this optional and switch the format syntax for the non-wysiwyg mode to CommonMark. I can understand that changing the formattin…

Agreed, isn't slack only popular because of "cool" tech startups picking it up initially?

65 of the fortune 100 companies use slack.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#315

Post by seandougall » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 4:13 AM UTC

city41 wrote: post #272

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…

The draft feature positively boggles my mind. The intention seems to be to collect all your drafts into one location. But that comes with the assumption people will have multiple drafts for ... chat channels? Do people really work that way? If the actual intention is to remind you you have a half written message, seems some kind of indicator on the channel would suffice. Having my channel “disappear” on me is maddeni…

It did suffice! There used to be a pencil indicator next to the channel name in its usual spot, and it worked great. It maybe could have been more visually obvious, since leaving a draft in a chat so really is a rare phenomenon, but it was still massively preferable to the capricious ordering it does now.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#316

Post by shantly » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 4:14 AM UTC

WatchDog wrote: post #33

Since moving companies, I have traded slack for microsoft teams. Teams is pretty terrible in comparison, one of the most annoying "features" is it's WYSIWYG editor, I have no idea why slack would want to copy one of the worst elements about teams.

Teams is way worse than Slack. So's Facebook's Business Chat offering, which I find less horrible than Teams at least but it tags along with their "business social" application, and those are always useless crap.

Though it's been a year since I used Slack and from the look of things on here, they're trying their best to catch up in the bad-UX department. The drafts thing that moves channels around seems awful, too.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#317

Post by xkcd-sucks » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 4:16 AM UTC

It's like overnight my text editor got replaced with MS Word

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#318

Post by igetspam » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 4:18 AM UTC

timcederman wrote: post #294

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.

That's ridiculous, right?. Cmd/Ctrl-z has a defined function. Slack is hijacking that because they've decided that decades of established patterns are wrong and creating another one-off for their very specific use case is the right thing to do. The hubris...

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#319

Post by tingletech » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 4:18 AM UTC

I can't reproduce the first issue;

  when you do `foo()` it foos the bar.

works as expected for me.

I do observe the second issue re trying to edit `foo()` to `bar.foo()`

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#320

Post by nicwolff » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 4:21 AM UTC

imglorp wrote: post #299

vailripper wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Jira still has two different WYSIWYG implementations on different pages. On the "classic" issue form, you still enter `{code}this is code{code}`, but if you open that issue in the sidebar of the backlog page, it's Markdown.