Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

Post by eternalny1 » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:11 PM UTC

lucideer wrote: post #624

bishalb wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I understand why this change can be annoying to the tech savvy folks of hackernews, it can be quite helpful for those who aren't that tech savvy and want easy ways to bold, italicize texts (that make up majority of the slack user base). Heck I am sure most of the slack users wouldn't even know it was possible to bold, italicize on slack using markdown.

Why does anyone (tech savvy or otherwise) need to bold or italicize anything. In my mind bolding/italicizing are nice-to-haves alongside emoji. You wouldn't compromise the entire functional user experience of the central feature of your app for nicer emojis. (at least I hope not).

Post by dangus » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:15 PM UTC

bartread wrote: post #339

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…

> This reminds me of Atlassian's god-awful WYSIWYG editor. Oh my goodness: triggered. I've barred the use of Confluence at our company specifically because of this. "But, but, we used it at blah company." "Yes, so did I at blahblah company, and it was unbelievably crappy and made me angry every time I had to edit a document: we're not using it." I DO NOT want to have to use what amounts to an extremely buggy, caprici…

Post by Fiahil » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:19 PM UTC

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.

Post by swader999 » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:20 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #456

swader999 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's in their ultimate best interest to find a new vocation. You can't just hit undo or tab out of this one.

That's for them to decide, not for HN users to prescribe. Internet commenters underestimate the impact their personal comments have on the targeted person by at least 10x. It's just not nice. It's unlikely that the person in question is reading this HN thread, but there's a chance that they are, and that means we should do better.

Post by reconstrukt » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 1:22 PM UTC