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Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

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Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#951

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Teams is pretty horrible

MS Teams is free. At a previous company, we had slack and MS Teams side by side, to trial out MS Teams. Everyone preferred Slack by a huge margin. We were told to get use to Teams, because Teams is free. Guess what, it was fine.. no notable productivity lose going from slack to teams. If anything, team's sharepoint file integration is much better than slack, for keeping a single source of truth.

Endless notifications. I use Teams daily and it drives me insane. Especially every notification you get for a thread you already explicitly told you don't want notifications for. I stopped wishing people happy birthday but cause I would get notifications on three devices for days. Even though I said I don't want notifications for that thread. Teams is a buggy mess they will never get fixed because they only follow the votes on User Voice.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#952
post #945

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First off, that's super good to hear. Secondly, I'm absolutely flabbergasted that this reaction wasn't obvious to them from the get-go. This isn't the first time some silly addition of a wysiwyg feature has ended in outrage. What's even more astounding is that I don't think there are many features as despised as wysiwyg. It's up there with comic sans. Why make your entire UI revolve around one of the most despised fe…

How did you come to the conclusion that WYSIWYG are “one of the most despised features in the UX world”? That seems completely unfounded to me. WYSIWYG editors can be extremely bad … but millions of people use WYSIWYG editors all the time and wouldn’t ever think of exchanging them for plaintext editors with Markdown or something like that. You comment seems completely disconnected from any semblance of reality.

...problem is combining WYSIWIG with Markdown: that can't ever work well, you need a small toggle to let users choose toggle/choose between WYSIWIG (default) and Markdown, and have it remember the last setting the user used.

Best for new users and advanced ones.

If you have BOTH in one editor it's like you've built some kind of Vim-like UI that randomly jumps between modes, it will confuse the shit out of everybody all the time!

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#953
post #948
post #945

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you come to the conclusion that WYSIWYG are “one of the most despised features in the UX world”? That seems completely unfounded to me. WYSIWYG editors can be extremely bad … but millions of people use WYSIWYG editors all the time and wouldn’t ever think of exchanging them for plaintext editors with Markdown or something like that. You comment seems completely disconnected from any semblance of reality.

Just because millions of people use WYSIWYG editors every day, does not mean that they don’t absolutely despise it. I haven’t ever heard anyone comment on how enjoyable Word is to use.

...Word doesn't at the same time allow markdown input and autoformats it impredictibly! If you know how bad Word is (or was, haven't touched it in a while), imagine how bad a Word version with multimodal input would be!

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#954

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Teams is pretty horrible

MS Teams is free. At a previous company, we had slack and MS Teams side by side, to trial out MS Teams. Everyone preferred Slack by a huge margin. We were told to get use to Teams, because Teams is free. Guess what, it was fine.. no notable productivity lose going from slack to teams. If anything, team's sharepoint file integration is much better than slack, for keeping a single source of truth.

Same here. We used Slack and liked it. We're now using Teams, it's tolerable but Slack had significantly better UX.

The Android app in particular has trouble. And muting is all-or-nothing.

I've also had corrupted channels, I even escalated to Microsoft once.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#955

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for anyone who'd like some confirmation of this. Their official Twitter account it's also saying the same[1] I'm glad they listened to the feedback but their attitude towards people who wrote in with bugs/criticism should also be learned from. Being told 'We know what's best for you, we're not reverting the changes' was pretty insulting. [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/119764013617293721...

And in more than one place, viz., https://mobile.twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/119764819999085772... And something that occurred to me: if it's true that "in the future everyone will code (to some degree)," don't you think it's OK to start the baby steps of textual thinking? C'mon, it's markup with like six modes, people. Practice for half as long as you're on in one day and you'll be fluent.

> Practice for half as long as you're on in one day and you'll be fluent.

To be fair, you could learn almost anything in that amount of time;)

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#956
Slack should understand their market advantage is targeting development communities (with their partnership with Atlassian for instance).

Microsoft, Facebook, and others are going to eat their lunch as a generic workplace chat tool.

And if your clients are developers than they're going to have different needs and wants than your average non-tech user. They understand markdown, they don't want the editor overriding their intent.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#958

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.

I'm fairly sure you also used to be able to put bullets in blockquotes, right?

e.g.

  > * My quoted bullet point
I can't double-check it now as all my workspaces have converted

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#959
post #948
post #945

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you come to the conclusion that WYSIWYG are “one of the most despised features in the UX world”? That seems completely unfounded to me. WYSIWYG editors can be extremely bad … but millions of people use WYSIWYG editors all the time and wouldn’t ever think of exchanging them for plaintext editors with Markdown or something like that. You comment seems completely disconnected from any semblance of reality.

Just because millions of people use WYSIWYG editors every day, does not mean that they don’t absolutely despise it. I haven’t ever heard anyone comment on how enjoyable Word is to use.

We've started working on a preference that will let you return to the previous message composer. We don't have a specific release date to share right now — it's this team's top and only priority, however, and we expect to have it available on the desktop within a couple of weeks

===

"team's top and only priority"

I guess they need to learn how to be efficient if they need several weeks to add a checkbox to change one setting

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