The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor • Hacker News Board

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#91

Post by inferiorhuman » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 1:23 AM UTC

ricefield wrote: post #84

Jamwinner wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isnt that just a silent admission that modern tech support is woefully broken, more than a twitter is good message?

Broken how? This feels like a good example of a company building and launching something, then watching and responding to how the public/users react to it. Isn't that more or less what you should do as a company? Build things and then adjust your strategy based on how the market likes or dislikes it?

Broken how?

Broken in the sense that Slack kept going forward even after the complaints kept rolling in. How hard would it have been to pull the latest release?

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#92

Post by munk-a » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 1:26 AM UTC

colechristensen wrote: post #27

fortytw2 wrote: post #18

It's pretty incredible to think that for all the billions of dollars around Slack it's still fundamentally the same product with the same value add that it was when it first launched. Sure, maybe it's faster or more efficient or whatever now, but what it is at heart is the _exact_ same thing it was on Day 1.

Does it need to change? I don't want Slack to be a different or more comprehensive tool.

Probably not, but why do they need the billions of dollars of funding and steep subscription cost then?

The per-user cost is only Silicon Valley reasonable - it's nearly as high as GSuite which provides a lot more value, and if so many other major business suite companies (Google, MSFT) weren't absolutely terrible at building chat applications I'm pretty sure Slack would be forced out of the market (or to actually compete).

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#93

Post by thenewnewguy » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 1:27 AM UTC

ArmandGrillet wrote: post #6

Dark mode, better performances, option to disable divisive new features: Slack might be making it harder to focus at work but the product itself improved quite a lot in 2019, kudos to the PMs.

> better performances

I don't mean to bash slack too hard, but it honestly feels like the performance has gotten worse over time for me. Certain actions like Up Arrow (edit previous message) and loading threads on the "Threads" page seem to take way longer than they used to.

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#94

Post by danShumway » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 1:27 AM UTC

Jamwinner wrote: post #81

danShumway wrote: post #79

This is a good reminder that sometimes complaining about companies on social media like Hackernews and Twitter does actually help. Not always, maybe not even usually. But Slack went from, "no, we have no plans to adjust this", to "yes, we'll include a toggle", and the reason was that a bunch of people publicly complained and wrote a bunch of messages to support. It is a very, very, very small victory, and if I was go…

Isnt that just a silent admission that modern tech support is woefully broken, more than a twitter is good message?

Modern tech support is woefully broken in many ways, and the speed to which consumers resort to complaining on Twitter is a partial symptom of that broken system -- it's the result of consumers feeling like mass, reactionary public shaming is the only strategy that works anymore.

That's not what I'm getting at though; I'm not saying everything is awesome, or that public backlash is even the best way to currently enact change -- I just want to push against the occasional criticism I see that complaining about stuff doesn't help, that consumer backlash is ultimately just virtue signalling, that boycotts don't ever work, and that it's all just a waste of time.

To be clear, some types of complaining are harmful, problematic, or worthless: this is complicated, it isn't black-and-white. But it's not universally worthless to publicly push back on company policies. There are a nontrivial number of stories about consumer backlashes actually causing companies to change course. What that suggests is that on more important issues (just for one example, arbitration), we could see real movement if the backlash was large enough and unified enough.

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#95

Post by zamalek » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 1:28 AM UTC

tasuki wrote: post #32

ianstormtaylor wrote: post #22

In case anyone's interested, here's the Chromium bug(s) that's one of the main reasons the WYSIWYG editor has such issues in Chrome(/Electron): - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=102937... - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608393 - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608162 The gist of it is that they "canonicalize" the DOM selection when you have two adjac…

Not sure Chromium is to blame here. All the WYSIWYGs in all the environments I've ever seen I found fiddly and unpleasant to use.

The reason is that content editable is a gaping hole in the HTML5 spec, at least last time I checked, there are tons of undefined undefined behaviors (not a typo) where vendors have to choose what they want to do and where developers have no idea that the behavior does not exist in a specification.

My very wise coworker made every effort to avoid that minefield. I thought he was wrong for many years, but I have been forced to agree, content editable is completely and utterly useless and should be avoided at all costs.

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#96

Post by binaryblitz » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 1:28 AM UTC

ArmandGrillet wrote: post #6

Dark mode, better performances, option to disable divisive new features: Slack might be making it harder to focus at work but the product itself improved quite a lot in 2019, kudos to the PMs.

Kudos to the PMs?

They allowed a half-baked (if that) feature to be shipped out and then wouldn't back down from it for a week.

This reeks of PMs pushing a feature that isn't ready yet.

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#97

Post by munk-a » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 1:30 AM UTC

mikl wrote: post #71

I was never a fan of their pseudo-markdown (it’s so close, but the minor deviations are annoying ), but it’s a great to have it back instead of that other train-wreck of an editor. At least you can now edit text without regularly wanting scream in frustration.

For someone who habitually uses old MUD style emote lead-ins I was constantly needing to back edit comments to fix:

* sigh * this was disappointing

being turned into a list.

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#98

Post by o-__-o » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 1:30 AM UTC

trynewideas wrote: post #76

soneca wrote: post #48

It is interesting to me that the rant post about Slack's WYSIWYG editor was the 18th most upvoted HN post of all time. No idea what conclusion should I draw from it, if any at all, but surprising for me at least.

lots of hn readers use slack lots of hn slack users disliked the feature lots of hn slack users who disliked the feature went straight to hn to vote up any post complaining about it that's how communities around tech broadly tend to work

a few people figured out how to change their workflow to deal with the change. turns out the same problem that exists between non-technical users and technical users exist between power-elite users and the non-PE users. when you try to show a non-technical user a different way to do things, they get really frustrated and give up easily because their entire mental model needs to change (they were used to clicking on an icon in a certain spot, goto a menu, select an option, get a dialog etc.). To them this represents a massive unknown if they do even one step wrong and so instead of accepting and using the new feature, regardless of the perceived benefit their anxiety takeover.

The correlations here is astounding. I'm the kind of person who will vocally speak out about emacs vs vi or the pronunciation of "c-out" vs "sow-t", but the WYSIWYG editor didn't fundamentally break my mental model of Slack. I just learned to adapt, but seeing the blowback.. holy cow.

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#99

Post by munk-a » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 1:32 AM UTC

wool_gather wrote: post #55

Well, they put it in the "Advanced" settings section, which I interpret as reluctance, but it's there.

I am a bit afraid they might be supplying it for just a limited while for them to fix it up and re-enable it for everyone.

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#100

Post by munk-a » Wed, Dec 04, 2019, 1:33 AM UTC

pkamb wrote: post #88

Now support real Markdown.

In particular their ``` code block support is super frustrating, especially since copying a code block produces invalid markdown even if it was originally written properly, they like to pull new lines out of it.