I use Slack on a daily basis and view it as just another chat app. I don't understand why people love it. Can someone please explain this to me? Not looking to smear it but want to understand to see if I am missing any functionality.
Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?
1–10 of 85 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?
#2because everyone and their mom is on it so its a readymade community.
Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?
#3My CTO asks me this everyday. I guess the answer is they marketed it well as a comprehensive tool for teams/companies. Everyone knows about it. A lot of ppl use it. It has integrations built in. No need to install anything. Does the job.
There are things we don't like about it but it does the job well enough that the opportunity cost of trying to replace it too high for us at the moment. So we keep going with it.
Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?
#4Every time someone ask this question I think people are forgetting that Slack was the first of these SaaS chat programs to find major success. Discord, Teams, and everything else came riding on the heels of Slack's success. While it might just be "another chat app" now, at the time Slack was an easy to setup tool with tons of integrations.
Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?
#5Because we've tried Teams?
Seriously, though, I don't love any chat app that much. They're useful in some circumstances, but they can easily devolve into a horrific time-suck. People use them for important info that ought to go in emails, for example. Or hammer channels with loads of chaff and the occasional critical wheat kernel, so that you have to waste time on them looking for the latter.
These days, I check mine once a day. I guess that's equivalent to having someone xerox a website for me, but I get a lot more done that way.
Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?
#6slackware is where linus made his first kernel
Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?
#7Because we've tried Teams? Seriously, though, I don't love any chat app that much. They're useful in some circumstances, but they can easily devolve into a horrific time-suck. People use them for important info that ought to go in emails, for example. Or hammer channels with loads of chaff and the occasional critical wheat kernel, so that you have to waste time on them looking for the latter. These days, I check mine…
> Because we've tried Teams?
That scans. I hate chat apps, personally, but we are required to use Teams at my workplace. Teams is truly horrendous. I would strongly prefer that we used Slack.
Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?
#8Because we've tried Teams? Seriously, though, I don't love any chat app that much. They're useful in some circumstances, but they can easily devolve into a horrific time-suck. People use them for important info that ought to go in emails, for example. Or hammer channels with loads of chaff and the occasional critical wheat kernel, so that you have to waste time on them looking for the latter. These days, I check mine…
> Because we've tried Teams? That scans. I hate chat apps, personally, but we are required to use Teams at my workplace. Teams is truly horrendous. I would strongly prefer that we used Slack.
Microsoft Teams really is horrendous.
I've used a lot of chat apps over decades. Teams might be the first one that manages to be _confusing_ - a feat I'd never seen in a chat app - because of the way it rearranges new threads, yet hides the recent part of the thread. Plus various other half-implemented features. The wiki and sharepoint/file integration doesn't work very well. There's no wiki search. It's super easy to delete an entire wiki. I've lost notifications on entire channels for > 1 month without realizing it. Just a ton of little stuff like that; my team will never go back.
Slack is "fine" - it mostly works, and has a lot of app integrations.
Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?
#9I suspect it has to do also with the culture of places that use it well.
Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?
#10Every time someone ask this question I think people are forgetting that Slack was the first of these SaaS chat programs to find major success. Discord, Teams, and everything else came riding on the heels of Slack's success. While it might just be "another chat app" now, at the time Slack was an easy to setup tool with tons of integrations.
And before Slack, HipChat was quite good.