Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 85 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?

#11

Post by mathattack »

downerending wrote: post #5

Because 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…

Teams is the choice of CFOs. If you’re buying a bazillion Office licenses anyway, MSFT will practically give Teams away if you boot Slack.

Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?

#12

Post by bouke »

downerending wrote: post #5

Because 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…

Ugh I hate Teams with a passion and hope it dies asap.

Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?

#13

Post by janee »

Personally I'd say it's a combination of traction and API for me.

It's pretty useful to have a ubiquitous comms tool that integrates with most saas infra out the box...I do loathe its shoddy audio/video/screenshare

Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?

#14

Post by oweiler »

meagher wrote: post #10
BoysenberryPi wrote: post #4

Every 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.

So good that Atlassian sold it.

Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?

#15

Post by free652 »

ruffrey wrote: post #8
JohnFen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

Teams is ok, it's just too much functionality. I have problem finding the correct chat room for the voice call right away, I always have to double check if I am in the correct chat.

Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?

#16

Post by Kaze404 »

I don't love it. On my time being forced to use it I hated pretty much every aspect of it that wasn't its text features (threads, custom emojis) or ready made integrations. Everything else, from the technical aspects to their API gave me nothing but headaches. And even then it's still better than Discord.

Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?

#17

Post by ralusek »

Because it's good enough, has nice integrations, and is better than email. Convincing non-technical parts of my team to use a chat application is impossible if it can't go on their phones and is basically one single step to get going. Slack fits that criteria.

That being said, their notification logic. I remember seeing this insane flowchart demonstrating how complicated slack's logic was when determining whether to do a push notification. I wonder why it never occurred to them that one of the primary considerations should be that if you've sent me over 3 notifications in the past 5 minutes, and I haven't checked, please fucking stop.

Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?

#18

Post by redis_mlc »

oweiler wrote: post #14
meagher wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And before Slack, HipChat was quite good.

So good that Atlassian sold it.

I used the Hipchat web client for a year. It worked perfectly.

I heard from others that the native app didn't.

I had a chance to talk to one of the Hipchat PMs. Atlassian didn't seem too attached to operating it for some reason.

Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?

#19

Post by secabeen »

ralusek wrote: post #17

Because it's good enough, has nice integrations, and is better than email. Convincing non-technical parts of my team to use a chat application is impossible if it can't go on their phones and is basically one single step to get going. Slack fits that criteria. That being said, their notification logic. I remember seeing this insane flowchart demonstrating how complicated slack's logic was when determining whether to…

> I wonder why it never occurred to them that one of the primary considerations should be that if you've sent me over 3 notifications in the past 5 minutes, and I haven't checked, please fucking stop.

Because sometimes reading the notification is enough to get the information I need, and I want to keep watching the notifications, but I don't need to respond to any of them.

Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?

#20

Post by tracker1 »

There are positives and negatives to them all. I'm relatively partial to MS Teams (now that it works well in Linux), since it has decent integration with Outlook and group chat/meetings, integrations are on par.

That said slack and the like are better mostly because of integration which is smoother than custom IRC bots and clients by contrast... Some obsess over security, groups, etc... other features are just that features.

On the flip side, they all suck... MS Teams' wikis aren't in markdown and can't be edited outside of the teams client, other sharing is actually integrated into Sharepoint, and those integrations with system syncing breaks a lot and sucks worse.

I haven't used slack but very little for one project I'm on in a few years... it now has a lot of the features I was missing before. I think Google's Hangouts had a lot of potential before they shifted gears into their client of the month and started breaking the UX.

In the end, what will be around in 5+ years, who knows. Things shift around and change... Things get re-invented in better and worse ways.

Post reply on HN