Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?

If you don’t understand why people love Slack, then you don’t understand what usable enterprise software means or why people love it.

Imagine how many people never used a chat app in a business context before. Maybe this is hard, as you can’t imagine who they could be — or you don’t remember a time _before_ the ubiquity of chat apps in the workplace. But trust me those people are a majority of the workforce.

Now imagine you are an enterprise user who has no control over how they work, and they’re told to use “something new to increase productivity”. They sigh because it is probably bullshit and they’re being forced to use it by the “decision maker”.

But lo and behold, Slack is actually useful and usable! Because in large part the value of any chat app is how well it is adopted by one’s (relatively non techy) teammates!

Slack is a masterclass in commercializing enterprise software through ease of adoption and use. The core tech is completely undifferentiated, but the understanding of enterprise environments and workplace psychology is second to maybe only Microsoft.

Slack is hard to leave. I work on a 100% remote team- it is our office. Few of us have met in person, there just isn't budget for travel. Therefore all of our emotional connections with each, all of our work-life are built atop the Slack (and Zoom) UI. That's a hard thing to replatform.

Slack also almost never falls down. Its remarkably fast, the search is fast and faceted, and they manage cross-device notification state better than... well Apple for one. That truly 'instant' messaging experience across devices is why they are superior to IRC and decentralized alternatives. 'Instant' editing and deleting your malformed message is a killer app.

Its a safe social network. I'd much rather post memes in Slack than on Facebook or Twitter, which is a persistent battlefield. If I slip up in front of my colleagues, it happens in context and can be sorted out among the tribe, but if I do so on a public social network, it could invite angry mobs or end my career, now or years into the future.

That said, I don't love Slack. I hate how it dominates my day. I hate how I find myself checking it in the car. I hate how I get into it while I'm running a build, post something funny and suck everybody's attention. I truly despise how their DM and notification read system means that have to check everything at all times to feel up to date. I'm in a half dozen public channels, and the blue alert in my tray shows that I have something to look at.

I want control of the UI. Its my workplace, but Slack can change it to their liking, not me to mine. Sometimes if we're lucky we'll get a feature flag, otherwise, its all up to them. There are a million Hacker News clients, but only one for Slack.

I want more nuanced prioritization.

I want my life back.

I don't, it was imposed on me as part of my daily job tooling.

> they manage cross-device notification state better than... well Apple for one. That truly 'instant' messaging experience across devices is why they are superior to IRC and decentralized alternatives

I recently deployed workplace chat for ~100 people using XMPP. People use whatever clients they want (but we have a list of recommended clients, and in practice everyone is using one of those). With the modern extensions (SMACKS, carbons, MAM, push service integration) cross-device notifications are totally seamless. A bunch of the users are non-technical and they have had no trouble.

Slack has a lot of advantages over the likes of XMPP but I don't think technical superiority is one of them.