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Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?

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Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?

#61

Post by rauhl »

reilly3000 wrote: post #53

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 s…

> There are a million Hacker News clients, but only one for Slack.

There’s also emacs-slack, which is exactly what it says on the tin. It means that I control my Slack experience.

Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?

#62

Post by exikyut »

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.

What, it looks identical to Slack as well!

Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?

#63

Post by scarface74 »

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.

The geek version of “Seinfeld is Unfunny”....

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...

Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?

#64

Post by rm445 »

People love Slack because IRC is loveable. People use Slack because its advantages over IRC are in areas that favour it being installed in corporate environments, while benefits of IRC (such as being free and open, simple and extensible, running in a shell) are neutral or even negatives for that environment.

Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?

#65

Post by hiccuphippo »

reilly3000 wrote: post #53

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 s…

There's another, unofficial, client for slack that I know of but I've never tried it: https://volt-app.com/

Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?

#66

Post by scarface74 »

x2f10 wrote: post #36
elwesties wrote: post #25

I suspect much of the hate for slack is from two types of people. Those who are too young to know the tyranny of email and those who used to ignore their email. As to why it’s so popular, it was the first good business chat solution that went mainstream. And I still haven’t seen another that matches it’s quality

Slack prevents deep work. I respond to e-mails 2-4 times a day during task transitions. The sender does not anticipate an immediate response so the 1-2 hours delay is OK. Compare this to Slack which requires constant monitoring where senders anticipate an immediate response. Not to mention the increase in casual "water cooler" conversations. The find the same people that recommend Slack are the same people that recom…

We are a smallish B2B SAAS company where new clients (whales) can add 5% to our revenue and enough load to our servers to need to monitor and add resources.

The first few weeks before and after a major go live, especially if there is new functionality, management will expect their team leads/single responsible individuals to respond immediately. Even if they don’t say it. The CxO’s, sales, and implementations folks will send you an email then immediately send you a Teams message asking you did you get the email and if they don’t hear from you, call you on Teams.

On the other hand, most days if it isn’t a major client issue, it’s mostly like you said, there isn’t a real expectation of an immediate response.

Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?

#67

Post by scarface74 »

muzani wrote: post #39
x2f10 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack prevents deep work. I respond to e-mails 2-4 times a day during task transitions. The sender does not anticipate an immediate response so the 1-2 hours delay is OK. Compare this to Slack which requires constant monitoring where senders anticipate an immediate response. Not to mention the increase in casual "water cooler" conversations. The find the same people that recommend Slack are the same people that recom…

This seems more a problem with the culture. Where I've worked, messaging and emails are used for non-urgent, handle this when you're available type notices. If something was urgent, we walk up to their desk and tell them. Slack actually cuts down on desk-related interruptions; we'd literally just Slack each other even though we're sitting across. Water cooler conversations are a kind of stress dissipation response fo…

Most software development companies of any size, even small companies, have some mixture of people in office, working from home, remote workers, separate offices etc.

Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?

#68

Post by brianush1 »

reilly3000 wrote: post #53

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 s…

There's also https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ which is pretty good.

Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?

#69

Post by aaron695 »

> I use Slack on a daily basis and view it as just another chat app.

Can you edit a message once sent in Facebook messenger?

Once you understand why that's important, you'll start to get it.

Slack actually cared what the users wanted. Not what managers or IT teams cargo culting current message apps thought workers should have.

This is upside down .

People secretly installed Slack at workplaces (there are old articles on this) and the managers had to get it. The rest is history.

Last month Signal got a Thumbs up and Thumbs down icons, after how many years.... The IT teams are partly to blame here on top of the managers.

Re: Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?

#70

Post by ken »

reilly3000 wrote: post #53

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 s…

> Its a safe social network. I'd much rather post memes in Slack than on Facebook or Twitter

Facebook has private groups, too. (I assume Twitter has something similar.) At worst, this is a great demonstration that defaults matter. I often hear people speak as though Facebook/Twitter/Slack/IRC/etc are only usable in their default mode, even though most people I know don't actually use them that way.

> Slack also almost never falls down. Its remarkably fast

I feel like the chat software I used to use called "Slack" was completely different than what I hear other people talk about by that name.

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