Is Discord a viable alternative to Slack? If not, why not?
Yes it is, but a key feature discord lacks is threads. Still it is a huge upgrade from Slack in terms of performance and ease of use.
Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance
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Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance
#82This backend outage reveals how horrible the Slack UI is implemented. You post a message.... you think it got sent. Then 1min later, it tells you it was not.
I understand why they use this UI paradigm, but I don't understand why it's not reversed eg make it light grey until the API has confirmed it's been posted. That would maintain the nice 'you posted a message nice and quickly' responsive UI idea, but without making the user angry when it doesn't work. Even if the idea is to fool the user in to thinking Slack is faster than it is, the UI could at least use the reversed…
This morning I sent a message and it was greyed out until finally sending a minute later. So it would seem both cases are possible somehow. Different stages of data propagation?
Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance
#83This backend outage reveals how horrible the Slack UI is implemented. You post a message.... you think it got sent. Then 1min later, it tells you it was not.
I understand why they use this UI paradigm, but I don't understand why it's not reversed eg make it light grey until the API has confirmed it's been posted. That would maintain the nice 'you posted a message nice and quickly' responsive UI idea, but without making the user angry when it doesn't work. Even if the idea is to fool the user in to thinking Slack is faster than it is, the UI could at least use the reversed…
Ripcord[1] does what you describe. My guess is that Slack doesn't do this because it makes Slack's latency extremely obvious. Even on a great connection, a decent fraction of messages will take multiple seconds to go from gray to black. Apparently even when Slack's API is operating normally, it can take a very long time to respond with, "Your message was received."
Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance
#84All of Amazon is transitioning from Chime to Slack; this doesn't look great.
Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance
#85Is Discord a viable alternative to Slack? If not, why not?
From my perspective, it offers an overall nicer user experience, and it's free.
I assume Discord's gamer branding (which they only dropped recently) might be the reason Slack is more widely used for teams.
Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Optimistic design is good, but you need to also tell the user when you’re being optimistic. iMessage, for example, “sends” a message, but it will also tell you when it’s been delivered so you can check to make sure.
Funny story—iMessage on one of my laptops used to very frequently tell me "This message could not be delivered" even though the person on the other end received it fine. (The problem went away after an OS reinstall.)
Pessimistic design lets you surprise and delight ;)
Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance
#87I’ve recently taken an interest in data analytics and have been using daily volumes of interruptions I receive via slack (and other sources) as a data set to learn myself on and try to understand how I can be more productive individually. Today’s disruption should provide an interesting data point all of its own.
Do you work for yourself or someone else? If the latter, why do you spend any effort maximizing your efficiency? This is a pattern that I see often on HN. People take an employer's problem (they are wasting the time they've purchased with distractions) and making it their personal problem.
Some people try to approach an employment relationship as one of good faith, rather than an adversarial one where you try to do the minimum amount of work without getting fired. Plus, investing in your craft has long term benefits for your career and skill set.
Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance
#88This backend outage reveals how horrible the Slack UI is implemented. You post a message.... you think it got sent. Then 1min later, it tells you it was not.
I was surprised that I couldn't even open up a DM conversation without it blocking on the network - the Ctrl-T/Ctrl-K quick-find just got stuck when I tried clicking on the person's name.
Just... how!?
Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance
#89Is Discord a viable alternative to Slack? If not, why not?
Yes it is, but a key feature discord lacks is threads. Still it is a huge upgrade from Slack in terms of performance and ease of use.
I am a heavy Slack user but I don't use threads. Threads seem like a confusing mess. Am I missing something not using Slack threads?
Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance
#902.5 hours in and still "investigating". No new updates for the moment as we're continuing to investigate. Customers may notice that other functionality, such as Search, is also affected. Oct 5, 12:40 PM EDT
Almost 3 hours now and their status and our user experience still shows issues. This is a bad one for them. Monday morning too.