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

Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 809 posts

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#231

Post by vehementi »

erichurkman wrote: post #159
lewisl9029 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord has much better performance for large communities, and I've found it to be perfect for remote collaboration with its intuitive and super low friction voice channels. But the issue around professionalism that you bring up is certainly valid. I don't want to have to maintain separate accounts for work vs play (unless there's a seamless way to switch between them, like for Google, but currently there isn't), but…

And you still cannot leave a channel in Discord. You can mute, but that's not the same thing — it still clutters your sidebar, and still downloads contents from it. Then, join any random server and there can be dozens of distinct channels, many of which are meta-on-meta channels: rules, announcements, shout-box, bot-sticky messages, bot commands, and a plethora of other noise, on top of the multitude of automated bot…

Obviously downloading contents from muted channels is not an issue. Also you can both mute and hide the channel which effectively leaves it. And obviously slack bots are just as powerful as discord's so it's just a matter of servers electing to add crazy bots or not. Everyone bitches about giphy... these are some real stretches if these are your actual complaints about enterprise readiness, rather than data/admin policies, account segregation, etc. Do you have a vested interest somewhere?

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#232

Post by randomdata »

tjpnz wrote: post #189

Just throwing out there but has Slack genuinely improved the work lives of anybody? I've used it for my past two jobs and have yet to find a way of using it that doesn't destroy my productivity or make me genuinely afraid of receiving a message and being thrown off what I was doing.

Maybe no more than any other chat application (Slack has been the nicest of those which we have tried though), but my workplace, which was born around office messaging, has recently started to push towards more voice communication and I feel like that has brought a decrease in productivity.

Having an automatic transcript of all discussion was the most amazing resource. Now I, along with everyone else, have to rely on faulty memory, which leads to more meetings to continually check that we understand each other, and longer meetings as it takes a lot longer to convey ideas. Quite frankly, it is a disaster, in my opinion.

But perhaps in both of our cases we are simply resistant to change.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#234

Post by Lucadg »

fpvracing wrote: post #61
tetrisgm wrote: post #44

Congrats to them. I used to be an avid user (loved the way some integrations could help productivity), but since then moved on to Discord, which feels superior in every aspect, especially since it's free. I'm not sure how I feel about the valuation. I'd like to see how the user base, especially the ratio of paying users, has been growing. It feels likely that most of the companies that would have been easy to convert…

How is Discord superior? I haven't really used it but my first impressions are that it seems very tailored to the gaming community. I have used Slack extensively and it appears more professional. And if Discord is free, how do they make money / keep the lights on? I do worry about Slack's pricing since there is a vast chasm between their free plan and their paid plans. I use Slack to run some open source and hobbyist…

We switched from Slack to Discord in our community and I prefer it. It feels faster to me, the Slack app on a Mac got really slow after a while. I wish Discord added Telegram style voice messages and it would be perfect. To be totally honest I still think forums like phpbb where much better but they didn't really transitioned to the mobile world. I miss them.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#235

Post by vehementi »

fpvracing wrote: post #114
lewisl9029 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord has much better performance for large communities, and I've found it to be perfect for remote collaboration with its intuitive and super low friction voice channels. But the issue around professionalism that you bring up is certainly valid. I don't want to have to maintain separate accounts for work vs play (unless there's a seamless way to switch between them, like for Google, but currently there isn't), but…

For me, the voice channels are actually off-putting. I've never been a gamer and don't like the idea of feeling like I'm chatting on the phone with strangers. Text feels much more comfortable. Thanks for your response. It is good to get feedback from somebody who has used Discord as I am just about to launch a new community on Slack. I will stick with Slack for now.

The historical context of discord, is that every gaming group would have some sort of chat app (mainly IRC, more recently hipchat, yammer, slack) as well as a push-to-talk voice app (ventrilo, teamspeak, mumble, ...). Discord is merely combining the best of both (slack, and all its api support, with built in voice channels).

Nobody has to use voice. In many communities, most don't. But as the above said, it's a super frictionless way to talk if needed and is a lot less formal than "starting a call/meeting". You just publicly hop into one of a dozen visible channels and anyone else can hop in with you to discuss an issue or just hang out mostly-not-talking.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#237

Post by ec109685 »

philwelch wrote: post #81
AznHisoka wrote: post #8

Is 16B really too high of a valuation when Atlassian is double the market cap at 32B? Both have similar products (collaboration/productivity) and are extremely sticky.

Atlassian products are more mission-critical. Most companies actually need some tool that does what Jira or Bitbucket does. They don't really need Slack.

People where I work would much rather give up Jira instead of slack.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#238

Post by snarfy »

fpvracing wrote: post #116
jMyles wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is Discord superior? I haven't really used it but my first impressions are that it seems very tailored to the gaming community. At NuCypher switched to Discord from Slack. It's not particularly tailored , but certainly cultural influenced. There are maybe a feature or two that make more sense for gaming, but it's very useful for business. The Discord voice features are particularly useful and are in use every d…

> Slack also has a disastrous "feature" wherein any user can cause the SlackBot to send a message to another user. In an open instance (which Slack seems wont to discourage), this means that a user can easily impersonate another user and purport to be sending messages in an official capacity. Could you tell me more about that? How is that done and is there a way for workspace owners to prevent it?

We use the api in our CI/CD pipeline to send messages to the teams about build status.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#239

Post by danpalmer »

nwallin wrote: post #144
ddlutz wrote: post #21

So they are worth $1,600 per user? I don't understand how that is possible at all.

My company is in the middle of switching from Slack to Microsoft teams. The water cooler talk is that we're paying Slack $1000-$2500 per year per user. It sounds like their business model thus far is that of p2w mobile games. Nearly all of your users are minnows, but some are whales. I don't know if any of this is true. It doesn't really sound believable that we're paying that much, tbh.

Why/how is your org paying that much per user? I was under the impression that Slack topped out at well below that figure even for all the enterprise bells and whistles. I assume there are additional services/features that I’m not aware of? On-premise or dedicated hardware? Special data location requirements?

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#240

Post by gtfratteus »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #179

This valuation depends on the continued incompetence of Google and Microsoft, who both offer Slack competitors as part of their productivity packages that most of Slack's paying customers already subscribe to. Their offerings are so bad that people pay money to Slack not to use them.

I use Hangouts every day at work. It's works fine. I have no complaints. What could Slack possibly be doing to make it worth paying extra to use it?

Seems like the bureaucracy of most companies just hasn't caught up to the fact that Slack isn't really necessary.

Post reply on HN