Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian • Hacker News Board

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#321

Post by philwelch » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:46 PM UTC

ebiester wrote: post #264

philwelch wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp, but ever since we got the bandwidth and CPU necessary for the internet to not be a primarily text-based medium, the illiterates took over and that was the end of that.

Email: Two use cases. With email, how can I subscribe to conversations I'm interested in? Mailing lists are nice, but we have no real way to make mailing lists that start and stop on the fly like a chat channel in a way that is searchable to the entire organization during or after the fact. What email list system allows for quick creation and the ability for everyone in an organization to know that a conversation is…

> You get to all the requirements, and you end up with a discussion board instead or a new product that is to email lists what slack is to chat.

This would also be acceptable IMO. Any medium that enables asynchronous long-form written communication has advantages that are fundamentally impossible for any synchronous chat medium to match.

It turns out that listservs have successfully done this for decades. If there was even a fraction of the effort invested in this communication style as is invested in reinventing IRC with emoji and reaction gifs, I'm sure it would be even better.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#322

Post by plett » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:46 PM UTC

dom96 wrote: post #250

rspeer wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common refrain of IRC users who don't know what it's like to have real, convenient persistence that works for everyone. Nobody has made persistent IRC channels that are as usable as newer chat products that don't try to be IRC.

BNCs provide a semblance of persistence. But the real problem with IRC is smartphone persistence, I think irccloud is the only service that solves this. But alas, it isn't free. So can this be solved for free? Is it even a good idea to solve it?

thelounge is an web based IRC client with persistence like irccloud, except that thelounge is open source and self-hosted.

https://thelounge.chat/

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#323

Post by it33 » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:47 PM UTC

jawilson2 wrote: post #258

apple4ever wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use Slack now, and are looking to migrate to Mattermost (since we run GitLab already). We don't want to pay the price we'd need to pay to keep Slack, and plus we want to host our own.

We moved from Slack to Mattermost, and Mattermost is garbage. Messages are delivered late (by hours), if ever. You don't get notifications correctly. It takes seconds (more than 10 sometimes) to load a page. Sometimes the page goes blank. Much of our office has reverted to email and phone calls for many things that would have worked fine with Slack.

Hi @jawilson2, Mattermost team here. Sorry to hear you're having issues, it sounds like websockets haven't been fully installed on your Mattermost instance.

a) When you hit "Refresh" on your browser, do new messages appear?

b) Do you ever get blue bar message reading "Please check connection, Mattermost unreachable. If issue persists, ask administrator to check WebSocket port."?

If so for either of these, here's a solution you can send to your IT Admin: https://docs.mattermost.com/install/troubleshooting.html#ple...

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#324

Post by Alex3917 » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:47 PM UTC

ebiester wrote: post #264

philwelch wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp, but ever since we got the bandwidth and CPU necessary for the internet to not be a primarily text-based medium, the illiterates took over and that was the end of that.

Email: Two use cases. With email, how can I subscribe to conversations I'm interested in? Mailing lists are nice, but we have no real way to make mailing lists that start and stop on the fly like a chat channel in a way that is searchable to the entire organization during or after the fact. What email list system allows for quick creation and the ability for everyone in an organization to know that a conversation is…

Our product https://www.fwdeveryone.com does almost all of what you’re looking for, and will do everything within a few months. (We still need to add live updating threads, and we’re also working on an add-on so you can upload content directly from gmail.)

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#325

Post by eddieh » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:48 PM UTC

AzzieElbab wrote: post #296

I hope they buy Skype and every other corporate chat app too. So, I do not have to run all this crap at the same time

Microsoft owns Skype. I doubt they'd sell it to Slack.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#326

Post by codereflection » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:48 PM UTC

pmontra wrote: post #66

Well, thanks to this today I learned that Microsoft had a product called Teams. I didn't see anybody using it but I saw plenty of people using Slack. Maybe is Team addressed to big companies? My customers are all medium or small. Does anyone here have some experience using Teams? Is it really in competition with Slack?

We have both HipChat and Teams at work, with my team using HipChat. My team ran an experiment to move all conversations and collaboration to Teams for a trial period. That trial period ended with everyone feeling very frustrated that they spent more time trying to figure out WHERE things were going on in Teams rather than the content of actual collaboration efforts. Teams has a horrible design for threads, and is ill-suited for the type of rapid-fire communication of a highly vocal team. I dread having to go back to that product and will be pushing either Slack or Mattermost as a migration path from HipChat Data Center.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#327

Post by zenethian » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:50 PM UTC

I really hope that this results in a combination of the two's best features. Slack is so nice and polished and runs well as a standalone app, and Hipchat has some really nice features (like channel re-ordering in the sidebar) that I'd love to see brought into Slack.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#328

Post by AzzieElbab » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:51 PM UTC

eddieh wrote: post #325

AzzieElbab wrote: post #296

I hope they buy Skype and every other corporate chat app too. So, I do not have to run all this crap at the same time

Microsoft owns Skype. I doubt they'd sell it to Slack.

One can dream...

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#329

Post by Macha » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:52 PM UTC

core-questions wrote: post #70

joeblau wrote: post #26

I've never really gotten into any of Atlasssian's products. It seems like they make tools for managers with bolt on functionality for engineers (which may be why I never caught onto their products). I hope this is good news for Slack, but as a software engineer today, Atlasssian's products are not the first ones I would recommend in any category.

I run the Atlassian stack for my company, so here's some thoughts on this: - Jira is pretty bog-standard these days, huge installed base. It's a bit weird to administer, and not as powerful in many ways as I'd like (especially compared to a more flexible system like ServiceNow). However, it's entrenched and a lot of people like it. - Confluence is a top tier wiki. I actually find it very nice to work with, both from…

> (especially compared to a more flexible system like ServiceNow

Oh dear god no. Our company runs mixed Jira and Service Now, and for all Jira's disadvantages, at least I can get a link. to a ticket. To you know, reference or share. Without explaining the awful UI for where people need to put the ticket number in if they want to see it.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#330

Post by nl » Thu, Jul 26, 2018, 10:52 PM UTC

alienreborn wrote: post #220

core-questions wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run the Atlassian stack for my company, so here's some thoughts on this: - Jira is pretty bog-standard these days, huge installed base. It's a bit weird to administer, and not as powerful in many ways as I'd like (especially compared to a more flexible system like ServiceNow). However, it's entrenched and a lot of people like it. - Confluence is a top tier wiki. I actually find it very nice to work with, both from…

Every engineer I met dislikes Confluence. Engineers who write most of the documentation don't like using Confluence which lead to out dated, subpar and incomplete documentation. In my org, I noticed this and created a github repo to push documentation in Markdown. I created initial version of docs and now every engineer in our team uses it because they know markdown, appreciate version controlled docs and can use wha…

I'm an engineer and I like Confluence, especially compared to any other options. And doubly compared to markdown (although I concede I'm probably the only engineer who dislikes markdown)