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Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

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Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#401

Post by alexis_fr »

kstrauser wrote: post #259
superbaconman wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped using confluence the moment I realized the markdown editor was removed. I don't care so much about the flavor, but there's something very annoying about needing to get fancy with the way I edit text to preserve formatting.

Same here. I'd made some nice (and quite simple) tooling to parse docstrings out of a Python project and turn them into Markdown that I could copy-and-paste into Confluence. It was so convenient to run something like "make documents" to basically compile the project's documentation from inspecting the project itself! But then Confluence broke their editor by making it WYSIWYG-only. And in response, I broke Confluence…

What is something else? I’m interested, if it’s available for download (not cloud).

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#402

Post by sgt »

What we needed was IRC with history. Nothing else. Slack keeps adding features and making things complicated, even cutting ties to XMPP and IRC on top of that.

On top of that it's running a terrible (yet seemingly good, so people are fooled by its looks) Electron app, when all you wanted as a native app.

If I can find a good alternative to Slack tomorrow I'll move my entire organization.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#404

Post by kevingadd »

hazz99 wrote: post #171
ghostcluster wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This attitude to their rollout reminds me of the recent rollout of Twitter's maligned new desktop UI, the new YouTube Studio Beta, and reddit's new UI. There is almost a meme of online platform service providers not understanding their users and their workflows, and rolling out new revisions that hamper or outright remove functionality that those users rely on. I guess the canonical example would be that one Digg red…

> online platform service providers not understanding their users and their workflows In regards to the Reddit redesign, I think the people complaining that "they ignore their users" are stuck inside a bit of a bubble. I have a lot of friends who recently discovered the site, and they much prefer the redesign to the old one. I forgot where I read it, but I vaguely remember stats backing this up, or at least increase…

I say this as someone who doesn't mind the redesign on desktop: The redesign is a shitshow on mobile. It's slow and constantly nags you to install the app.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#405

Post by ako »

StefanKarpinski wrote: post #288

Slack’s old formatting syntax was Markdown-like but not exactly Markdown, just similar. In case anyone from Slack is paying attention to their technical users here, this is a great opportunity to move to CommonMark formatting for technical users and wysiwyg for non-technical users: just make this optional and switch the format syntax for the non-wysiwyg mode to CommonMark. I can understand that changing the formattin…

Slack probably has statistics which indicate that by now their largest user group is non-techies. And i'm assuming that if you look at paying customers, the amount of non-technies is probably even larger. People who are probably not even aware of this thing called markdown. So if you need to increase revenue replacing markdown with wysiwyg will make sense to UX and product management.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#406

Post by rocho »

nh2 wrote: post #196
StavrosK wrote: post #39

At the risk of sounding like a shill, I'd like to shill Zulip. We started using it instead of Slack, and it has been amazing . It's fast, everything is designed to help you get to conversations quickly, keyboard accessibility is second to none and the streams is a much better default than rooms. I can't recommend it enough, it's well worth the money even though they have a nice free tier and are OSS so you can self-h…

What's keeping me on Slack instead of Zulip is its inability to mark messages as unread [1] (Alt+Click on Slack). I think that's critical for a communication app when you want to ensure that you've answered all things that need answering. [1] https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/2676

I wasn't aware of this Slack feature. I used reminders for that. Maybe that's supported in Zulip too.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#408

Post by wilg »

exogeny wrote: post #38

I'm going to take the opposite of this argument, and for bonafides, I run the product team for a 1000+ person company. I'm going to assume that this thing was tested out the wazoo, both qualitatively and behind enough feature-flags and buckets to keep Optimizely in business for a year. So I have no doubt that this wasn't just a hunch on their part, but something that they meticulously tracked. If I'm wrong, definitel…

Is your 1000+ person company known for a great product with great UX?

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#410

Post by kburman »

llampx wrote: post #3

I've given up entirely on the Slack desktop app and use Ripcord exclusively. Much faster, more responsive and easier to use for 99% of my time spent on slack.

I just checked the screenshot. It reminds me of Windows 95. What I feel like one app can't fit all. Some people want a faster response time rather than a modern design and vice-versa.

Talking about slack new input box. The non-technical person would be more than happy with it. Because they don't know markdown and something that works like MS Word is good enough.

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