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Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

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

#451

Post by hellofunk »

bborud wrote: post #392
Roritharr wrote: post #5

Well deserved. Their product-vision was clear, their execution focused on what mattered... and they didn't need to bend or break laws to succeed. It's easily my favorite unicorn of the past decade.

You are not wrong :-). In fact, your second line is completely correct. However, Slack has lowered the standards for desktop software by being a really terrible piece of software. Which means that the professional in me wants to see a decent client before I'm happy. What's more worrying is that we are rapidly moving away from an Internet based on open standards and into walled gardens.

My personal take is that, as long as profit remains a guiding priority for a society, there will always be much greater incentive to create a new and successful walled garden than to share and contribute to open standards.

This is made evident by countless technology firms and other industries.

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

#452

Post by TeMPOraL »

coldtea wrote: post #438
TeMPOraL wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike being poked in a vital organ, communication is a repeatable exercise, so reasonable people can keep communicating over the lower-fidelity medium until problem is resolved. Face-to-face communication may be ideal, but it has huge overhead and limits. Compared to the scale of communication text (especially one over the wire) enabled, I think the world is much better off with the tech than it would be without it.…

> so reasonable people can keep communicating over the lower-fidelity medium until problem is resolved. And has empirical evidence, of people communicating in text mediums, from USENET to modern social forums, proven the above?

Yes? I mean, I don't have issues communicating over text on HN, or the subreddits I frequent, or the Slacks, IRC channels and the mailing lists I'm on, ...

What the empirical evidence shows me is that there's a (possibly very large) chunk of population which I would call unreasonable on a good day, that I only get to observe on the Internet, but can't ever find in meatspace. I know what's going on over at YouTube comments, or /r/all, but such people are all mysteriously absent from my meatspace circles, with no effort on my end to specifically identify and avoid them. I sometimes see them speaking unreasonable things when I pass them by on the street, but that's the limit of my exposure [0].

It's kind of similar to what Scott identified[1] as "dark matter people", except they seem to be inhabiting all the non-niche Internet forums.

Point being, if you exclude unreasonable people, text-based communications are fine. If you include unreasonable people, I wouldn't trust face to face communications either; if someone wants to abuse you with words, they can do that just as well in physical proximity.

--

[0] - Actually, the closest I've ever been to talking with such people was the couple of times during my university years when I ended up on some completely random party with people I didn't know. This suggests to me that there's a strong but barely noticeable filtering/selection effect in meatspace social networks. School selection, or workplace selection, aren't random enough to break out from it.

[1] - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin..., C-f "dark matter".

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

#454

Post by saagarjha »

dingaling wrote: post #416
shereadsthenews wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does anyone use the app instead of the site?

> Why does anyone use the app instead of the site? Because on Android at least the website detects that you're on a mobile device and switches to read-only mode. Correct, you can't even post a reply without fudging user-agent or installing the app.

Isn't the Slack app on Android native?

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

#455

Post by midhir »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #431
warp_factor wrote: post #351

Congratulation to them. I think what they did is absolutely amazing and will be seen retrospectively as one of the biggest fads of history. - They managed to disturb millions of worker to an attention-driven work culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate. - They managed to change chat from a set of open protocols to a single closed app terribly written in JS. - They managed to make a lo…

I see this complaint a lot, and I'm very sensitive to dopamine addiction myself so perhaps a few of my tips can help someone else make Slack less frustrating: 1. use /mute judiciously. especially on the main chats. only unmute important "#500" style channels. People immediately learn to @you when relevant. 2. disable notifications for everything on mobile: DMs, @here, @channel, @yourname, anything. No notifications w…

I moved from the native app to just using the Web app in a pinned tab a while ago. Then you only have to block notifications in one place.

When someone @heres or tags me I only see the red dot on the favicon when I'm already in my browser.

On top of that you get tons of resources back on your machine!

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

#456

Post by golergka »

beatgammit wrote: post #398
askafriend wrote: post #361

Slack is great. The valuation makes sense and I wish them continued success. All the integrations, and workflows that Slack has enabled for our company make us more productive. I would hate to go back to what came before it. IRC is complete trash and I don't know why anyone would use it in the same sentence as Slack. UX matters. It matters A LOT.

What's wrong with the UX of IRC? IRC is a protocol, not a specific client, and it supports a wide variety of server and client plugins. We had a really nice IRC going productively for a year or two, but we scrapped it because only our software developer used it and other people in the company preferred something else (they used a mix of email, Google chat/hangouts, and text). The nice thing about IRC is that everyone…

Can you log on to IRC from your phone and then instantly search through all of your company's chat history through the last couple of years?

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

#457

Post by biztos »

I like the human story: Stewart Butterfield co-creates Flickr, revolutionizing online photo sharing; sells it for what at the time was "real money" but quickly discovers he could have held out for a whole lot more; burns through some VC failing at games; and then has that Eureka! moment when he realizes the Enterprise will eat any damn thing you feed it, and he hatches his plan to join the nine-zeroes club he missed out on in 2005, software quality be damned!

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

#458

Post by czechdeveloper »

warp_factor wrote: post #351

Congratulation to them. I think what they did is absolutely amazing and will be seen retrospectively as one of the biggest fads of history. - They managed to disturb millions of worker to an attention-driven work culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate. - They managed to change chat from a set of open protocols to a single closed app terribly written in JS. - They managed to make a lo…

As remote developer, I must disagree.

There has always been distractions in office. Colleague would just walk over to you.

Now you get message. You can choose what you check and when. And reaction that is not immediate is usually fine. At least at my company.

And best of all, I don't have to be in same office to be able to communicate. I'm not even in same country, yet we can work realtime with team.

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

#459

Post by orcdork »

biztos wrote: post #457

I like the human story: Stewart Butterfield co-creates Flickr, revolutionizing online photo sharing; sells it for what at the time was "real money" but quickly discovers he could have held out for a whole lot more; burns through some VC failing at games; and then has that Eureka! moment when he realizes the Enterprise will eat any damn thing you feed it, and he hatches his plan to join the nine-zeroes club he missed…

It's like software quality is sometimes irrelevant to monetary success or something.

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

#460

Post by smugglerFlynn »

beatgammit wrote: post #398
askafriend wrote: post #361

Slack is great. The valuation makes sense and I wish them continued success. All the integrations, and workflows that Slack has enabled for our company make us more productive. I would hate to go back to what came before it. IRC is complete trash and I don't know why anyone would use it in the same sentence as Slack. UX matters. It matters A LOT.

What's wrong with the UX of IRC? IRC is a protocol, not a specific client, and it supports a wide variety of server and client plugins. We had a really nice IRC going productively for a year or two, but we scrapped it because only our software developer used it and other people in the company preferred something else (they used a mix of email, Google chat/hangouts, and text). The nice thing about IRC is that everyone…

Exactly.

And the only company out there that was able to stitch together more or less usable UX for a group messenger is Slack. IRC has no such killer app (sorry IRC fans!..)

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