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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

#471

Post by mettamage »

mullingitover wrote: post #449

It's pretty hilarious that first Stewart Butterfield tried to make an MMO (Game Neverending), failed at that, and ended up making a fortune on the spinoff, Flickr. Then he tried to make another MMO (Glitch), failed at that, and ended up making a fortune on the spinoff, Slack. I hope he tries to make another MMO.

I feel naive for asking: how would you come up with Flickr as a spinoff for an MMO? A chat application, yea seems fair, but Flickr?

I am seriously withholding my urge to spam question marks on this page as they are dancing around my head.

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

#472

Post by skribbj »

welly wrote: post #467
skribbj wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have every right to think that Slack is amazing and that IRC is "complete trash" (although I completely disagree) - but please don't attribute it to UX. UX isn't just graphical design, it's also feeling responsive, fast, and accessible. Something that Slack, in my opinion, gets horribly wrong.

Curious as to what specifically you think Slack gets wrong? Honestly, I can't find fault with it. It's such a basic and uncomplicated piece of software, I'm not sure how they could get anything wrong.

I just think it doesn't actually fit any purpose. For quick chats irc is faster and more accessible, and for long thoughtful discussions Slack is lacking a lot of features so that you might as well use email.

A lot of discussion from this post from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20227115

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

#473

Post by quickthrower2 »

estomagordo wrote: post #448
shereadsthenews wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does anyone use the app instead of the site?

Why would I hide my chatrooms in several browser tabs? Sounds maddening.

As a web developer I’m often using my browser as a guinea pig. Hell a selenium test shut the whole shit down and hijacked it today. I’m not going to run slack in the browser.

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

#474

Post by blub »

raverbashing wrote: post #465
bborud wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whenever I read those "slack sucks", "jira sucks" rants I can't help but think "kids these days" are spoiled Hate slack? Try mIRC. Oh wait what's a "netsplit"? What do you mean I can't paste pictures or code snippets without going to a 3rd party service? Hate Jira? Try Bugzilla/Trac or a multitude of other bug trackers. "Oh the design sucks" really? Have you tried writing a Win32 app and make it look nice? Ok, try it…

IRC is better than you're suggesting:

* Netsplits would not be an issue, since most small to medium companies would use only one server. Even when they did happen to me in the past, the servers reconnected quite fast. I imagine a big corporation would be able to handle this rare failure case properly.

* DCC allows one to send files and since it's a direct connection, there is no 3rd party company in the US that's inserting itself in the conversation.

Jira is actually quite ok, I don't know why you're besmirching its name by comparing it to a bloated chat client.

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

#475

Post by quickthrower2 »

beatgammit wrote: post #402
randomsearch wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using lots of browser tabs instead of applications appears to me to be a step backward in usability. Instead of relying on the window manager to organise your work, you add cognitive load instead.

Eh, you can just put Slack into it's own window if you're going to use multiple tabs for it. Personally, I just pin it next to my email and it works fine. I'm not a fan of how much RAM or CPU it uses. I tried the desktop app hoping it would be better, but it seems like it's perhaps worse (I use Firefox, so

Not great for web developers. We have enough tabs open and if every window is a chrome icon it’s a pain to find stuff. I’ve got karma tests running, selenium tests, incognito windows testing security etc etc.

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

#476

Post by Kiro »

mettamage wrote: post #471
mullingitover wrote: post #449

It's pretty hilarious that first Stewart Butterfield tried to make an MMO (Game Neverending), failed at that, and ended up making a fortune on the spinoff, Flickr. Then he tried to make another MMO (Glitch), failed at that, and ended up making a fortune on the spinoff, Slack. I hope he tries to make another MMO.

I feel naive for asking: how would you come up with Flickr as a spinoff for an MMO? A chat application, yea seems fair, but Flickr? I am seriously withholding my urge to spam question marks on this page as they are dancing around my head.

Is it so hard to imagine a photo sharing feature inside the game? MMOs can be anything.

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

#477

Post by Y-bar »

mettamage wrote: post #471
mullingitover wrote: post #449

It's pretty hilarious that first Stewart Butterfield tried to make an MMO (Game Neverending), failed at that, and ended up making a fortune on the spinoff, Flickr. Then he tried to make another MMO (Glitch), failed at that, and ended up making a fortune on the spinoff, Slack. I hope he tries to make another MMO.

I feel naive for asking: how would you come up with Flickr as a spinoff for an MMO? A chat application, yea seems fair, but Flickr? I am seriously withholding my urge to spam question marks on this page as they are dancing around my head.

I remember reading a story that it was a screenshot upload and sharing tool. But it’s a vague memory possibility based on hearsay.

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

#478

Post by michaelt »

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…

  What's wrong with the UX of IRC?
* No user accounts, except via a baffling NickServ process involving things like 'ghosting'

* Poor abuse tools, e.g. accidentally IP-banning web IRC gateways.

* No searchable history

* No scrollback / visibility of messages that arrived while you were offline

* No support for uploading images or files.

* No sharing of a single identity / session across multiple clients (e.g. phone+pc+laptop)

As a veteran IRC user I know you can mitigate these problems by getting a shell account on an always-on unix server and running Irssi in Screen over SSH with logging, automated NickServ login, a bot to provide !seen and !tell, sharing images via Imgur, sharing files by uploading them to my personal website, and so on.

Slack has simply looked at the big collection of bodges I just described and made them native features. And you don't even need to know to use Ctrl+Alt+2 to change between channels like you do with ssh+screen+irssi.

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

#479

Post by raverbashing »

blub wrote: post #474
raverbashing wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I read those "slack sucks", "jira sucks" rants I can't help but think "kids these days" are spoiled Hate slack? Try mIRC. Oh wait what's a "netsplit"? What do you mean I can't paste pictures or code snippets without going to a 3rd party service? Hate Jira? Try Bugzilla/Trac or a multitude of other bug trackers. "Oh the design sucks" really? Have you tried writing a Win32 app and make it look nice? Ok, try it…

IRC is better than you're suggesting: * Netsplits would not be an issue, since most small to medium companies would use only one server. Even when they did happen to me in the past, the servers reconnected quite fast. I imagine a big corporation would be able to handle this rare failure case properly. * DCC allows one to send files and since it's a direct connection, there is no 3rd party company in the US that's ins…

> DCC allows one to send files and since it's a direct connection

since it's a direct connection it will never work in our modern nat'd/firewalled world, even between company branches (unless you have the whole company in the same VPN - but yeah don't do that)

Yes Jira is ok, it's just the target of (some) unfair hate like slack

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

#480

Post by dep_b »

distances wrote: post #362
solidasparagus wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack didn't clone text chat. They took the best parts of text chat, Facebook (reactions), Reddit (threads, edits) and terminals (simple UI for applications) and merged them into a single tool. I'm currently using HipChat and the difference is night and day. Slack makes large, busy chat rooms coherent in a way that just isn't possible with other text chats. And because of that, it opens new completely new possibiliti…

> Reddit (threads, edits) I haven't used Slack since 2016 so I don't know if it's changed, but the threads were such a disappointment when they came out. I suppose everyone was hoping for some similar threading that Flowdock has, but Slack threads simply just hide the discussion. I agree that Slack beats HipChat and IRC for work communication, but that's about it. I prefer even the new Google Chat over it, and that d…

Yeah threads still suck. They claim they've investigated it and it was the best solution but I totally get lost with twenty threads over five Slacks with ten channels each.
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