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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

#481

Post by Kiro »

netwanderer3 wrote: post #381
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.

Why are we comparing Slack to IRC, a product that came out in 1988?

It's the pro-IRC crowd's own fault for bringing up IRC as an argument against Slack. They're obviously shooting themselves in the foot though.

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

#482

Post by Kiro »

wayoutthere wrote: post #12

I agree they’re a great product org, but not sure I agree they’re a $16B company — messaging apps tend to be cyclical, so I’m not sold on their long term viability. It’s just too easy for new IM platforms to take root inside a company once the old one gets too noisy. Given the growing grassroots backlash against the entire Slack Way, I’m not convinced they have a long enough runway to pivot to a stickier product befo…

I haven't seen any backlash outside this tiny circle. HN is not a good yardstick.

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

#484

Post by Ensorceled »

Kiro wrote: post #476
mettamage wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. Can you please explain or give an example of an MMO where photo sharing is a major mechanic or important MVP feature?

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

#485

Post by crummy »

dep_b wrote: post #480
distances wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

IMO the small changes they've made have really helped. I like how they keep off topic conversations from overflowing into the channel, and the little notification about unread threads helps me not forget them. Plus you can go back to conversations you missed and add to them.

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

#486

Post by Aromasin »

Ensorceled wrote: post #484
Kiro wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes. Can you please explain or give an example of an MMO where photo sharing is a major mechanic or important MVP feature?

I mean, if a developer made an MMO akin to the old Pokémon Snap game I'd be over the moon.

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

#487

Post by luckylion »

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.

> Curious as to what specifically you think Slack gets wrong?

Personally: responsiveness. Slack's native app on linux is slow. Switching channels has a noticeable delay, switching Workspaces takes seconds if you haven't used the workspace for a while. Starting the program takes ~8s on my machine (three workspaces, i7 with SSDs and 32G RAM).

For most IRC clients or Telegram, startup times are about as fast as Slack changes a channel, and there are no noticable delays when switching channels/IMs etc.

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

#488

Post by antirez »

Happy for the people that built it, with the idea of improving what the chat was. Sad for the internet, because we were better in the 1980s with an open standard like IRC, and gradually the internet community lost the ability to adapt their old open protocols for the future.

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

#489

Post by piva00 »

lostjohnny wrote: post #445
piva00 wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not when I have to keep sorting my mailing lists into its own "label/category/folder/whatever your e-mail client calls it" on a sidebar so I can keep track of activity happening in which mailing list. In Slack or any IRC-like chat I can keep track of the channels that interest me, I keep track of live operations, my team's public channel to see if there are stakeholders having issues with our systems, our private cha…

> Not when I have to keep sorting my mailing lists into its own There's a field on emails called subject. Linux kernel is still developed using mailing list, I can imagine only a few things harder than that, still the kernel team manages to work on it just fine, without being in the same physical space. Channels are just another way of labeling stuff... > (even more when I'm working from home) emails have been distri…

Like I have previously said: I have no personal investment in Slack, I couldn't care less if it was Mattermost or whatever.

Unfortunately for us, tech people, business decisions are taken on ease-of-use and other features that we don't tackle when we focus on the technical aspects of products, companies don't want to invest to roll out their own infrastructure, for anything, that is why the cloud is a thing. It's the same with a chat app, if a company can pay another company and offload all of the liability and responsibility to an easy-to-use product, they will do.

I don't know why you are ranting with me. I have used mailing lists before, I have used IRC before and I know what kind of workflows each can improve on my 15 years of career.

E-mails don't cut it, it's not the same ease of use, I don't care if technically I can achieve the same results, the interface and interaction is different and this is enough of an improvement for a product to have its place over another.

Good for the Linux Kernel to keep being developed on a mailing list, the rest of the world doesn't and is better if another tool can improve communication, be it IRC, Mattermost or Slack.

Create a product better than Slack and push it around to solve this problem, don't try to preach this to me, a mere cog in the system that is trying to be productive.

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

#490

Post by oliyoung »

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.

Guy Raz's podcast How I Made This does a whole episode on it, it's excellent https://www.npr.org/2018/07/27/633164558/slack-flickr-stewar...
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