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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

#531

Post by roel_v »

raverbashing wrote: post #479
blub wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'll admit I haven't been on IRC in 20 years, but while I remember fiddling with active/passive FTP settings and port forwarding every week at the very least, I do not remember any times where I had similar issues on IRC (using mIRC and later various Linux IRC clients, mostly Xchat and BitchX) in the 1890's. I don't know how it would have worked though, thinking about it.

(and I think from the above description of my typical computer use at the time, it's quite obvious what I was doing, and how that would have given me plenty of opportunities to run into all sorts of (compatibility) issues)

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

#532

Post by trizzak »

gutnor wrote: post #520
blub wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Jira is actually quite ok, I don't know why you're besmirching its name by comparing it to a bloated chat client. It takes a lot of heat because it is very customisable and get locked down in large corporation. I worked in company that ran an old shitty very version on underpowered server and disabled feature like rich text editing but force you through a 5 page wizard with in total tens of mandatory field to fill…

Agree 100%. Almost every Jira complaint I see is a byproduct of the way our company centrally manages and locks it down. Things like custom fields and workflows require submitting a ticket and waiting a few weeks. That said, it can still be customized and made to work well for most internal teams.

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

#533

Post by etaty »

Sahhaese wrote: post #529
antirez wrote: post #488

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.

The death of the protocol. People no longer release protocols, they release products. The open net, the open web has truly died. I wonder sometimes what we're missing because the conditions that let the web grow out of the internet have disappeared. What next leap are we missing?

Not products, but platforms.

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

#534

Post by OrgNet »

golergka wrote: post #456
beatgammit wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You can, if you log everything... and there are many websites that provide search engines for public channels... you could do the same for your private IRC server. If you don't mind having all of your data in the cloud, use slack.

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

#535

Post by Nimitz14 »

luckylion wrote: post #487
welly wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ch…

I'm on ubuntu. Have never had these issues.

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

#536

Post by stestagg »

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…

I get the impression that threads (like browser tabs) are a very individual thing.

Some people want total threading, others want a flat flow.

Slack seem to be treading a very careful line between the two extremes

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

#537

Post by bwat49 »

pmontra wrote: post #517
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…

You could have a point with Slack but Jira is really terrible. I used it for a customer years ago and I'm so happy any other customer is using something simpler. Jira could be OK if operated by a specialized team paid to do project management and to shield developers from the complications of the tool. It's not only the design, it's the sheer amount of functionality. We don't need all of that. I'd go with Github simp…

as a user (I do QA testing) I use JIRA every day and I really like it compared to other bug trackers I've used

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

#538

Post by ethbro »

buboard wrote: post #526
avip wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it not an inevitable result of federation and decentralization as governance? A camel is a horse designed by a committee , as the saying has it.

I dont think federation has anything to do with it. There were no incentives to bring it to consumers though (in contrast e.g. to email), and by itself it is not easy to use for vast majority of end users.

The email protocols pre-date commercial access to the internet. So incentives were very different when it was created.

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

#539

Post by Myrmornis »

mcv wrote: post #524
pmontra wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could have a point with Slack but Jira is really terrible. I used it for a customer years ago and I'm so happy any other customer is using something simpler. Jira could be OK if operated by a specialized team paid to do project management and to shield developers from the complications of the tool. It's not only the design, it's the sheer amount of functionality. We don't need all of that. I'd go with Github simp…

Every single one of my clients uses Jira, and nobody I've ever met had a problem with it. It works, it's flexible, it's pretty easy to use. It's the industry standard, and for good reason, as far as I can tell.

Meet me.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Confluence is OKish. But Jira is absurdly bad. I'm talking about the UI for creating Issues and Epics etc. The front-end devs that wrote it simply didn't have the ability. The parser for entering markup such as preformatted code blocks just doesn't work a lot of the time. The newer "Visual mode" just doesn't work a lot of the time. It simply needs to switch over to markdown and use a 3rd-party parser and renderer. The Visual Mode preview doesn't render using a fixed-width font. have you ever clicked on the little "Link" symbol in the top right of the text entry box? Obviously that should copy the current URL to the system clipboard. But they didn't know how to look that up on StackOverflow and instead made it a normal link to the current page (so you reload the page accidentally), with the link title saying

> title="Right click and copy link for a permanent link to this comment."

! You enter `bq.` to quote a line of text. This is all just some crap that someone with no design sense or standards came up with after 10 seconds thought.

I'm talking specifically about the quality of the UI. It is far, far, below the quality of UIs put out by respected modern products.

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

#540

Post by igbrdjk »

mehrdadn wrote: post #80
colechristensen wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free is there to be a sales demo without deadlines with a casual shrug for people who aren't going to pay, I wouldn't ever use slack if it wasn't my intention to play and slack wouldn't miss me. Choose your customers.

I never used Slack out of choice either. I've used it because I was forced to due to others' decisions. So now I've lost a bunch of my communications due to others' choices that I had little control over.

> So now I've lost a bunch of my communications due to others' choices that I had little control over.

I wrote a simple exporter using Slack api. It archives Slack from position of user, almost everything (like attachments).

But I'm not publishing it on GitHub because I don't want more people to use it, and don't want Slack to block mass api calls, and don't want slacks admins to know I written it and use it.

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