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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

#781

Post by ccantana »

el_cujo wrote: post #645
ccantana wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's wrong with the UX of IRC? One sentence later: > ...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). Clearly something was wrong with the UX if only one person was willing to use it? This place is a parody of itself sometimes.

I think they may have left off the "s" from developers, based on context it seems like there must have been multiple people who liked it enough to build plugins. Sounds more like a "developers vs. management" kind of thing rather than "our one IT guy tried to sell the whole company on IRC".

Typo aside, that does not materially affect the point. “Management” in this case appears to be every other team at the company...

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

#782

Post by jillesvangurp »

saagarjha wrote: post #765
jillesvangurp wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were when they started out and not getting distracted by a multi platform strategy is what allowed them to stop being one.

They’ve had more than a couple of years with plenty of resources to fix their apps.

I just explained you how not doing that was crucial to their growth strategy. Not having to coordinate bugs, features, and releases across multiple teams with different tech stacks is really nice when you are trying to outpace your competitors. Most of these follow a similar strategy. Pure native chat apps are not that common anymore.

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

#783

Post by xf86alsa »

wildduck wrote: post #744
drzaiusx11 wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

matrix is exactly this, at least from an client/server interop standpoint. email is the first massively successful federated application. matrix just needs an easy to use client/webclient. Riot.im is close, but needs some UX love.

Agree. However the fact that E2E with perfect forwarding secrecy is not guaranteed is going to be an issue.

Can you explain? My understanding is that megolm (what Matrix uses) ratchets the session forward every hour or every 100 msgs, whichever first.

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

#784

Post by rakoo »

kuschku wrote: post #667
ubermonkey wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The one single real advantage of Slack is marketing." Respectfully, NO. Providing a very useful turnkey set of features out of the box that are technically possible but fiddly and hard to use in IRC is in and of itself a huge advantage. This is why they're successful. This is why people use it. This is why people use it who barely know what a command line IS.

If you want that, you can just use IRCCloud, it has all that in a single solution. Just like Slack. IRCCloud can even connect to Slack workspaces. The only advantage Slack has over IRCCloud is marketing. It's relatively ironic that I have to end up praising IRCCloud here, considering I'm contributing to a competing IRC client.

But when you use IRCCloud you don't use the IRC protocol anymore, you use the IRCCloud protocol. Which is the same as using the Slack protocol. Your features aren't available outside IRCCloud. Your account, your data, your history, everything is tied to IRCCloud. You haven't gained anything compared to Slack. You're advocating for the _exact_ same model and you don't realize that the only way to have the same features as Slack in an easy way is to basically do what Slack does. You're just agreeing with what the parent is saying.

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

#785

Post by rakoo »

lostjohnny wrote: post #434
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.

> IRC is complete trash We'll talk about it 10 years from now when Slack is gonna be "old cruft" while IRC still gonna be there rocking.

10 years from now IRC will finally allow you to upload images and documents in the discussion while the Slack competitor will have figured the perfect blending between instant chat, asynchronous long-form communication and concurrent editing for documenting the decisions that were taken. It's easy to keep a protocol alive when the protocol does almost nothing.

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

#786

Post by rakoo »

kuschku wrote: post #754
golergka wrote: post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, I use self-hosted quassel and quasseldroid. That sounds exactly like the infamous first comments on the HN Dropbox post. I'd rather pay someone to use their app than go through the pain of self-hosting and administering yet another service.

Well, the post was "just use FTP with rsync". Quassel on the other hand is to Slack what Seafile or NextCloud are to Dropbox — definitely not as comfortable, as you need some knowledge to self host it, but it's easily doable for everyone on this site, and once it's set up, it's just as comfortable. Of course, if one wants to use a hosted service, there are solutions like that — IRCCloud is pretty much identical to Sl…

> but it's easily doable for everyone on this site

And that's where you lost sight of the big picture. Slack is _not_ for people on this site it's specifically for people out there: people who don't know and don't need to know what a protocol is, who don't care about netsplits, who couldn't be bothered to install some random stupid stuff on their machine and spend an afternoon configuring it just to be able to talk to their co-worker. We're not the target here. And yet it has convinced some of us because it ticks so many boxes by default.

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

#787

Post by nailer »

zwily wrote: post #735
nailer wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? Wouldn't it be a direct connection, just between two NAT gateways? With each using the ports to track which connection belonged to the host behind the NAT?

If the connection is already established, sure. How did you establish it though? There are ways to hook clients up that are both NAT’d, (STUN, etc) but DCC doesn’t use any of them.

You did a handshake to the NAT server, which passed it on to the destination behind the firewall?

I'm more a Unix person that a network person so it's possible I'm missing something, but I'm not sure what it is. Thanks for replying.

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

#788

Post by bborud »

rubyfan wrote: post #541
hellofunk wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The internet’s previous models were doomed to fail. Service providers did not have a reliable monetization scheme. Client apps for open protocols have rarely had wide adoption and longevity, especially anything you had to pay for. I can think of plenty of examples of paid client apps from the late 90s/early 2000s... email clients, web, irc, etc. that just aren’t around because not enough people would pay for the clie…

And yet, the Internet exists because short sighted profit requirements were kept at bay, and eventually the Internet managed to create more value for society than any online service ever by a margin so large that logarithm of the difference is amazingly large.

I work for a telco. My assumption is that the profit margin for connectivity will first converge on zero and then it will drop below zero. There's so much value in the services above connectivity that connectivity won't need to be profitable.

Of course, nobody in my industry will want to talk about that, or even admit this is a real possibility, because it implies that connectivity will most likely be owned by those who make money on services on top.

If we think net neutrality is important today, we ain't seen nothing yet. And given how hard we have had to fight in the past to just about maintain some form of parity, I'm not extremely optimistic about the future.

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

#789

Post by bborud »

briandear wrote: post #757
eeZah7Ux wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as long as profit remains a guiding priority for a society Found the bug. > there will always be much greater incentive to create a new and successful walled garden than to share and contribute to open standards It's really a shame that most customers never learn and they keep accepting closed source/protocols. While the world economy is quickly moving into endless vertical monopolies, history has shown that govern…

> It's really a shame that most customers never learn and they keep accepting closed source/protocols. I don’t care. I just want my tool to solve my problem so I can focus on creating business value at my job. I am sure we could all make our own hammers, but time spent making hammers is time lost from using them.

This isn't really what we're talking about. A better analogy are laptops, phones and tractors - which you are not allowed to repair and only work within a closed ecosystem that you either have to opt into our out of, and where opting out has an extraordinary cost.

I use a Mac. I'm part of the problem for having handed my money to an abusive, fraudulent company that is now squeezing all its users for more money for increasingly lower quality products. It used to be easy to buy into Apple's walled garden. But now choice of convenience over freedom is starting to cost me real money and that money buys less each year.

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

#790

Post by el_cujo »

ccantana wrote: post #781
el_cujo wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they may have left off the "s" from developers, based on context it seems like there must have been multiple people who liked it enough to build plugins. Sounds more like a "developers vs. management" kind of thing rather than "our one IT guy tried to sell the whole company on IRC".

Typo aside, that does not materially affect the point. “Management” in this case appears to be every other team at the company ...

The point you were making is that a single rabid IRC fan was trying to steer the rest of the company, so actually I'd say the typo certainly does affect the point.
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