7 ms·

Facebook F8 all over again in the sense of startups throwing the success or failure of their company onto a proprietary centralized system that can block or cut

Facebook F8 all over again in the sense of startups throwing the success or failure of their company onto a proprietary centralized system that can block or cut them off for any reason. Or rather, another incarnation of IRC chat bots, email listservs, and stuff that's been around forever as commodity autoresponders, only now it's worth millions in investments to write the equivalent of a weekend hack IRC bot because of artificial scarcity imposed by a non-open platform.

stanleydrew 11y ago
I upvoted, but I don't think I agree. There are lots of people building things on proprietary platforms all the time. Why single out FB and Slack? AWS is proprietary. Twilio is proprietary. It's not as if it's hard to find examples. And so what if some small team implements an auto responder bot and gets a couple hundred thousand in investment?
- danmaz74 11y ago
  One difference is that with AWS you're the paying customer and have leverage. With FB or Slack, you're a non-paying "partner" and your leverage is almost null.
  - asmosoinio 11y ago
    But companies usually pay for Slack? You pretty much have to to get full history.
    - cromwellian 11y ago
      Consumers pay for iOS, but Apple still bans you from selling your app in the store. The gatekeeper function of the platform means they can shut you off at any time. If instead, Slack published a protocol so anyone could author a client, then bots would just be normal chat users, for the most part, on par with regular users, and a bot would simply be something you deploy somewhere to sit in your channels, just like IRC bots. I think Slack is a great app, very good UI, but I'm a little sick of proprietary messaging. We really don't need proprietary centralized messaging networks. Standardize a federated open protocol and let people compete on the clients and let the community agree on extensions to message payloads that clients pay attention to, or ignore.
      - stanleydrew 11y ago
        Yeah it's a shame XMPP turned out to be unable to keep up with the shift from desktop to mobile. Maybe we should take a crack at a more modern alternative?
        ex3ndr 11y ago
        We are trying to make so at Actor (https://actor.im https://actor.im).
        oddvar 11y ago
        cool! we should interoperate :) (we being https://matrix.org https://matrix.org) ps. your https://actor.im/platform https://actor.im/platform page 404s
        oddvar 11y ago
        that's exactly what https://matrix.org https://matrix.org is trying to do!
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
  - stanleydrew 11y ago
    Good point. Maybe Salesforce is a better example. Or Github. Don't people build tons of integrations on it?
  - chinathrow 11y ago
    Same as with Twitter; remember Meerkat and firehose access as examples.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  You're not making fair comparisons. FB and Slack are platforms in which you write directly for it and it cannot be used or moved elsewhere. AWS provides many things but, unless you're directly integrating with them, you can move onto another service if you need to (and even direct integration you can later abstract and move away from many of their services to alternatives). Same with Twilio; they provide SMS and other like services but others do as well so you can move your app to any platform with, mostly, minor code changes. You can't make a minor code change to move your Facebook or Slack app to another vendor / platform. In fact that wouldn't really make sense.
  - stanleydrew 11y ago
    Fair enough. See my sibling comment about Salesforce and Github which I think are better examples. Or the iOS and Android platforms. My point is that we have certain implicit biases (I too hate FB and Salesforce as platforms) but those biases aren't really based on some kind of general principle that "proprietary platforms are always bad and dangerous". Proprietary platforms run by untrustworthy companies are bad and dangerous.
    - jclulow 11y ago
      A trustworthy company is always one "being acquired by Oracle" away from becoming an untrustworthy, belligerent rent-seeker. Any dependency on another company for your own business must be considered a risk to be managed.
    - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
      > Proprietary platforms run by untrustworthy companies are bad and dangerous. But do proprietary platforms run by trustworthy companies exist? If so, what happens when a new CEO, product owner, etc takes over and makes changes that could ruin existing relationships? Seems inevitable for every platform to evolve to some degree; what if the evolution is simply not compatible with what you built? Does that make them untrustworthy? It all seems kinda nebulous to me and I'm not sure I'd want to put all my cards in one basket :)
    - the_ancient 11y ago
oskarth 11y ago
While you are right that it's very similar to IRC etc you are completely missing the fundamental reason Slack et al are popular: user experience, especially for non-technical people. Not everyone grew up on IRC with bouncers, irssi on a remote server, and their own server where they could upload attachments to in a single keystroke. Now it's true that there are new alternatives for non-technical people such as IRCCloud, but (a) it costs money for individuals (b) it's frankly not as good, UX-wise. Hence not as popular.
- wh-uws 11y ago
  THANK YOU. This is why slack is winning. They took many of the concepts of what makes irc great abd put a much better user experience on top. Why is that so hard for people to understand? This happens over and over again. - Google wasn't the first search engine. - Facebook wasn't the first social network. - Microsoft didn't build the first operating system. They all just did it in a way that appealed to mass amounts of users.
  - babuskov 11y ago
    I have no idea why you were down-voted. It's the truth. Now, to answer why is it so hard to understand? Many people here are programmers/engineers and fail to understand how marketing and nice packaging can sell. Especially if they are old enough to know how IRC works. To extend what you wrote, I'd compare Slack with iPhone. All the tech. to build the iPhone was there, but Apple managed to put it all together in beautiful, easy to use package. Slack is the iPhone in its area.
    - nothrabannosir 11y ago
      Because it's a platitude that has been repeated ad nauseam, and we get it. The GP gets it. As he explains in OP's sister comment.
    - cromwellian 11y ago
      Think of it this way. Did the Web Browser need to be a proprietary closed protocol in order for the massive improvement over Gopher/WAIS or other end user hypertext information systems back then? No, Netscape/Mozilla didn't need to "own" HTTP and HTML completely, and turn the Web into a giant App Store in order to innovate in the Browser client, neither did Google, Apple, or MS. At various points, proprietary extensions were tried, and either failed, or got standardized when they became popular or proven their need. All Praise to Slack's UI, I love all the flourishes, like auto-detection of paste of code bits and offering to create snippets. I get it, I really do. I just don't think we need another messaging platform owned by a single company.
luckydata 11y ago
So what? Atlassian has a thriving marketplace of extensions for their products and small developers make money out of it. Slack is not a social media site, it's a collaboration tool that is trying to build a platform for the enterprise. This is an "apples and battleships" comparison.
onion2k 11y ago
One key difference is that people building Slack integrations adds a huge amount of value to Slack's product. If there's a tool that works with Slack that you want then you're much more likely to pay for Slack. Consequently Slack do better if they support developers. The same isn't really true for Facebook.
Kiro 11y ago
I've probably been on IRC longer than most people and I believe Slack is superior in most ways.
dvdplm 11y ago
> a proprietary centralized system that can block or cut them off for any reason. As a startup founder – chatlio.com – betting on the Slack "platform" I have to say that it feels pretty great to know that they are not planning on cutting us off tomorrow morning... :) Might happen anyway of course, but this announcement means we can work somewhat more serenely for a while longer. I see this as a kind of "stability pledge" to third party dev shops.
- oddvar 11y ago
  Hey, have you looked at https://matrix.org https://matrix.org? If you build on us, you don't have to fear ever being cut off - we're completely open source and free! We do also have a slack-bridge, and we're building more bridges - our goal is interoperability rather than isolated silos!
tommorris 11y ago
> another incarnation of IRC chat bots, email listservs, and stuff that's been around forever as commodity autoresponders, only now it's worth millions in investments to write the equivalent of a weekend hack IRC bot because of artificial scarcity imposed by a non-open platform. Nope, it has value because it can be used by people who aren't massive nerds.
ris 11y ago
And it's going to be extremely fun to watch when Slack gets acquired by one of the real big guys and the product itself gets grandfathered (or "absorbed" into something else). Don't say "it'll never happen"...
wstrange 11y ago
I see Google using Slack for things like the Dart and Kubernetes projects. I understand the ease of use aspect (Slack is quite nice) - but one thing that concerns me is that the discussion that happens is no longer (easily) searchable. Mailing list archives are handy when you are looking for a solution to a problem. With Slack, a lot of that knowledge disappears.
- rv77ax 11y ago
  Do you even use Slack? I don't work for Slack but your comment is so misleading. > but one thing that concerns me is that the discussion that happens is no longer (easily) searchable. No it is not. Look at the top right and type your words. If you use free plan, only 10k message will be archived, other than that it will be deleted.[1] > Mailing list archives are handy when you are looking for a solution to a problem. With Slack, a lot of that knowledge disappears. Its a tool for direct communication for group, not for documentation. I think you miss a hammer for screwdriver. [1] https://myabuy.slack.com/pricing https://myabuy.slack.com/pricing
  - rrix 11y ago
    Are slack histories indexed by google, like mailing list archives or large IRC channels?
    - wstrange 11y ago
      They are not - this is exactly the problem I am alluding to.
  - wstrange 11y ago
    I use Slack often, and yes I know about the search feature. How do I find the answer to a question that was posted two months ago, for an open source project that is not paying to keep more than 10K messages? History vanishes with Slack. I get why this is very cool for internal communication. I just question the use of Slack for open source community driven projects.
astrostl 11y ago
"proprietary centralized system that can block or cut them off for any reason" Chat and ChatOps aren't going anywhere, and Slack already has a gaggle of nascent competitors, both commercial and OSS. If you build on Facebook or Twitter and they tell you to pound sand, it's game over. If Slack does the same, you can add support for everyone else - if you haven't already. You aren't building a "Slack app," you're building a chat app which happens to support the Slack API. Huge difference.
niutech 11y ago
The biggest problems of Slack are: being closed source, transferring internal communication to external servers and loading very slow. Here you can find the alternatives solving all problems: http://browsingthenet.blogspot.com/2015/05/slack-is-so-slow-here-are-5-lightweight.html http://browsingthenet.blogspot.com/2015/05/slack-is-so-slow-...

stanleydrew 11y ago

I upvoted, but I don't think I agree. There are lots of people building things on proprietary platforms all the time. Why single out FB and Slack? AWS is proprietary. Twilio is proprietary. It's not as if it's hard to find examples. And so what if some small team implements an auto responder bot and gets a couple hundred thousand in investment?

danmaz74 11y ago
One difference is that with AWS you're the paying customer and have leverage. With FB or Slack, you're a non-paying "partner" and your leverage is almost null.
- asmosoinio 11y ago
  But companies usually pay for Slack? You pretty much have to to get full history.
  - cromwellian 11y ago
    Consumers pay for iOS, but Apple still bans you from selling your app in the store. The gatekeeper function of the platform means they can shut you off at any time. If instead, Slack published a protocol so anyone could author a client, then bots would just be normal chat users, for the most part, on par with regular users, and a bot would simply be something you deploy somewhere to sit in your channels, just like IRC bots. I think Slack is a great app, very good UI, but I'm a little sick of proprietary messaging. We really don't need proprietary centralized messaging networks. Standardize a federated open protocol and let people compete on the clients and let the community agree on extensions to message payloads that clients pay attention to, or ignore.
    - stanleydrew 11y ago
      Yeah it's a shame XMPP turned out to be unable to keep up with the shift from desktop to mobile. Maybe we should take a crack at a more modern alternative?
      - ex3ndr 11y ago
        We are trying to make so at Actor (https://actor.im https://actor.im).
        oddvar 11y ago
        cool! we should interoperate :) (we being https://matrix.org https://matrix.org) ps. your https://actor.im/platform https://actor.im/platform page 404s
      - oddvar 11y ago
        that's exactly what https://matrix.org https://matrix.org is trying to do!
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- stanleydrew 11y ago
  Good point. Maybe Salesforce is a better example. Or Github. Don't people build tons of integrations on it?
- chinathrow 11y ago
  Same as with Twitter; remember Meerkat and firehose access as examples.
BinaryIdiot 11y ago
You're not making fair comparisons. FB and Slack are platforms in which you write directly for it and it cannot be used or moved elsewhere. AWS provides many things but, unless you're directly integrating with them, you can move onto another service if you need to (and even direct integration you can later abstract and move away from many of their services to alternatives). Same with Twilio; they provide SMS and other like services but others do as well so you can move your app to any platform with, mostly, minor code changes. You can't make a minor code change to move your Facebook or Slack app to another vendor / platform. In fact that wouldn't really make sense.
- stanleydrew 11y ago
  Fair enough. See my sibling comment about Salesforce and Github which I think are better examples. Or the iOS and Android platforms. My point is that we have certain implicit biases (I too hate FB and Salesforce as platforms) but those biases aren't really based on some kind of general principle that "proprietary platforms are always bad and dangerous". Proprietary platforms run by untrustworthy companies are bad and dangerous.
  - jclulow 11y ago
    A trustworthy company is always one "being acquired by Oracle" away from becoming an untrustworthy, belligerent rent-seeker. Any dependency on another company for your own business must be considered a risk to be managed.
  - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
    > Proprietary platforms run by untrustworthy companies are bad and dangerous. But do proprietary platforms run by trustworthy companies exist? If so, what happens when a new CEO, product owner, etc takes over and makes changes that could ruin existing relationships? Seems inevitable for every platform to evolve to some degree; what if the evolution is simply not compatible with what you built? Does that make them untrustworthy? It all seems kinda nebulous to me and I'm not sure I'd want to put all my cards in one basket :)
  - the_ancient 11y ago

oskarth 11y ago

While you are right that it's very similar to IRC etc you are completely missing the fundamental reason Slack et al are popular: user experience, especially for non-technical people. Not everyone grew up on IRC with bouncers, irssi on a remote server, and their own server where they could upload attachments to in a single keystroke. Now it's true that there are new alternatives for non-technical people such as IRCCloud, but (a) it costs money for individuals (b) it's frankly not as good, UX-wise. Hence not as popular.

wh-uws 11y ago
THANK YOU. This is why slack is winning. They took many of the concepts of what makes irc great abd put a much better user experience on top. Why is that so hard for people to understand? This happens over and over again. - Google wasn't the first search engine. - Facebook wasn't the first social network. - Microsoft didn't build the first operating system. They all just did it in a way that appealed to mass amounts of users.
- babuskov 11y ago
  I have no idea why you were down-voted. It's the truth. Now, to answer why is it so hard to understand? Many people here are programmers/engineers and fail to understand how marketing and nice packaging can sell. Especially if they are old enough to know how IRC works. To extend what you wrote, I'd compare Slack with iPhone. All the tech. to build the iPhone was there, but Apple managed to put it all together in beautiful, easy to use package. Slack is the iPhone in its area.
  - nothrabannosir 11y ago
    Because it's a platitude that has been repeated ad nauseam, and we get it. The GP gets it. As he explains in OP's sister comment.
  - cromwellian 11y ago
    Think of it this way. Did the Web Browser need to be a proprietary closed protocol in order for the massive improvement over Gopher/WAIS or other end user hypertext information systems back then? No, Netscape/Mozilla didn't need to "own" HTTP and HTML completely, and turn the Web into a giant App Store in order to innovate in the Browser client, neither did Google, Apple, or MS. At various points, proprietary extensions were tried, and either failed, or got standardized when they became popular or proven their need. All Praise to Slack's UI, I love all the flourishes, like auto-detection of paste of code bits and offering to create snippets. I get it, I really do. I just don't think we need another messaging platform owned by a single company.

luckydata 11y ago

So what? Atlassian has a thriving marketplace of extensions for their products and small developers make money out of it. Slack is not a social media site, it's a collaboration tool that is trying to build a platform for the enterprise. This is an "apples and battleships" comparison.

onion2k 11y ago

One key difference is that people building Slack integrations adds a huge amount of value to Slack's product. If there's a tool that works with Slack that you want then you're much more likely to pay for Slack. Consequently Slack do better if they support developers. The same isn't really true for Facebook.

Kiro 11y ago

I've probably been on IRC longer than most people and I believe Slack is superior in most ways.

dvdplm 11y ago

> a proprietary centralized system that can block or cut them off for any reason. As a startup founder – chatlio.com – betting on the Slack "platform" I have to say that it feels pretty great to know that they are not planning on cutting us off tomorrow morning... :) Might happen anyway of course, but this announcement means we can work somewhat more serenely for a while longer. I see this as a kind of "stability pledge" to third party dev shops.

oddvar 11y ago
Hey, have you looked at https://matrix.org https://matrix.org? If you build on us, you don't have to fear ever being cut off - we're completely open source and free! We do also have a slack-bridge, and we're building more bridges - our goal is interoperability rather than isolated silos!

tommorris 11y ago

> another incarnation of IRC chat bots, email listservs, and stuff that's been around forever as commodity autoresponders, only now it's worth millions in investments to write the equivalent of a weekend hack IRC bot because of artificial scarcity imposed by a non-open platform. Nope, it has value because it can be used by people who aren't massive nerds.

ris 11y ago

And it's going to be extremely fun to watch when Slack gets acquired by one of the real big guys and the product itself gets grandfathered (or "absorbed" into something else). Don't say "it'll never happen"...

wstrange 11y ago

I see Google using Slack for things like the Dart and Kubernetes projects. I understand the ease of use aspect (Slack is quite nice) - but one thing that concerns me is that the discussion that happens is no longer (easily) searchable. Mailing list archives are handy when you are looking for a solution to a problem. With Slack, a lot of that knowledge disappears.

rv77ax 11y ago
Do you even use Slack? I don't work for Slack but your comment is so misleading. > but one thing that concerns me is that the discussion that happens is no longer (easily) searchable. No it is not. Look at the top right and type your words. If you use free plan, only 10k message will be archived, other than that it will be deleted.[1] > Mailing list archives are handy when you are looking for a solution to a problem. With Slack, a lot of that knowledge disappears. Its a tool for direct communication for group, not for documentation. I think you miss a hammer for screwdriver. [1] https://myabuy.slack.com/pricing https://myabuy.slack.com/pricing
- rrix 11y ago
  Are slack histories indexed by google, like mailing list archives or large IRC channels?
  - wstrange 11y ago
    They are not - this is exactly the problem I am alluding to.
- wstrange 11y ago
  I use Slack often, and yes I know about the search feature. How do I find the answer to a question that was posted two months ago, for an open source project that is not paying to keep more than 10K messages? History vanishes with Slack. I get why this is very cool for internal communication. I just question the use of Slack for open source community driven projects.

astrostl 11y ago

"proprietary centralized system that can block or cut them off for any reason" Chat and ChatOps aren't going anywhere, and Slack already has a gaggle of nascent competitors, both commercial and OSS. If you build on Facebook or Twitter and they tell you to pound sand, it's game over. If Slack does the same, you can add support for everyone else - if you haven't already. You aren't building a "Slack app," you're building a chat app which happens to support the Slack API. Huge difference.

niutech 11y ago

The biggest problems of Slack are: being closed source, transferring internal communication to external servers and loading very slow. Here you can find the alternatives solving all problems: http://browsingthenet.blogspot.com/2015/05/slack-is-so-slow-here-are-5-lightweight.html http://browsingthenet.blogspot.com/2015/05/slack-is-so-slow-...