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I really wish people would stop pretending Slack is just IRC with a brand name slapped on. It's so much better to use in every single way. If you don't care ab

I really wish people would stop pretending Slack is just IRC with a brand name slapped on. It's so much better to use in every single way. If you don't care about UX then you don't care about UX, but at least have the intellectual honesty to say it.

popmystack 10y ago
There is nothing about IRC which dictates what UX you have to use. Nothing was stopping the slack team with creating that client.
spotman 10y ago
I don't think the parent comment is talking about the UX really. But on the topic of UX and what are or are not losing, I will say that the UX of slack is not so good when it eats 2gb of memory all day and beachballs a modern day iMac quite badly if you have a channel with lots of fancy formatting. I have written to slack about this and they wrote a polite response back acknowledging the issue. Really hope they do solve this soon (Despite the connectivity issues) because it's become unusable for my team lately. Supposedly according to slack it is compounded when you have multiple teams. We have a team per client as we primarily do consulting, so now we have had to switch some teams over to another solution so that we can allow the teams that must be in slack to stay in slack. So, while I think slack has the potential to be much better in every single way, days like today illustrate that it's an SPOF, and on days when it is available, I would not call the experience reliably good, not as reliably good as modern day IRC is, unfortunately. (and I don't say this lightly, i love things like in-line code blocks, @ notifying people, mobile clients, and more)
ams6110 10y ago
I care about UX but I care about my desired UX. I'm not a slack user but assuming it were to be offered to me I'd want a command-line client. If it didn't have that capability I'd pass.
- devhead 10y ago
  here you go: https://github.com/TidalLabs/Slacker https://github.com/TidalLabs/Slacker
forgottenpass 10y ago
If you don't care about UX then you don't care about UX, but at least have the intellectual honesty to say it. I care about UX. What I don't care for is the idea the UX has become a distance multiplier when talking about differences in software. Is anyone suggesting that Slack is literally just a client for the existing IRC protocol? No. They're suggesting that slack is just a particularly nice and popular iteration on IRC. You seem to have some impression that just because a slack feature isn't part of the IRC protocol, that it isn't a short evolutionary distance from IRC. Breed in some modern design conventions and use paradigms and you're pretty close. So it's not crazy to call slack IRC, it's a convenient shorthand for people who don't demand exacting terminology (and don't mind mentioning slack in the same breath as an icky ugly fixed with text-only app). And that intellectual dishonesty comment is just a way to say a really shitty thing and fly it under dang's radar.
gumby 10y ago
draw_down, could you tell me what you think the advantages are other than UX? I believe the bot integration may be better though I don't use it. I'm genuinely curious: I consider it simply Yet Another Chat System -- am I missing out on something?

popmystack 10y ago

There is nothing about IRC which dictates what UX you have to use. Nothing was stopping the slack team with creating that client.

spotman 10y ago

I don't think the parent comment is talking about the UX really. But on the topic of UX and what are or are not losing, I will say that the UX of slack is not so good when it eats 2gb of memory all day and beachballs a modern day iMac quite badly if you have a channel with lots of fancy formatting. I have written to slack about this and they wrote a polite response back acknowledging the issue. Really hope they do solve this soon (Despite the connectivity issues) because it's become unusable for my team lately. Supposedly according to slack it is compounded when you have multiple teams. We have a team per client as we primarily do consulting, so now we have had to switch some teams over to another solution so that we can allow the teams that must be in slack to stay in slack. So, while I think slack has the potential to be much better in every single way, days like today illustrate that it's an SPOF, and on days when it is available, I would not call the experience reliably good, not as reliably good as modern day IRC is, unfortunately. (and I don't say this lightly, i love things like in-line code blocks, @ notifying people, mobile clients, and more)

ams6110 10y ago

I care about UX but I care about my desired UX. I'm not a slack user but assuming it were to be offered to me I'd want a command-line client. If it didn't have that capability I'd pass.

devhead 10y ago
here you go: https://github.com/TidalLabs/Slacker https://github.com/TidalLabs/Slacker

forgottenpass 10y ago

If you don't care about UX then you don't care about UX, but at least have the intellectual honesty to say it. I care about UX. What I don't care for is the idea the UX has become a distance multiplier when talking about differences in software. Is anyone suggesting that Slack is literally just a client for the existing IRC protocol? No. They're suggesting that slack is just a particularly nice and popular iteration on IRC. You seem to have some impression that just because a slack feature isn't part of the IRC protocol, that it isn't a short evolutionary distance from IRC. Breed in some modern design conventions and use paradigms and you're pretty close. So it's not crazy to call slack IRC, it's a convenient shorthand for people who don't demand exacting terminology (and don't mind mentioning slack in the same breath as an icky ugly fixed with text-only app). And that intellectual dishonesty comment is just a way to say a really shitty thing and fly it under dang's radar.

gumby 10y ago

draw_down, could you tell me what you think the advantages are other than UX? I believe the bot integration may be better though I don't use it. I'm genuinely curious: I consider it simply Yet Another Chat System -- am I missing out on something?