7 ms·

Despite all the detractors, Slack definitely made collaboration much easier b/w teams. IRC was just too techy for tech and non-tech teams to collaborate. Howev

by pm90 9y ago

Despite all the detractors, Slack definitely made collaboration much easier b/w teams. IRC was just too techy for tech and non-tech teams to collaborate. However, I don't think the future of collaboration will be Slack. It is just too expensive and quite buggy at the moment. I'm hoping there will be competition that will either make Slack better or replace Slack with a cheaper, less buggy alternative.

rishabhparikh 9y ago
Hoping for the same. Stopped using Slack primarily because of their mobile (iOS) experience. Push notifications never seem to come on time and I hate that the notifications get pushed in reverse order when EVERY other app does the opposite.
verelo 9y ago
I struggle to agree, despite being the person who initially championed it at the company. It feels like the worst of both IM and email: people use it instead of email, so delayed responses are ok (although sometimes you want a realtime convo and cannnot get it), but alike IM they also just don't respond sometimes (this reminds me of how people sometimes treat iMessage/SMS). I was thinking about the impact of taking it away again, if Hangouts supported "channels" that people in the domain could join I think we would have a pretty seamless departure. The channels feature is about all I've remained to love after having slack for 2 years.
- pySSK 9y ago
  They should just bring back Google Wave.
  - flukus 9y ago
    Funny how slack suffers many of the same issues (performance wise) that killed wave but they benefit from a decade of hardware advancements.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Like being based on web stack? Because otherwise I don't really see any inherent performance issues in the problem domain that would require hardware more powerful than what we had in the early 90s. IRC, for all it's UX issues, proves exactly that.
      - maccard 9y ago
        Discord manages much better performance on a similar(?) stack
        riffraff 9y ago
        but what performance issues do you have? Sure, slack might be resource hungry, but it doesn't feel "slow" to me.
        scrollaway 9y ago
        Say that again after trying Discord :) It's night and day. Especially voice/video chat, holy crap Slack is ridiculous. The first time I started a Slack voice chat, I actually had time to disable my extensions and log into my router before I figured that no, it's not a problem on my end, it's just that slow and the damn thing loaded. Slack is just really bad in terms of performance.
        dingaling 9y ago
        Ony work laptop ( Core2/Duo, 8GB RAM ) Slack in a Firefox tab lags when typing. Incredible in 2017.
        gizzlon 9y ago
        The app is ridiculously slow on my 4 year old laptop. Non-electron apps are always fast and snappy, but slack is almost unusable.
        pdimitar 9y ago
        i7 3770, 32GB RAM, dual SSD and two HDD setup, Windows 10 x64, everything flies, absolutely everything updates before I finish half-blinking my eyes. I have 2-3 Twitch streams running 24/7 and still have 30-50ms in any game I enter. Yet, Slack manages to have lag between pressing Enter and showing a message. It's baffling to me how almost nobody doesn't seem to have a problem with that. Miranda IM worked much faster when connected to 6 networks... on a machine that was 10x slower than my phone. Like, come on.
- Swizec 9y ago
  > but alike IM they also just don't respond sometimes Don’t people “just not respond” even more with email? Maybe I’m an outlier but I probably reply to less than 50% of things that come into my email. And if you need a realtime convo, come tap me on the shoulder or schedule a time to talk. That’s the main benefit of slack (and email): async communication. Async is good.
  - danpalmer 9y ago
    For your work email? If I had a 50% response rate for emails that clearly need a response, that would severely impact my ability to do my job and would likely result in my manager taking steps to help me improve that.
    - Swizec 9y ago
      Oh I don’t even open my work email. That has a 100% ignore rate. If it’s not important enough to Slack or talk to me about it doesn’t exist. I meant for my real email. As for my manager taking steps to help me improve that, he’s even worse. Or just has a stronger things-that-are-important filter than I do for Slack. Email is for papertrailing things that were previously agreed upon in person or on slack.
      - alexasmyths 9y ago
        If your work email is not worth reading, you have a communications problem at your company. The problem is not 'Slack' or 'Email' - it's the wasted communications energy at all these companies. Most companies have not figured this out, and think that tech will solve if for them. Not so much.
        andrewprock 9y ago
        Often the "communications problem" is that people have low reading comprehension, and cannot type.
  - verelo 9y ago
- inferiorhuman 9y ago
  > but alike IM they also just don't respond sometimes (this reminds me of how people sometimes treat iMessage/SMS). Given that they steadfastly refuse to implement an ignore user feature while at the same time they've implemented mandatory channels, of course the signal-to-noise ratio falls and people just ignore Slack. I know I do.
  - sgift 9y ago
    > Given that they steadfastly refuse to implement an ignore user feature If you have to ignore your colleagues you have far worse problems than Slack not having an "ignore user" feature.
    - user5994461 9y ago
      The problem is well identified. It's Slack.
    - lithos 9y ago
      Slack is also used for some casual communities as well. For instance if I were to use the Screeps/EVE Online slack like I do a work one, I'd never be off my phone.
      - chimeracoder 9y ago
        > Slack is also used for some casual communities as well. For instance if I were to use the Screeps/EVE Online slack like I do a work one, I'd never be off my phone. Slack's been pretty clear that they don't want their product to be used for this use case, and have even nudged some larger "casual" communities and open-source projects off. So it's not surprising that they plan their feature roadmap according to what (they think) will be useful to businesses.
    - inferiorhuman 9y ago
      > If you have to ignore your colleagues you have far worse problems than Slack not having an "ignore user" feature. Try working at a large enough company. Or, try using any number of bots. I'm in a few mandatory channels of zero relevance (ok, mute) and a few of high relevance that are punctuated with lots of bot chatter I'd like to ignore. And, sure, there are a few coworkers I'd prefer to ignore. Even IRC will let you manage notifications with more granularity than Slack will.
- ryguytilidie 9y ago
  Totally agree with this. I do consulting for a bunch of startups and they often invite me to their slack. I'm pretty fascinated by the hugely different "slack cultures" at each company. One company I worked for would militantly tell people to never use @all, @channel, etc, because it was distracting (THANK YOU!!!!) and another client will literally do "@channel, I'm WFH today" in the all company channel. I've had 2-3 hour blocks where I'll have 6-7 notifications that aren't for me. If you ask me, Slack is the best way to distract your employees from doing work. It's like putting everyone in ~1 hour of meetings a day for no good reason.
humbertomn 9y ago
Atlassian has just launched Stride as a cheaper alternative. I'm planning to test it out soon to see if it hits the mark for your second requirement too. [1] https://www.stride.com/pricing https://www.stride.com/pricing
wyattk 9y ago
I view this like much of the rest of communications software (or even software in general). Over time, it tends to go to zero. It can be useful to compare it to video services or even personal messaging. In personal messaging, you have an insane amount of services like Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, GroupMe, Allo, Hangouts, iMessage, Signal, etc... I could see something similar to Slack as a free, open source project. It could possibly develop out of something like Signal [https://signal.org/ https://signal.org/]. Making and supporting an open source solution can be a viable business too (e.g. CoreOS, Docker). I doubt that it would kill Slack either. It should be interesting to watch, and will benefit the end users as a whole through an improved Slack and/or a similar free option.
- hkjayakumar 9y ago
  Mattermost[1] is an existing open-source[2] Slack alternative. [1] https://about.mattermost.com/ https://about.mattermost.com/ [2] https://github.com/mattermost https://github.com/mattermost
  - locusofself 9y ago
    I have a few dozen mattermost deployments I maintain. It's great.
    - darksim905 9y ago
      Except they don't have an app you can install on your phone/desktop/laptop, last I checked. If I could also join a 'Mattermost' team from the Slack app so everything is centralized, I'd be happy as fuck.
      - vith 9y ago
        Looks like they do: https://about.mattermost.com/download/#mattermostApps https://about.mattermost.com/download/#mattermostApps
        9y ago
adzm 9y ago
One thing about Slack is that communication and chat is literally their core business. With offerings from Atlassian or Microsoft et al, they could just let their platform wither when they have a mood swing. But it is all Slack has.
- copperx 9y ago
  That's true. But I also look at Evernote and realize that notes are all Evernote have, and yet look at their stagnation ...
bobsil1 9y ago
Still isn't end-to-end encrypted, I think.
- danpalmer 9y ago
  I don’t think there’s any need to be. Their target market is either business who need it on-premises for regulatory reasons, or its business who don’t. The former being hacked is the fault of the business, but that’s what they pay for with on-prem deployment, the latter isn’t critical (because it’s not regulated), the business has not committed a crime mishandling data or anything, and will seek compensation for damages from Slack. Slack being hacked is generally just not something most business need in their threat model. Same goes for Gmail, GitHub, and most other business services.
  - always_good 9y ago
    That's hard for me to believe. I can imagine people lackadaisically sharing things like ssh keys / passwords on it. I certainly have. Any time something is hacked where the participants thought they had privacy is a potential disaster. Not sure how you can say otherwise.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jjrh 9y ago
> IRC was just too techy for tech and non-tech teams to collaborate. There are PLENTY of other chat protocols other than IRC. Not sure why people always make the comparison. IRC would be a poor choice for a workplace. XMPP is a pretty good alternative with stuff like movim that have a friendly modern looking client.

by pm90 9y ago

rishabhparikh 9y ago

Hoping for the same. Stopped using Slack primarily because of their mobile (iOS) experience. Push notifications never seem to come on time and I hate that the notifications get pushed in reverse order when EVERY other app does the opposite.

verelo 9y ago

I struggle to agree, despite being the person who initially championed it at the company. It feels like the worst of both IM and email: people use it instead of email, so delayed responses are ok (although sometimes you want a realtime convo and cannnot get it), but alike IM they also just don't respond sometimes (this reminds me of how people sometimes treat iMessage/SMS). I was thinking about the impact of taking it away again, if Hangouts supported "channels" that people in the domain could join I think we would have a pretty seamless departure. The channels feature is about all I've remained to love after having slack for 2 years.

pySSK 9y ago
They should just bring back Google Wave.
- flukus 9y ago
  Funny how slack suffers many of the same issues (performance wise) that killed wave but they benefit from a decade of hardware advancements.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Like being based on web stack? Because otherwise I don't really see any inherent performance issues in the problem domain that would require hardware more powerful than what we had in the early 90s. IRC, for all it's UX issues, proves exactly that.
    - maccard 9y ago
      Discord manages much better performance on a similar(?) stack
      - riffraff 9y ago
        but what performance issues do you have? Sure, slack might be resource hungry, but it doesn't feel "slow" to me.
        scrollaway 9y ago
        Say that again after trying Discord :) It's night and day. Especially voice/video chat, holy crap Slack is ridiculous. The first time I started a Slack voice chat, I actually had time to disable my extensions and log into my router before I figured that no, it's not a problem on my end, it's just that slow and the damn thing loaded. Slack is just really bad in terms of performance.
        dingaling 9y ago
        Ony work laptop ( Core2/Duo, 8GB RAM ) Slack in a Firefox tab lags when typing. Incredible in 2017.
        gizzlon 9y ago
        The app is ridiculously slow on my 4 year old laptop. Non-electron apps are always fast and snappy, but slack is almost unusable.
        pdimitar 9y ago
        i7 3770, 32GB RAM, dual SSD and two HDD setup, Windows 10 x64, everything flies, absolutely everything updates before I finish half-blinking my eyes. I have 2-3 Twitch streams running 24/7 and still have 30-50ms in any game I enter. Yet, Slack manages to have lag between pressing Enter and showing a message. It's baffling to me how almost nobody doesn't seem to have a problem with that. Miranda IM worked much faster when connected to 6 networks... on a machine that was 10x slower than my phone. Like, come on.
Swizec 9y ago
> but alike IM they also just don't respond sometimes Don’t people “just not respond” even more with email? Maybe I’m an outlier but I probably reply to less than 50% of things that come into my email. And if you need a realtime convo, come tap me on the shoulder or schedule a time to talk. That’s the main benefit of slack (and email): async communication. Async is good.
- danpalmer 9y ago
  For your work email? If I had a 50% response rate for emails that clearly need a response, that would severely impact my ability to do my job and would likely result in my manager taking steps to help me improve that.
  - Swizec 9y ago
    Oh I don’t even open my work email. That has a 100% ignore rate. If it’s not important enough to Slack or talk to me about it doesn’t exist. I meant for my real email. As for my manager taking steps to help me improve that, he’s even worse. Or just has a stronger things-that-are-important filter than I do for Slack. Email is for papertrailing things that were previously agreed upon in person or on slack.
    - alexasmyths 9y ago
      If your work email is not worth reading, you have a communications problem at your company. The problem is not 'Slack' or 'Email' - it's the wasted communications energy at all these companies. Most companies have not figured this out, and think that tech will solve if for them. Not so much.
      - andrewprock 9y ago
        Often the "communications problem" is that people have low reading comprehension, and cannot type.
- verelo 9y ago
inferiorhuman 9y ago
> but alike IM they also just don't respond sometimes (this reminds me of how people sometimes treat iMessage/SMS). Given that they steadfastly refuse to implement an ignore user feature while at the same time they've implemented mandatory channels, of course the signal-to-noise ratio falls and people just ignore Slack. I know I do.
- sgift 9y ago
  > Given that they steadfastly refuse to implement an ignore user feature If you have to ignore your colleagues you have far worse problems than Slack not having an "ignore user" feature.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    The problem is well identified. It's Slack.
  - lithos 9y ago
    Slack is also used for some casual communities as well. For instance if I were to use the Screeps/EVE Online slack like I do a work one, I'd never be off my phone.
    - chimeracoder 9y ago
      > Slack is also used for some casual communities as well. For instance if I were to use the Screeps/EVE Online slack like I do a work one, I'd never be off my phone. Slack's been pretty clear that they don't want their product to be used for this use case, and have even nudged some larger "casual" communities and open-source projects off. So it's not surprising that they plan their feature roadmap according to what (they think) will be useful to businesses.
  - inferiorhuman 9y ago
    > If you have to ignore your colleagues you have far worse problems than Slack not having an "ignore user" feature. Try working at a large enough company. Or, try using any number of bots. I'm in a few mandatory channels of zero relevance (ok, mute) and a few of high relevance that are punctuated with lots of bot chatter I'd like to ignore. And, sure, there are a few coworkers I'd prefer to ignore. Even IRC will let you manage notifications with more granularity than Slack will.
ryguytilidie 9y ago
Totally agree with this. I do consulting for a bunch of startups and they often invite me to their slack. I'm pretty fascinated by the hugely different "slack cultures" at each company. One company I worked for would militantly tell people to never use @all, @channel, etc, because it was distracting (THANK YOU!!!!) and another client will literally do "@channel, I'm WFH today" in the all company channel. I've had 2-3 hour blocks where I'll have 6-7 notifications that aren't for me. If you ask me, Slack is the best way to distract your employees from doing work. It's like putting everyone in ~1 hour of meetings a day for no good reason.

humbertomn 9y ago

Atlassian has just launched Stride as a cheaper alternative. I'm planning to test it out soon to see if it hits the mark for your second requirement too. [1] https://www.stride.com/pricing https://www.stride.com/pricing

wyattk 9y ago

I view this like much of the rest of communications software (or even software in general). Over time, it tends to go to zero. It can be useful to compare it to video services or even personal messaging. In personal messaging, you have an insane amount of services like Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, GroupMe, Allo, Hangouts, iMessage, Signal, etc... I could see something similar to Slack as a free, open source project. It could possibly develop out of something like Signal [https://signal.org/ https://signal.org/]. Making and supporting an open source solution can be a viable business too (e.g. CoreOS, Docker). I doubt that it would kill Slack either. It should be interesting to watch, and will benefit the end users as a whole through an improved Slack and/or a similar free option.

hkjayakumar 9y ago
Mattermost[1] is an existing open-source[2] Slack alternative. [1] https://about.mattermost.com/ https://about.mattermost.com/ [2] https://github.com/mattermost https://github.com/mattermost
- locusofself 9y ago
  I have a few dozen mattermost deployments I maintain. It's great.
  - darksim905 9y ago
    Except they don't have an app you can install on your phone/desktop/laptop, last I checked. If I could also join a 'Mattermost' team from the Slack app so everything is centralized, I'd be happy as fuck.
    - vith 9y ago
      Looks like they do: https://about.mattermost.com/download/#mattermostApps https://about.mattermost.com/download/#mattermostApps
      - 9y ago

adzm 9y ago

One thing about Slack is that communication and chat is literally their core business. With offerings from Atlassian or Microsoft et al, they could just let their platform wither when they have a mood swing. But it is all Slack has.

copperx 9y ago
That's true. But I also look at Evernote and realize that notes are all Evernote have, and yet look at their stagnation ...

bobsil1 9y ago

Still isn't end-to-end encrypted, I think.

danpalmer 9y ago
I don’t think there’s any need to be. Their target market is either business who need it on-premises for regulatory reasons, or its business who don’t. The former being hacked is the fault of the business, but that’s what they pay for with on-prem deployment, the latter isn’t critical (because it’s not regulated), the business has not committed a crime mishandling data or anything, and will seek compensation for damages from Slack. Slack being hacked is generally just not something most business need in their threat model. Same goes for Gmail, GitHub, and most other business services.
- always_good 9y ago
  That's hard for me to believe. I can imagine people lackadaisically sharing things like ssh keys / passwords on it. I certainly have. Any time something is hacked where the participants thought they had privacy is a potential disaster. Not sure how you can say otherwise.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jjrh 9y ago

> IRC was just too techy for tech and non-tech teams to collaborate. There are PLENTY of other chat protocols other than IRC. Not sure why people always make the comparison. IRC would be a poor choice for a workplace. XMPP is a pretty good alternative with stuff like movim that have a friendly modern looking client.