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With all the (appropriate) smugness of "I told you so" surrounding this issue, I think that many people's attitude around sticking to IRC and mail is a reason w

With all the (appropriate) smugness of "I told you so" surrounding this issue, I think that many people's attitude around sticking to IRC and mail is a reason why something like slack could even take off so quickly. I regularly speak to people like that, who just plain refuse (are unable?) to even see the difference between a chat like slack (or telegram, or mattermost, or or or...) where I can post images/videos inline, use proper markup etc, and a combination of IRC and email. "But you can just send images by mail!" they shout. Yes, you can. But the user experience will be a different one. And it doesn't even matter that I personally prefer the slack-like UX. Many other people seem to prefer it too, that's what matters. For anyone who's only mildly technical, setting up IRC is only a small hurdle, but it's one of many. IMHO, if you want people to use anything else but slack, sticking your head in the sand and screaming "you can do all of that in IRC" won't get you anywhere and is equivalent to complaining about the very nature of humanity. It might feel good to scream out your weltschmerz, but it won't change anything.

Wintamute 9y ago
Did you read the article to the end? The author isn't sticking his head in the sand, he puts his money where his mouth is and it currently developing a Slack-like client built on XMPP. The protocol can support many of the Slack-style features you cite, but a lot of the clients are currently lagging behind. Also, if you let hatred of other people's imagined smugness drive your technical and tooling decisions then ... well, I'm not sure it's the most effective metric to use.
- raverbashing 9y ago
  Interesting if it ends up supporting Emoji Reactions (note, this is not just Emoji, but Emoji Reactions to messages) and Threads That's the right answer, I'm very skeptical of people saying "this can be done in XMPP" but when it comes to the actual implementation it falls short Edit: also note the author updated the article and Emoji Reactions are still not supported in XMPP but are in development
- Can_Not 9y ago
  > The author isn't sticking his head in the sand I think he was talking about HN users who argue that IRC does everything slack does.
  - octalmage 9y ago
    Yeah anytime Slack is mentioned at work someone brings up IRC. So I get what he’s saying.
  - cup-of-tea 9y ago
    Nobody argues that. But they may very well argue that IRC doesn't everything they want it to do.
    - black_puppydog 9y ago
      I know people who literally argue that. Needless to say, I don't agree with them. :P
    - typon 9y ago
      See the replies to my comment 10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16495893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16495893
      - cup-of-tea 9y ago
        Most of the replies are criticising the ghastly inefficient app. What is wrong with that?
    - rwmj 9y ago
      My argument is that IRC is better because it doesn't do a lot of things. I really don't feel my day would be enhanced by people pasting images or animated emojis into my IRC channels.
      - cup-of-tea 9y ago
        Ugh I messed up my post, "doesn't" was supposed to be "does".
- dmitriid 9y ago
  > but a lot of the clients are currently lagging behind. ^ this. A lot of people are so mad at Slack and extolling the virtues of XMPP and IRC and fully forget that there are about zero clients for either XMPP or IRC that have the same functionality (consistent across multiple platforms) as Slack. Yes, I'm fully aware of exactly one client for Android (Conversations) that supports mobile-friendly XEPS. And yes, I'm fully aware of IRCCloud, a closed-source, proprietary 100% web-based product on top of IRC (all the things that people seem to hate about Slack. Go figure)
  - gurkendoktor 9y ago
    > And yes, I'm fully aware of IRCCloud, a closed-source, proprietary 100% web-based product on top of IRC (all the things that people seem to hate about Slack. Go figure) My understanding is that many of IRCCloud's Slack-like features are based on the open IRCv3 standard. If this standard ever takes off (fingers crossed...), IRCCloud will have a lot less vendor lock-in than Slack does.
    - bpicolo 9y ago
      > If this standard ever takes off Hard to imagine it will for Slack's audience. Slack is serving the case for the non-technical folk extraordinarily well right now. A significant amount of their user base doesn't care about standards or IRC channels. They just want a consistent, well-designed product that does the things they need it to for work. They've never opened a terminal in their life and they don't need the terminal-irc-gateway that this recent change has killed off.
      - gurkendoktor 9y ago
        All of that is true, not to mention that Slack is free (up to a certain point). But many IT departments require on-premise hosting, which Slack doesn't offer. Users don't care about open standards, but maybe their sysadmins do. If IRCv3 can capture this audience, it has a chance to co-exist with Slack.
        9y ago
bogomipz 9y ago
>"sticking your head in the sand and screaming "you can do all of that in IRC" won't get you anywhere and is equivalent to complaining about the very nature of humanity." Did we read the same article? This article had nothing do do with IRC knee-jerk reactionaries. The author's main point is that Slack results in a walled garden and information silo'ing of our conversations. The author then went on to provide a potential antidote to that problem by discussing a javascript project they been working on.
- black_puppydog 9y ago
  I should have made this clearer: I am not talking about the author of that blog post but rather of a subset of the tech community discussing slack's move and business model.
  - toyg 9y ago
    In other words, you set up a strawman.
    - _Tev 9y ago
      Have you read any previous discussion om HN about slack? There are plenty of people holding views OP attacked, so hardly a strawman.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
nukeop 9y ago
I don't see anything conductive to actual work that slack has but IRC lacks. the software industries and choices of tools such as chat clients are fashion-driven and most people will be hard pressed to provide a reason why they prefer slack or discord or whatever the newest shiny toy is other than "it's popular". They're popular, in turn, because their owners have marketing budgets, and decentralized, superior alternatives don't, because they are not commercial products. Just accept that any choice of tools or technologies is typically at least 95% irrational and dictated by marketing, not by rational reasons or calculations of risks and benefits. It used to be that companies would never risk third parties getting hold of confidential internal communications, nobody cares anymore though.
- zwily 9y ago
  “Sync’d read-state across multiple devices” is what sold me on Slack years ago. I had been trying to simulate it for a long time in IRC using various bouncers, but it never worked very well and was hard to set up for non-technical people at work.
  - Mithaldu 9y ago
    Try IRCCloud.
    - moosingin3space 9y ago
      Which is a centralized, proprietary, web-based client. All three of which HN loves to hate Slack for.
      - isostatic 9y ago
        It does have a really easy way to extract your conversations as a log file though. An OSS version of irccloud you could just "apt-get install blahblah" with may have stemmed the rise of slack, at least in companies.
        9y ago
erikb 9y ago
> IMHO, if you want people to use anything else but slack, sticking your head in the sand and screaming "you can do all of that in IRC" won't get you anywhere and is equivalent to complaining about the very nature of humanity. It might feel good to scream out your weltschmerz, but it won't change anything. This is not what the article says. The article says clearly that everyone knows we want these fancy UIs in open chat apps. But the problem is funding. You need to pay 10+ developers, each costing between $100k and $200k (50-100 without tax) for 1-3 years to get such a nifty UI and after that you still need 1-3 devs each year to keep up with all the changes in the IT world. Someone needs to PAY that to get such a nifty UI. The article also argues correctly that you are currently paying for it by giving away your data which is worth a lot more than a few 100k USD/year. And all you get is a more nifty UI. Wow. And instead of understanding that you are exploited you complain about how stupid the people are that fight for protection of your values. That is REALLY stupid. The same level a child complaining about needing to go to bed early than the parents while the loud and colorful ads try to keep the child in front of the TV until 2 am or longer. Start acting like a grown up.
- joesb 9y ago
  The author can start acting like a grown up by making enough money to fund the development or shut up. If he knew users are already paying for Slack, then obviously he can do what grown ups like Slack did to get paid users as well.
  - dwighttk 9y ago
    why would [enough people] pay for slack if they didn't need information in a silo?
  - erikb 9y ago
    While I haven't checked for proof I wouldn't be surprised if the author is in fact spending a lot of his time not just blogging and informing about the situation, but also working on improving things. I challenge you to do it better. Ah, screw that. I don't think you can, the way you talk. I challenge you to do something much simper: Read an RFC and try to provide interview style non-compiling code to implement it, then write a single blog post explaining what you did, applying a correct and reasonable free license to your source code and your blog post. That's something an untalented hobby programmer can do if he puts his mind to it.
unicornporn 9y ago
Sorry if I keep repeating myself. If you suddenly feel that IRC is too feature free or outdated for your needs, have some courtesy and consider a modern, federated and open solution instead. Matrix/Riot.im roughly has the pros of Slack (yes, including IRC bridges). https://riot.im/ https://riot.im/ https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/
dwc 9y ago
> who just plain refuse (are unable?) to even see the difference between a chat like slack (or telegram, or mattermost, or or or...) What if they do see the difference and don't see the value in it? This is worth considering. > where I can post images/videos inline, use proper markup etc I don't want someone else putting inline videos or markup into my feed. In IRC people post links, most of which I happily ignore at very low cost because they're not important to anything.
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  If they don’t see the value but everyone else dies then they are an outlier. That’s absolutely ok, as long as they understand that and that at some point the value is in network effects too
- black_puppydog 9y ago
  > I don't want someone else putting inline videos or markup into my feed. That is of course your personal choice, no arguing with it. I'm thinking of projects where communicating with/about videos and images is an integral part of the work. Think image processing for example. In that context a message of the kind "Hey, I tried this new method, look what I got as a result [image]" can make tons of sense. If you don't need images, you don't have to use them. If the person on the other end of the chat insists on sending them anyway, why are you talking to them? :P
  - toyg 9y ago
    So maybe the issue is just that this sort of features should really be enabled client-side. Which you could do fine with an intelligent IRC client.
scythe 9y ago
The problem with IRC is that it's technically capable of being so much more than what people think it is but it's actually a real hurdle to set up and nobody is very good at it, plus the clients are stuck in the past. The right way to use IRC is to SSH into a screen/tmux session on a remote server that's always up and running; in theory it should be fully possible to send any files (images, videos etc) over DCC and use terminal plugins to display them but no clients can handle this right. DCC is perfectly capable of this as IRC piracy has been a thing for years and those files are much larger. The trouble is that FOSS is so often made by ascetics for ascetics and so most clients won't help you with any of this and people sniff at you if you use one that does.
- ebiester 9y ago
  So, how do I teach the non-technical users with whom I need to communicate to use IRC, SSH, TMUX, and and get the right things on their system? We'd likely still need a client wrapper on top of it all.
  - def_true_false 9y ago
    Something like Quassel had most of this functionality more than 5 years ago, while looking at least as good as Slack. I haven't used it in a long time but I'm pretty sure the setup was simple (not one click, but certainly easier than tmux, etc). It's a Qt app, so might be a better fit for non-technical users.
  - scythe 9y ago
    I didn't say you should; rather, my point is that the problems with IRC mostly happen at the client level rather than the protocol level. Of course, it is also hard to ensure that a dominant client vendor does not start trying to add backwards-incompatible changes to the protocol. This has already happened once, and it's why the character U+0001 is now responsible for /me. I think ideally such a client could be implemented as a plugin to an extensible terminal emulator, which might help to keep the project small and prevent Jabberification.
hbosch 9y ago
>post images/videos inline There are quite a few IRC clients that do this automatically, fwiw.
thaumaturgy 9y ago
Okay, I'll take the bait. I'm about as good a representative sample of the people you're talking about as anyone else. I'm 39. I've been in technology in a professional capacity for 22 years, longer now than perhaps a few folks on HN have been alive. I wrote my first computer programs over 30 years ago, started online with local BBSs and then eWorld and then the internet. I've seen a lot of stuff come and go. The tech industry as a whole has, over the last decade, adopted an especially frenzied pace that looks an awful lot like someone lost in the woods, freaking out, running in different directions trying to figure out where they've been and where they're supposed to be going. There's nobody I can wag a finger at and say, "see, you didn't learn the last time 'round", because with a constant influx of new people, there's always a big group of folks that will adopt the latest thing because it's the latest thing, and have no memory of the last 30 years of latest things, and haven't been stung before when the latest thing fizzles out and takes a chunk of your time or infrastructure investment along with it. Slack had advantages, sure. But it's hardly the first time that some service has come along and offered advantages over the tired old thing -- all except for a public, common protocol -- and then decided to take their ball and go home and to hell with everyone else. My staid desire for things being built on open protocols and available to people who want to self-host it doesn't come from some hardnosed ideology, it comes from years of, "oh no, this shit again." Unfortunately, comments like yours tend to dismissively shout down the comments from the been-there-done-that folks, and so we're locked in a particularly self-defeating Eternal September that's costing the tech industry an incalculable amount of money. In my more cynical moments, I wonder if a cadre of old farts oughtta start getting together and giving the less experienced folks the advice they want to hear, just to see how long it takes them to catch on: "building infrastructure out of walled gardens is a good idea, because they are commercial businesses and will be able to offer you more features than the slow-moving open source alternatives that haven't changed much in a long time".
- TAForObvReasons 9y ago
  > The tech industry as a whole has, over the last decade, adopted an especially frenzied pace that looks an awful lot like someone lost in the woods, freaking out, running in different directions trying to figure out where they've been and where they're supposed to be going. I think there's a simpler explanation: people are trying to find new business models. The old model of individuals paying tens or hundreds of dollars for software is slowly dying, and it's on full display in the iOS app store where even $5 is perceived to be a lot to charge for an app. So we need new models. The rise of SaaS is tied to that shift. in-app purchases and related psychological shenanigans are related to that shift. The SV elders, like Peter Thiel of Palantir, now more than ever seem to favor rent-seeking business models and started selecting for those businesses 5 years ago. To course-correct, someone in technology will have to discover a new business model. I'm personally betting that we'll see a backlash and new models wherein people pay so there is no chance of data harvesting (going back from SaaS to standalone software)
OnlyRepliesToBS 9y ago
Slack is trying to make a vendor lock in, and that's evil.
dalbasal 9y ago
This comment is on the money. "..just plain refuse (are unable?) to even see the difference between a chat like slack. ...the user experience will be a different one." Underlying this is (unusually) a way some technical people think, and the way most bureaucracies think. Bureaucracies will often "checklist" requirements, see that it does all the things "users have identified as important," use cases they think these apply to and go on that information alone. They only consider stuff that is tangible & legible. By that checklist method email, whatsapp, Twitter, slack are IRC and such are essentially the same. Some may tick a.minor box that the other does not, but basically they all get messages from A to B (sometimes to B, C & D). It's even worse in this case, because slack is social software and the conventions people form as users are very impactful on the UX. This compounds differences.
lamby 9y ago
> But you can just send images by mail!" they shout. When Dropbox was originally announced in a "Show HN" someone said: You can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
baxtr 9y ago
I don't like Slack not because it is slick and nice, but because it breaks my productivity. People think they're more productive, but they're not. They just chat. The great thing about email is that it is asynchronous.

Wintamute 9y ago

Did you read the article to the end? The author isn't sticking his head in the sand, he puts his money where his mouth is and it currently developing a Slack-like client built on XMPP. The protocol can support many of the Slack-style features you cite, but a lot of the clients are currently lagging behind. Also, if you let hatred of other people's imagined smugness drive your technical and tooling decisions then ... well, I'm not sure it's the most effective metric to use.

raverbashing 9y ago
Interesting if it ends up supporting Emoji Reactions (note, this is not just Emoji, but Emoji Reactions to messages) and Threads That's the right answer, I'm very skeptical of people saying "this can be done in XMPP" but when it comes to the actual implementation it falls short Edit: also note the author updated the article and Emoji Reactions are still not supported in XMPP but are in development
Can_Not 9y ago
> The author isn't sticking his head in the sand I think he was talking about HN users who argue that IRC does everything slack does.
- octalmage 9y ago
  Yeah anytime Slack is mentioned at work someone brings up IRC. So I get what he’s saying.
- cup-of-tea 9y ago
  Nobody argues that. But they may very well argue that IRC doesn't everything they want it to do.
  - black_puppydog 9y ago
    I know people who literally argue that. Needless to say, I don't agree with them. :P
  - typon 9y ago
    See the replies to my comment 10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16495893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16495893
    - cup-of-tea 9y ago
      Most of the replies are criticising the ghastly inefficient app. What is wrong with that?
  - rwmj 9y ago
    My argument is that IRC is better because it doesn't do a lot of things. I really don't feel my day would be enhanced by people pasting images or animated emojis into my IRC channels.
    - cup-of-tea 9y ago
      Ugh I messed up my post, "doesn't" was supposed to be "does".
dmitriid 9y ago
> but a lot of the clients are currently lagging behind. ^ this. A lot of people are so mad at Slack and extolling the virtues of XMPP and IRC and fully forget that there are about zero clients for either XMPP or IRC that have the same functionality (consistent across multiple platforms) as Slack. Yes, I'm fully aware of exactly one client for Android (Conversations) that supports mobile-friendly XEPS. And yes, I'm fully aware of IRCCloud, a closed-source, proprietary 100% web-based product on top of IRC (all the things that people seem to hate about Slack. Go figure)
- gurkendoktor 9y ago
  > And yes, I'm fully aware of IRCCloud, a closed-source, proprietary 100% web-based product on top of IRC (all the things that people seem to hate about Slack. Go figure) My understanding is that many of IRCCloud's Slack-like features are based on the open IRCv3 standard. If this standard ever takes off (fingers crossed...), IRCCloud will have a lot less vendor lock-in than Slack does.
  - bpicolo 9y ago
    > If this standard ever takes off Hard to imagine it will for Slack's audience. Slack is serving the case for the non-technical folk extraordinarily well right now. A significant amount of their user base doesn't care about standards or IRC channels. They just want a consistent, well-designed product that does the things they need it to for work. They've never opened a terminal in their life and they don't need the terminal-irc-gateway that this recent change has killed off.
    - gurkendoktor 9y ago
      All of that is true, not to mention that Slack is free (up to a certain point). But many IT departments require on-premise hosting, which Slack doesn't offer. Users don't care about open standards, but maybe their sysadmins do. If IRCv3 can capture this audience, it has a chance to co-exist with Slack.
      - 9y ago

bogomipz 9y ago

>"sticking your head in the sand and screaming "you can do all of that in IRC" won't get you anywhere and is equivalent to complaining about the very nature of humanity." Did we read the same article? This article had nothing do do with IRC knee-jerk reactionaries. The author's main point is that Slack results in a walled garden and information silo'ing of our conversations. The author then went on to provide a potential antidote to that problem by discussing a javascript project they been working on.

black_puppydog 9y ago
I should have made this clearer: I am not talking about the author of that blog post but rather of a subset of the tech community discussing slack's move and business model.
- toyg 9y ago
  In other words, you set up a strawman.
  - _Tev 9y ago
    Have you read any previous discussion om HN about slack? There are plenty of people holding views OP attacked, so hardly a strawman.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

nukeop 9y ago

I don't see anything conductive to actual work that slack has but IRC lacks. the software industries and choices of tools such as chat clients are fashion-driven and most people will be hard pressed to provide a reason why they prefer slack or discord or whatever the newest shiny toy is other than "it's popular". They're popular, in turn, because their owners have marketing budgets, and decentralized, superior alternatives don't, because they are not commercial products. Just accept that any choice of tools or technologies is typically at least 95% irrational and dictated by marketing, not by rational reasons or calculations of risks and benefits. It used to be that companies would never risk third parties getting hold of confidential internal communications, nobody cares anymore though.

zwily 9y ago
“Sync’d read-state across multiple devices” is what sold me on Slack years ago. I had been trying to simulate it for a long time in IRC using various bouncers, but it never worked very well and was hard to set up for non-technical people at work.
- Mithaldu 9y ago
  Try IRCCloud.
  - moosingin3space 9y ago
    Which is a centralized, proprietary, web-based client. All three of which HN loves to hate Slack for.
    - isostatic 9y ago
      It does have a really easy way to extract your conversations as a log file though. An OSS version of irccloud you could just "apt-get install blahblah" with may have stemmed the rise of slack, at least in companies.
      - 9y ago

erikb 9y ago

> IMHO, if you want people to use anything else but slack, sticking your head in the sand and screaming "you can do all of that in IRC" won't get you anywhere and is equivalent to complaining about the very nature of humanity. It might feel good to scream out your weltschmerz, but it won't change anything. This is not what the article says. The article says clearly that everyone knows we want these fancy UIs in open chat apps. But the problem is funding. You need to pay 10+ developers, each costing between $100k and $200k (50-100 without tax) for 1-3 years to get such a nifty UI and after that you still need 1-3 devs each year to keep up with all the changes in the IT world. Someone needs to PAY that to get such a nifty UI. The article also argues correctly that you are currently paying for it by giving away your data which is worth a lot more than a few 100k USD/year. And all you get is a more nifty UI. Wow. And instead of understanding that you are exploited you complain about how stupid the people are that fight for protection of your values. That is REALLY stupid. The same level a child complaining about needing to go to bed early than the parents while the loud and colorful ads try to keep the child in front of the TV until 2 am or longer. Start acting like a grown up.

joesb 9y ago
The author can start acting like a grown up by making enough money to fund the development or shut up. If he knew users are already paying for Slack, then obviously he can do what grown ups like Slack did to get paid users as well.
- dwighttk 9y ago
  why would [enough people] pay for slack if they didn't need information in a silo?
- erikb 9y ago
  While I haven't checked for proof I wouldn't be surprised if the author is in fact spending a lot of his time not just blogging and informing about the situation, but also working on improving things. I challenge you to do it better. Ah, screw that. I don't think you can, the way you talk. I challenge you to do something much simper: Read an RFC and try to provide interview style non-compiling code to implement it, then write a single blog post explaining what you did, applying a correct and reasonable free license to your source code and your blog post. That's something an untalented hobby programmer can do if he puts his mind to it.

unicornporn 9y ago

Sorry if I keep repeating myself. If you suddenly feel that IRC is too feature free or outdated for your needs, have some courtesy and consider a modern, federated and open solution instead. Matrix/Riot.im roughly has the pros of Slack (yes, including IRC bridges). https://riot.im/ https://riot.im/ https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/

dwc 9y ago

> who just plain refuse (are unable?) to even see the difference between a chat like slack (or telegram, or mattermost, or or or...) What if they do see the difference and don't see the value in it? This is worth considering. > where I can post images/videos inline, use proper markup etc I don't want someone else putting inline videos or markup into my feed. In IRC people post links, most of which I happily ignore at very low cost because they're not important to anything.

abritinthebay 9y ago
If they don’t see the value but everyone else dies then they are an outlier. That’s absolutely ok, as long as they understand that and that at some point the value is in network effects too
black_puppydog 9y ago
> I don't want someone else putting inline videos or markup into my feed. That is of course your personal choice, no arguing with it. I'm thinking of projects where communicating with/about videos and images is an integral part of the work. Think image processing for example. In that context a message of the kind "Hey, I tried this new method, look what I got as a result [image]" can make tons of sense. If you don't need images, you don't have to use them. If the person on the other end of the chat insists on sending them anyway, why are you talking to them? :P
- toyg 9y ago
  So maybe the issue is just that this sort of features should really be enabled client-side. Which you could do fine with an intelligent IRC client.

scythe 9y ago

The problem with IRC is that it's technically capable of being so much more than what people think it is but it's actually a real hurdle to set up and nobody is very good at it, plus the clients are stuck in the past. The right way to use IRC is to SSH into a screen/tmux session on a remote server that's always up and running; in theory it should be fully possible to send any files (images, videos etc) over DCC and use terminal plugins to display them but no clients can handle this right. DCC is perfectly capable of this as IRC piracy has been a thing for years and those files are much larger. The trouble is that FOSS is so often made by ascetics for ascetics and so most clients won't help you with any of this and people sniff at you if you use one that does.

ebiester 9y ago
So, how do I teach the non-technical users with whom I need to communicate to use IRC, SSH, TMUX, and and get the right things on their system? We'd likely still need a client wrapper on top of it all.
- def_true_false 9y ago
  Something like Quassel had most of this functionality more than 5 years ago, while looking at least as good as Slack. I haven't used it in a long time but I'm pretty sure the setup was simple (not one click, but certainly easier than tmux, etc). It's a Qt app, so might be a better fit for non-technical users.
- scythe 9y ago
  I didn't say you should; rather, my point is that the problems with IRC mostly happen at the client level rather than the protocol level. Of course, it is also hard to ensure that a dominant client vendor does not start trying to add backwards-incompatible changes to the protocol. This has already happened once, and it's why the character U+0001 is now responsible for /me. I think ideally such a client could be implemented as a plugin to an extensible terminal emulator, which might help to keep the project small and prevent Jabberification.

hbosch 9y ago

>post images/videos inline There are quite a few IRC clients that do this automatically, fwiw.

thaumaturgy 9y ago

Okay, I'll take the bait. I'm about as good a representative sample of the people you're talking about as anyone else. I'm 39. I've been in technology in a professional capacity for 22 years, longer now than perhaps a few folks on HN have been alive. I wrote my first computer programs over 30 years ago, started online with local BBSs and then eWorld and then the internet. I've seen a lot of stuff come and go. The tech industry as a whole has, over the last decade, adopted an especially frenzied pace that looks an awful lot like someone lost in the woods, freaking out, running in different directions trying to figure out where they've been and where they're supposed to be going. There's nobody I can wag a finger at and say, "see, you didn't learn the last time 'round", because with a constant influx of new people, there's always a big group of folks that will adopt the latest thing because it's the latest thing, and have no memory of the last 30 years of latest things, and haven't been stung before when the latest thing fizzles out and takes a chunk of your time or infrastructure investment along with it. Slack had advantages, sure. But it's hardly the first time that some service has come along and offered advantages over the tired old thing -- all except for a public, common protocol -- and then decided to take their ball and go home and to hell with everyone else. My staid desire for things being built on open protocols and available to people who want to self-host it doesn't come from some hardnosed ideology, it comes from years of, "oh no, this shit again." Unfortunately, comments like yours tend to dismissively shout down the comments from the been-there-done-that folks, and so we're locked in a particularly self-defeating Eternal September that's costing the tech industry an incalculable amount of money. In my more cynical moments, I wonder if a cadre of old farts oughtta start getting together and giving the less experienced folks the advice they want to hear, just to see how long it takes them to catch on: "building infrastructure out of walled gardens is a good idea, because they are commercial businesses and will be able to offer you more features than the slow-moving open source alternatives that haven't changed much in a long time".

TAForObvReasons 9y ago
> The tech industry as a whole has, over the last decade, adopted an especially frenzied pace that looks an awful lot like someone lost in the woods, freaking out, running in different directions trying to figure out where they've been and where they're supposed to be going. I think there's a simpler explanation: people are trying to find new business models. The old model of individuals paying tens or hundreds of dollars for software is slowly dying, and it's on full display in the iOS app store where even $5 is perceived to be a lot to charge for an app. So we need new models. The rise of SaaS is tied to that shift. in-app purchases and related psychological shenanigans are related to that shift. The SV elders, like Peter Thiel of Palantir, now more than ever seem to favor rent-seeking business models and started selecting for those businesses 5 years ago. To course-correct, someone in technology will have to discover a new business model. I'm personally betting that we'll see a backlash and new models wherein people pay so there is no chance of data harvesting (going back from SaaS to standalone software)

OnlyRepliesToBS 9y ago

Slack is trying to make a vendor lock in, and that's evil.

dalbasal 9y ago

This comment is on the money. "..just plain refuse (are unable?) to even see the difference between a chat like slack. ...the user experience will be a different one." Underlying this is (unusually) a way some technical people think, and the way most bureaucracies think. Bureaucracies will often "checklist" requirements, see that it does all the things "users have identified as important," use cases they think these apply to and go on that information alone. They only consider stuff that is tangible & legible. By that checklist method email, whatsapp, Twitter, slack are IRC and such are essentially the same. Some may tick a.minor box that the other does not, but basically they all get messages from A to B (sometimes to B, C & D). It's even worse in this case, because slack is social software and the conventions people form as users are very impactful on the UX. This compounds differences.

lamby 9y ago

> But you can just send images by mail!" they shout. When Dropbox was originally announced in a "Show HN" someone said: You can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

baxtr 9y ago

I don't like Slack not because it is slick and nice, but because it breaks my productivity. People think they're more productive, but they're not. They just chat. The great thing about email is that it is asynchronous.