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Ask HN: How do you feel about Slack developer communities?
I've noticed quite an increase in non-commercial project developer communities that use Slack as their primary medium of communication, particularly for help and developer-related inquiries.
My gut reaction to this is a negative one, where I feel like the siloing of developer releated questions and answers is against the nature of the web, and more importantly detremental to the community itself, as it prevents discovery of previous discussions in forums, Google Groups, Stackoverflow etc.
How do you feel about these?
- detaro 8y agoNot a fan. Annoying to access, limited history, ... Can be improved with having external logs and/or a strong culture of moving things to external documentation, you can set up open gateways for joining, ..., but few Slack-based communities bother.
- hluska 8y agoThis is a well reasoned post, so my first reaction is to agree with you. But, then I remember two things. First, I largely learned to program because of some (extremely patient) people on IRC. IRC is similar to Slack in that it theoretically silos away questions and answers and prevents future discoverability. And second, despite all these years of conversations that were held on IRC, I can still find answers to any question imaginable on Google. In retrospect, I think that Slack (or IRC) might actually be a great way to disseminate information from developers to highly technical people. And, I think that many of these first generation learners blog about what they learned or go to answer questions on other services (ie - StackOverflow). But, I'm a sample of one and have absolutely no proof of any of this...:)
- hellofunk 8y agoOverall, they are good simply because you do often get quick real-time help, like Irc but with more people.
- siddhant 8y agoI don't like this trend either. What I particularly don't like is that to be signed in into multiple Slack communities, I need to add them to the Slack desktop app. And the more apps I have, the worse the desktop app seems to perform. I wish the developer communities would realize that IRC has been around for years and performs much much better than Slack.
- markatkinson 8y agoDiscord seems to be a more elegant solution than Slack tbh, and I happen to be on several developer servers. The web app/desktop app/mobile app all function brilliantly.
- karimdag 8y agoCould you suggest some ?
- markatkinson 8y agohttp://unrealslackers.org/ http://unrealslackers.org/ https://godotengine.org/community https://godotengine.org/community Both game engine examples but super helpful developer communities none the less.
- moltar 8y agoAgree. One huge plus over Slack is that you don’t need a separate account for each community. And joining can be easily done via just clicking a link.
- jehlakj 8y agoI feel like slack is better for work. But for almost everything else, I just want to check out a channel without the overhead of creating an account.
- codefined 8y agoThe issue I have with Discord is the lack of threads. When you're helping multiple people at once threads can help distinguish who you're talking to. Or when you have multiple conversations happening at once it stops things getting confusing.
- markatkinson 8y agowholeheartedly agree with this. The counter on the top an be annoying as it just aggregates all private chats.
- always_good 8y agoThey are great because they create actual communities. Chat is ephemeral. If you have a question that's not on StackOverflow, then you can just ask people in chat. It's even better for deeper questions because you can have a conversation. Not every social vessel we have in the world needs to become an archived knowledgebase. And one of the reasons StackOverflow exists is because it's so hard to mine Q&A from even more static mediums like forums much less chatrooms.
- Raphmedia 8y agoI've become a regular on Symfony's (PHP framework). It works really great for creating a sense of community. Slack is great to talk with each others and split concerns between channels. The thread feature is great at keeping the main channels from getting clogged. Now the main issue is that those Slack workspace are always on free tier. The only other options would be to charge the users as it's a fixed price per users and paying $8/users/month is impossible for open source projects. Since those are on the free tier, message history is lost. You cannot leverage Slack's great search engine and community support gets lost. On a regular forum, you could search for previous questions. On Slack, you cannot.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoI don't mind the chat aspect. Instant chat is something common in communities, development or otherwise. I used to hang out on my share of dev IRC channels back when I was younger. I'd argue that instant chats like these are actually crucial for maintaining communities. I mind Slack per se. I could understand non-technical communities going for it, but developers? Come on. Why choose a commercial walled garden that forces you to use a single, heavyweight and non-ergonomic interface? A product made by a startup, which can unpredictably go in any direction including disappearing overnight, if some big corporation opens their wallet widely enough?
- always_good 8y agoBecause even developers appreciate the same UX ergonomics that our end-users users do. Did you think everyone uses Vim? I don't really if all chat messages disappear. It's chat. It's ephemeral. No value to me beyond sentimental. And most people including myself think the UI is ergonomic, and far more featureful than any IRC client when nobody bothers to run their IRC clients on an always-on server. The worst part of IRC is that everyone is offline the second they close their laptop or client when their question is. They won't be seeing your message. That only a few power users will bother to receive messages "while offline" is also a mark against IRC for the general public. Notice that developer /= IRC power user. Not even close.
- untog 8y ago> I don't really if all chat messages disappear. It's chat. It's ephemeral. No value to me beyond sentimental. I don't think that's really the case here though. Developer communities chat about bugs, how they've solved them, future project plans, etc etc etc. It's not always just idle chat. It's a shame to lose that.
- always_good 8y agoMay be, but I also don't use any projects that have you searching chat logs (even if they exist) for future roadmap information, for example. I think the point of log history search is fair but overrated. It's easy to point out the feature, but I'm not convinced that regular chat search is part of anybody's centerpiece day-to-day bug-hunting strategy even on platforms with chat history. Also, some things are better off on the forum. For example, Elm has a Slack and a forum. If you need to assume that all project discussion happens on Slack to find weaknesses in Slack, then I don't find those very compelling. It's just forum vs chatroom discussion and of course there are differences, just like how chat history doesn't make a chatroom competitive with a forum. I know it looks like I'm going out of my way to "defend Slack" in the comments section here, but I think that Slack vs IRC arguments are the perfect example of how many developers are clueless about UX and things the end-user cares about. I just responded someone who couldn't think of a single reason someone would use Slack beyond "hipsterism" whatever that means (btw, I thought hipsters liked old stuff like vinyl records and Polaroids). It's something I see as a big problem in our field along with the stereotype of how developers cannot design products (not just visually) -- these arguments tends to validate those stereotypes.
- auscompgeek 8y agoIf we're talking about an open-source project dev community, I honestly think there are better tools out there these days. There are two main problems I have with Slack communities: the message limit, and having to create yet another account. Being able to search for a question that may have already been asked is great, and the need for more accounts is a bit of a turnoff too. Gitter was specifically built with open-source projects in mind, which is great. However, once a project becomes large enough, having a single channel is probably not conducive to productivity. Lately I've started seeing open-source communities use Discord, which seems rather interesting. Of course, there are also the projects out there that use Matrix and have IRC and Gitter bridges. Having said all this, I'm also a part of some non-project-based Slack dev communities. I can definitely see the appeal to these; a lot of people already use Slack for work, after all.
- jayflux 8y agoGitter’s search is also terrible and barely existent. I think this is to do with the way they store logs after a month.
- mrxyz100 8y agoThey are bad for people who actually produce something and good for people that want to be associated with a project with minimal effort. It is a symptom of the general trend that slowly turns open source projects into Animal Farm, with unproductive pigs as the public faces, sheep that promote the software, and on the lowest rung Boxer, the work horse, who actually produces something.
- mistrial9 8y agomisc thoughts -- if the service is free, then you are the product... Commercial companies can change their terms at will, and are long-term motivated towards vendor lock-in ... FOSS producers need FOSS IRC channels.. and lastly, crowds move by both fashion and fiat. Efforts may not be immediately returned, but over the longer term this can change quite a bit.
- DanHulton 8y agoI see what you're saying, and I agree with all your points, but there are positive points as well: 1) When you need low-latency help, i.e. where you need to have a conversation about your problem, a real-time communications medium is ideal. 2) They do tend to lean towards becoming communities, and communities are very good at driving engagement within that community. I've joined a few Slack communities and become a contributing member, whereas I experimented with early Stack Overflow and haven't really engaged with it since. Honestly, I think they tend to lead to stronger communities, since you have to join and participate even a bit to get your answer out of it. With GG/SO, you can just pop in, read your bit, and move on, having never contributed.
- bryanlarsen 8y agoI suggest Zulip as an alternative. Two main advantages: - free & open source. - threads are google-able and linkable.
- mooreds 8y agoI don't like it for a number of reasons: * Exclusivity. Often they require some kind of signup before you can even read it. This isn't a big deal but I prefer a more open discussion. * Lack of google visibility. Lots of good discussions will benefit the asker and a few people in the slack but no one in the future, searching for the same information. * Lack of searching for the members. Once you get to 10k messages, you can't search the older ones. If you have a large slack, it doesn't take long to get there. And unless see company is willing to pony up thousands of dollars a month, those discussions are lost forever. On the other hand, maybe three memory hole aspect of slack is actually a feature not a bug. Perhaps it lets folks speak more freely.
- emidln 8y ago> * Lack of google visibility. Lots of good discussions will benefit the asker and a few people in the slack but no one in the future, searching for the same information. > Lack of searching for the members. Once you get to 10k messages, you can't search the older ones. If you have a large slack, it doesn't take long to get there. And unless see company is willing to pony up thousands of dollars a month, those discussions are lost forever. This is the default state on the old real-time communication medium, IRC. Communities can solve the problem on Slack the same was as on IRC, using accounts controlled by bots who log channel messages. If the bot then puts the logs somewhere Google can find, you have a record that can be Googled. This only happens for the public if somebody cares.
- scaryclam 8y agoYou actually can't do this with slack and be compliant with their TOS (https://slack.com/terms-of-service/api https://slack.com/terms-of-service/api): "Functionality. You may not use the Slack API to replicate or compete with core products or services offered by Slack. You acknowledge and agree that Slack has or may in the future offer products or services that are similar to your Application, and nothing will prevent Slack from doing so;" So any communities doing this can get their community shut down by slack at any time.
- Hoasi 8y ago
- ergo14 8y agoI would rather have the projects advocate IRC with some nice frontend, I get there are some benefits of slack for developers, but this is thin ice - unless the projects are prepared to pay for channels that have thousands of users.
- deft 8y agoThey're unsearchable (with google), require an account just to read and have no seperation of discussion besides channels. I prefer forums.
- Apes 8y agoSlack has "threads" which are meant to separate discussions, but they're not really convenient to use and are frequently unused.
- indigodaddy 8y agoZulip has "topics" inside streams (kind of what they call channels).
- agf 8y agoMy experience with these communities is that they are very close to non-functional, for several reasons. I use paid Slack, to pretty good effect, every day at work. First of all, they have to rely heavily on hacks to store information long-term because of the 10,000 message limit. Second, even with fairly diligent use of Google Docs for important stuff, tons of info is still lost. I've got a slack where I have DMs with four different people starred. But for two of the four, I have no idea why, because I don't recognize the names and the entire conversation history is gone. Third, where the message limit is less of an issue, and low barrier to entry is important -- ones with a lower activity rate, and where the community is not super close-knit -- tend to suffer from constant challenges to the group's norms. People drift in and out, wanting to argue again and again about how it's OK for them to use exclusively male pronouns all the time, or how it's OK for them to discuss irrelevant topics. This takes up a ton of the message history, and lowers the information density. Like it or not, IRC, with a web client, and a publicly available archive that is searchable, is far more functional for this situation. Paid Slack is a pretty good tool for work communication, but the free version, for now, doesn't translate well to open communities.
- amorphid 8y ago> My experience with these communities is that they are very close to non-functional I had really good luck with the Elixir Slack channel when I was first starting out with the language. I guess I'd say Slack can be a great newb friendly place to ask dumb questions. There were plenty of times I didn't know what to Google, because I didn't understand a basic concept, and I couldn't figure out how ask a clear question on StackOverflow. When you're in newb territory, having a Slack channel full of helpful people is nice.
- Hoasi 8y ago> When you're in newb territory, having a Slack channel full of helpful people is nice. Exactly my experience as well. In those cases, Slack is just like an old school IRC channel with a shinier interface.
- 8y ago
- Jedi72 8y agoI agree with all the other negative comments here plus one more - Slack just isn't very good software, it frequently bugs out or outright crashes and is rediculously slow.
- TomK32 8y agoOver the years I've seen projects using stackoverflow to answer dev/user questions and just recently I started using http://stimulusjs.org/ http://stimulusjs.org/ which runs a discourse installation for their users. Which I like a lot because it discourse is fixing a lot of the problems stackoverflow has while not being a chaotic chat like slack. I like my information well-ordered, grouped, focused and easy to search. Slack is a waterfall I just can't stand. (plus the emojis, am I too old for those?)
- blairanderson 8y agoI agree. the information they're sharing would better serve those communities by being public. Its a short-sighted solution.
- jaboutboul 8y agoIt sucks. Bring back IRC now!
- DmenshunlAnlsis 8y agoIRC never went away and is alive and well, and still both useful and fun.
- curioussavage 8y agoI keep hearing that and then I go to an irc room and ask a question and sit... and sit some more... I think I’m at 5 times in a row now that no one even answered. I am done wasting my time there. Irc might not be totally dead but despite all the denial it’s definitely on its way out. And good riddance.
- orb_yt 8y agoWas this on freenode? What channel?
- ken 8y agoI love that Slack exists. I don't see any need to use it myself. It provides a great honeypot for the Eternal September influx. IRC is (to steal Metacity's slogan) like Cheerios. (Yes, I used Slack for a while, at a company I worked for. I found it technically unimpressive, and the UI seems to be designed primarily to encourage every channel to descend into emoji and memes, and to maximize distraction.) I find the lack of logging/search on IRC to be a feature. I think people are more open in a community when they know they're not going to be hyper-analyzed by strangers on the internet in the distant future. There do exist IRC loggers, but I think most of the channels I frequent don't allow them.
- shylendar 8y agoI find spectrum.chat working better for communities when compared to slack. Somehow slack adds too much noise to your "work communication" And I hate when people tag the whole channel for some silly reasons(most communities disable this option...but still)
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- pier25 8y agoI think steering questions to a chat is a terrible idea. There is no collective learning anymore.
- schlotzisk 8y agohttps://spectrum.chat https://spectrum.chat tries to solve the problem of giant Slack communities. It gained a lot of popularity in the last year + it's open source, if that is something you care about.
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