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When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? It is a chat application with a slightly improved UI like it existed 30 years ago. This is a step in corporate I

When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? It is a chat application with a slightly improved UI like it existed 30 years ago. This is a step in corporate IT that I really cannot fully understand. It seems that every company//startup has to use slack nowadays to pretend to be cool again. Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it is more disruptive than helpful. It fosters a "Always on" culture, where irrelevant chats are exchanged publicly to advertise how much work is being done. If you shut down Slack and appear as Offline people assume you are not working. It also seems to me that now that Slack became the norm for communication, I almost don't receive well written emails with well-argued technical discussions anymore. Everything is now a "Chat" that dilutes the technical discussion because it needs to be responded "directly". I would expect 2018 to be the year where people start questioning the utility of "Slack everywhere" and not blindly jump on the Slack bandwagon because that's what great startups do.

slededit 8y ago
A few months ago slack's early plan was posted here. From day one this was the goal - they knew it was just a chat app so they had to make it feel like something different. Its one of the best marketing coups in recent history and I'd love to see more analysis on how it was pulled off.
- ironjunkie 8y ago
  It also see it as a hugely successful marketing coup. As an early employee of a startup, I remember the day we had to setup the initial infrastructure. For the majority in the room, Slack was an absolute requirement. They didn't wanted to have the ability to chat, they wanted to specifically use Slack, like a badge of honor.
- greglindahl 8y ago
  I was involved in the early days of IRC, and personally, I'm amazed at how great Slack is. I parachuted into an org which had a not-great email culture and took up Slack as a replacement. It was amazingly great.
  - slededit 8y ago
    I wish I could find the original document. They do spend about 1/8th talking about how it has to be a great experience. But the majority of the document discusses how they aren't a chat app, they had a broader vision of team communication. And so you don't compare Slack to IRC because IRC is "just" a chat app while Slack is for "collaboration". In the early days of Slack we had Office Communicator in Microsoft. But because they thought of themselves as essentially MSN messenger for business they didn't do the things Slack did with their clear vision. Ultimately both apps existed to send text/files/images to people in realtime but Slack communicated a vision of how this should work while the rest just let you figure it out yourself.
    - andygcook 8y ago
      Not sure, but perhaps you are referencing the article from Stewart Butterfield, We Don’t Sell Saddles Here: https://medium.com/@stewart/we-dont-sell-saddles-here-4c59524d650d https://medium.com/@stewart/we-dont-sell-saddles-here-4c5952...
      - slededit 8y ago
        Yes! Thank you.
  - u801e 8y ago
    > I was involved in the early days of IRC, and personally, I'm amazed at how great Slack is. At my company, we used to use IRC for internal communication and have since transitioned to Slack. The primary difference I see is that in chat, we see reactions to certain messages, in-line paste snippets, and links that use a slack redirect service. I don't really see much utility in reactions. In-line paste snippets could just as well be a link I could click on to display the image or document in an external application I launch. And the slack redirect service makes it much harder to search my browser history for the document I was looking for. I've also noticed that in the browser I use (Firefox), slack will, after a few days of using it in the same tab, become very laggy and non-responsive. This requires me to close the tab and open a new one to free up whatever resources were causing it to slow down so much. This was never a problem in the local application I used for my IRC client. I'm not very impressed with Slack.
- GuiA 8y ago
  > Its one of the best marketing coups in recent history and I'd love to see more analysis on how it was pulled off Steward Butterfield pushed private beta invites to his well connected Silicon Valley social media friends, who then imposed it in their startups because “it’s what everyone else is doing, it’s going to revolutionize communication”. Rinse, repeat. Source: a social media ninja wizard friend of Butterfield worked in the same startup as I did in the private beta days. I found it to be yet another internal chat app at the time, but my CEO drank the kool aid right away.
  - komali2 8y ago
    To be fair, it now has actual useful zero setup functionality like screen sharing and file sharing. Before that though yea I didn't get the point.
- wuliwong 8y ago
  I think it's far less about marketing and more about lowering the barrier to entry. I work at a real estate company. They were using Slack before I got here and did not have a single technical person on staff. This company would have never considered IRC if Slack didn't exist.
rileyt 8y ago
"Always on", except when they are down, which has been a monthly occurrence lately...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Karunamon 8y ago
None of the problems you mentioned are unique to any particular messaging product, up to and including IRC and Jabber. And with respect, you cannot speak to any culture other than the few you've been a part of. I can say with some authority that this is not a problem at my workplace. The reason IM has proliferated is precisely because it's instant and usually targeted. Email is a pain in the ass and usually serves as a dumping ground for irrelevant messages. If your culture demands that you treat a fundamentally asynchronous tool as synchronous, that's a problem with your culture, not the tool.
- ironjunkie 8y ago
  I would agree with you, except that Slack promotes actively that culture of quick response and disruption. And I indeed blame that most work cultures took that in blindly without reflecting on what the impact would be. I see it as something similar to the rise of open-spaces. Now there is a backslash against it because people finally realize that it was overhyped and that open-spaces are maybe not always that good. Regarding emails, I disagree with you. It is still my go-to channel for deep technical discussions on difficult subjects on which you need to reflect. With emails, I have no pressure to respond directly. When I respond, I will write multiple well constructed paragraphs where I explain why I would do this or this technical choice. Emails are archived easily and can be reread and referenced later. Slack is a dumping ground of irrelevant messages, the opposite of your experience.
- SamWhited 8y ago
  Slight aside: I think one of the big problems in the IRC and XMPP communities is that we discuss them as if the protocol itself or the public federated network (in the case of Jabber) were a "messaging product", but it's really not. Someone could (and should) build a messaging product with XMPP or IRC. HipChat started out that way a bit, but then tacked on more and more proprietary bits, or abused the XMPP protocol in its own clients enough that it could hardly be called XMPP anymore, which was a real shame.
mmanfrin 8y ago
There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. You fall in to the former, and I would bet that a lot of people here fall in to the former. However, many people fall in to the latter, and Slack handily beats the competition there. There is also an element of having nice and polished features baked in that appeals to many people. Want it on your phone? There's an app. Want to search? Baked in. Want convenient chat bots? Click a button. To be sure, all these things are possible in IRC and other lo-fi chat protocols, but getting them set up is easy on Slack. I see this as similar to the argument of Linux vs. OSX. Linux can do practically anything OSX can, but it requires tweaking and setting up. It's a battle of pick-and-choose vs having it all baked in.
- philwelch 8y ago
  > There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp, but ever since we got the bandwidth and CPU necessary for the internet to not be a primarily text-based medium, the illiterates took over and that was the end of that.
  - smt88 8y ago
    Email has a lot of problems, but the dealbreaker for my company is that it isn't secure.
    - bigiain 8y ago
      And you somehow trust Slack as a "secure alternative"?
      - smt88 8y ago
        Where did I imply that? There are tons of options for business chat. My point was only that email isn't even in the running.
    - tathougies 8y ago
ellyagg 8y ago
You write and borrow plug-ins for Slack. With plug-ins, Slack becomes an extensible, configurable, fine-grained company alerts system. You adapt it to alert you about your latest website traffic, analytics goals, customer support requests, and bug tickets to triage. When Slack is down for a few hours, I know start-ups that feel it in the gut. As a social tool, Slack is one among many, but social tools for work are becoming huge because they enable passive knowledge transfer. Employees can spy on others' conversations to see who knows what and that knowledge makes companies more efficient. Something's lost and something's gained in living every day, but Slack isn't a fad and it's not going anywhere.
- laumars 8y ago
  What you've described is just as applicable to nearly every other popular communications platform whether it's Slack, IRC, Skype, Twitter or even email. Slack didn't invent those qualities. It's not unique in that regard. What Slack does do better than most is provide a half decent interface for real time chat amongst groups of people. Personally I'd prefer vanilla IRC because I'd then get to chose my chat client but in terms of official clients go by, Slack is better than most (though that's really more of a criticism about Skype, email, etc than a compliment to Slack. I mean how is it that so many collaborative tools have such poorly designed UIs?)
viraptor 8y ago
It depends on the company model. If everyone works in the same place, is probably not that useful. If you're partially/fully remote, something like Slack is pretty much necessary. It really changes the way you experience other people. There's one side of it that's less organised then a proper email chain. There's the other side that replaces the physical water-cooler and allows people to join public conversations they'd otherwise not be aware of.
karlkatzke 8y ago
We use HipChat. It’s terrible, and it has been a frequent comment that having Slack would help us build better communication culture, because people avoid using hipchat (and use Skype or other platforms instead).
- wuliwong 8y ago
  I don't think I've ever used HipChat. What don't you guys like about it?
  - briandear 8y ago
    Sync. I have three computers and an iPhone. If I check a message on one device, it still shows unread on the other devices. It's total crap.
    - hrktb 8y ago
      That’s the best case. It often fails to notify of new direct messages, I suspect thinking one device was active when it was received.
    - nl 8y ago
      I actually raised a ticket for this. There was a long thread I didn't follow at all about how that was how it was supposed work. That's when I switched to Slack.
    - Jach 8y ago
      To be fair Slack doesn't do this and other network related things much better (in my experience). For each complaint here about HipChat I experience the same failings in Slack, just less often. But Slack is a bit better, so people make the argument that it adds up. (We moved from HipChat to Slack several month sago, I didn't find it much of a game changer apart from getting the company to pay Slack to store history and make it searchable but I'm someone who would be content with IRC and searching local logs.)
  - emodendroket 8y ago
mdeeks 8y ago
Going through all of your channels you don't need immediate updates from and doing /mute will go a long way to getting the silence you want. People can still @mention you to get your attention if needed. You can check muted channels on your own time when you feel like it. You should also set up Do not Disturb and turn off the red notification dots. The rest is a cultural problem that exists will all communication channels (including email). Ask people to be mindful and not use @channel all of the time (you can disable @channel if it is abused). Ask people to keep their chats to relevant channels. e.g. Daily interesting links do not belong in #general, please keep it to #random. Stuff like that. Also, encourage people to move long complicated topics to a thread (to not annoy everyone in the room). Or ask them to compose a larger email or wiki page on the topic.
- komali2 8y ago
  For some inexplicable reason, in the absurdly big Hack Reactor alumni slack, it's considered cool to scoff at people asking for conversations to be taken into threads. There's like 3000 people in there. Sometimes shitloads of conversations are happening at once. The people that refuse to use threads aren't cool, they're just co-opting literally the entire channel for just their conversation. I see it as a forum, where you browse threads and click into the ones you want to discuss in. I guess other people see it as a bloodless Colosseum, may the loudest win.
  - mdeeks 8y ago
    Ask, don't scoff? Also to be fair, Slack's implementation of threads is awful. Probably their most poorly done feature in my mind. If there is already a lively topic ongoing in a room and I need to jump in with another topic, I write a message and say "Hey I have a question, can someone help me?" and then I immediately start a thread with myself so people see that it is a thread and click it to respond rather than just spamming the room. I have always wanted to try out twistapp and see how it is with their "Thread first" UX mentality.
    - madeofpalk 8y ago
      I've definitely found that preemptive threading is a lot more successful than hoping others will cooperatively thread the conversation
lossolo 8y ago
We do not use Slack, we use IRC for direct and fast communication. We do not use it for things that need RFCs and technical specifications, for that we use gitlab and other tools. IRC is great and I am using it for 14+ years already. It's stable, fast, efficient and secure with lots of options. I've written a lot of IRC bots in many languages because protocol is so easy and every language have library/bot for IRC that can be easily expanded with your logic/code. Before there was a cloud and big data, we used IRC for handling distributed services as high availability central orchestration to which many services/servers connected that had IRC bots running on them. We had control over many machines and services from IRC channels, with full authorization/authentication, logging channels, you could run commands on one server or on many same time, you've seen real time error reporting or when node went down. It worked great and still works great.
- briandear 8y ago
  Can you share an image inline? Can you rapidly search the history? Can you customize alerts? Does it work reliably on mobile? You're debugging something and you want to share a screenshot, inline, how does that work on IRC? Can you start audio or video calls with room participants? Slack is great. I don't need to waste time writing bots because all of the tools I use already have simple integrations: GitHub, Box, DropBox, Intercom, etc. Doing all of that within IRC is a pain. For example: responding to an Intercom conversation from within Slack. I can set up Slack for an org in literally minutes. With IRC? Not literally minutes.
  - cellularmitosis 8y ago
    I think most of the "Why not IRC?" sentiment comes from a viewpoint of "I only use chat for sending short, ASCII sentences." The parent comment really captures the additional use-cases which make Slack much more productive for developers discussing code.
    - u801e 8y ago
      > I think most of the "Why not IRC?" sentiment comes from a viewpoint of "I only use chat for sending short, ASCII sentences." Most IRC clients support unicode. Also, I've never had an issue just using an internal pastebin to share code-snippets with other devs. If we needed to work on code together, we would use an application like remote desktop or a shared screen session.
jchung 8y ago
> When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? I challenge you to consider whether your perspective applies to the 99% of people who use Slack that are not developers writing software. For those people, email is often not a place where well-argued discussions happen. It's usually a place where chat-like communication happens, slowly, and in an ill-fitting interface. For non-developers, let's take a operations associate for example or a logistics manager, or someone else whose job is to coordinate and communicate frequently, Slack plays a very different role than it does for devs. Unfortunately for you, and others like you who don't like Slack, if 99% of your company wants to use it, you'll almost certainly get pulled in. Unless your department or team explicitly opts-out, you'll get pulled into the same platform the rest of the company is using. This isn't to say you're wrong -- just to say that we must not judge the hype around Slack, or it's clear successes, as a fad if we're only judging it based on the experiences of the kinds of people who frequent HN.
- meowface 8y ago
  From my experience, in most office jobs, email is primarily used for serious and well-argued discussions concerning projects, business goals, technical details, etc. Software developers really don't use email any differently from IT support, accountants, HR managers, or salespeople. Non-developers generally reserve chit-chat for chat software, just like developers do. Not sure what it is about HN assuming software devs are somehow intellectually and professionally superior to others.
  - caf 8y ago
    I agree that the "software dev" distinction here is not relevant. However, it's definitely true that email is typically used both for "serious and well-argued discussions" and for chatty threads along the lines of Thanks. BTW How are we looking for this month's revenue target? >No idea, maybe the data load didn't run last night, >I'll look into it. > >>This report looks broken, the opportunity I closed >>yesterday isn't in there, what's up?
    - meowface 8y ago
emodendroket 8y ago
> I would expect 2018 to be the year where people start questioning the utility of "Slack everywhere" and not blindly jump on the Slack bandwagon because that's what great startups do. I would not hold my breath.
themagician 8y ago
There are two other thing that have happened in the past few years: • Gchat was effectively deprecated • AIM is gone You might be surprised how many companies now use Slack that have NOTHING to do with IT an/or software: everything form PR agencies to manufacturing. I wouldn't be surprised if half of Slacks user base is now people who were using Gchat or AIM. All the major players who offered free chat basically got out, and Slack was kind of the cheapest cross-platform alternative. Even at the end of it's life million of people still used AIM daily for work, and then it suddenly went kaput.
eldavido 8y ago
I think you've gotta acknowledge that a lot of this stuff is just fashion. Anyone can buy a pair of pants. Look beyond the functionality to understand why people do things. It can be social signaling, wanting to be part of a crowd, or dozens of other reasons. My wife is an architect. She made me see this.
- sequoia 8y ago
  > Anyone can buy a pair of pants. Wait a second... what's the alternative to pants?? :p
  - TallGuyShort 8y ago
    I think they mean as opposed to buying the right pair of pants that will make you feel awesome in front of your friends. It's not just about covering your lower body - it's about the fit, the style, the fabric, etc.
raldi 8y ago
I feel the same way about web browsers, and before that, sound cards, and before that, color monitors.
chx 8y ago
I participate less in channels but 1-on-1 chats with colleagues I work with is indispensable. I am an old hat, I have been online for 25 years (OK, it'll be 25 on September 2, fine, yes I am part of the Eternal September cohort). But I have never seen any app, talk, ICQ, AOL, MSN, Skype, you name it, I tried it, I used it which made this so easy. Discussion and code separates, inserting images and longer code snippets are trivial. Remember the IRC rule of not pasting more than three lines and pastebinning the rest? And now it has video and voice which works, just like that. And part of the hype might be how easy it is to add emojis and have a little fun. It's important, too.
bromuro 8y ago
At my company we use slack because Skype was getting worse. We tried some alternatives, and slack was the friendliest, easier to use, with the right features. I don’t see any hype in our choice - simply it was the right one.
snom380 8y ago
In my experience, Slack is the first chat application that both techies and non-techies actually use. I don't know why that is. But instead of asking when the hype is going to stop, it might be useful asking why the hype is there in the first place. [Edit:spelling]
- u801e 8y ago
  > Slack is the first chat application that both techies and non-techies actually use. IRC, MSN Messenger, AIM, and Yahoo Chat were definitely used by both groups. None of them required a lot of resources to run.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
capkutay 8y ago
Those aren't slack problems, those are people problems. I can just as easily point to email threads that are incoherent and hard to follow. I can also point to meetings with no agenda that waste everyones time but give the appearance of 'managing' or team building. When used properly (not lazily), Slack is a great place to organize communication between teams. At worst its Skype with a way better UI...what's wrong with that?
- inetknght 8y ago
  Better than "Skype with a way better UI". * it has a history I can actually search. Skype used to have this, but removed it when they rewrote it in Electron. !@#$ you to whoever at Microsoft decided to get rid of that; I used chat history search every day as part of my workflow. * it has an API/plugin ecosystem. Admittedly, that's a walled garden so it's a double-edged sword. But for businesses that's awesome. Skype used to have an API but that's been deprecated. Conjecture: from abuse? * it has security. I can log on to a private Slack and know that the people in there belong there. I can search for people on Slack and know that I'm communicating with who I intended to communicate. On Skype, you search for your coworker by typing in their name and you end up finding some other person instead. Hope you didn't just reveal corporate secrets to China. Slack doesn't come without its own set of gripes, for sure. Let me enumerate some of them: * Information density isn't configurable. I want a teeny tiny font. It's better than what Skype has become but still not as configurable as chat clients from the 90's * Resource hog. Seriously, we've gone so far backwards it's appalling. Chat clients from the 90s didn't need anywhere near as much memory or CPU as Electron does and they were just as functional (sans audio/video/link preview). I'm sure there's others but I'm tired
  - realusername 8y ago
    I could also add to your list that Slack actually works in other platforms than Windows. Yes it's Electron but at least it's guaranteed to work, unlike Skype for Linux or Skype for Mac.
    - inetknght 8y ago
sanderjd 8y ago
When is the Slack-hating hype going to stop? It's a tool that lots of businesses find useful. Its a company that makes a good product that they sell for money to people who find it useful. This is exactly the kind of success story we badly need a lot more of in our industry. And yet the top comment on every Slack-related story is some variant of "why not just use email or IRC?" It's a bummer.
tabbott 8y ago
Because just about every technical team needs the ability to do some sort of real-time communication, and Slack's UI is obviously better polished than the products that predate it (HipChat/IRC/etc). If you're looking for a product built by top MIT engineers who spent years thinking about how to make chat actually productive, check out Zulip. I'm one of those MIT engineers, and I agree that Slack is a huge waste of time, for precisely the reasons you describe (here's our attempt at explaining how Slack wastes your time: https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/ https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/, and how Zulip solves those problems; there's more on our homepage). The fact that Slack is, in most organizations, either very low-traffic or a waste of time is why we don't market Zulip primarily as "open source Slack" -- it really is a different product, designed to be amazing for a large, distributed team doing a lot of communication, without things becoming overwhelming. If you don't believe me, read this awesome cartoon by one of our users: https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/986444234365521920 https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/986444234365521920 (As another reason for Slack's success, I'll also add that a lot of "Slack clone" products are pretty buggy; everyone underestimates how much work a high-quality chat experience is. Check out https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/subsystems/markdown.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/subsystems/markdown.h... and https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/subsystems/events-system.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/subsystems/events-sys... if you want to learn about the complexity of a few of the more interesting challenges.)
- matchbok 8y ago
  Someone finally gets it! This is exactly what I've seen as horrible as a Slack user. Zulip looks great!
- g3rv4 8y ago
  wow, this looks really really really good
- mtremsal 8y ago
  A Julia Evans cartoon is high praise indeed. Good for you!
- Eridrus 8y ago
  I didn't get why everyone was getting hyped over a product without threads when they were the most useful part of Flowdock, so I'm glad you're trying to think about it further. But the flat thread model is still limited, particularly for complicated topics even a thread starts having the same problem as a channel where there is too much going on; have you thought about tree-structured threads, or some way of branching threads when there is a bunch of discussion happening on different topics? I haven't really used Slack much, but one of the other places with lots of space for improvement in Flowdock was search, and Slack does seem to be investing there significantly, and I hope Zulip is as well.
hnzix 8y ago
I have this same complaint about message boards all moving into Facebook groups. Sure it's convenient but the same content ends up recycled endlessly. Sure phpbb is a little clunky but at least I can use it as a knowledgebase.
- u801e 8y ago
  > Sure phpbb is a little clunky but at least I can use it as a knowledgebase. Newsgroups were far better than phpbb :), and they were more easy to search IME.
hakfoo 8y ago
I like the message board model, like Basecamp, myself. * You can respond in a delayed manner and not appear rude. * Complex stuff can be previewed before submission. * The subject and thread organization adds more fine-grained control than you usually get with Slack channels. The #team-name channel might have discussions on several topics at once, not all of which affect you, and no easy way to filter them. On a message board, it's easy to break out a new thread even if people are subscribed to it by default. * Slack search is ugly because you come back two months later and have to pull the info out of a tangled discussion with unrelated stuff in the middle.
icelancer 8y ago
>> Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it is more disruptive than helpful. It fosters a "Always on" culture, where irrelevant chats are exchanged publicly to advertise how much work is being done. If you shut down Slack and appear as Offline people assume you are not working. This is once again entirely up to the business that deploys it. We use Slack and punish people who use Slack as a project management tool; we have Basecamp for that. It comes to setting boundaries and consent, which is something en vogue in the 21st century and something I guess a lot of humans didn't get trained on when they were young.
tiny-dancer 8y ago
Not a slack user but an avid fan of our persistent chat tool for a central place on with alerting and deployment approvals where you can immediately dive into meaningful conversations about either. Slacks API and number of systems with built in integrations blows the competition away.
evrydayhustling 8y ago
> Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it is more disruptive than helpful. So, the tens of thousands of teams paying for Slack either aren't having serious conversations or have decided the opposite. Here are some things I think you are undervaluing about team chat: - It replaces many meetings and phone calls that are more interruptive. - It helps distributed teams with legitimate needs for casual collaboration. - It reduces an enormous cost of people being blocked waiting for email answers to simple questions that could not be anticipated. The disadvantages of team chat can be avoided by discipline, but the benefits above require an assistive tool. While we are at it, if you can't distinguish Slack from other team chat solutions, here are some things I think you are undervaluing: - ease of onboarding for teams and individual users - scalability to large, active teams - Enterprise IT management - automatic refunds for inactive users - integration and third party app community - Dev community supporting custom integrations - strong mobile and desktop experiences All of the above are super important for companies adopting, even though they're not about the core channel-messaging interaction you experience day to day. None of the alternatives check all of these boxes, and only teams is close.
- ishaanbahal 8y ago
  I'd say you should give Flock a shot! It does provide a very similar feature set and does some things differently! The ease you talk about is all there, a lot of third party app integrations are also there. The platform lets you run proper apps inside of flock, apart from the usual slash commands and bots. All the pricing grids provide video conference by default, even the free plan! And the pricing is way cheaper than Slack. I'm a dev at Flock, and an ex-user of Slack in my previous company, I hardly miss anything Slack had that isn't there on Flock!
DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago
Email does not guarantee quality, or coherence. I am regularly Cc'd into conversations that have 10 or so people and multiple topics lasting a week.
wheels 8y ago
We really wanted to not use Slack. We really wanted something self-hosted. After weeks of wasting time trying a half-dozen alternatives, we bit the bullet and now use Slack too. I too thought, "Chat isn't that hard -- why wouldn't we self host?" Things we were looking for: - Separate work / personal accounts (i.e. not just Skype, Telegram, etc.) - Decent native apps for macOS, Android and iOS, bonus points for Linux and Windows - Reliable notifications across those platforms - Tracking unread messages across platforms (i.e. you get the whole history everywhere, everywhere knows what the last message you read on any device is) - Some basic niceties like the ability to drop images into a chat and have them show up across all devices That's it, really. Aside from the last one, that's almost the definition of group chat. It doesn't sound hard. All self-hosted alternatives failed. Things that couldn't hack it: - Jabber - IRC - Rocket.Chat - Mattermost - Zulip - Matrix / riot.im It seems mostly the Achilles' Heel is apps and reliable notifications. This seems like it shouldn't be that hard, but almost everything fails there. Most platforms couldn't reliably have message show up punctually on all platforms. Sometimes the clients took 15% of a laptop's CPU idling. Often messages just wouldn't show up until you explicitly opened the app on mobile. So, like I said, now we use Slack. And we're mostly happy. I had to fight the dork impulses to start writing my own version of this and get back to work that mattered.
- sandGorgon 8y ago
  Same here. Mobile apps and notifications are super hard - especially when you pair them with email notifications (in case you don't see a chat). Hipchat did this amazingly well. There was a strong guarantee that a notification would be delivered - either email or app. I don't think a lot of others do it well. It seems that everyone is mucking about threads and UI and emojis.
  - noirbot 8y ago
    I'd argue that Hipchat had the exact opposite problem with notifications. It was _too_ aggressive about notifying everywhere. I've had many times where I was looking at a DM room with someone in Hipchat, with the window focused, and it was still sending me emails with every message from them like I was AFK. This is especially common on the mobile apps, both Android and iOS. I'd often be chatting on my phone at lunch, and come back to my computer to find 50-100 emails of every reply I'd gotten in Hipchat.
blazespin 8y ago
I'll take this over open offices, at least you can tune it out. Search is pretty good too
zacsme 8y ago
At my job we use Slack to track pull requests for review, to monitor alerts for services, to track releases for deployments. Of course we also use it for private team chats. Some of the non-technical people have other bots they use too. Slack is much more than chat.
firecall 8y ago
Im with you on this. It's a great product for sure - it has something about it. (Although Flowdock has way better threading). But yes, the thing I hate is the expectation that I'm monitoring it or have notifications firing. Notifications are off all the time. If you need to tell me something important either email me or come and tell me. Slack is not the place for that. I like Slack as a chat product, but it's very far from a productivity tool. It's often a productivity nightmare that operates to interrupt deep productive creative work.
Alex3917 8y ago
> Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it is more disruptive than helpful. This past year at Inbox Awesome, one of Slack's team leads asked the audience how many there used Slack. Of the 300 or so people there, around 75% raised their hands. Next he asked for a show of hands on how many people felt that Slack made them more productive. Not a single person raised their hand. It's on video at around 17:30 here: https://livestream.com/accounts/9197973/events/7910977/videos/166267001 https://livestream.com/accounts/9197973/events/7910977/video...
overgard 8y ago
Well, it's not like it's a technological marvel or anything (I mean, the amount of ram it uses is kinda insane), and chat apps are like the "hello world" of network programming, BUT! From what I've seen the social effects of it are huge. There's just a lot of nice subtleties that they nailed, and it's so invisible that there just doesn't feel like there's a need to find an alternative. It just kinda works and you don't have to think about it.
me551ah 8y ago
Applications like slack/flock/microsoft teams work because they integrate all of the apps/third party websites that you would use. So instead of checking multiple websites in a day for updates ( crashes on crashlytics, new reviews on play/app store, new pull requests on github , new task in JIRA etc), you can get realtime updates for them in one tool. A lot of conversations which happen in a workplace revolve around these tools, and have updates in one place not only save time but also encourage conversations around these updates. Disclaimer: I work for Flock, an alternative to Slack. We are currently rated as #1 slack alternative on Product Hunt and PC Mag.We have a import tool so that you can import all of your data from HipChat on to Flock.
ninad 8y ago
I feel a huge part of the value of tools like slack, MS Teams, flock, comes from not being cool chat tools but for bringing context into conversation and giving life to information. I've thought deeply about this over the past few years, and I feel it does add value. I agree with capkutay, these are not problems of a tool, just like you can't help a coworker coming over to you and interrupting your flow, same applies here. I feel we will see more chat etiquette in enterprise and guidelines which will help avoid the tradeoffs. in my experience, the benefits outweigh the tradeoffs. Disclaimer: I'm helping build flock.com

slededit 8y ago

A few months ago slack's early plan was posted here. From day one this was the goal - they knew it was just a chat app so they had to make it feel like something different. Its one of the best marketing coups in recent history and I'd love to see more analysis on how it was pulled off.

ironjunkie 8y ago
It also see it as a hugely successful marketing coup. As an early employee of a startup, I remember the day we had to setup the initial infrastructure. For the majority in the room, Slack was an absolute requirement. They didn't wanted to have the ability to chat, they wanted to specifically use Slack, like a badge of honor.
greglindahl 8y ago
I was involved in the early days of IRC, and personally, I'm amazed at how great Slack is. I parachuted into an org which had a not-great email culture and took up Slack as a replacement. It was amazingly great.
- slededit 8y ago
  I wish I could find the original document. They do spend about 1/8th talking about how it has to be a great experience. But the majority of the document discusses how they aren't a chat app, they had a broader vision of team communication. And so you don't compare Slack to IRC because IRC is "just" a chat app while Slack is for "collaboration". In the early days of Slack we had Office Communicator in Microsoft. But because they thought of themselves as essentially MSN messenger for business they didn't do the things Slack did with their clear vision. Ultimately both apps existed to send text/files/images to people in realtime but Slack communicated a vision of how this should work while the rest just let you figure it out yourself.
  - andygcook 8y ago
    Not sure, but perhaps you are referencing the article from Stewart Butterfield, We Don’t Sell Saddles Here: https://medium.com/@stewart/we-dont-sell-saddles-here-4c59524d650d https://medium.com/@stewart/we-dont-sell-saddles-here-4c5952...
    - slededit 8y ago
      Yes! Thank you.
- u801e 8y ago
  > I was involved in the early days of IRC, and personally, I'm amazed at how great Slack is. At my company, we used to use IRC for internal communication and have since transitioned to Slack. The primary difference I see is that in chat, we see reactions to certain messages, in-line paste snippets, and links that use a slack redirect service. I don't really see much utility in reactions. In-line paste snippets could just as well be a link I could click on to display the image or document in an external application I launch. And the slack redirect service makes it much harder to search my browser history for the document I was looking for. I've also noticed that in the browser I use (Firefox), slack will, after a few days of using it in the same tab, become very laggy and non-responsive. This requires me to close the tab and open a new one to free up whatever resources were causing it to slow down so much. This was never a problem in the local application I used for my IRC client. I'm not very impressed with Slack.
GuiA 8y ago
> Its one of the best marketing coups in recent history and I'd love to see more analysis on how it was pulled off Steward Butterfield pushed private beta invites to his well connected Silicon Valley social media friends, who then imposed it in their startups because “it’s what everyone else is doing, it’s going to revolutionize communication”. Rinse, repeat. Source: a social media ninja wizard friend of Butterfield worked in the same startup as I did in the private beta days. I found it to be yet another internal chat app at the time, but my CEO drank the kool aid right away.
- komali2 8y ago
  To be fair, it now has actual useful zero setup functionality like screen sharing and file sharing. Before that though yea I didn't get the point.
wuliwong 8y ago
I think it's far less about marketing and more about lowering the barrier to entry. I work at a real estate company. They were using Slack before I got here and did not have a single technical person on staff. This company would have never considered IRC if Slack didn't exist.

rileyt 8y ago

"Always on", except when they are down, which has been a monthly occurrence lately...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Karunamon 8y ago

None of the problems you mentioned are unique to any particular messaging product, up to and including IRC and Jabber. And with respect, you cannot speak to any culture other than the few you've been a part of. I can say with some authority that this is not a problem at my workplace. The reason IM has proliferated is precisely because it's instant and usually targeted. Email is a pain in the ass and usually serves as a dumping ground for irrelevant messages. If your culture demands that you treat a fundamentally asynchronous tool as synchronous, that's a problem with your culture, not the tool.

ironjunkie 8y ago
I would agree with you, except that Slack promotes actively that culture of quick response and disruption. And I indeed blame that most work cultures took that in blindly without reflecting on what the impact would be. I see it as something similar to the rise of open-spaces. Now there is a backslash against it because people finally realize that it was overhyped and that open-spaces are maybe not always that good. Regarding emails, I disagree with you. It is still my go-to channel for deep technical discussions on difficult subjects on which you need to reflect. With emails, I have no pressure to respond directly. When I respond, I will write multiple well constructed paragraphs where I explain why I would do this or this technical choice. Emails are archived easily and can be reread and referenced later. Slack is a dumping ground of irrelevant messages, the opposite of your experience.
SamWhited 8y ago
Slight aside: I think one of the big problems in the IRC and XMPP communities is that we discuss them as if the protocol itself or the public federated network (in the case of Jabber) were a "messaging product", but it's really not. Someone could (and should) build a messaging product with XMPP or IRC. HipChat started out that way a bit, but then tacked on more and more proprietary bits, or abused the XMPP protocol in its own clients enough that it could hardly be called XMPP anymore, which was a real shame.

mmanfrin 8y ago

There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. You fall in to the former, and I would bet that a lot of people here fall in to the former. However, many people fall in to the latter, and Slack handily beats the competition there. There is also an element of having nice and polished features baked in that appeals to many people. Want it on your phone? There's an app. Want to search? Baked in. Want convenient chat bots? Click a button. To be sure, all these things are possible in IRC and other lo-fi chat protocols, but getting them set up is easy on Slack. I see this as similar to the argument of Linux vs. OSX. Linux can do practically anything OSX can, but it requires tweaking and setting up. It's a battle of pick-and-choose vs having it all baked in.

philwelch 8y ago
> There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp, but ever since we got the bandwidth and CPU necessary for the internet to not be a primarily text-based medium, the illiterates took over and that was the end of that.
- smt88 8y ago
  Email has a lot of problems, but the dealbreaker for my company is that it isn't secure.
  - bigiain 8y ago
    And you somehow trust Slack as a "secure alternative"?
    - smt88 8y ago
      Where did I imply that? There are tons of options for business chat. My point was only that email isn't even in the running.
  - tathougies 8y ago

ellyagg 8y ago

You write and borrow plug-ins for Slack. With plug-ins, Slack becomes an extensible, configurable, fine-grained company alerts system. You adapt it to alert you about your latest website traffic, analytics goals, customer support requests, and bug tickets to triage. When Slack is down for a few hours, I know start-ups that feel it in the gut. As a social tool, Slack is one among many, but social tools for work are becoming huge because they enable passive knowledge transfer. Employees can spy on others' conversations to see who knows what and that knowledge makes companies more efficient. Something's lost and something's gained in living every day, but Slack isn't a fad and it's not going anywhere.

laumars 8y ago
What you've described is just as applicable to nearly every other popular communications platform whether it's Slack, IRC, Skype, Twitter or even email. Slack didn't invent those qualities. It's not unique in that regard. What Slack does do better than most is provide a half decent interface for real time chat amongst groups of people. Personally I'd prefer vanilla IRC because I'd then get to chose my chat client but in terms of official clients go by, Slack is better than most (though that's really more of a criticism about Skype, email, etc than a compliment to Slack. I mean how is it that so many collaborative tools have such poorly designed UIs?)

viraptor 8y ago

It depends on the company model. If everyone works in the same place, is probably not that useful. If you're partially/fully remote, something like Slack is pretty much necessary. It really changes the way you experience other people. There's one side of it that's less organised then a proper email chain. There's the other side that replaces the physical water-cooler and allows people to join public conversations they'd otherwise not be aware of.

karlkatzke 8y ago

We use HipChat. It’s terrible, and it has been a frequent comment that having Slack would help us build better communication culture, because people avoid using hipchat (and use Skype or other platforms instead).

wuliwong 8y ago
I don't think I've ever used HipChat. What don't you guys like about it?
- briandear 8y ago
  Sync. I have three computers and an iPhone. If I check a message on one device, it still shows unread on the other devices. It's total crap.
  - hrktb 8y ago
    That’s the best case. It often fails to notify of new direct messages, I suspect thinking one device was active when it was received.
  - nl 8y ago
    I actually raised a ticket for this. There was a long thread I didn't follow at all about how that was how it was supposed work. That's when I switched to Slack.
  - Jach 8y ago
    To be fair Slack doesn't do this and other network related things much better (in my experience). For each complaint here about HipChat I experience the same failings in Slack, just less often. But Slack is a bit better, so people make the argument that it adds up. (We moved from HipChat to Slack several month sago, I didn't find it much of a game changer apart from getting the company to pay Slack to store history and make it searchable but I'm someone who would be content with IRC and searching local logs.)
- emodendroket 8y ago

mdeeks 8y ago

Going through all of your channels you don't need immediate updates from and doing /mute will go a long way to getting the silence you want. People can still @mention you to get your attention if needed. You can check muted channels on your own time when you feel like it. You should also set up Do not Disturb and turn off the red notification dots. The rest is a cultural problem that exists will all communication channels (including email). Ask people to be mindful and not use @channel all of the time (you can disable @channel if it is abused). Ask people to keep their chats to relevant channels. e.g. Daily interesting links do not belong in #general, please keep it to #random. Stuff like that. Also, encourage people to move long complicated topics to a thread (to not annoy everyone in the room). Or ask them to compose a larger email or wiki page on the topic.

komali2 8y ago
For some inexplicable reason, in the absurdly big Hack Reactor alumni slack, it's considered cool to scoff at people asking for conversations to be taken into threads. There's like 3000 people in there. Sometimes shitloads of conversations are happening at once. The people that refuse to use threads aren't cool, they're just co-opting literally the entire channel for just their conversation. I see it as a forum, where you browse threads and click into the ones you want to discuss in. I guess other people see it as a bloodless Colosseum, may the loudest win.
- mdeeks 8y ago
  Ask, don't scoff? Also to be fair, Slack's implementation of threads is awful. Probably their most poorly done feature in my mind. If there is already a lively topic ongoing in a room and I need to jump in with another topic, I write a message and say "Hey I have a question, can someone help me?" and then I immediately start a thread with myself so people see that it is a thread and click it to respond rather than just spamming the room. I have always wanted to try out twistapp and see how it is with their "Thread first" UX mentality.
  - madeofpalk 8y ago
    I've definitely found that preemptive threading is a lot more successful than hoping others will cooperatively thread the conversation

lossolo 8y ago

We do not use Slack, we use IRC for direct and fast communication. We do not use it for things that need RFCs and technical specifications, for that we use gitlab and other tools. IRC is great and I am using it for 14+ years already. It's stable, fast, efficient and secure with lots of options. I've written a lot of IRC bots in many languages because protocol is so easy and every language have library/bot for IRC that can be easily expanded with your logic/code. Before there was a cloud and big data, we used IRC for handling distributed services as high availability central orchestration to which many services/servers connected that had IRC bots running on them. We had control over many machines and services from IRC channels, with full authorization/authentication, logging channels, you could run commands on one server or on many same time, you've seen real time error reporting or when node went down. It worked great and still works great.

briandear 8y ago
Can you share an image inline? Can you rapidly search the history? Can you customize alerts? Does it work reliably on mobile? You're debugging something and you want to share a screenshot, inline, how does that work on IRC? Can you start audio or video calls with room participants? Slack is great. I don't need to waste time writing bots because all of the tools I use already have simple integrations: GitHub, Box, DropBox, Intercom, etc. Doing all of that within IRC is a pain. For example: responding to an Intercom conversation from within Slack. I can set up Slack for an org in literally minutes. With IRC? Not literally minutes.
- cellularmitosis 8y ago
  I think most of the "Why not IRC?" sentiment comes from a viewpoint of "I only use chat for sending short, ASCII sentences." The parent comment really captures the additional use-cases which make Slack much more productive for developers discussing code.
  - u801e 8y ago
    > I think most of the "Why not IRC?" sentiment comes from a viewpoint of "I only use chat for sending short, ASCII sentences." Most IRC clients support unicode. Also, I've never had an issue just using an internal pastebin to share code-snippets with other devs. If we needed to work on code together, we would use an application like remote desktop or a shared screen session.

jchung 8y ago

> When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? I challenge you to consider whether your perspective applies to the 99% of people who use Slack that are not developers writing software. For those people, email is often not a place where well-argued discussions happen. It's usually a place where chat-like communication happens, slowly, and in an ill-fitting interface. For non-developers, let's take a operations associate for example or a logistics manager, or someone else whose job is to coordinate and communicate frequently, Slack plays a very different role than it does for devs. Unfortunately for you, and others like you who don't like Slack, if 99% of your company wants to use it, you'll almost certainly get pulled in. Unless your department or team explicitly opts-out, you'll get pulled into the same platform the rest of the company is using. This isn't to say you're wrong -- just to say that we must not judge the hype around Slack, or it's clear successes, as a fad if we're only judging it based on the experiences of the kinds of people who frequent HN.

meowface 8y ago
From my experience, in most office jobs, email is primarily used for serious and well-argued discussions concerning projects, business goals, technical details, etc. Software developers really don't use email any differently from IT support, accountants, HR managers, or salespeople. Non-developers generally reserve chit-chat for chat software, just like developers do. Not sure what it is about HN assuming software devs are somehow intellectually and professionally superior to others.
- caf 8y ago
  I agree that the "software dev" distinction here is not relevant. However, it's definitely true that email is typically used both for "serious and well-argued discussions" and for chatty threads along the lines of Thanks. BTW How are we looking for this month's revenue target? >No idea, maybe the data load didn't run last night, >I'll look into it. > >>This report looks broken, the opportunity I closed >>yesterday isn't in there, what's up?
  - meowface 8y ago

emodendroket 8y ago

> I would expect 2018 to be the year where people start questioning the utility of "Slack everywhere" and not blindly jump on the Slack bandwagon because that's what great startups do. I would not hold my breath.

themagician 8y ago

There are two other thing that have happened in the past few years: • Gchat was effectively deprecated • AIM is gone You might be surprised how many companies now use Slack that have NOTHING to do with IT an/or software: everything form PR agencies to manufacturing. I wouldn't be surprised if half of Slacks user base is now people who were using Gchat or AIM. All the major players who offered free chat basically got out, and Slack was kind of the cheapest cross-platform alternative. Even at the end of it's life million of people still used AIM daily for work, and then it suddenly went kaput.

eldavido 8y ago

I think you've gotta acknowledge that a lot of this stuff is just fashion. Anyone can buy a pair of pants. Look beyond the functionality to understand why people do things. It can be social signaling, wanting to be part of a crowd, or dozens of other reasons. My wife is an architect. She made me see this.

sequoia 8y ago
> Anyone can buy a pair of pants. Wait a second... what's the alternative to pants?? :p
- TallGuyShort 8y ago
  I think they mean as opposed to buying the right pair of pants that will make you feel awesome in front of your friends. It's not just about covering your lower body - it's about the fit, the style, the fabric, etc.

raldi 8y ago

I feel the same way about web browsers, and before that, sound cards, and before that, color monitors.

chx 8y ago

I participate less in channels but 1-on-1 chats with colleagues I work with is indispensable. I am an old hat, I have been online for 25 years (OK, it'll be 25 on September 2, fine, yes I am part of the Eternal September cohort). But I have never seen any app, talk, ICQ, AOL, MSN, Skype, you name it, I tried it, I used it which made this so easy. Discussion and code separates, inserting images and longer code snippets are trivial. Remember the IRC rule of not pasting more than three lines and pastebinning the rest? And now it has video and voice which works, just like that. And part of the hype might be how easy it is to add emojis and have a little fun. It's important, too.

bromuro 8y ago

At my company we use slack because Skype was getting worse. We tried some alternatives, and slack was the friendliest, easier to use, with the right features. I don’t see any hype in our choice - simply it was the right one.

snom380 8y ago

In my experience, Slack is the first chat application that both techies and non-techies actually use. I don't know why that is. But instead of asking when the hype is going to stop, it might be useful asking why the hype is there in the first place. [Edit:spelling]

u801e 8y ago
> Slack is the first chat application that both techies and non-techies actually use. IRC, MSN Messenger, AIM, and Yahoo Chat were definitely used by both groups. None of them required a lot of resources to run.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

capkutay 8y ago

Those aren't slack problems, those are people problems. I can just as easily point to email threads that are incoherent and hard to follow. I can also point to meetings with no agenda that waste everyones time but give the appearance of 'managing' or team building. When used properly (not lazily), Slack is a great place to organize communication between teams. At worst its Skype with a way better UI...what's wrong with that?

inetknght 8y ago
Better than "Skype with a way better UI". * it has a history I can actually search. Skype used to have this, but removed it when they rewrote it in Electron. !@#$ you to whoever at Microsoft decided to get rid of that; I used chat history search every day as part of my workflow. * it has an API/plugin ecosystem. Admittedly, that's a walled garden so it's a double-edged sword. But for businesses that's awesome. Skype used to have an API but that's been deprecated. Conjecture: from abuse? * it has security. I can log on to a private Slack and know that the people in there belong there. I can search for people on Slack and know that I'm communicating with who I intended to communicate. On Skype, you search for your coworker by typing in their name and you end up finding some other person instead. Hope you didn't just reveal corporate secrets to China. Slack doesn't come without its own set of gripes, for sure. Let me enumerate some of them: * Information density isn't configurable. I want a teeny tiny font. It's better than what Skype has become but still not as configurable as chat clients from the 90's * Resource hog. Seriously, we've gone so far backwards it's appalling. Chat clients from the 90s didn't need anywhere near as much memory or CPU as Electron does and they were just as functional (sans audio/video/link preview). I'm sure there's others but I'm tired
- realusername 8y ago
  I could also add to your list that Slack actually works in other platforms than Windows. Yes it's Electron but at least it's guaranteed to work, unlike Skype for Linux or Skype for Mac.
  - inetknght 8y ago

sanderjd 8y ago

When is the Slack-hating hype going to stop? It's a tool that lots of businesses find useful. Its a company that makes a good product that they sell for money to people who find it useful. This is exactly the kind of success story we badly need a lot more of in our industry. And yet the top comment on every Slack-related story is some variant of "why not just use email or IRC?" It's a bummer.

tabbott 8y ago

Because just about every technical team needs the ability to do some sort of real-time communication, and Slack's UI is obviously better polished than the products that predate it (HipChat/IRC/etc). If you're looking for a product built by top MIT engineers who spent years thinking about how to make chat actually productive, check out Zulip. I'm one of those MIT engineers, and I agree that Slack is a huge waste of time, for precisely the reasons you describe (here's our attempt at explaining how Slack wastes your time: https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/ https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/, and how Zulip solves those problems; there's more on our homepage). The fact that Slack is, in most organizations, either very low-traffic or a waste of time is why we don't market Zulip primarily as "open source Slack" -- it really is a different product, designed to be amazing for a large, distributed team doing a lot of communication, without things becoming overwhelming. If you don't believe me, read this awesome cartoon by one of our users: https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/986444234365521920 https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/986444234365521920 (As another reason for Slack's success, I'll also add that a lot of "Slack clone" products are pretty buggy; everyone underestimates how much work a high-quality chat experience is. Check out https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/subsystems/markdown.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/subsystems/markdown.h... and https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/subsystems/events-system.html https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/subsystems/events-sys... if you want to learn about the complexity of a few of the more interesting challenges.)

matchbok 8y ago
Someone finally gets it! This is exactly what I've seen as horrible as a Slack user. Zulip looks great!
g3rv4 8y ago
wow, this looks really really really good
mtremsal 8y ago
A Julia Evans cartoon is high praise indeed. Good for you!
Eridrus 8y ago
I didn't get why everyone was getting hyped over a product without threads when they were the most useful part of Flowdock, so I'm glad you're trying to think about it further. But the flat thread model is still limited, particularly for complicated topics even a thread starts having the same problem as a channel where there is too much going on; have you thought about tree-structured threads, or some way of branching threads when there is a bunch of discussion happening on different topics? I haven't really used Slack much, but one of the other places with lots of space for improvement in Flowdock was search, and Slack does seem to be investing there significantly, and I hope Zulip is as well.

hnzix 8y ago

I have this same complaint about message boards all moving into Facebook groups. Sure it's convenient but the same content ends up recycled endlessly. Sure phpbb is a little clunky but at least I can use it as a knowledgebase.

u801e 8y ago
> Sure phpbb is a little clunky but at least I can use it as a knowledgebase. Newsgroups were far better than phpbb :), and they were more easy to search IME.

hakfoo 8y ago

I like the message board model, like Basecamp, myself. * You can respond in a delayed manner and not appear rude. * Complex stuff can be previewed before submission. * The subject and thread organization adds more fine-grained control than you usually get with Slack channels. The #team-name channel might have discussions on several topics at once, not all of which affect you, and no easy way to filter them. On a message board, it's easy to break out a new thread even if people are subscribed to it by default. * Slack search is ugly because you come back two months later and have to pull the info out of a tangled discussion with unrelated stuff in the middle.

icelancer 8y ago

>> Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it is more disruptive than helpful. It fosters a "Always on" culture, where irrelevant chats are exchanged publicly to advertise how much work is being done. If you shut down Slack and appear as Offline people assume you are not working. This is once again entirely up to the business that deploys it. We use Slack and punish people who use Slack as a project management tool; we have Basecamp for that. It comes to setting boundaries and consent, which is something en vogue in the 21st century and something I guess a lot of humans didn't get trained on when they were young.

tiny-dancer 8y ago

Not a slack user but an avid fan of our persistent chat tool for a central place on with alerting and deployment approvals where you can immediately dive into meaningful conversations about either. Slacks API and number of systems with built in integrations blows the competition away.

evrydayhustling 8y ago

> Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it is more disruptive than helpful. So, the tens of thousands of teams paying for Slack either aren't having serious conversations or have decided the opposite. Here are some things I think you are undervaluing about team chat: - It replaces many meetings and phone calls that are more interruptive. - It helps distributed teams with legitimate needs for casual collaboration. - It reduces an enormous cost of people being blocked waiting for email answers to simple questions that could not be anticipated. The disadvantages of team chat can be avoided by discipline, but the benefits above require an assistive tool. While we are at it, if you can't distinguish Slack from other team chat solutions, here are some things I think you are undervaluing: - ease of onboarding for teams and individual users - scalability to large, active teams - Enterprise IT management - automatic refunds for inactive users - integration and third party app community - Dev community supporting custom integrations - strong mobile and desktop experiences All of the above are super important for companies adopting, even though they're not about the core channel-messaging interaction you experience day to day. None of the alternatives check all of these boxes, and only teams is close.

ishaanbahal 8y ago
I'd say you should give Flock a shot! It does provide a very similar feature set and does some things differently! The ease you talk about is all there, a lot of third party app integrations are also there. The platform lets you run proper apps inside of flock, apart from the usual slash commands and bots. All the pricing grids provide video conference by default, even the free plan! And the pricing is way cheaper than Slack. I'm a dev at Flock, and an ex-user of Slack in my previous company, I hardly miss anything Slack had that isn't there on Flock!

DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago

Email does not guarantee quality, or coherence. I am regularly Cc'd into conversations that have 10 or so people and multiple topics lasting a week.

wheels 8y ago

We really wanted to not use Slack. We really wanted something self-hosted. After weeks of wasting time trying a half-dozen alternatives, we bit the bullet and now use Slack too. I too thought, "Chat isn't that hard -- why wouldn't we self host?" Things we were looking for: - Separate work / personal accounts (i.e. not just Skype, Telegram, etc.) - Decent native apps for macOS, Android and iOS, bonus points for Linux and Windows - Reliable notifications across those platforms - Tracking unread messages across platforms (i.e. you get the whole history everywhere, everywhere knows what the last message you read on any device is) - Some basic niceties like the ability to drop images into a chat and have them show up across all devices That's it, really. Aside from the last one, that's almost the definition of group chat. It doesn't sound hard. All self-hosted alternatives failed. Things that couldn't hack it: - Jabber - IRC - Rocket.Chat - Mattermost - Zulip - Matrix / riot.im It seems mostly the Achilles' Heel is apps and reliable notifications. This seems like it shouldn't be that hard, but almost everything fails there. Most platforms couldn't reliably have message show up punctually on all platforms. Sometimes the clients took 15% of a laptop's CPU idling. Often messages just wouldn't show up until you explicitly opened the app on mobile. So, like I said, now we use Slack. And we're mostly happy. I had to fight the dork impulses to start writing my own version of this and get back to work that mattered.

sandGorgon 8y ago
Same here. Mobile apps and notifications are super hard - especially when you pair them with email notifications (in case you don't see a chat). Hipchat did this amazingly well. There was a strong guarantee that a notification would be delivered - either email or app. I don't think a lot of others do it well. It seems that everyone is mucking about threads and UI and emojis.
- noirbot 8y ago
  I'd argue that Hipchat had the exact opposite problem with notifications. It was _too_ aggressive about notifying everywhere. I've had many times where I was looking at a DM room with someone in Hipchat, with the window focused, and it was still sending me emails with every message from them like I was AFK. This is especially common on the mobile apps, both Android and iOS. I'd often be chatting on my phone at lunch, and come back to my computer to find 50-100 emails of every reply I'd gotten in Hipchat.

blazespin 8y ago

I'll take this over open offices, at least you can tune it out. Search is pretty good too

zacsme 8y ago

At my job we use Slack to track pull requests for review, to monitor alerts for services, to track releases for deployments. Of course we also use it for private team chats. Some of the non-technical people have other bots they use too. Slack is much more than chat.

firecall 8y ago

Im with you on this. It's a great product for sure - it has something about it. (Although Flowdock has way better threading). But yes, the thing I hate is the expectation that I'm monitoring it or have notifications firing. Notifications are off all the time. If you need to tell me something important either email me or come and tell me. Slack is not the place for that. I like Slack as a chat product, but it's very far from a productivity tool. It's often a productivity nightmare that operates to interrupt deep productive creative work.

Alex3917 8y ago

> Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it is more disruptive than helpful. This past year at Inbox Awesome, one of Slack's team leads asked the audience how many there used Slack. Of the 300 or so people there, around 75% raised their hands. Next he asked for a show of hands on how many people felt that Slack made them more productive. Not a single person raised their hand. It's on video at around 17:30 here: https://livestream.com/accounts/9197973/events/7910977/videos/166267001 https://livestream.com/accounts/9197973/events/7910977/video...

overgard 8y ago

Well, it's not like it's a technological marvel or anything (I mean, the amount of ram it uses is kinda insane), and chat apps are like the "hello world" of network programming, BUT! From what I've seen the social effects of it are huge. There's just a lot of nice subtleties that they nailed, and it's so invisible that there just doesn't feel like there's a need to find an alternative. It just kinda works and you don't have to think about it.

me551ah 8y ago

Applications like slack/flock/microsoft teams work because they integrate all of the apps/third party websites that you would use. So instead of checking multiple websites in a day for updates ( crashes on crashlytics, new reviews on play/app store, new pull requests on github , new task in JIRA etc), you can get realtime updates for them in one tool. A lot of conversations which happen in a workplace revolve around these tools, and have updates in one place not only save time but also encourage conversations around these updates. Disclaimer: I work for Flock, an alternative to Slack. We are currently rated as #1 slack alternative on Product Hunt and PC Mag.We have a import tool so that you can import all of your data from HipChat on to Flock.

ninad 8y ago

I feel a huge part of the value of tools like slack, MS Teams, flock, comes from not being cool chat tools but for bringing context into conversation and giving life to information. I've thought deeply about this over the past few years, and I feel it does add value. I agree with capkutay, these are not problems of a tool, just like you can't help a coworker coming over to you and interrupting your flow, same applies here. I feel we will see more chat etiquette in enterprise and guidelines which will help avoid the tradeoffs. in my experience, the benefits outweigh the tradeoffs. Disclaimer: I'm helping build flock.com