8 ms·

You are not wrong :-). In fact, your second line is completely correct. However, Slack has lowered the standards for desktop software by being a really terrib

by bborud 7y ago

You are not wrong :-). In fact, your second line is completely correct. However, Slack has lowered the standards for desktop software by being a really terrible piece of software. Which means that the professional in me wants to see a decent client before I'm happy. What's more worrying is that we are rapidly moving away from an Internet based on open standards and into walled gardens.

hellofunk 7y ago
My personal take is that, as long as profit remains a guiding priority for a society, there will always be much greater incentive to create a new and successful walled garden than to share and contribute to open standards. This is made evident by countless technology firms and other industries.
- rubyfan 7y ago
  The internet’s previous models were doomed to fail. Service providers did not have a reliable monetization scheme. Client apps for open protocols have rarely had wide adoption and longevity, especially anything you had to pay for. I can think of plenty of examples of paid client apps from the late 90s/early 2000s... email clients, web, irc, etc. that just aren’t around because not enough people would pay for the client to sustain their development. Slack and other tools are solving a problem customers have and they should be compensated for it, especially given much of their users are profit oriented enterprises.
  - eeZah7Ux 7y ago
    > Slack and other tools are solving a problem customers have ...while creating others: fragmentation and lock-in
  - bborud 7y ago
    And yet, the Internet exists because short sighted profit requirements were kept at bay, and eventually the Internet managed to create more value for society than any online service ever by a margin so large that logarithm of the difference is amazingly large. I work for a telco. My assumption is that the profit margin for connectivity will first converge on zero and then it will drop below zero. There's so much value in the services above connectivity that connectivity won't need to be profitable. Of course, nobody in my industry will want to talk about that, or even admit this is a real possibility, because it implies that connectivity will most likely be owned by those who make money on services on top. If we think net neutrality is important today, we ain't seen nothing yet. And given how hard we have had to fight in the past to just about maintain some form of parity, I'm not extremely optimistic about the future.
- eeZah7Ux 7y ago
  > as long as profit remains a guiding priority for a society Found the bug. > there will always be much greater incentive to create a new and successful walled garden than to share and contribute to open standards It's really a shame that most customers never learn and they keep accepting closed source/protocols. While the world economy is quickly moving into endless vertical monopolies, history has shown that governments can sometimes wake up and restore competition. Perhaps in 50 years using open standards will be encouraged e.g. by providing a tax discount
  - briandear 7y ago
    > It's really a shame that most customers never learn and they keep accepting closed source/protocols. I don’t care. I just want my tool to solve my problem so I can focus on creating business value at my job. I am sure we could all make our own hammers, but time spent making hammers is time lost from using them.
    - bborud 7y ago
      This isn't really what we're talking about. A better analogy are laptops, phones and tractors - which you are not allowed to repair and only work within a closed ecosystem that you either have to opt into our out of, and where opting out has an extraordinary cost. I use a Mac. I'm part of the problem for having handed my money to an abusive, fraudulent company that is now squeezing all its users for more money for increasingly lower quality products. It used to be easy to buy into Apple's walled garden. But now choice of convenience over freedom is starting to cost me real money and that money buys less each year.
      - codyb 7y ago
        I’m interested in the lower quality part. My Dad _just_ upgraded from an iPhone 5. Do you think his Xs won’t last as long? I agree the laptop situation is a bit shitty. I hate the USB-C everything on my work laptop. Everything works fine on my personal computer but as soon as I plug my usb hub into a usb c adaptor everything stutters. Love their privacy stance though. Best in the business for sure. Also, what’s abusive? And what’s fraudulent? Apparently their new monitors are very well priced. And building the same machine you’d get in a MacBookPro or different model ends up being more expensive or similarly priced. I could be wrong, and I am, certainly, an Apple fan, but I will criticize when I think it’s appropriate and don’t hold views concretely.
raverbashing 7y ago
Whenever I read those "slack sucks", "jira sucks" rants I can't help but think "kids these days" are spoiled Hate slack? Try mIRC. Oh wait what's a "netsplit"? What do you mean I can't paste pictures or code snippets without going to a 3rd party service? Hate Jira? Try Bugzilla/Trac or a multitude of other bug trackers. "Oh the design sucks" really? Have you tried writing a Win32 app and make it look nice? Ok, try it with Qt (old Qt). Cool huh?
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  Slack has resources!
- blub 7y ago
  IRC is better than you're suggesting: * Netsplits would not be an issue, since most small to medium companies would use only one server. Even when they did happen to me in the past, the servers reconnected quite fast. I imagine a big corporation would be able to handle this rare failure case properly. * DCC allows one to send files and since it's a direct connection, there is no 3rd party company in the US that's inserting itself in the conversation. Jira is actually quite ok, I don't know why you're besmirching its name by comparing it to a bloated chat client.
  - raverbashing 7y ago
    > DCC allows one to send files and since it's a direct connection since it's a direct connection it will never work in our modern nat'd/firewalled world, even between company branches (unless you have the whole company in the same VPN - but yeah don't do that) Yes Jira is ok, it's just the target of (some) unfair hate like slack
    - nailer 7y ago
      Are you sure? Wouldn't it be a direct connection, just between two NAT gateways? With each using the ports to track which connection belonged to the host behind the NAT?
Myrmornis 7y ago
> However, Slack has lowered the standards for desktop software by being a really terrible piece of software. You need to explain a claim like that. On the face of it, the Slack UI works beautifully in Browser, Desktop and iOS clients. I'd quite like it to have code syntax highlighting. But really, what are you talking about?
- jumbopapa 7y ago
  The fact that the performance of the application is awful. You would think that a $16B company could move away from Electron and make native applications for their platforms.
  - dthedev 7y ago
    It's never been awful for me. Even when running it on an iPhone 6S, it has always been nice and responsive.
    - danny_taco 7y ago
      It is native on iOS but not for desktop.
- bonaldi 7y ago
  >On the face of it, the Slack UI works beautifully in Browser, Desktop and iOS clients. It's not accessible. This alone destroys "beautifully". But even beyond that, it's just not a good citizen or experience wherever it is. It's deeply single-paned and hence single-tasked: you can't open a conversation in a tab or separate window. And switching between conversations/threads/groups on any platform is much harder than it needs to be. Their quick-switcher is a quasi CLI bandage over this that increases cognitive load on the user. The enterprise multi-slack experience is even more horrible as it expands that problem across multiple quasi-discrete instances. On iOS it does unnatural things with text so you can't select portions to copy and paste. On desktop it is so much of a resource hog it's our generation's version of Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping. And this isn't intrinsic: none of this stuff was an issue when you could use IRC clients to access it. But they turned those off.
hiccuphippo 7y ago
Check volt if you want a slack client: https://volt-app.com/ https://volt-app.com/ Other electron based apps like Discord perform better so I'm not sure why Slack is so crappy.
- skinnymuch 7y ago
  Have there been lots of updates? A few months ago it felt very alpha.

by bborud 7y ago

hellofunk 7y ago

My personal take is that, as long as profit remains a guiding priority for a society, there will always be much greater incentive to create a new and successful walled garden than to share and contribute to open standards. This is made evident by countless technology firms and other industries.

rubyfan 7y ago
The internet’s previous models were doomed to fail. Service providers did not have a reliable monetization scheme. Client apps for open protocols have rarely had wide adoption and longevity, especially anything you had to pay for. I can think of plenty of examples of paid client apps from the late 90s/early 2000s... email clients, web, irc, etc. that just aren’t around because not enough people would pay for the client to sustain their development. Slack and other tools are solving a problem customers have and they should be compensated for it, especially given much of their users are profit oriented enterprises.
- eeZah7Ux 7y ago
  > Slack and other tools are solving a problem customers have ...while creating others: fragmentation and lock-in
- bborud 7y ago
  And yet, the Internet exists because short sighted profit requirements were kept at bay, and eventually the Internet managed to create more value for society than any online service ever by a margin so large that logarithm of the difference is amazingly large. I work for a telco. My assumption is that the profit margin for connectivity will first converge on zero and then it will drop below zero. There's so much value in the services above connectivity that connectivity won't need to be profitable. Of course, nobody in my industry will want to talk about that, or even admit this is a real possibility, because it implies that connectivity will most likely be owned by those who make money on services on top. If we think net neutrality is important today, we ain't seen nothing yet. And given how hard we have had to fight in the past to just about maintain some form of parity, I'm not extremely optimistic about the future.
eeZah7Ux 7y ago
> as long as profit remains a guiding priority for a society Found the bug. > there will always be much greater incentive to create a new and successful walled garden than to share and contribute to open standards It's really a shame that most customers never learn and they keep accepting closed source/protocols. While the world economy is quickly moving into endless vertical monopolies, history has shown that governments can sometimes wake up and restore competition. Perhaps in 50 years using open standards will be encouraged e.g. by providing a tax discount
- briandear 7y ago
  > It's really a shame that most customers never learn and they keep accepting closed source/protocols. I don’t care. I just want my tool to solve my problem so I can focus on creating business value at my job. I am sure we could all make our own hammers, but time spent making hammers is time lost from using them.
  - bborud 7y ago
    This isn't really what we're talking about. A better analogy are laptops, phones and tractors - which you are not allowed to repair and only work within a closed ecosystem that you either have to opt into our out of, and where opting out has an extraordinary cost. I use a Mac. I'm part of the problem for having handed my money to an abusive, fraudulent company that is now squeezing all its users for more money for increasingly lower quality products. It used to be easy to buy into Apple's walled garden. But now choice of convenience over freedom is starting to cost me real money and that money buys less each year.
    - codyb 7y ago
      I’m interested in the lower quality part. My Dad _just_ upgraded from an iPhone 5. Do you think his Xs won’t last as long? I agree the laptop situation is a bit shitty. I hate the USB-C everything on my work laptop. Everything works fine on my personal computer but as soon as I plug my usb hub into a usb c adaptor everything stutters. Love their privacy stance though. Best in the business for sure. Also, what’s abusive? And what’s fraudulent? Apparently their new monitors are very well priced. And building the same machine you’d get in a MacBookPro or different model ends up being more expensive or similarly priced. I could be wrong, and I am, certainly, an Apple fan, but I will criticize when I think it’s appropriate and don’t hold views concretely.

raverbashing 7y ago

Whenever I read those "slack sucks", "jira sucks" rants I can't help but think "kids these days" are spoiled Hate slack? Try mIRC. Oh wait what's a "netsplit"? What do you mean I can't paste pictures or code snippets without going to a 3rd party service? Hate Jira? Try Bugzilla/Trac or a multitude of other bug trackers. "Oh the design sucks" really? Have you tried writing a Win32 app and make it look nice? Ok, try it with Qt (old Qt). Cool huh?

quickthrower2 7y ago
Slack has resources!
blub 7y ago
IRC is better than you're suggesting: * Netsplits would not be an issue, since most small to medium companies would use only one server. Even when they did happen to me in the past, the servers reconnected quite fast. I imagine a big corporation would be able to handle this rare failure case properly. * DCC allows one to send files and since it's a direct connection, there is no 3rd party company in the US that's inserting itself in the conversation. Jira is actually quite ok, I don't know why you're besmirching its name by comparing it to a bloated chat client.
- raverbashing 7y ago
  > DCC allows one to send files and since it's a direct connection since it's a direct connection it will never work in our modern nat'd/firewalled world, even between company branches (unless you have the whole company in the same VPN - but yeah don't do that) Yes Jira is ok, it's just the target of (some) unfair hate like slack
  - nailer 7y ago
    Are you sure? Wouldn't it be a direct connection, just between two NAT gateways? With each using the ports to track which connection belonged to the host behind the NAT?

Myrmornis 7y ago

> However, Slack has lowered the standards for desktop software by being a really terrible piece of software. You need to explain a claim like that. On the face of it, the Slack UI works beautifully in Browser, Desktop and iOS clients. I'd quite like it to have code syntax highlighting. But really, what are you talking about?

jumbopapa 7y ago
The fact that the performance of the application is awful. You would think that a $16B company could move away from Electron and make native applications for their platforms.
- dthedev 7y ago
  It's never been awful for me. Even when running it on an iPhone 6S, it has always been nice and responsive.
  - danny_taco 7y ago
    It is native on iOS but not for desktop.
bonaldi 7y ago
>On the face of it, the Slack UI works beautifully in Browser, Desktop and iOS clients. It's not accessible. This alone destroys "beautifully". But even beyond that, it's just not a good citizen or experience wherever it is. It's deeply single-paned and hence single-tasked: you can't open a conversation in a tab or separate window. And switching between conversations/threads/groups on any platform is much harder than it needs to be. Their quick-switcher is a quasi CLI bandage over this that increases cognitive load on the user. The enterprise multi-slack experience is even more horrible as it expands that problem across multiple quasi-discrete instances. On iOS it does unnatural things with text so you can't select portions to copy and paste. On desktop it is so much of a resource hog it's our generation's version of Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping. And this isn't intrinsic: none of this stuff was an issue when you could use IRC clients to access it. But they turned those off.

hiccuphippo 7y ago

Check volt if you want a slack client: https://volt-app.com/ https://volt-app.com/ Other electron based apps like Discord perform better so I'm not sure why Slack is so crappy.

skinnymuch 7y ago
Have there been lots of updates? A few months ago it felt very alpha.