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* search engine that just work * push-notifications that just work * client available for enough people * copy / pasting images that just work (the'll never

* search engine that just work * push-notifications that just work * client available for enough people * copy / pasting images that just work (the'll never admit it, but animated gif is their killer feature) * stable-enough infrastructure for something that costs you 15€/month/user not taken from your "salary" budget (often a different and substantially less taxed part) * and their outages are funny (receiving messages twice is arguably better than not receiving message) Yes, it's because it "just kinda works for what it costs, and you can forget about it most of the time and do your job." This seems to be characterized as "laziness" by some people, a point I honestly don't understand (I though lazyness was a virtue in our circles.) That being said, there are legitimate reasons to not use it: * software licence * data property * technical implementation of the native clients * general distrust of centralized solutions * cost of having IM at all (see Newport's whole publishing career) At least, it means there's an opportunity to create a company that handles decentralized user-friendly open-source standard-based data-respectful attention-preserving uber-reliable chat system. HN users would be a market.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
> search engine that just work For some definitions of "just" and "working". Even ignoring the business limitation, the UX of Slack search is meh. That said, I'm yet to see any of the modern web&mobile-oriented IMs that would have a decent search UX. But yeah, your list is solid. They offer plenty of value, just mixed with plenty of negatives. A big source of the complaints against Slack is usually the network effect - in context of both work and OSS communities, it's usually somebody else that makes the decision and imposes it on you, forcing you to run face-first into all the "legitimate reasons to not use it" you listed. Half of the pain would be gone if they opened up their service to third-party clients; I'd say the reason they didn't have as much opposition from people initially is because they run the bait-and-switch with IRC gateway.
- phtrivier 7y ago
  Interesting point about : work environment vs communities. For work, the decision of which IM tool is most likely going to be a corporate one, without much choice of solution. I guess the problem here is the same as for other corporate tools. (And people have strong feelings about corporate tools, but it seems there are less strong feelings about "using jira vs bugzilla" as there are "using slack vs irc". Or maybe there are as much strong feelings.) On the other end, I get the troubles with the "network" effect for out-of-work communities (open source projects, clubs, etc...) Such communities can at least have "some" level of debate about which solution to use, and balance the pros and cons as they see fit. It's completely acceptable for an OSS community to discourage using such platforms - as any other non-free, centralized platforms. We're still not forced to use anything. Then, there is the "club of non-power user" situation. I would be hard pressed to ask someone from my drama club to setup and maintain an IRC server (neither do I want to do it.) Thanks for adding this dimension. Follow-up: is there a "nice" provider of some slack-like solution (mattermost, etc...) that hosts servers for communities of non-techies for not too much money ?

TeMPOraL 7y ago

> search engine that just work For some definitions of "just" and "working". Even ignoring the business limitation, the UX of Slack search is meh. That said, I'm yet to see any of the modern web&mobile-oriented IMs that would have a decent search UX. But yeah, your list is solid. They offer plenty of value, just mixed with plenty of negatives. A big source of the complaints against Slack is usually the network effect - in context of both work and OSS communities, it's usually somebody else that makes the decision and imposes it on you, forcing you to run face-first into all the "legitimate reasons to not use it" you listed. Half of the pain would be gone if they opened up their service to third-party clients; I'd say the reason they didn't have as much opposition from people initially is because they run the bait-and-switch with IRC gateway.

phtrivier 7y ago
Interesting point about : work environment vs communities. For work, the decision of which IM tool is most likely going to be a corporate one, without much choice of solution. I guess the problem here is the same as for other corporate tools. (And people have strong feelings about corporate tools, but it seems there are less strong feelings about "using jira vs bugzilla" as there are "using slack vs irc". Or maybe there are as much strong feelings.) On the other end, I get the troubles with the "network" effect for out-of-work communities (open source projects, clubs, etc...) Such communities can at least have "some" level of debate about which solution to use, and balance the pros and cons as they see fit. It's completely acceptable for an OSS community to discourage using such platforms - as any other non-free, centralized platforms. We're still not forced to use anything. Then, there is the "club of non-power user" situation. I would be hard pressed to ask someone from my drama club to setup and maintain an IRC server (neither do I want to do it.) Thanks for adding this dimension. Follow-up: is there a "nice" provider of some slack-like solution (mattermost, etc...) that hosts servers for communities of non-techies for not too much money ?