7 ms·

Wish we wouldn’t use such language, “sucks less” is highly subjective and your opinion but we don’t need to disparage Slack in order to make a point that altern

Wish we wouldn’t use such language, “sucks less” is highly subjective and your opinion but we don’t need to disparage Slack in order to make a point that alternatives like Zulip are available. Seems like especially poor tone on an outage thread... “Don’t kick them while they’re down” or something?

dharmab 7y ago
"suck less" is a specific software development philosophy https://suckless.org/philosophy/ https://suckless.org/philosophy/
- monsieurbanana 7y ago
  It's also not what op meant.
- dropmann 7y ago
  If the original commenter would have meant that, he probably would have recommended using https://tools.suckless.org/sic/ https://tools.suckless.org/sic/ and not some web application which is categorized as "stuff that sucks" See: https://suckless.org/sucks/web/ https://suckless.org/sucks/web/
allana 7y ago
2GB of RAM use for 6 open tabs in Slack is pretty awful, their desktop client has set the bar to compete with Slack on performance very low. This abusive resource usage has created a dislike of Slack among a subset of its users.
- timdorr 7y ago
  They actually just fixed that in 4.0: https://slackhq.com/introducing-a-more-efficient-slack-desktop-experience https://slackhq.com/introducing-a-more-efficient-slack-deskt... I'm currently sitting at 400MB total usage (including helpers) for 4 workspaces.
  - xeromal 7y ago
    Half a gig for IRC + gifs
    - asark 7y ago
      Seriously. Oh, good, now it's only 4-5x as large as it has any right to be, even allowing for modern software bloat...
    - allana 7y ago
      Such is the nature of slightly optimized Electron apps, T-Mobile Digits Desktop app is a similar resource hog. Using the browser based version often is less resource intensive.
      - lugg 7y ago
        Tried that, they actively employ darkpatterns to coerce users onto desktop apps. I even asked them to stop asking for an app install on their links that you open from inside the webapp and they told me to get stuffed and use the desktop app.
        allana 7y ago
        Yea, I use Matrix integration when I deal with Slack, that way I have my choice of client and there isn't any code of Slack's running on my machine.
        KORraN 7y ago
        Strange, after declining message about "native" desktop app, I've never seen it again. No other issues as well. Firefox 69 on Windows, one paid and one free workspace.
    - freetobesmart 7y ago
      If we dont support the bloat wear created from silicon valley what will those javascript devs do. All the barista jobs are taken.
  - 7y ago
- vdfs 7y ago
  Their new version seem to use less RAM, it's still Electron but with a lot of lazy-loading's
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- brynjolf 7y ago
  Same with MS Teams, and there isn't even a way to disable notifications per channel. So if people ping the channel and you are ini tyou will get a notification. It drives me insane but no progress since August 2018. They did add a way to send unicorns to people though. Priorities...
  - firedrakerage 7y ago
    In MS Teams you can click the '...' next to a channel and then click 'channel notifications'. The options allow you to mute 'all new posts' and also to mute 'channel mentions'.
- holtalanm 7y ago
  as mentioned in another reply -- the slack client memory hog issue was fixed in the latest update.
- DangerousPie 7y ago
  I can honestly say that I have never checked or cared about how much RAM Slack uses. Or any other software for that matter. It's certainly not an issue that I'd use as the basis for deciding which team communication tool to use.
  - IggleSniggle 7y ago
    Yeah see the people that are caring about this are caring because it has used up all of their available RAM, has pushed stuff into Virtual Memory, and it is causing performance problems for their system. Or, if they are IT, it is causing performance problems on their users' systems. This is a pretty reasonable complaint when you're talking about a system with 2gb, and a chat application that uses 1.5gb of memory...or heck, a 16gb system when you have programs that legitimately need as much memory as you can give them and are being starved of it. Nobody would begrudge this usage if it was necessary for the task, but it isn't. Not even close. Edit: Apparently this is better than it used to be, but there have been times when Slack also ate up CPU like crazy. Which, again, no biggie if you have plenty to spare, but when you don't...and even then, if you have plenty to spare, you're still going to be annoyed with Slack if it's eating all of your battery because the CPU is working really really really hard at...um...dunno? If it were mining bitcoin/monero without your knowledge or consent then at least it would be DOING something.
    - allana 7y ago
      CPU nomming is a worse problem IMO, as your fans spin up and battery life shrinks. Other chat clients don't use notable resources, its suprising that Slack hasn't had much pushback over its heavy resource usage thus far.
    - scott_s 7y ago
      "Virtual memory" is not a synonym for swap space: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2937597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2937597
      - MiroF 7y ago
- enlyth 7y ago
  I'm sitting at 341MB after all day heavy usage, let's not exaggerate here :)
- UncleMeat 7y ago
  Is it? Memory exists to be used.
  - jeltz 7y ago
    Yeah, but I run Firefox, Slack, Skype, Discord and VirtualBox. Together they can peak at like 10 GB when stars align badly and I only have 8 GB RAM.
- woodrowbarlow 7y ago
  zulip is electron also.
anaphor 7y ago
I don't mean it in a disparaging way. Most software sucks to some degree so the goal is to find something that "sucks less". Pretty much everything can always be improved on.
- papln 7y ago
  "more pleasant to use and less buggy." Borrowing from Lin Manuel-Miranda's Thomas Jefferson: > These are wise words, enterprising men quote 'em > Don't act surprised, you guys, 'anaphor wrote 'em It's a nicer way to convey the same idea, without triggering a combative emotional response in reaaders.
  - forgottenpass 7y ago
    If saying slack sucks "trigger[s] a combative emotional response in reaaders," I don't think it's the speaker that needs to re-evaluate their choices in life.
spyspy 7y ago
They're a $17 billion company. They'll be just fine.
- kolbe 7y ago
  Their valuation is actually extremely sensitive to usage patterns right now, however. If they lose $1m of business, it's not like they're worth $1m less. That million bucks is not only used in an assumption for making that money over and over for the next couple decade, but also as an indication of growth for more adoption. I don't know the exact model that gets used, but it's likely that losing $1m in business today causes hundreds of millions in loss for their market cap.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
hartator 7y ago
We pay for Slack and I’ve lost some time this morning coordinating with my team. 2 weeks ago it was screen sharing that was down. It’s infuriating. Not sure why you think OP can’t say “Slack sucks”.
- abhchand 7y ago
  Some reasons, playing devil's advocate: 1. While today's incident was unfortunate, Slack has been historically reliable. 2. There's a team of real people that works very hard to keep it that way. Using dismissive language just dumps all over their hard work. 3. It's easy to be dismissive but once you move away from Slack you'll realize how much an app that size gives you. IN other words the "sucks less" statement has shades of ignorance, and of course subjectivity. 4. Why be rude at all? Even if you don't buy into any of the above, is it that hard to be nice in making a point?
  - hartator 7y ago
    Playing the devil's advocate's advocate: > 1. While today's incident was unfortunate, Slack has been historically reliable. Screen sharing and video have not been reliable in the past month. With several public incidents. > 2. There's a team of real people that works very hard to keep it that way. Using dismissive language just dumps all over their hard work. I feel very little sympathy for an engineer who make couple of hundred thousands per year. Not accounting stock options, vacation, and work environment. And Slack won't fire the culprit. > 3. It's easy to be dismissive but once you move away from Slack you'll realize how much an app that size gives you. IN other words the "sucks less" statement has shades of ignorance, and of course subjectivity We invest our own time building integrations. Why should be doing that for Slack and not for the competition? > 4. Why be rude at all? Even if you don't buy into any of the above, is it that hard to be nice in making a point? I don't think OP's "It sucks" is dismissive or rude. You can be nice and still thinking something sucks. It helps no one to lie by choosing less explicit words.
echelon 7y ago
Engineers grew up on chat (IRC, AIM/MSN/ICQ, Jabber/XMPP, etc.) and have opinions about what it should look and feel like. When a company raises billions for a product that feels like using dinky Fisher-Price software that you could have written better and gotten rich off instead, and moreover when their product is forced upon you by your workplace and it becomes a major distraction and headache... Ire, jealousy, hate... There are a lot of bad feelings towards Slack. These are not necessarily my feelings, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't dislike them just a little.
- DangerousPie 7y ago
  I grew up with all of these and I have no issues with Slack. It's much more convenient and useful than any of the above.
MiroF 7y ago
Slack is a multi-billion dollar valued company, we're not kicking them while they're down
- contravariant 7y ago
  Except in the literal sense.
pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
They are down... You are talking about the potential to kick them.
anbop 7y ago
You’re supposed to be soft on a company during an outage? That’s exactly when you’re supposed to be considering alternatives! Similar peeve is when people say “don’t politicize this tragedy.” No, politics is how we decide to act, a tragedy is exactly when we should be the most political. The Boeing 737 crashes is when we should excoriate and eliminate the rot at Boeing and the FAA, not six years later after some respectful silence.
dkarl 7y ago
Lindsey Graham, a 64-year-old conservative U.S. senator, just said China's ability to influence the U.S. film industry "sucks," so I don't think the language has the swear-word power it used to.

dharmab 7y ago

"suck less" is a specific software development philosophy https://suckless.org/philosophy/ https://suckless.org/philosophy/

monsieurbanana 7y ago
It's also not what op meant.
dropmann 7y ago
If the original commenter would have meant that, he probably would have recommended using https://tools.suckless.org/sic/ https://tools.suckless.org/sic/ and not some web application which is categorized as "stuff that sucks" See: https://suckless.org/sucks/web/ https://suckless.org/sucks/web/

allana 7y ago

2GB of RAM use for 6 open tabs in Slack is pretty awful, their desktop client has set the bar to compete with Slack on performance very low. This abusive resource usage has created a dislike of Slack among a subset of its users.

timdorr 7y ago
They actually just fixed that in 4.0: https://slackhq.com/introducing-a-more-efficient-slack-desktop-experience https://slackhq.com/introducing-a-more-efficient-slack-deskt... I'm currently sitting at 400MB total usage (including helpers) for 4 workspaces.
- xeromal 7y ago
  Half a gig for IRC + gifs
  - asark 7y ago
    Seriously. Oh, good, now it's only 4-5x as large as it has any right to be, even allowing for modern software bloat...
  - allana 7y ago
    Such is the nature of slightly optimized Electron apps, T-Mobile Digits Desktop app is a similar resource hog. Using the browser based version often is less resource intensive.
    - lugg 7y ago
      Tried that, they actively employ darkpatterns to coerce users onto desktop apps. I even asked them to stop asking for an app install on their links that you open from inside the webapp and they told me to get stuffed and use the desktop app.
      - allana 7y ago
        Yea, I use Matrix integration when I deal with Slack, that way I have my choice of client and there isn't any code of Slack's running on my machine.
      - KORraN 7y ago
        Strange, after declining message about "native" desktop app, I've never seen it again. No other issues as well. Firefox 69 on Windows, one paid and one free workspace.
  - freetobesmart 7y ago
    If we dont support the bloat wear created from silicon valley what will those javascript devs do. All the barista jobs are taken.
- 7y ago
vdfs 7y ago
Their new version seem to use less RAM, it's still Electron but with a lot of lazy-loading's
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
brynjolf 7y ago
Same with MS Teams, and there isn't even a way to disable notifications per channel. So if people ping the channel and you are ini tyou will get a notification. It drives me insane but no progress since August 2018. They did add a way to send unicorns to people though. Priorities...
- firedrakerage 7y ago
  In MS Teams you can click the '...' next to a channel and then click 'channel notifications'. The options allow you to mute 'all new posts' and also to mute 'channel mentions'.
holtalanm 7y ago
as mentioned in another reply -- the slack client memory hog issue was fixed in the latest update.
DangerousPie 7y ago
I can honestly say that I have never checked or cared about how much RAM Slack uses. Or any other software for that matter. It's certainly not an issue that I'd use as the basis for deciding which team communication tool to use.
- IggleSniggle 7y ago
  Yeah see the people that are caring about this are caring because it has used up all of their available RAM, has pushed stuff into Virtual Memory, and it is causing performance problems for their system. Or, if they are IT, it is causing performance problems on their users' systems. This is a pretty reasonable complaint when you're talking about a system with 2gb, and a chat application that uses 1.5gb of memory...or heck, a 16gb system when you have programs that legitimately need as much memory as you can give them and are being starved of it. Nobody would begrudge this usage if it was necessary for the task, but it isn't. Not even close. Edit: Apparently this is better than it used to be, but there have been times when Slack also ate up CPU like crazy. Which, again, no biggie if you have plenty to spare, but when you don't...and even then, if you have plenty to spare, you're still going to be annoyed with Slack if it's eating all of your battery because the CPU is working really really really hard at...um...dunno? If it were mining bitcoin/monero without your knowledge or consent then at least it would be DOING something.
  - allana 7y ago
    CPU nomming is a worse problem IMO, as your fans spin up and battery life shrinks. Other chat clients don't use notable resources, its suprising that Slack hasn't had much pushback over its heavy resource usage thus far.
  - scott_s 7y ago
    "Virtual memory" is not a synonym for swap space: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2937597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2937597
    - MiroF 7y ago
enlyth 7y ago
I'm sitting at 341MB after all day heavy usage, let's not exaggerate here :)
UncleMeat 7y ago
Is it? Memory exists to be used.
- jeltz 7y ago
  Yeah, but I run Firefox, Slack, Skype, Discord and VirtualBox. Together they can peak at like 10 GB when stars align badly and I only have 8 GB RAM.
woodrowbarlow 7y ago
zulip is electron also.

anaphor 7y ago

I don't mean it in a disparaging way. Most software sucks to some degree so the goal is to find something that "sucks less". Pretty much everything can always be improved on.

papln 7y ago
"more pleasant to use and less buggy." Borrowing from Lin Manuel-Miranda's Thomas Jefferson: > These are wise words, enterprising men quote 'em > Don't act surprised, you guys, 'anaphor wrote 'em It's a nicer way to convey the same idea, without triggering a combative emotional response in reaaders.
- forgottenpass 7y ago
  If saying slack sucks "trigger[s] a combative emotional response in reaaders," I don't think it's the speaker that needs to re-evaluate their choices in life.

spyspy 7y ago

They're a $17 billion company. They'll be just fine.

kolbe 7y ago
Their valuation is actually extremely sensitive to usage patterns right now, however. If they lose $1m of business, it's not like they're worth $1m less. That million bucks is not only used in an assumption for making that money over and over for the next couple decade, but also as an indication of growth for more adoption. I don't know the exact model that gets used, but it's likely that losing $1m in business today causes hundreds of millions in loss for their market cap.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

hartator 7y ago

We pay for Slack and I’ve lost some time this morning coordinating with my team. 2 weeks ago it was screen sharing that was down. It’s infuriating. Not sure why you think OP can’t say “Slack sucks”.

abhchand 7y ago
Some reasons, playing devil's advocate: 1. While today's incident was unfortunate, Slack has been historically reliable. 2. There's a team of real people that works very hard to keep it that way. Using dismissive language just dumps all over their hard work. 3. It's easy to be dismissive but once you move away from Slack you'll realize how much an app that size gives you. IN other words the "sucks less" statement has shades of ignorance, and of course subjectivity. 4. Why be rude at all? Even if you don't buy into any of the above, is it that hard to be nice in making a point?
- hartator 7y ago
  Playing the devil's advocate's advocate: > 1. While today's incident was unfortunate, Slack has been historically reliable. Screen sharing and video have not been reliable in the past month. With several public incidents. > 2. There's a team of real people that works very hard to keep it that way. Using dismissive language just dumps all over their hard work. I feel very little sympathy for an engineer who make couple of hundred thousands per year. Not accounting stock options, vacation, and work environment. And Slack won't fire the culprit. > 3. It's easy to be dismissive but once you move away from Slack you'll realize how much an app that size gives you. IN other words the "sucks less" statement has shades of ignorance, and of course subjectivity We invest our own time building integrations. Why should be doing that for Slack and not for the competition? > 4. Why be rude at all? Even if you don't buy into any of the above, is it that hard to be nice in making a point? I don't think OP's "It sucks" is dismissive or rude. You can be nice and still thinking something sucks. It helps no one to lie by choosing less explicit words.

echelon 7y ago

Engineers grew up on chat (IRC, AIM/MSN/ICQ, Jabber/XMPP, etc.) and have opinions about what it should look and feel like. When a company raises billions for a product that feels like using dinky Fisher-Price software that you could have written better and gotten rich off instead, and moreover when their product is forced upon you by your workplace and it becomes a major distraction and headache... Ire, jealousy, hate... There are a lot of bad feelings towards Slack. These are not necessarily my feelings, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't dislike them just a little.

DangerousPie 7y ago
I grew up with all of these and I have no issues with Slack. It's much more convenient and useful than any of the above.

MiroF 7y ago

Slack is a multi-billion dollar valued company, we're not kicking them while they're down

contravariant 7y ago
Except in the literal sense.

pg_is_a_butt 7y ago

They are down... You are talking about the potential to kick them.

anbop 7y ago

You’re supposed to be soft on a company during an outage? That’s exactly when you’re supposed to be considering alternatives! Similar peeve is when people say “don’t politicize this tragedy.” No, politics is how we decide to act, a tragedy is exactly when we should be the most political. The Boeing 737 crashes is when we should excoriate and eliminate the rot at Boeing and the FAA, not six years later after some respectful silence.

dkarl 7y ago

Lindsey Graham, a 64-year-old conservative U.S. senator, just said China's ability to influence the U.S. film industry "sucks," so I don't think the language has the swear-word power it used to.