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Can someone please enlighten me? I am having trouble understanding the myriad communications/chat apps out there that don't seem to do much more than what we o

Can someone please enlighten me? I am having trouble understanding the myriad communications/chat apps out there that don't seem to do much more than what we older folk used to do on USENET. Then there's all the clones of more modern platforms. Things like Whatsup. It just seems to me there are, as a friend of mine used to say, "too many useless duplicates". Meaning, most of it is a huge waste of time. So, what am I missing about Slack specifically? What unique differentiation makes this worthy of anyone investing their nest egg on their stock? I honestly want to know. BTW, I have used Slack. I think it's horrible. I don't see much improvement over, say, a phpBB site (which can be deployed privately inside of a network or on the internet).

pssdbt 7y ago
Comparing to phpBB doesn't make sense. It isn't incredibly unique, but maybe reading this will help a little? https://slack.com/enterprise https://slack.com/enterprise
grimjack00 7y ago
phpBB and USENET are not the right comparisons; Slack is comparable to IRC: real-time chat. It's not the only one, it's just one of the most successful re-implementations.
okabat 7y ago
Slack is great at managing "read/unread" state across my 4 devices even in messy mobile networking situations. Good threading tools allow conversations to remain sandboxed and not gum up entire channels. Do these improvements justify the valuation? Maybe not, especially given how many other comms apps have a similar feature set. But for the vast majority of realtime modern workplace communication use-cases, IRC or a bulletin board will not cut it
- writehappycode 7y ago
  I’ve missed important messages at critical times due to their mobile app not providing me notification as configured (ios). Syncing across devices is handled nicely though.
pmart123 7y ago
Some smaller companies essentially run customer service directly through Slack. It can be pretty nifty in that a customer support message thread can easily be rerouted to a developer if it involves a bug, attached to an issue, which then notifies the customer service team that the bug is resolved once the code branch is pushed to master and deployed. Other use cases can be simple things like notifying teams when you get new subscribers, reporting metrics/charts that are displayed in a thread versus pushed via email (allowing newly joined channel members, etc. to scroll through. I'm not saying any of these are game changes by themselves, but they each bring incremental value.

pssdbt 7y ago

Comparing to phpBB doesn't make sense. It isn't incredibly unique, but maybe reading this will help a little? https://slack.com/enterprise https://slack.com/enterprise

grimjack00 7y ago

phpBB and USENET are not the right comparisons; Slack is comparable to IRC: real-time chat. It's not the only one, it's just one of the most successful re-implementations.

okabat 7y ago

Slack is great at managing "read/unread" state across my 4 devices even in messy mobile networking situations. Good threading tools allow conversations to remain sandboxed and not gum up entire channels. Do these improvements justify the valuation? Maybe not, especially given how many other comms apps have a similar feature set. But for the vast majority of realtime modern workplace communication use-cases, IRC or a bulletin board will not cut it

writehappycode 7y ago
I’ve missed important messages at critical times due to their mobile app not providing me notification as configured (ios). Syncing across devices is handled nicely though.

pmart123 7y ago

Some smaller companies essentially run customer service directly through Slack. It can be pretty nifty in that a customer support message thread can easily be rerouted to a developer if it involves a bug, attached to an issue, which then notifies the customer service team that the bug is resolved once the code branch is pushed to master and deployed. Other use cases can be simple things like notifying teams when you get new subscribers, reporting metrics/charts that are displayed in a thread versus pushed via email (allowing newly joined channel members, etc. to scroll through. I'm not saying any of these are game changes by themselves, but they each bring incremental value.