10 ms·

Reading their non-replies on Twitter feels like I'm reading something specifically designed to piss me off. Smarmy apologies, low empathy, cocksure of how corre

Reading their non-replies on Twitter feels like I'm reading something specifically designed to piss me off. Smarmy apologies, low empathy, cocksure of how correct their vision of a chat service should be. This one in particular[1]: > The goal is for workflows to evolve, but we realize change can be a bit of a pain. "Stupid peasant, we are only here to help you. Once you see the glorious vision we have you will thank us." [1]: https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/1192147475672510474?s=21 https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/1192147475672510474?s=21

breeny592 7y ago
Smells of bad UX/design process - some senior "wants" this particular solution, despite their users showing direct feedback that it doesn't work for their needs.
- exogeny 7y ago
  I'd push back on your last point; there's a zero-sum feedback process here that is invisible. You're seeing the negative feedback from a vocal set of minority power users; the positive feedback from people isn't going to be known or seen in anything other than usage metrics. You say "users": how many, what percentage, what cohort..you get the idea.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    I somehow doubt a lot of people are going to be happy about a rich text editor that doesn’t work. A bit like the teams editor, which was forced upon me and is absolutely horrendous.
  - lallysingh 7y ago
    How do you tell the difference between unpopular features and ones that are mostly liked? In both cases, only "a vocal set of minority power users" would say anything.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - tom_mellior 7y ago
    If we lack percentages, how do you know it's a minority that dislikes this?
  - catalogia 7y ago
    With the state of statistics literacy in this industry, "usage metrics" often mean whatever the person citing them want, with no malice or deception intended. Accidental, inadvertent p-hacking is shockingly common.
  - vorpalhex 7y ago
    My concern is that they'll count any interaction with this new forced editor as a "win" and pretend it's an A/B test when in reality it's a lark.
  - userbinator 7y ago
    Some people don't care, but the ones who do care and don't like the change, tend to really not like it. Personally, I think the importance of not upsetting the established userbase far outweighs the probability of maybe growing that userbase a little.
dicytea 7y ago
"The WYSIWYG editor is being gradually rolled out over the coming days – if you don't see it in some workspaces, just hang tight, you will soon. " Not to mention, unintentional threats.
- ghostcluster 7y ago
  This attitude to their rollout reminds me of the recent rollout of Twitter's maligned new desktop UI, the new YouTube Studio Beta, and reddit's new UI. There is almost a meme of online platform service providers not understanding their users and their workflows, and rolling out new revisions that hamper or outright remove functionality that those users rely on. I guess the canonical example would be that one Digg redesign that nuked the whole platform, or Snapchat's redesign a year ago that stunted their growth. Luckily, we haven't had to experience this at Hacker News thus far ;)
  - Analemma_ 7y ago
    > There is almost a meme of online platform service providers not understanding their users and their workflows, and rolling out new revisions that hamper or outright remove functionality that those users rely on. True, but there's also a meme of people screaming bloody murder over a redesign for a day, and then being fine with it, e.g. [0]. Some complaints are worth investigating and some are just who-moved-my-cheese griping that can and should be ignored. It can be tricky to tell which is which though. [0]: https://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter/facebook_layout https://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter/facebook_layout
  - hazz99 7y ago
    > online platform service providers not understanding their users and their workflows In regards to the Reddit redesign, I think the people complaining that "they ignore their users" are stuck inside a bit of a bubble. I have a lot of friends who recently discovered the site, and they much prefer the redesign to the old one. I forgot where I read it, but I vaguely remember stats backing this up, or at least increase in engagement or a reduction in churn for new users following the redesign. Something like 50% of Reddit users are on mobile, for which the redesign is targeted (I believe) Re: Slack, I know many non-techies who struggle with markdown and would welcome a WYSIWYG editor with open arms and wide smiles.
p1necone 7y ago
It reads more to me like whoever they hire to run their twitter doesn't have the authority/knowledge to engage with complaints other than being nice and saying "I'll pass that on". This would be fine normally, but not really when they've shipped a feature that everyone hates.
- jakebasile 7y ago
  I know. I try to give the social media people leeway since they're almost always just the messengers. This thread in particular just seemed laser targeted to aggravate me.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    If you are taking a job with you are specifically being paid to be a human shield, I am not going to hold back from treating you like the face of the company you are. The more abuse these mercenaries take, the more the corp has to pay to staff them, and the more the owners feel the pain of their misdeeds.
howdydoo 7y ago
> You can use Cmd/Ctrl + Z to undo the format rendering within the text box, if that helps? This is the one that got me. Yeah thanks, I've been using text boxes since the 90s, I know how to undo. Now we'll get to find out if _they_ know how to undo.
- DavidHull 7y ago
  Actually, the cmd/ctl-z advice is actually moderately useful. If you type it immediately after the closing formatting character it undoes the wysiwyg formatting. (I'm not arguing against a way to turn the wysiwyg input window off, however.)
haberman 7y ago
Is there any way that tweet could have been written that would have satisfied you, without actually agreeing to change course right away? To me the tweet's tone says that they honestly care and don't want people to be inconvenienced, but also want to at least see if people will warm to it. There has to be some kind of healthy balance between listening to user feedback and never changing anything. The extreme version of listening to user feedback is: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
- swader999 7y ago
  It needs the PM and the team that championed this gong show to step up and own the reply.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  They dishonestly care, because they didn't bother to spend any of their billions of dollars to help their existing paying users.
- NoodleIncident 7y ago
  "Not writing it at all" is already miles ahead. Just like this comment, actually
- JoshTriplett 7y ago
  > Is there any way that tweet could have been written that would have satisfied you, without actually agreeing to change course right away? Not passive-aggressively suggesting that the problem is with the user and not the tool. "The goal is for workflows to evolve" effectively means "this is how it's going to be, you'll have to adapt (even if it's worse for you)". My workflows have thankfully "evolved" to use different tools. Zulip and Discord both still use markdown input, and I no longer use Slack for anything.
jpalomaki 7y ago
I don't think Slack is building a chat service. Based on the features they are building, they could be aiming to be The Groupware[1] of 2020's. On the web site they put it this way "Slack is the collaboration hub that brings the right people, information, and tools together to get work done." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_software
- _jal 7y ago
  That's a surefire path to irrelevance. Nobody wants groupware. Nobody uses it unless forced. On the bright side, that would leave a hole in the market for an enterprising chat developer to fill, hopefully with something less annoying and resource intensive.
  - hunter2_ 7y ago
    > Nobody wants groupware. Nobody uses it unless forced. Surely you're talking about some very specific crapware subset of groupware, because plenty of people choose to use, and very much enjoy using, all sorts of groupware. Distributed version control, issue trackers, simultaneous editing of documents... just to name a few examples of incredible groupware. But yes, generally when it claims to do all the things, it does none well. This is orthogonal.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    You mean like an pre packaged combo of an IRC server + logging + bouncer for users that can trivially be rolled out. Like one days work for 1 person?
    - nwallin 7y ago
      The problem isn't implementing the features, the problem is making the UX/UI intuitive to people who call Microsoft's tech support when Firefox displays a "cannot connect to internet" message because they unplugged their router because they needed the socket for something else. IRC is objectively superior to slack as a distributed chat client, but goddamned if the first step into slack isn't significantly shallower than the first step into IRC.
rmsaksida 7y ago
That style of communication where a corporate entity pretends to be friendly and concerned even as they're downright shutting you down is extremely annoying. It comes across as dishonest and condescending. I wish this type of PR would go away. If someone who's reading this works in social media, here's what would have been less annoying: - Saying "it's not possible right now, but you have a point and we'll reevaluate this" (even if it's a lie) - Saying nothing
nothrabannosir 7y ago
This new hive mind of corporations empathising with the poor common man needs to stop. It is outrageously frustrating, condescending and patronising. Every CS rep is trained to say “I understand” more often than they breathe. Corporate blog posts wax poetic about their understanding of the struggle of modern life in the first world. How sorry they are to be doing exactly the opposite of what somebody would do, who actually empathised. I will be the first to admit to a temper, but honestly if I hear one more CS drone tell me how much they understand, I swear to god I will reach through that phone and quiz them on it. Do you really? Explain it to me. In detail. So help you God if you forget anything. Ugh. You know, say what you will about the mob; at least they don’t treat you like you’re three years old.
donio 7y ago
Look, this was somebody's OKR so it had to be shipped. Can't you people understand that?
danShumway 7y ago
> The goal is for workflows to evolve This exchange is a pretty good summation of one of the biggest purely practical reasons why I'm so obsessive about tools, and why I'm so willing to put up with the initial cost of learning systems like Linux and Vim/Emacs. Outside of fundamentally better workflow improvements, most professional fields don't randomly change their tools. If you gave a professional artist a new pencil that had to be gripped differently for no reason, they'd throw it in the trash. But in software, we tolerate buggy tools that change all the time for no discernible reason. We tolerate software that simultaneously targets professionals and casual users, serving both segments poorly. We tolerate software that can't be customized or adapted for specific workflows. It's tough to put into words, but if you watch a musician or a painter interact with their tools, there's a very clear difference that emerges, and over time you start to realize how much better all of their stuff is. In most professional artistic settings, workflow changes only happen because they have a clear benefit -- drawing from your shoulder instead of your wrist, changing your embouchure if you play an instrument. And even in those fields, it's generally accepted that over time people will end up with very specialized setups that are very consistent and refined and that remain constant for years and years. Only in the software industry would someone tell me that my professional tools should change because change is inherently good. Only in commercial software would an elegant, consistent interface like Markdown that allowed me to build up decades of muscle memory until my computer was an extension of my fingers and I didn't need to think about the way I typed -- only in software would that be considered a bad thing.
- Swizec 7y ago
  > Only in the software industry would someone tell me that my professional tools should change because change is inherently good Translation: "we're paying all these engineers and product managers and they need something to do"
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    And they are all scrambling to data mine every arbitrary slice of the data to make it look like the musical chairs of features somehow drove conversion and the lack of bottom line fiscal performance is some other department’s fault for handwavy reasons.
anaisbetts 7y ago
Slack's voice is great when they're saying positive things, but God is it exhausting when they are replying to negative feedback. It's like listening to Ned Flanders, only with some extra patronizing emoji to rub it in
EGreg 7y ago
Wow, pretty egregious. How do you like this reply to tweet: https://twitter.com/qbixapps/status/1197332922807865344 https://twitter.com/qbixapps/status/1197332922807865344
erichurkman 7y ago
Did their engineering team not dogfood this change? What Slack engineer or product manager tried to share a `snippet of code` with a peer and thought, "yes, that was a pleasant experience. we should ship that."
- frandroid 7y ago
  It's clearly a product manager. Let's find out what's their name.
- city41 7y ago
  I could honestly say that about most Slack features. The drafts feature in particular drives me crazy.

breeny592 7y ago

Smells of bad UX/design process - some senior "wants" this particular solution, despite their users showing direct feedback that it doesn't work for their needs.

exogeny 7y ago
I'd push back on your last point; there's a zero-sum feedback process here that is invisible. You're seeing the negative feedback from a vocal set of minority power users; the positive feedback from people isn't going to be known or seen in anything other than usage metrics. You say "users": how many, what percentage, what cohort..you get the idea.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  I somehow doubt a lot of people are going to be happy about a rich text editor that doesn’t work. A bit like the teams editor, which was forced upon me and is absolutely horrendous.
- lallysingh 7y ago
  How do you tell the difference between unpopular features and ones that are mostly liked? In both cases, only "a vocal set of minority power users" would say anything.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- tom_mellior 7y ago
  If we lack percentages, how do you know it's a minority that dislikes this?
- catalogia 7y ago
  With the state of statistics literacy in this industry, "usage metrics" often mean whatever the person citing them want, with no malice or deception intended. Accidental, inadvertent p-hacking is shockingly common.
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  My concern is that they'll count any interaction with this new forced editor as a "win" and pretend it's an A/B test when in reality it's a lark.
- userbinator 7y ago
  Some people don't care, but the ones who do care and don't like the change, tend to really not like it. Personally, I think the importance of not upsetting the established userbase far outweighs the probability of maybe growing that userbase a little.

dicytea 7y ago

"The WYSIWYG editor is being gradually rolled out over the coming days – if you don't see it in some workspaces, just hang tight, you will soon. " Not to mention, unintentional threats.

ghostcluster 7y ago
This attitude to their rollout reminds me of the recent rollout of Twitter's maligned new desktop UI, the new YouTube Studio Beta, and reddit's new UI. There is almost a meme of online platform service providers not understanding their users and their workflows, and rolling out new revisions that hamper or outright remove functionality that those users rely on. I guess the canonical example would be that one Digg redesign that nuked the whole platform, or Snapchat's redesign a year ago that stunted their growth. Luckily, we haven't had to experience this at Hacker News thus far ;)
- Analemma_ 7y ago
  > There is almost a meme of online platform service providers not understanding their users and their workflows, and rolling out new revisions that hamper or outright remove functionality that those users rely on. True, but there's also a meme of people screaming bloody murder over a redesign for a day, and then being fine with it, e.g. [0]. Some complaints are worth investigating and some are just who-moved-my-cheese griping that can and should be ignored. It can be tricky to tell which is which though. [0]: https://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter/facebook_layout https://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter/facebook_layout
- hazz99 7y ago
  > online platform service providers not understanding their users and their workflows In regards to the Reddit redesign, I think the people complaining that "they ignore their users" are stuck inside a bit of a bubble. I have a lot of friends who recently discovered the site, and they much prefer the redesign to the old one. I forgot where I read it, but I vaguely remember stats backing this up, or at least increase in engagement or a reduction in churn for new users following the redesign. Something like 50% of Reddit users are on mobile, for which the redesign is targeted (I believe) Re: Slack, I know many non-techies who struggle with markdown and would welcome a WYSIWYG editor with open arms and wide smiles.

p1necone 7y ago

It reads more to me like whoever they hire to run their twitter doesn't have the authority/knowledge to engage with complaints other than being nice and saying "I'll pass that on". This would be fine normally, but not really when they've shipped a feature that everyone hates.

jakebasile 7y ago
I know. I try to give the social media people leeway since they're almost always just the messengers. This thread in particular just seemed laser targeted to aggravate me.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  If you are taking a job with you are specifically being paid to be a human shield, I am not going to hold back from treating you like the face of the company you are. The more abuse these mercenaries take, the more the corp has to pay to staff them, and the more the owners feel the pain of their misdeeds.

howdydoo 7y ago

> You can use Cmd/Ctrl + Z to undo the format rendering within the text box, if that helps? This is the one that got me. Yeah thanks, I've been using text boxes since the 90s, I know how to undo. Now we'll get to find out if _they_ know how to undo.

DavidHull 7y ago
Actually, the cmd/ctl-z advice is actually moderately useful. If you type it immediately after the closing formatting character it undoes the wysiwyg formatting. (I'm not arguing against a way to turn the wysiwyg input window off, however.)

haberman 7y ago

Is there any way that tweet could have been written that would have satisfied you, without actually agreeing to change course right away? To me the tweet's tone says that they honestly care and don't want people to be inconvenienced, but also want to at least see if people will warm to it. There has to be some kind of healthy balance between listening to user feedback and never changing anything. The extreme version of listening to user feedback is: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/

swader999 7y ago
It needs the PM and the team that championed this gong show to step up and own the reply.
lonelappde 7y ago
They dishonestly care, because they didn't bother to spend any of their billions of dollars to help their existing paying users.
NoodleIncident 7y ago
"Not writing it at all" is already miles ahead. Just like this comment, actually
JoshTriplett 7y ago
> Is there any way that tweet could have been written that would have satisfied you, without actually agreeing to change course right away? Not passive-aggressively suggesting that the problem is with the user and not the tool. "The goal is for workflows to evolve" effectively means "this is how it's going to be, you'll have to adapt (even if it's worse for you)". My workflows have thankfully "evolved" to use different tools. Zulip and Discord both still use markdown input, and I no longer use Slack for anything.

jpalomaki 7y ago

I don't think Slack is building a chat service. Based on the features they are building, they could be aiming to be The Groupware[1] of 2020's. On the web site they put it this way "Slack is the collaboration hub that brings the right people, information, and tools together to get work done." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_software

_jal 7y ago
That's a surefire path to irrelevance. Nobody wants groupware. Nobody uses it unless forced. On the bright side, that would leave a hole in the market for an enterprising chat developer to fill, hopefully with something less annoying and resource intensive.
- hunter2_ 7y ago
  > Nobody wants groupware. Nobody uses it unless forced. Surely you're talking about some very specific crapware subset of groupware, because plenty of people choose to use, and very much enjoy using, all sorts of groupware. Distributed version control, issue trackers, simultaneous editing of documents... just to name a few examples of incredible groupware. But yes, generally when it claims to do all the things, it does none well. This is orthogonal.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  You mean like an pre packaged combo of an IRC server + logging + bouncer for users that can trivially be rolled out. Like one days work for 1 person?
  - nwallin 7y ago
    The problem isn't implementing the features, the problem is making the UX/UI intuitive to people who call Microsoft's tech support when Firefox displays a "cannot connect to internet" message because they unplugged their router because they needed the socket for something else. IRC is objectively superior to slack as a distributed chat client, but goddamned if the first step into slack isn't significantly shallower than the first step into IRC.

rmsaksida 7y ago

That style of communication where a corporate entity pretends to be friendly and concerned even as they're downright shutting you down is extremely annoying. It comes across as dishonest and condescending. I wish this type of PR would go away. If someone who's reading this works in social media, here's what would have been less annoying: - Saying "it's not possible right now, but you have a point and we'll reevaluate this" (even if it's a lie) - Saying nothing

nothrabannosir 7y ago

This new hive mind of corporations empathising with the poor common man needs to stop. It is outrageously frustrating, condescending and patronising. Every CS rep is trained to say “I understand” more often than they breathe. Corporate blog posts wax poetic about their understanding of the struggle of modern life in the first world. How sorry they are to be doing exactly the opposite of what somebody would do, who actually empathised. I will be the first to admit to a temper, but honestly if I hear one more CS drone tell me how much they understand, I swear to god I will reach through that phone and quiz them on it. Do you really? Explain it to me. In detail. So help you God if you forget anything. Ugh. You know, say what you will about the mob; at least they don’t treat you like you’re three years old.

donio 7y ago

Look, this was somebody's OKR so it had to be shipped. Can't you people understand that?

danShumway 7y ago

> The goal is for workflows to evolve This exchange is a pretty good summation of one of the biggest purely practical reasons why I'm so obsessive about tools, and why I'm so willing to put up with the initial cost of learning systems like Linux and Vim/Emacs. Outside of fundamentally better workflow improvements, most professional fields don't randomly change their tools. If you gave a professional artist a new pencil that had to be gripped differently for no reason, they'd throw it in the trash. But in software, we tolerate buggy tools that change all the time for no discernible reason. We tolerate software that simultaneously targets professionals and casual users, serving both segments poorly. We tolerate software that can't be customized or adapted for specific workflows. It's tough to put into words, but if you watch a musician or a painter interact with their tools, there's a very clear difference that emerges, and over time you start to realize how much better all of their stuff is. In most professional artistic settings, workflow changes only happen because they have a clear benefit -- drawing from your shoulder instead of your wrist, changing your embouchure if you play an instrument. And even in those fields, it's generally accepted that over time people will end up with very specialized setups that are very consistent and refined and that remain constant for years and years. Only in the software industry would someone tell me that my professional tools should change because change is inherently good. Only in commercial software would an elegant, consistent interface like Markdown that allowed me to build up decades of muscle memory until my computer was an extension of my fingers and I didn't need to think about the way I typed -- only in software would that be considered a bad thing.

Swizec 7y ago
> Only in the software industry would someone tell me that my professional tools should change because change is inherently good Translation: "we're paying all these engineers and product managers and they need something to do"
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  And they are all scrambling to data mine every arbitrary slice of the data to make it look like the musical chairs of features somehow drove conversion and the lack of bottom line fiscal performance is some other department’s fault for handwavy reasons.

anaisbetts 7y ago

Slack's voice is great when they're saying positive things, but God is it exhausting when they are replying to negative feedback. It's like listening to Ned Flanders, only with some extra patronizing emoji to rub it in

EGreg 7y ago

Wow, pretty egregious. How do you like this reply to tweet: https://twitter.com/qbixapps/status/1197332922807865344 https://twitter.com/qbixapps/status/1197332922807865344

erichurkman 7y ago

Did their engineering team not dogfood this change? What Slack engineer or product manager tried to share a `snippet of code` with a peer and thought, "yes, that was a pleasant experience. we should ship that."

frandroid 7y ago
It's clearly a product manager. Let's find out what's their name.
city41 7y ago
I could honestly say that about most Slack features. The drafts feature in particular drives me crazy.