24 ms·

This is not one of those "oh, that's annoying, i'll have to remember that and learn to work around it" issues. It's more like "I want to immediately stop using

• TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Exactly. Personally, I recommend switching to Ripcord as a Slack client. That's what I did some time ago, and I couldn't be happier.
  • ulrikrasmussen 7y ago
    Thank you! I didn't know about Ripcord, and so far it is great. I am amazed how fast it is. I'm also depressed that this amazes me, as it basically does what mIRC did for me over a decade ago. This is developed in QT by one person, and it looks pretty feature-complete to me. I really don't understand why a company the size of Slack invests all their development effort into such a subpar platform as Electron, when a native solution is clearly doable with very limited resources.
    • bandrami 7y ago
      > as it basically does what mIRC did for me over a decade ago When Atlassian finally pulled Hipchat last year I was tasked with finding the replacement. Turns out the one that met everybody's needs best was a local IRCd and whatever desktop client for it people liked. Some problems have been solved correctly for a while; chat is one of them.
      • UI_at_80x24 7y ago
        I'm actually in the process of doing this right now. (Looking for a Slack replacement.) Which specific daemon did you settle on?
        • syockit 7y ago
          I was about to ask the same. One of the things I badly needed was persistent logs. I googled around and found https://github.com/davisonio/awesome-irc https://github.com/davisonio/awesome-irc which lists bouncers that serves the purpose. Not really looking for replacement though (team is currently on Mattermost)
        • bandrami 7y ago
          inspircd with a cron job to mail the logs daily to a pastebin for people who wanted to reference them later.
      • phicoh 7y ago
        I'm curious, how does IRC handle history and multi-device sync? How does IRC handle end-to-end encryption in groups? How does IRC handle editing messages?
        • bandrami 7y ago
          I asked users for a desired feature list, and none of those were mentioned.
          • jacobsenscott 7y ago
            That's kind of like saying nobody mentioned they wanted wheels for their car, so you got them cars without wheels. What's the problem?
        • progval 7y ago
          > I'm curious, how does IRC handle history Servers can re-send history when a client join. At least InspIRCd supports this (though it's not enabled by default.)
        • mavhc 7y ago
          Quassel. Blowfish normally. Press up arrow, retype message, or type *correction.
        • rb808 7y ago
          Personally I dont need that stuff. Encryption maybe, but if we can run inside our VPN we should be good.
      • DagAgren 7y ago
        I am an old-time IRC user, but IRC is missing tons of features I use literally every single day in Slack. It does not have well-functioning and reliable file transfers. It does not keep history of discussions. It does not have media embedding. It is very far from a solution in 2019.
        • vorpalhex 7y ago
          If you have control of the entire IRC stack (the daemon, the bouncers, etc) you can work around a lot of those issues.. though at that rate, it's probably a lot less work to just host something like Riot..
          • DagAgren 7y ago
            How do you work around the lack of a kept history?
            • bandrami 7y ago
              In our case, we didn't. Kept history wasn't a feature people used or wanted. Stuff you were going to refer back to later was for email.
              • DagAgren 7y ago
                As I said, I use this every single day of the week. Not having it means it is not even close to a solution.
            • t34543 7y ago
              Lack of history is a feature, not a bug. If you want persistent storage of decisions/etc there are better options out there.
              • DagAgren 7y ago
                Yes, like Slack.
    • userbinator 7y ago
      I really don't understand why a company the size of Slack invests all their development effort into such a subpar platform as Electron, when a native solution is clearly doable with very limited resources. Several things I can think of: "quantity is not quality"; JS developers far outnumber everyone; making web apps look exactly the way they want is easy, and they are not interested in platform-native functionality, preferring a "consistent" UI across platforms instead; "premature optimisation" dogma that means no one cares about efficiency anymore. Microsoft Teams and (later versions of --- they actually moved away from perfectly decent native Win32) Skype also use Electron, and that's Microsoft. That says the size of the company and its resources matters little in things like this.
      • shaan7 7y ago
        > making web apps look exactly the way they want is easy Its easy peasy with Qt as well. I am the only dev for https://www.sostronk.com/app https://www.sostronk.com/app and it looks (and behaves) _exactly_ as our designer wants it to. (Oh, and this is when I'm also spending time working on backend stories). > no one cares about efficiency anymore. That is not true. Discord and friends spend a lot of time for efficiency because they're using Electron. It is not impossible to have a (relatively) efficient application with Electron (VSCode for example), it just takes more effort. Compare that with Qt where performance is free of cost - in the last 5 years at SoStronk, I've hardly ever needed to spend dedicated effort for improving performance. Another example, and I wasn't aware of this till very recently, is the Telegram Desktop app which is Qt as well. But yeah, I do agree with your first point, the only reason Electron is in use is because JS developers are a plenty. At the end, cost is the #1 thing when businesses make decisions.
        • wtetzner 7y ago
          But it's not clear that JS developers being plentiful actually reduces cost in the long (or even medium) term.
      • nolok 7y ago
        Ehhh for Skype it's mostly a Skype thing. Pretty much every decision made about Skype be it platform, features, ... Is wrong. I'm convinced Skype within Microsoft is now some middle step they put their product managers through for a year or two without paying much attention to them, and each tries to implement his "own mark" on it as some sort of achievement. The alternatives to that theory are too scary.
    • joepie91_ 7y ago
      Keep in mind that Ripcord only needs to implement support for whatever Slack has already decided to implement. They don't need to do the whole "iterative design" process (which Slack is doing for them), which is precisely the part where C++/Qt things tend to fare poorly.
      • TeMPOraL 7y ago
        That doesn't explain why Slack seemingly can't do it. They could literally hire the Ripcord author and pay him to continue development, and sell Ripcord as Slack Lite. It would be peanuts for them, and it would vastly improve their product offering.
        • zentiggr 7y ago
          But then it wouldn't be theirs, and that's clearly more important than success now.
      • malvosenior 7y ago
        Slack should stop iterating as each time they do it the product gets worse. They're not good at this.
    • peterwwillis 7y ago
      > I really don't understand why a company the size of Slack invests all their development effort into such a subpar platform as Electron, when a native solution is clearly doable with very limited resources. A lot of reasons... a solution 1) grows to match the size of its budget constraints 2) becomes more complicated the more people with long titles have a say in it 3) becomes more difficult to implement the more people that are working on it 4) becomes less useful the more people there are that can dictate what it does and how 5) fulfills more of the letter than the spirit of its requirements as more hierarchies of people manage it 6) becomes less user friendly as fewer typical users are involved with its development Though the actual answer is "somebody with power just wanted electron for personal reasons and nobody had the power to turn the ship once it started on its course"
  • gizzlon 7y ago
    thanks, looks great!
  • e12e 7y ago
    There's also wee-slack: https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack
    • UI_at_80x24 7y ago
      Just switched over to this. Thanks for posting.
    • theedwood 7y ago
      Wee-slack was my go-to for the longest time but can no longer use it and it makes me sad... The problem with it now is that they had to migrate off the legacy API tokens. You now need an administrator to authorize wee-slack as an application for your organization. Not all organizations are willing to do this.
      • e12e 7y ago
        One benefit of being the admin... Fwiw I was worried about the port/move, but it works very well.
  • infinitezest 7y ago
    I seem to remember reports of people having their accounts suspended for using third-party clients (though I may be thinking of Discord accounts). Either way, I've used ripcord a bit and though it's not much to look at, it certainly gets the job done. I'm personally grateful for an alternative.
    • TeMPOraL 7y ago
      WRT. Ripcord, from what I've heard (I can't find the source now :/), it was Discord, the bans were due to a bug, and were promptly lifted after contact with support. But perhaps there were other bans I haven't heard of.
• josteink 7y ago
  > I want to immediately stop using this software but have no choice As someone who never got into slack, and never found it appealing... How so?
  • Ensorceled 7y ago
    Good point, I guess they could stop using slack and eventually get fired.
    • rndgermandude 7y ago
      Why so snarky? The parent poster asked a valid question, and "my organization relies on it and de-facto mandates its use" would have been a good answer.
      • Ensorceled 7y ago
        I'm confused, do you honestly believe the person I was replying to doesn't know that Slack is critical comms infrastructure at a LOT of companies?
        • rndgermandude 7y ago
          Why would this person know that? Speaking from personal experience, I myself did not know how critical it is for some as I do not use it day to day (I heard some anecdotes sometimes, but that's it), rarely ever used it, and only recently experienced it in a setting were it was Slacks all the down.
          • Ensorceled 7y ago
            They previously looked at Slack and never found it appealing, they are replying pretty deep into a massively popular HN thread and their question was a pretty snarky "How so?". Maybe my snark was unjustified but I'm comfortable with it.
• niutech 7y ago
  This is another argument against using proprietary SaaS solutions for such crucial purposes as business communication. There are free open source alternatives which give you full control and privacy: Mattermost, Riot.im, Rocket.chat, Let's Chat.
  • ascar 7y ago
    If you mean with "you" the operator of the tool, then yes I agree partially. But in this context it's more like "you" the user and then using open source alternatives doesn't make a big difference. Updates (which you generally want for security/good features/fixes/x) will still break your workflow regularly. It's about how the service handles change (e.g. options to use the old interface etc.) that make the difference and not open source or proprietary. There are many examples in FOSS that made user interfaces arguably worse and you have a hard time dealing with it, if you still need/want to run the newer version for other reasons.
    • joepie91_ 7y ago
      It being open-source (under your control) or not does make a difference here. In an open-source thing, with this sort of productivity-harming breakage, you could worst-case just pay a random freelancer to fix it for you. You don't have that option with Slack.
      • acdha 7y ago
        That’s how you end up with critical apps which are full of known security issues because now upgrading requires reverse-engineering and migrating a bunch of one-off customizations. This approach only works if you’re committed to paying regularly to maintain your fork.
        • woodrowbarlow 7y ago
          or upstream your fixes
• tiborsaas 7y ago
  We are different. For me it's exactly the "oh you changed it, never mind, I'll use it a bit differently from now on" situation.
  • TotempaaltJ 7y ago
    Same here. I've already mostly adapted to the new editor. There's some annoyances, but I love not having to send to myself just to see what the message will look like and how Slack's version of Markdown will interpret my formatting.
    • dd82 7y ago
      I wouldn't have a problem with this _if_ this were configurable. Its not. This is two pretty good UI/UX screwups in a row by Slack (this, and threads) Slack's good at engineering and development. They used to be good at UI/UX, but whoever over there in the text entry product design slot is having a case of the Jony Ives.
  • wingerlang 7y ago
    I bet the majority (like 95%+++) of users are like that. I'm technical and while I've only used it for 1 day so far I still sent multiple code blocks and used formatting as usual. Maybe I'll run into problems but so far it's very much a whatever situation IMO.
  • nemo44x 7y ago
    A “preview” button would have facilitated this. Or even better, let users edit in the preview input if they want or the regular editor, switching back and forth as desired.
  • SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    Funny enough, I kind of like it better - the way that the enter key changed in and out of a ``` block would always screw me up and I'd end up sending messages before I wanted to, and then instead of bugging someone for 1 message I have to send 3 with the middle being "sorry, hit enter too soon".
• jsjohnst 7y ago
  I’ve already put my money where my mouth is and sent an email saying I intend to cancel all future payments to Slack unless they give the option to disable it, I suggest everyone else does the same.
  • nmec 7y ago
    I expressed my discontent to them as well and just received this reply: "I'm afraid there is no way to disable this at the moment, and it's not in the roadmap to roll back on this feature. That said, we're still in the initial stages here, so our focus right now is listening to feedback as we consider certain changes for improvement as we move forward. You've raised some fair points here, so I've shared your feedback with my team for consideration in the future."
    • imglorp 7y ago
      I mailed them too, and got a human response instantly. They're good at that.
      • geodel 7y ago
        Yea, having about ~2K employees for chat app company also helps in getting human response
        • kill_nate_kill 7y ago
          They have closer to 4k employees, doubly explains the human response.
    • asix66 7y ago
      So their rollout methodology here was to go live with beta software, on production servers, to paying customers, and force them to find the bugs. Brilliant!
      • MattSayar 7y ago
• bishalb 7y ago
  While I understand why this change can be annoying to the tech savvy folks of hackernews, it can be quite helpful for those who aren't that tech savvy and want easy ways to bold, italicize texts (that make up majority of the slack user base). Heck I am sure most of the slack users wouldn't even know it was possible to bold, italicize on slack using markdown.
  • piva00 7y ago
    Just give me the option to disable this shitty input.
  • lucideer 7y ago
    Why does anyone (tech savvy or otherwise) need to bold or italicize anything. In my mind bolding/italicizing are nice-to-haves alongside emoji. You wouldn't compromise the entire functional user experience of the central feature of your app for nicer emojis. (at least I hope not).
    • bishalb 7y ago
      I myself use them sometimes to emphasize certain parts of the message. They can be very helpful. Many people like bolding certain words in an email as well to emphasize them.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    • DagAgren 7y ago
      They compromised the part that you already said was not important, not the "entire functional user experience", though?
    • Frondo 7y ago
      Honestly, the unsatisfying answer is simply because they (i.e. those of us who didn't grow up on IRC, like marketing teams) want to, and are used to being able to do it elsewhere. I'm sure the people who include images in email and set their own fonts and stuff are happy with the upgrade; I can especially relate to that since I used to do some marketing and sales work myself. I also hate the new input field but I understand why they turned it on globally. But a strong enough want is often indistinguishable from a need.
• sundvor 7y ago
  On the topic of the old, am I the only one who found the switched behaviour of enter/shift-enter inside/outside a ``` block somewhat annoying?
  • cmwright 7y ago
    This you can actually fix - check out Settings -> Advanced -> Input Options for enter behaviour in code blocks.
    • sundvor 7y ago
      Oh thanks! Appreciated.
• Iv 7y ago
  Uh... you just have to press the right arrow to get out of the code block when you type. Seriously, that's not even one more key press, that's just pressing "right" instead of `
• rgrau 7y ago
  Another one for the lists in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21480590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21480590
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• scjody 7y ago
  I feel like this is the way of things with Slack: poorly implemented new features are introduced with no way to disable them, and a significant portion of their users end up needing to work around them. I'd love to have time to research replacements for my employer's use of Slack because they clearly care more about being "innovative" than meeting the needs of their existing userbase. Other examples: * The UX around threads is still horrendous, and there's no way to turn it off. * There's no way to turn off "drafts", which still causes me to lose messages I'm working on.
  • Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    What don't you like about threads? I think they're actually my favorite Slack feature. I find myself missing them in more casual chat apps like Discord.
    • AlexandrB 7y ago
      Threads turn every slack channel into a multi-headed hydra. Now, in addition to keeping up with updates on slack channels, you're also having to keep up with updates to threads in slack channels. Worse than that, if you're looking for an old thread you have to remember the channel it's in and the first message that started it if you want a hope in hell of finding it, since the threaded responses don't (normally) show up in the channel itself.