20 ms·

The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

783 points by agwa 7y ago

dang 7y ago
The big recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21589647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21589647 A smaller one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21591950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21591950
k-godwin 7y ago
Just fyi for anyone who finds it MIA in the brower, you just need to refresh to get the option.
SCdF 7y ago
Thank the maker. I'm sure it is perfectly fine if you just bold stuff sometimes, but it's so wonky with anything slightly complicated, and completely messes with my muscle memory compared with every other application I use that doesn't mess around with this stuff.
ripley12 7y ago
The ability to format markup with keyboard shortcuts seems to be gone now. Previously you could select some text, type ctrl-i, and it would add the necessary markup to make the selected text italic. Same for bold text etc. Still, I'll take it over the WYSIWYG editor which was a nightmare for code snippets.
- KORraN 7y ago
  You're right, after disabling WYSIWYG editor keyboard shortcuts don't work. That means I'm staying with extension for Firefox...
  - swader999 7y ago
    Judas priest this blows monkey goats.
ArmandGrillet 7y ago
Dark mode, better performances, option to disable divisive new features: Slack might be making it harder to focus at work but the product itself improved quite a lot in 2019, kudos to the PMs.
- gota 7y ago
  Side comment: I've tried to use Slack's dark mode but had to quit. I was constantly having to download images to be able to read the black-over-transparent background of matplotlib images (that's apparently the default for the axis, markings, legends, etc.) It's not a matter of changing my code, too, because I want to see the images posted by _other_ people
  - rcfox 7y ago
    I wonder if you could add a CSS rule to set the background colour of images to white?
    - hapidjus 7y ago
      Or use a pseudo element with z-index -1
      - ZeikJT 7y ago
        Parent suggested a very sensible, simple, and efficient solution. Why suggest a less efficient and more involved one?
    - ethanwillis 7y ago
      Slack will cease and desist you for making such modifications.
  - thenewnewguy 7y ago
    to be fair, that's not really a problem with slack
  - reportgunner 7y ago
vhogemann 7y ago
Bring back the IRC gateway.
- bfrog 7y ago
  Just bring back IRC
  - dividedbyzero 7y ago
    Ugh no. IRC was great in its day, and I'm sure there are things today that it's still good enough for, but at work, I vastly prefer Slack (and possibly other similar tools, but I haven't power-used any of them yet.) I've been a very, very regular IRC user up until a few years ago. I wouldn't want to go back. With IRC, there is no simple, just-works-for-non-techies way to receive messages if you aren't online; running irssi in tmux is not such a solution. No proper history to scroll through to catch up on what's happened on your day off, or search for that analysis summary someone posted back in June. No way to embed images or code snippets in a way that makes them visible without clicking a link or DDC-sending things. No custom emoji, e.g. for making alert messages easier to scan (like, aws icon, server icon, triple exclamation mark -> EC2 instance(s) have issues and someone should check this right now). Security and data protection are terrible by default in all ircds I know. Last time I checked, securing channels was a very cumbersome interaction with some custom network bot. It's harder to get alerts sent to IRC; everyone and their mother offer Slack integration nowadays, and you can literally curl some text against a webhook if none is offered. We do that a lot. No emoji reactions, e.g. checkmark on someone else's request to say "I did this, everyone else don't bother" or for thumbsup-thumbsdown voting on lunch places or for some sometimes-much-needed comical relief. We use gifs very, very seldomly, but they, too, are great for some comical relief. No treads, like for "I just finished this analysis, this is the summary, details in thread" – extremely useful. No functioning way to edit or delete messages for everyone after the fact (and see the edit history if needed) – great for "oops wrong channel", "i copy-pasted the wrong numbers", etc. Yes, some could be improvised on IRC in some way, others could be replaced by lots of redundant messages, and if everyone agrees to use the same client (like irssi in tmux), and you sink enough time into hacking your ircd, it might even come somewhat close – but I vastly prefer the ready-to-use UX candy. Well worth the cost of the Slack premium package, IMO.
tempsy 7y ago
Amazing to see how Slack turned from something everyone raved about to something everyone is sort of annoyed with and critical of. Maybe that isn't that surprising for most products as they age/mature but it seems particularly acute with Slack.
- ses4j 7y ago
  It was better than everything that came before it for it's purpose, so people were happy with the improvement. But then every time they change something, unless it is just 100% obviously better for everyone, like a speedup, it's gonna annoy some people.
- agapon 7y ago
  People and companies alike keep forgetting that the best is the enemy of the good. They achieve success with the good and they try to get ahead of themselves with the better. Sometimes they succeed :-)
- Someone1234 7y ago
  “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” -- Bjarne Stroustrup I've found this quote extremely true, but not just with programming language but with all things. People complain about Slack because they use Slack a lot, so minor quibbles become a daily frustration. It is when people go quiet about a product that you should really worry. They're either extremely happy or aren't using it, might be critical to find out which.
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    The turning point is when tools go from something enthusiasts choose to being mandated by management.
    - braythwayt 7y ago
      Digging deeper on your excellent comment, when ai was inEnterprise Sales, we were taught that there were people who made buying decisions, people who influenced buying decisions, and users. Sometimes users belonged to one of the first two categories, but often not. Companies that pivot from selling to people who use the product to selling to enterprise organizations pivot from building things for users, to building things for decision-makers and decision-influencers. So it’s not only that management are choosing products for users, but the products themselves evolve to please managers at the expense of users.
mdszy 7y ago
"I apologize for the disruption to your existing workflows. Our aim is to build an editor that works for all Slack users to better format their messages and clearly communicate in channels, regardless of their technical expertise. While we are taking all feedback on board, disabling the new formatting tool isn't an option that we will be offering."
- geoffreyhale 7y ago
  Source?
  - ajkjk 7y ago
    Sounds very similar to the infuriating twitter replies when this feature came out.
  - sm4rk0 7y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592828
    - munk-a 7y ago
      Well, I'm quite happy they had to shamefully walk that statement back - seems like it might have been a feature pushed arbitrarily by a C-level fiat rather than user research. Having the WYSIWYG thing as an option is nice - forcing everyone into it less so.
- gropius 7y ago
  > regardless of their technical expertise Good luck with that. Trying to make one product powerful enough for the techies yet simple enough for the normies is the software equivalent of Napoleon attacking Russia.
  - HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
    ... In the winter.
agluszak 7y ago
Still waiting for an option to disable "drafts" (channels all of a sudden jumping to the top of the channel list)
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  I'd be 100% fine with drafts if it cloned the channel listing instead of moving it.
  - agluszak 7y ago
    I wonder if there exists a single person happy with the current state of affairs other then the one who designed it
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - baddox 7y ago
      There's no reason to suspect that the people who designed it are happy with it either.
  - OJFord 7y ago
    I provided that /feedback as soon as it rolled out (to me) I guess 6mo ago. I even got a reply along the lines that it was totally reasonable and eminently sensible, and yet here we are.
    - jdnenej 7y ago
      I provided feedback to slack once and got a reply similar to that. I wonder if they say that just to make you feel good and then throw the feedback in the bin.
- pizza234 7y ago
  I actually like that; it reminds me to cleanup after myself :-)
vesche 7y ago
Thank God. This was the worst thing ever.
fortytw2 7y ago
It's pretty incredible to think that for all the billions of dollars around Slack it's still fundamentally the same product with the same value add that it was when it first launched. Sure, maybe it's faster or more efficient or whatever now, but what it is at heart is the _exact_ same thing it was on Day 1.
- colechristensen 7y ago
  Does it need to change? I don't want Slack to be a different or more comprehensive tool.
  - fortytw2 7y ago
    I agree! That's why I think it's so interesting. Aside from bugfixes, I'm sure they could have done absolutely nothing since launching and be profitable and useful.
  - bottled_poe 7y ago
    Yes, in order to provide a competitive advantage over the numerous clones that are already coming along, Slack must continue to innovate.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - zbentley 7y ago
      And become what, Microsoft Teams? Everything for everyone ... executed badly? Staying focused is orthogonal to continued innovation.
  - empath75 7y ago
    I’d prefer that slack just release more products rather than add a ton of features to slack. I’d like to see a slack version ticket tracking for example — not a slack feature, just a separate product.
  - munk-a 7y ago
ianstormtaylor 7y ago
In case anyone's interested, here's the Chromium bug(s) that's one of the main reasons the WYSIWYG editor has such issues in Chrome(/Electron): - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1029374 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=102937... - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608393 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608393 - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608162 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608162 The gist of it is that they "canonicalize" the DOM selection when you have two adjacent inline elements, so that it can only ever be at the ending edge of the first inline element. Which makes certain selection states impossible. And on top of that, they don't draw the cursor in the right spot when doing the canonicalization. So for instance, it might look like your cursor is here: one|two But it's actually here: one|two Drawn in the wrong place. And impossible to put it at the beginning of "two" at all! It's crazy! I don't know how much the take "starring" into account, but it can't hurt to star them in the hopes they're fixed sooner. --- Edit: If you want to see the craziness in action, check out this sandbox: https://codesandbox.io/s/amazing-breeze-6elsy https://codesandbox.io/s/amazing-breeze-6elsy 1. Try to put your cursor at the end of the word "one" 2. Try to type a character at the start of the word "two"
- tasuki 7y ago
 Not sure Chromium is to blame here. All the WYSIWYGs in all the environments I've ever seen I found fiddly and unpleasant to use.
 - jammaloo 7y ago
 The above demo works fine in Firefox, FWIW. I had a large hand in building a WYSIWYG email editor a few years back, using direct DOM editing, that was the most full featured available at the time. I would only recommend it to people with very high pain tolerance, as the differences between browsers are stark, undocumented and hard to work around.
 - martinbooth 7y ago
 In firefox it skips one letter at a time and maybe that is the intended behaviour, but it doesn't seem consistent with what I'd expect from a WYSIWYG editor. I'd expect there to be 2 positions between the "e" and the "t" that the cursor would stop at so I can either insert text with the formatting of "one" or "two"
aflag 7y ago
That's great! I've been using a JavaScript hack to avoid it for a while. The current editor has so many not well thought through corner cases!
themattress 7y ago
Thanks to all that ruckus I discovered Ripcord and have been enjoying how snappy it is. Not pretty but works well for me.
soneca 7y ago
It is interesting to me that the rant post about Slack's WYSIWYG editor was the 18th most upvoted HN post of all time. No idea what conclusion should I draw from it, if any at all, but surprising for me at least.
- ajkjk 7y ago
  I know what I think it is: there's a great deal of latent frustration among the rank and file of this industry, that the people running the show are basically greedy and/or incompetent morons. For people who are in it for money or status or feeling successful it's not a big deal. For the people who care about products, tools, elegance, and candor, it's absolutely maddening. It especially doesn't help for a company to spew fake bullshit when it pointlessly changes something. What would it take to get a little candor? Why do all the corporations end up being so candorless? Why does working in this field have to be so depressing?
- jmcqk6 7y ago
  I don't think there is anything strange about that. Slack is a widespread used tool, which introduced a feature that made it very difficult and frustrating to use.
- trynewideas 7y ago
  lots of hn readers use slack lots of hn slack users disliked the feature lots of hn slack users who disliked the feature went straight to hn to vote up any post complaining about it that's how communities around tech broadly tend to work
  - o-__-o 7y ago
    a few people figured out how to change their workflow to deal with the change. turns out the same problem that exists between non-technical users and technical users exist between power-elite users and the non-PE users. when you try to show a non-technical user a different way to do things, they get really frustrated and give up easily because their entire mental model needs to change (they were used to clicking on an icon in a certain spot, goto a menu, select an option, get a dialog etc.). To them this represents a massive unknown if they do even one step wrong and so instead of accepting and using the new feature, regardless of the perceived benefit their anxiety takeover. The correlations here is astounding. I'm the kind of person who will vocally speak out about emacs vs vi or the pronunciation of "c-out" vs "sow-t", but the WYSIWYG editor didn't fundamentally break my mental model of Slack. I just learned to adapt, but seeing the blowback.. holy cow.
wool_gather 7y ago
Well, they put it in the "Advanced" settings section, which I interpret as reluctance, but it's there.
- munk-a 7y ago
  I am a bit afraid they might be supplying it for just a limited while for them to fix it up and re-enable it for everyone.
lilyball 7y ago
Looks like this doesn't bring back the markup help text in the lower-right corner, which is a shame. I really wish they'd just highlight your markup in the appropriate style while leaving the markup intact. That would solve the "I want to see what the markup I just typed will do" without any of the problems of the WYSIWYG approach. Basically just syntax highlighting for markup.
- mtremsal 7y ago
  This is pretty much what Bear does. It's great.
mikl 7y ago
I was never a fan of their pseudo-markdown (it’s so close, but the minor deviations are annoying), but it’s a great to have it back instead of that other train-wreck of an editor. At least you can now edit text without regularly wanting scream in frustration.
- munk-a 7y ago
  For someone who habitually uses old MUD style emote lead-ins I was constantly needing to back edit comments to fix: * sigh * this was disappointing being turned into a list.
danShumway 7y ago
This is a good reminder that sometimes complaining about companies on social media like Hackernews and Twitter does actually help. Not always, maybe not even usually. But Slack went from, "no, we have no plans to adjust this", to "yes, we'll include a toggle", and the reason was that a bunch of people publicly complained and wrote a bunch of messages to support. It is a very, very, very small victory, and if I was going to choose a victory, Slack's Markdown editor would not be very high on my list of priorities -- but I'll take it.
- Jamwinner 7y ago
  Isnt that just a silent admission that modern tech support is woefully broken, more than a twitter is good message?
  - ricefield 7y ago
    Broken how? This feels like a good example of a company building and launching something, then watching and responding to how the public/users react to it. Isn't that more or less what you should do as a company? Build things and then adjust your strategy based on how the market likes or dislikes it?
    - inferiorhuman 7y ago
      Broken how? Broken in the sense that Slack kept going forward even after the complaints kept rolling in. How hard would it have been to pull the latest release?
      - cortesoft 7y ago
        Every release will get complaints. They have to wait to see if it is more than normal.
    - umanwizard 7y ago
      The problem isn’t that they launched a feature, it’s that they unilaterally removed a feature people were using. Everyone would have been totally fine with it being behind a toggle, even if on by default.
srathi 7y ago
When will they add tabs for open conversations? Why is there a limit one of open conversation at a time? Many times I lose the person I was talking to and have to hunt down few names to find it out again.
pkamb 7y ago
Now support real Markdown.
- munk-a 7y ago
  In particular their ``` code block support is super frustrating, especially since copying a code block produces invalid markdown even if it was originally written properly, they like to pull new lines out of it.
- m463 7y ago
  Why is markdown so popular? It seems like a hacked up language instead of a language that was designed.
outworlder 7y ago
What's more ridiculous is that this WYSIWYG editor is not only a front-end change, it changes the backend. And broke our bot. I have no idea why anything else should care. Their changelog didn't make the problem obvious. Took me a bunch of time to track down the issue, as it worked for a few people, but the bot would completely ignore other people – including my boss. https://github.com/nlopes/slack/issues/630 https://github.com/nlopes/slack/issues/630
marcoperaza 7y ago
The iOS client regularly loses large swaths of messages, with no clue that they’re missing except a time gap. The only way to fix it is to log out and log back in. I imagine a large percent of users are just oblivious to the missing messages. Me and others have been hitting this bug for at least a year at this point, probably much longer. Is anyone at Slack aware of this? Missing messages should be a priority 1 bug for a tool advertised as a replacement for business email.
asmint3 7y ago
Don’t understand the need for a WYSIWYG editor in the first place. It’s not a word processor. The need to add formatting to a Slack message should be rare enough that the WYSIWYG overhead just isn’t worth it.
- gempir 7y ago
  They want to make the product appeal to all users and not just techy ones. And If I product managers or CEO or whoever can print his message bold he's happy. Very few non techy people know what markdown even is. (From my own experience asking friends etc.)
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    Step 1: google “how to make text bold in Slack” There is no step 2, that’s literally all you need to do.
    - leadingthenet 7y ago
      I think you overestimate the tech skills of your average user. I know so many people for whom typing "how do I X" in Google is too difficult, and will flat out refuse to do it. That's not to say that I think we should be dumbing down software for them. In fact, we should be doing the exact opposite.
      - umanwizard 7y ago
        You're not wrong. I suppose all I can say is that software companies have every right in a free society to cater to people like that to the detriment of technical users... and I have every right to vote with my feet and wallet. (There's a reason OpenBSD and macOS are both alive and well.)
  - reportgunner 7y ago
    I'm sorry, but what users ? AFAIK Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter doesn't have a WYSIWYG editor. Are there some hidden users that send font size 30 all capitals red colored text in Times New Roman to each other ?
ancorevard 7y ago
How to force this option for the whole organization/workspace?
ncmncm 7y ago
Now all we need is a setting to make employers not require you to run it. I have thought about why ggl hangouts at my current employer has been ok. We mostly only use direct, 1 to 1 windows so any activity is certainly to be relevant, and nothing important scrolls off screen.
shmerl 7y ago
Thanks for fixing something that shouldn't have been broken in the first place.
njacobs5074 7y ago
I’m a bit amused because: 1. Their customer support emphatically told me they wouldn’t make this an option AND 2. They didn’t even need to do a new release to turn on the option. At least their engineering team is still making good decisions :)
- anonytrary 7y ago
  Customer Support having outdated/bad communication with Product is not surprising at all. For every person where the person who makes the decisions is not the person to relay the decisions, this error can be introduced. It's like a big game of telephone.
ulrikrasmussen 7y ago
I just changed to the ripcord desktop client, and couldn't be happier. While not as superficially polished, it is super responsive and does what you would expect of a chat app very well. Overall, I think the UI is less ugly, because I judge latency as one of the ugliest warts in UI.
cyrusmg 7y ago
Do not forget you can say thank you via the /feedback command in Slack
- stephenr 7y ago
  "Thank you for giving us a hard to find, poorly named option to opt out of your buggy shit"?
wodenokoto 7y ago
I don't get the commotion about this. The old slack editor was really poor, and the new one is just as poor, but differently. But at least with the WYSIWYG you can see before you send what parts of the markup it got wrong.
- MrOxiMoron 7y ago
  yes, but with the new one there are situations where you can't correct a mistake once you see it. just start with a backtick escaped piece and then try to add extra text at the beginning of the line...
  - wodenokoto 7y ago
    Okay lets say that that action would cause me to write outside the backticked area. How would I go about adding something new to the beginning of a backticked area placed at the beginning of a line? That would either be impossible, or there would be a move of the cursor that doesn't move a character (to go in and out of the backtick/code segment.) Isn't that just how it always is when working in WYSIWYG? The same struggle is real in word or google docs, where you constantly have to add a remove formatting when editing around inline blocks with styles or formatting.
dotmavriq 7y ago
What is the proposed utility of moving from being Markdown-friendly to getting all of these WYSIWYG solutions or " Simpler than Markdown " editing options on boards and chat solutions. I really struggle to comprehend it, would it not be better to just have some sort of "standard" we all can go after? Genuinely interested in knowing what companies are thinking, is it feedback-driven?
draklor40 7y ago
Moral of the day: Grumpiest programmers win !
sethammons 7y ago
Not sure if it was a regression, but I found myself _having_ to use the editor to insert an image in a thread. I couldn't drag and drop in the threads view.
shmerl 7y ago
Looks like markdown for bullet items is still broken. Try * test1 * test2

783 points by agwa 7y ago

dang 7y ago

The big recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21589647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21589647 A smaller one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21591950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21591950

k-godwin 7y ago

Just fyi for anyone who finds it MIA in the brower, you just need to refresh to get the option.

SCdF 7y ago

Thank the maker. I'm sure it is perfectly fine if you just bold stuff sometimes, but it's so wonky with anything slightly complicated, and completely messes with my muscle memory compared with every other application I use that doesn't mess around with this stuff.

ripley12 7y ago

The ability to format markup with keyboard shortcuts seems to be gone now. Previously you could select some text, type ctrl-i, and it would add the necessary markup to make the selected text italic. Same for bold text etc. Still, I'll take it over the WYSIWYG editor which was a nightmare for code snippets.

KORraN 7y ago
You're right, after disabling WYSIWYG editor keyboard shortcuts don't work. That means I'm staying with extension for Firefox...
- swader999 7y ago
  Judas priest this blows monkey goats.

ArmandGrillet 7y ago

Dark mode, better performances, option to disable divisive new features: Slack might be making it harder to focus at work but the product itself improved quite a lot in 2019, kudos to the PMs.

gota 7y ago
Side comment: I've tried to use Slack's dark mode but had to quit. I was constantly having to download images to be able to read the black-over-transparent background of matplotlib images (that's apparently the default for the axis, markings, legends, etc.) It's not a matter of changing my code, too, because I want to see the images posted by _other_ people
- rcfox 7y ago
  I wonder if you could add a CSS rule to set the background colour of images to white?
  - hapidjus 7y ago
    Or use a pseudo element with z-index -1
    - ZeikJT 7y ago
      Parent suggested a very sensible, simple, and efficient solution. Why suggest a less efficient and more involved one?
  - ethanwillis 7y ago
    Slack will cease and desist you for making such modifications.
- thenewnewguy 7y ago
  to be fair, that's not really a problem with slack
- reportgunner 7y ago

vhogemann 7y ago

Bring back the IRC gateway.

bfrog 7y ago
Just bring back IRC
- dividedbyzero 7y ago
  Ugh no. IRC was great in its day, and I'm sure there are things today that it's still good enough for, but at work, I vastly prefer Slack (and possibly other similar tools, but I haven't power-used any of them yet.) I've been a very, very regular IRC user up until a few years ago. I wouldn't want to go back. With IRC, there is no simple, just-works-for-non-techies way to receive messages if you aren't online; running irssi in tmux is not such a solution. No proper history to scroll through to catch up on what's happened on your day off, or search for that analysis summary someone posted back in June. No way to embed images or code snippets in a way that makes them visible without clicking a link or DDC-sending things. No custom emoji, e.g. for making alert messages easier to scan (like, aws icon, server icon, triple exclamation mark -> EC2 instance(s) have issues and someone should check this right now). Security and data protection are terrible by default in all ircds I know. Last time I checked, securing channels was a very cumbersome interaction with some custom network bot. It's harder to get alerts sent to IRC; everyone and their mother offer Slack integration nowadays, and you can literally curl some text against a webhook if none is offered. We do that a lot. No emoji reactions, e.g. checkmark on someone else's request to say "I did this, everyone else don't bother" or for thumbsup-thumbsdown voting on lunch places or for some sometimes-much-needed comical relief. We use gifs very, very seldomly, but they, too, are great for some comical relief. No treads, like for "I just finished this analysis, this is the summary, details in thread" – extremely useful. No functioning way to edit or delete messages for everyone after the fact (and see the edit history if needed) – great for "oops wrong channel", "i copy-pasted the wrong numbers", etc. Yes, some could be improvised on IRC in some way, others could be replaced by lots of redundant messages, and if everyone agrees to use the same client (like irssi in tmux), and you sink enough time into hacking your ircd, it might even come somewhat close – but I vastly prefer the ready-to-use UX candy. Well worth the cost of the Slack premium package, IMO.

tempsy 7y ago

Amazing to see how Slack turned from something everyone raved about to something everyone is sort of annoyed with and critical of. Maybe that isn't that surprising for most products as they age/mature but it seems particularly acute with Slack.

ses4j 7y ago
It was better than everything that came before it for it's purpose, so people were happy with the improvement. But then every time they change something, unless it is just 100% obviously better for everyone, like a speedup, it's gonna annoy some people.
agapon 7y ago
People and companies alike keep forgetting that the best is the enemy of the good. They achieve success with the good and they try to get ahead of themselves with the better. Sometimes they succeed :-)
Someone1234 7y ago
“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” -- Bjarne Stroustrup I've found this quote extremely true, but not just with programming language but with all things. People complain about Slack because they use Slack a lot, so minor quibbles become a daily frustration. It is when people go quiet about a product that you should really worry. They're either extremely happy or aren't using it, might be critical to find out which.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  The turning point is when tools go from something enthusiasts choose to being mandated by management.
  - braythwayt 7y ago
    Digging deeper on your excellent comment, when ai was inEnterprise Sales, we were taught that there were people who made buying decisions, people who influenced buying decisions, and users. Sometimes users belonged to one of the first two categories, but often not. Companies that pivot from selling to people who use the product to selling to enterprise organizations pivot from building things for users, to building things for decision-makers and decision-influencers. So it’s not only that management are choosing products for users, but the products themselves evolve to please managers at the expense of users.

mdszy 7y ago

"I apologize for the disruption to your existing workflows. Our aim is to build an editor that works for all Slack users to better format their messages and clearly communicate in channels, regardless of their technical expertise. While we are taking all feedback on board, disabling the new formatting tool isn't an option that we will be offering."

geoffreyhale 7y ago
Source?
- ajkjk 7y ago
  Sounds very similar to the infuriating twitter replies when this feature came out.
- sm4rk0 7y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592828
  - munk-a 7y ago
    Well, I'm quite happy they had to shamefully walk that statement back - seems like it might have been a feature pushed arbitrarily by a C-level fiat rather than user research. Having the WYSIWYG thing as an option is nice - forcing everyone into it less so.
gropius 7y ago
> regardless of their technical expertise Good luck with that. Trying to make one product powerful enough for the techies yet simple enough for the normies is the software equivalent of Napoleon attacking Russia.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
  ... In the winter.

agluszak 7y ago

Still waiting for an option to disable "drafts" (channels all of a sudden jumping to the top of the channel list)

ceejayoz 7y ago
I'd be 100% fine with drafts if it cloned the channel listing instead of moving it.
- agluszak 7y ago
  I wonder if there exists a single person happy with the current state of affairs other then the one who designed it
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - baddox 7y ago
    There's no reason to suspect that the people who designed it are happy with it either.
- OJFord 7y ago
  I provided that /feedback as soon as it rolled out (to me) I guess 6mo ago. I even got a reply along the lines that it was totally reasonable and eminently sensible, and yet here we are.
  - jdnenej 7y ago
    I provided feedback to slack once and got a reply similar to that. I wonder if they say that just to make you feel good and then throw the feedback in the bin.
pizza234 7y ago
I actually like that; it reminds me to cleanup after myself :-)

vesche 7y ago

Thank God. This was the worst thing ever.

fortytw2 7y ago

It's pretty incredible to think that for all the billions of dollars around Slack it's still fundamentally the same product with the same value add that it was when it first launched. Sure, maybe it's faster or more efficient or whatever now, but what it is at heart is the _exact_ same thing it was on Day 1.

colechristensen 7y ago
Does it need to change? I don't want Slack to be a different or more comprehensive tool.
- fortytw2 7y ago
  I agree! That's why I think it's so interesting. Aside from bugfixes, I'm sure they could have done absolutely nothing since launching and be profitable and useful.
- bottled_poe 7y ago
  Yes, in order to provide a competitive advantage over the numerous clones that are already coming along, Slack must continue to innovate.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - zbentley 7y ago
    And become what, Microsoft Teams? Everything for everyone ... executed badly? Staying focused is orthogonal to continued innovation.
- empath75 7y ago
  I’d prefer that slack just release more products rather than add a ton of features to slack. I’d like to see a slack version ticket tracking for example — not a slack feature, just a separate product.
- munk-a 7y ago

ianstormtaylor 7y ago

In case anyone's interested, here's the Chromium bug(s) that's one of the main reasons the WYSIWYG editor has such issues in Chrome(/Electron): - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1029374 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=102937... - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608393 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608393 - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608162 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608162 The gist of it is that they "canonicalize" the DOM selection when you have two adjacent inline elements, so that it can only ever be at the ending edge of the first inline element. Which makes certain selection states impossible. And on top of that, they don't draw the cursor in the right spot when doing the canonicalization. So for instance, it might look like your cursor is here: one|two But it's actually here: one|two Drawn in the wrong place. And impossible to put it at the beginning of "two" at all! It's crazy! I don't know how much the take "starring" into account, but it can't hurt to star them in the hopes they're fixed sooner. --- Edit: If you want to see the craziness in action, check out this sandbox: https://codesandbox.io/s/amazing-breeze-6elsy https://codesandbox.io/s/amazing-breeze-6elsy 1. Try to put your cursor at the end of the word "one" 2. Try to type a character at the start of the word "two"

tasuki 7y ago
Not sure Chromium is to blame here. All the WYSIWYGs in all the environments I've ever seen I found fiddly and unpleasant to use.
- jammaloo 7y ago
  The above demo works fine in Firefox, FWIW. I had a large hand in building a WYSIWYG email editor a few years back, using direct DOM editing, that was the most full featured available at the time. I would only recommend it to people with very high pain tolerance, as the differences between browsers are stark, undocumented and hard to work around.
  - martinbooth 7y ago
    In firefox it skips one letter at a time and maybe that is the intended behaviour, but it doesn't seem consistent with what I'd expect from a WYSIWYG editor. I'd expect there to be 2 positions between the "e" and the "t" that the cursor would stop at so I can either insert text with the formatting of "one" or "two"

aflag 7y ago

That's great! I've been using a JavaScript hack to avoid it for a while. The current editor has so many not well thought through corner cases!

themattress 7y ago

Thanks to all that ruckus I discovered Ripcord and have been enjoying how snappy it is. Not pretty but works well for me.

soneca 7y ago

It is interesting to me that the rant post about Slack's WYSIWYG editor was the 18th most upvoted HN post of all time. No idea what conclusion should I draw from it, if any at all, but surprising for me at least.

ajkjk 7y ago
I know what I think it is: there's a great deal of latent frustration among the rank and file of this industry, that the people running the show are basically greedy and/or incompetent morons. For people who are in it for money or status or feeling successful it's not a big deal. For the people who care about products, tools, elegance, and candor, it's absolutely maddening. It especially doesn't help for a company to spew fake bullshit when it pointlessly changes something. What would it take to get a little candor? Why do all the corporations end up being so candorless? Why does working in this field have to be so depressing?
jmcqk6 7y ago
I don't think there is anything strange about that. Slack is a widespread used tool, which introduced a feature that made it very difficult and frustrating to use.
trynewideas 7y ago
lots of hn readers use slack lots of hn slack users disliked the feature lots of hn slack users who disliked the feature went straight to hn to vote up any post complaining about it that's how communities around tech broadly tend to work
- o-__-o 7y ago
  a few people figured out how to change their workflow to deal with the change. turns out the same problem that exists between non-technical users and technical users exist between power-elite users and the non-PE users. when you try to show a non-technical user a different way to do things, they get really frustrated and give up easily because their entire mental model needs to change (they were used to clicking on an icon in a certain spot, goto a menu, select an option, get a dialog etc.). To them this represents a massive unknown if they do even one step wrong and so instead of accepting and using the new feature, regardless of the perceived benefit their anxiety takeover. The correlations here is astounding. I'm the kind of person who will vocally speak out about emacs vs vi or the pronunciation of "c-out" vs "sow-t", but the WYSIWYG editor didn't fundamentally break my mental model of Slack. I just learned to adapt, but seeing the blowback.. holy cow.

wool_gather 7y ago

Well, they put it in the "Advanced" settings section, which I interpret as reluctance, but it's there.

munk-a 7y ago
I am a bit afraid they might be supplying it for just a limited while for them to fix it up and re-enable it for everyone.

lilyball 7y ago

Looks like this doesn't bring back the markup help text in the lower-right corner, which is a shame. I really wish they'd just highlight your markup in the appropriate style while leaving the markup intact. That would solve the "I want to see what the markup I just typed will do" without any of the problems of the WYSIWYG approach. Basically just syntax highlighting for markup.

mtremsal 7y ago
This is pretty much what Bear does. It's great.

mikl 7y ago

I was never a fan of their pseudo-markdown (it’s so close, but the minor deviations are annoying), but it’s a great to have it back instead of that other train-wreck of an editor. At least you can now edit text without regularly wanting scream in frustration.

munk-a 7y ago
For someone who habitually uses old MUD style emote lead-ins I was constantly needing to back edit comments to fix: * sigh * this was disappointing being turned into a list.

danShumway 7y ago

This is a good reminder that sometimes complaining about companies on social media like Hackernews and Twitter does actually help. Not always, maybe not even usually. But Slack went from, "no, we have no plans to adjust this", to "yes, we'll include a toggle", and the reason was that a bunch of people publicly complained and wrote a bunch of messages to support. It is a very, very, very small victory, and if I was going to choose a victory, Slack's Markdown editor would not be very high on my list of priorities -- but I'll take it.

Jamwinner 7y ago
Isnt that just a silent admission that modern tech support is woefully broken, more than a twitter is good message?
- ricefield 7y ago
  Broken how? This feels like a good example of a company building and launching something, then watching and responding to how the public/users react to it. Isn't that more or less what you should do as a company? Build things and then adjust your strategy based on how the market likes or dislikes it?
  - inferiorhuman 7y ago
    Broken how? Broken in the sense that Slack kept going forward even after the complaints kept rolling in. How hard would it have been to pull the latest release?
    - cortesoft 7y ago
      Every release will get complaints. They have to wait to see if it is more than normal.
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    The problem isn’t that they launched a feature, it’s that they unilaterally removed a feature people were using. Everyone would have been totally fine with it being behind a toggle, even if on by default.

srathi 7y ago

When will they add tabs for open conversations? Why is there a limit one of open conversation at a time? Many times I lose the person I was talking to and have to hunt down few names to find it out again.

pkamb 7y ago

Now support real Markdown.

munk-a 7y ago
In particular their ``` code block support is super frustrating, especially since copying a code block produces invalid markdown even if it was originally written properly, they like to pull new lines out of it.
m463 7y ago
Why is markdown so popular? It seems like a hacked up language instead of a language that was designed.

outworlder 7y ago

What's more ridiculous is that this WYSIWYG editor is not only a front-end change, it changes the backend. And broke our bot. I have no idea why anything else should care. Their changelog didn't make the problem obvious. Took me a bunch of time to track down the issue, as it worked for a few people, but the bot would completely ignore other people – including my boss. https://github.com/nlopes/slack/issues/630 https://github.com/nlopes/slack/issues/630

marcoperaza 7y ago

The iOS client regularly loses large swaths of messages, with no clue that they’re missing except a time gap. The only way to fix it is to log out and log back in. I imagine a large percent of users are just oblivious to the missing messages. Me and others have been hitting this bug for at least a year at this point, probably much longer. Is anyone at Slack aware of this? Missing messages should be a priority 1 bug for a tool advertised as a replacement for business email.

asmint3 7y ago

Don’t understand the need for a WYSIWYG editor in the first place. It’s not a word processor. The need to add formatting to a Slack message should be rare enough that the WYSIWYG overhead just isn’t worth it.

gempir 7y ago
They want to make the product appeal to all users and not just techy ones. And If I product managers or CEO or whoever can print his message bold he's happy. Very few non techy people know what markdown even is. (From my own experience asking friends etc.)
- umanwizard 7y ago
  Step 1: google “how to make text bold in Slack” There is no step 2, that’s literally all you need to do.
  - leadingthenet 7y ago
    I think you overestimate the tech skills of your average user. I know so many people for whom typing "how do I X" in Google is too difficult, and will flat out refuse to do it. That's not to say that I think we should be dumbing down software for them. In fact, we should be doing the exact opposite.
    - umanwizard 7y ago
      You're not wrong. I suppose all I can say is that software companies have every right in a free society to cater to people like that to the detriment of technical users... and I have every right to vote with my feet and wallet. (There's a reason OpenBSD and macOS are both alive and well.)
- reportgunner 7y ago
  I'm sorry, but what users ? AFAIK Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter doesn't have a WYSIWYG editor. Are there some hidden users that send font size 30 all capitals red colored text in Times New Roman to each other ?

ancorevard 7y ago

How to force this option for the whole organization/workspace?

ncmncm 7y ago

Now all we need is a setting to make employers not require you to run it. I have thought about why ggl hangouts at my current employer has been ok. We mostly only use direct, 1 to 1 windows so any activity is certainly to be relevant, and nothing important scrolls off screen.

shmerl 7y ago

Thanks for fixing something that shouldn't have been broken in the first place.

njacobs5074 7y ago

I’m a bit amused because: 1. Their customer support emphatically told me they wouldn’t make this an option AND 2. They didn’t even need to do a new release to turn on the option. At least their engineering team is still making good decisions :)

anonytrary 7y ago
Customer Support having outdated/bad communication with Product is not surprising at all. For every person where the person who makes the decisions is not the person to relay the decisions, this error can be introduced. It's like a big game of telephone.

ulrikrasmussen 7y ago

I just changed to the ripcord desktop client, and couldn't be happier. While not as superficially polished, it is super responsive and does what you would expect of a chat app very well. Overall, I think the UI is less ugly, because I judge latency as one of the ugliest warts in UI.

cyrusmg 7y ago

Do not forget you can say thank you via the /feedback command in Slack

stephenr 7y ago
"Thank you for giving us a hard to find, poorly named option to opt out of your buggy shit"?

wodenokoto 7y ago

I don't get the commotion about this. The old slack editor was really poor, and the new one is just as poor, but differently. But at least with the WYSIWYG you can see before you send what parts of the markup it got wrong.

MrOxiMoron 7y ago
yes, but with the new one there are situations where you can't correct a mistake once you see it. just start with a backtick escaped piece and then try to add extra text at the beginning of the line...
- wodenokoto 7y ago
  Okay lets say that that action would cause me to write outside the backticked area. How would I go about adding something new to the beginning of a backticked area placed at the beginning of a line? That would either be impossible, or there would be a move of the cursor that doesn't move a character (to go in and out of the backtick/code segment.) Isn't that just how it always is when working in WYSIWYG? The same struggle is real in word or google docs, where you constantly have to add a remove formatting when editing around inline blocks with styles or formatting.

dotmavriq 7y ago

What is the proposed utility of moving from being Markdown-friendly to getting all of these WYSIWYG solutions or " Simpler than Markdown " editing options on boards and chat solutions. I really struggle to comprehend it, would it not be better to just have some sort of "standard" we all can go after? Genuinely interested in knowing what companies are thinking, is it feedback-driven?

draklor40 7y ago

Moral of the day: Grumpiest programmers win !

sethammons 7y ago

Not sure if it was a regression, but I found myself _having_ to use the editor to insert an image in a thread. I couldn't drag and drop in the threads view.

shmerl 7y ago

Looks like markdown for bullet items is still broken. Try * test1 * test2