5 ms·
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 fr
by 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 agoI 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 agoI 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 agolots 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 agoa 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.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y agoCough, cough https://devrant.io https://devrant.io They closed the loop, folks!
- criddell 7y agoI'd love to know in a year what percentage of users disable the WYSIWYG editor. It blows me away that there are almost 2000 people working at Slack. The product feels like it is done and they should be able to downsize to a skeleton crew and slip into maintenance mode.