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Slack didn’t take over its market with advertisement & marketing (although that’s certainly helpful). It was just better than IRC, which is the open protocol pe

Slack didn’t take over its market with advertisement & marketing (although that’s certainly helpful). It was just better than IRC, which is the open protocol people often compare it to. And if you feel the impulse to list the ways that IRC is superior to slack, you are likely to just illustrate the mismatch between features people love to talk about or implement and features that drive adoption and retention. The OSS community is somewhere between incompetence and active hostility when it comes to good UIs, for example. (edit: as an example, see the sister comment and its complaint about „more gloss-coated shit-consumerism“) Chat happens to be the worst possible example for this idea that bad technology is winning against OSS or open protocols by throwing money into advertisement and fooling users that are just too stupid to understand. Besides slack, Signal and Telegram, two entities completely unknown by consumers and with budgets that round to zero took over that highly competitive market.

brimble 5y ago
Of course, Slack had a great client. It could have been a great client for an open protocol. Maybe an existing one. Maybe a new one that they could steer entirely. But that would fail to capture the user sufficiently. > The OSS community is somewhere between incompetence and active hostility when it comes to good UIs, for example. Mostly true! But commercial clients for open protocols are A Thing, for the tiny handful of user-facing protocols that haven't been sent toward a slow, obscure death. I'm writing this from a (largely) closed-source Web browser. I also have a closed-source email client open.
- astrange 5y ago
  I think IRC had decades to come up with a better protocol and never did. Just don't have netsplits, show the user the channel history when they join, and have encryption. I'll excuse the auth systems being driven by bots and so not built into clients.
  - modo_mario 5y ago
    There's Matrix and IRCv3 tho i haven't looked into the later much
    - Arathorn 5y ago
      We’re working on a kickass native macOS+iOS Matrix client btw (SwiftUI + matrix-rust-sdk), to buck the trend in the OP :)
datavirtue 5y ago
It's not just the OSS community that's hostile to good UIs. Every single product seems to footgun it's UI. Snowflake, what a dream. It just works. Then they roll out the new UI, that you can currently switch between the old and new. OMG what hobbled mess. Before I started using that UI I was ready to start buying Thier stock hand over fist. Now, I'm not so sure.

brimble 5y ago

Of course, Slack had a great client. It could have been a great client for an open protocol. Maybe an existing one. Maybe a new one that they could steer entirely. But that would fail to capture the user sufficiently. > The OSS community is somewhere between incompetence and active hostility when it comes to good UIs, for example. Mostly true! But commercial clients for open protocols are A Thing, for the tiny handful of user-facing protocols that haven't been sent toward a slow, obscure death. I'm writing this from a (largely) closed-source Web browser. I also have a closed-source email client open.

astrange 5y ago
I think IRC had decades to come up with a better protocol and never did. Just don't have netsplits, show the user the channel history when they join, and have encryption. I'll excuse the auth systems being driven by bots and so not built into clients.
- modo_mario 5y ago
  There's Matrix and IRCv3 tho i haven't looked into the later much
  - Arathorn 5y ago
    We’re working on a kickass native macOS+iOS Matrix client btw (SwiftUI + matrix-rust-sdk), to buck the trend in the OP :)

datavirtue 5y ago

It's not just the OSS community that's hostile to good UIs. Every single product seems to footgun it's UI. Snowflake, what a dream. It just works. Then they roll out the new UI, that you can currently switch between the old and new. OMG what hobbled mess. Before I started using that UI I was ready to start buying Thier stock hand over fist. Now, I'm not so sure.