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Compared to existing and free software chat solutions[1], Slack however looks like such a kindergarten tool. It has a terrible performance. Every time one switc

Compared to existing and free software chat solutions[1], Slack however looks like such a kindergarten tool. It has a terrible performance. Every time one switches a channel, it basically burns a CPU. The loading of messages when scrolling down a channel with many message is not working well, not pre-loading enough messages to make scrolling a smooth experience. Instead one has to wait half a second or so until the next 20 messages or so are loaded, then scroll, then wait again, then scroll ... And the "markdown" text input oh my. Rarely have I seen a worse markdown input than in Slack. Maybe on Bitbucket or Confluence it is worse. It is as if they have decided to not use any existing and perfectly well working markdown parsers, but instead get an incapable team of engineers to reimplement a bug-ridden one with missing features. One cannot even insert an image at any place in the message, but only at the bottom. That means one needs to refer to the image in the message, when otherwise one could have simply had the picture in that place where it is relevant. It is such a headache for anyone more familiar with markdown. At this point just give me a plain text input, that has any normal off the mill markdown parser to properly translate my text into a message. Oh and they still have not managed to implement voice chat according to standards properly, so that it works in all modern browsers. While other more feature full chat programs like Discord had this solved for years ago, Slack is still the same old shit. Now I have to start ungoogled-chromium every time I want to enter a "Huddle" and navigate to their website, where they will bug me with their incessant popup asking me to use their desktop app, which I have to decline every. single. time. because chromium does not remember to block such popups from websites. So basically Slack is quite crap. [1]: https://github.com/zulip/zulip https://github.com/zulip/zulip

hot_gril 4y ago
I've used Discord for work chat before. It's not designed for that, but it does a better job than Slack, MS Teams, or Google Chat.
- class4behavior 4y ago
  Well, if you have the opportunity to choose, it's a bad choice to surrender your communications to a commercial globally centralized black box both professionally and privately. Moving to Zulip, RocketChat, Matrix/Jitsi, etc. instead of Slack, Discord or even Signal/Whatsapp should be the long-term goal for everyone. Adobe has already started to feed its customers' data to its AI. Who says, other providers won't take advantage of broad contracts and terms in order to avoid informing their clients.
  - hot_gril 4y ago
    One big hurdle to this is how there's no widely-used open standard. Many corps don't want to commit to something niche that might lose support, but if there were many interchangeable services for the same kind of chat, it'd be a different story. The standard used to be XMPP, but I used to work with that closely and can rant for an hour about every reason it failed, and maybe any new standard would have similar problems.
- KyeRussell 4y ago
  Part of my criteria for a work IM tool is something that non-techies can actually use. I wouldn’t wish Discord on my worst enemy, with all its weird gamer marketing language. And I certainly don’t want to work in a team where I’m that far removed from reality.
  - hot_gril 4y ago
    I'm looking at the Discord UI now and don't see any gamer lingo except for the "welcome" messages. I can see how the UI could be overwhelming with features, and my older family members couldn't figure out how to use it the one time they tried, but Slack is even worse in that way too. And MS Teams was so bad that I couldn't figure out how to even log in. If it weren't for the security and reliance implications, I'd run a company chat over Facebook Messenger. Simple as.
selykg 4y ago
Go use Microsoft Teams for awhile and then tell me "Slack is quite crap." I'm stuck using Teams right now and it is an abysmal experience. There are definitely complaints to have about Slack, but it can be miles worse. Just today I was looking for a prior conversation to document it for the future. I selected a portion of the conversation so that I could paste it into another tool I use for documenting. I selected the text once and it deselected a good chunk of it. Repeat. Okay, clearly not working well. I had to copy and paste 5 times to get ~15 lines of text because if you scrolled at all it somehow deselected some portion of the text. I mean, honestly, what tool doesn't even let you easily copy the conversation? Teams is that tool. That's just one of the many issues I have run into today.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  Just because Teams is bad, and it's bad, make no mistake, it doesn't make Slack a good tool. Slack is just a resource hog which creates too much noise. Neither are good tools.
- beebmam 4y ago
  I couldn't disagree more with this post. Teams offers such a better solution than Slack for virtually everything, in my opinion. Slack's voice/video chat is a toy, and it's unbelievably slow and unreliable. I am so glad I don't work for a company that uses Slack anymore.
  - progman32 4y ago
    It's very interesting how different people's experiences are. I worked for a company that used both Slack and Teams, and Teams always caused issues, was unstable, and had many video problems. Slack worked much more reliably for us. Perhaps it's a platform issue? Nobody in our workplace used Windows, everyone was either Linux or OSX.
    - version_five 4y ago
      I've found teams > slack for video and stability on OSX, but slack has a better UI. Both have been mostly unusable for me on linux though I think it may also be machine dependent (I had an XPS13). I've never tried them with windows
jxramos 4y ago
I’m pretty sure it’s a simplified pared down md.
folkrav 4y ago
Looking at Slack's own documentation on formatting messages, they don't even mention Markdown. I agree it's Markdown-like, but they at least aren't pretending it is.
jt2190 4y ago
Not sure if your threads contain a lot of images/media, but I find that having images collapsed by default improves performance immensely.
- dylan604 4y ago
  one company i worked with was horrible with the amount of GIFs littered throughout the threads. it was like a light shining down from heaven with a chorus of angels when i found the disable anims feature.
marmetio 4y ago
I was surprised when it nearly froze because people used too many of those reaction emoji gif things on a comment. How is a tiny cartoon more important than than being able to use the app? It's ridiculous that they apparently didn't prioritize tasks.
sacnoradhq 4y ago
Others that came through: - HipChat, Campfire (Basecamp) clone - FlowDock, which was superior to Basecamp and Slack - Textual - IRC And now there's Discord, albeit for different purposes. Workplace is an everything platform. The problem with each tends to be distractions, discoverability, bookmarking, an app/browser performance. You really have to have a strong culture of netiquette to use any of them AND access to video conferencing to have quick meetings, because trying to do everything over chat doesn't work.
happymellon 4y ago
> And the "markdown" text input oh my. Rarely have I seen a worse markdown input than in Slack Let me introduce you to Teams.
robertlagrant 4y ago
> Rarely have I seen a worse markdown input than in Slack Try writing code in Microsoft Teams. Slack is very decent.

hot_gril 4y ago

I've used Discord for work chat before. It's not designed for that, but it does a better job than Slack, MS Teams, or Google Chat.

class4behavior 4y ago
Well, if you have the opportunity to choose, it's a bad choice to surrender your communications to a commercial globally centralized black box both professionally and privately. Moving to Zulip, RocketChat, Matrix/Jitsi, etc. instead of Slack, Discord or even Signal/Whatsapp should be the long-term goal for everyone. Adobe has already started to feed its customers' data to its AI. Who says, other providers won't take advantage of broad contracts and terms in order to avoid informing their clients.
- hot_gril 4y ago
  One big hurdle to this is how there's no widely-used open standard. Many corps don't want to commit to something niche that might lose support, but if there were many interchangeable services for the same kind of chat, it'd be a different story. The standard used to be XMPP, but I used to work with that closely and can rant for an hour about every reason it failed, and maybe any new standard would have similar problems.
KyeRussell 4y ago
Part of my criteria for a work IM tool is something that non-techies can actually use. I wouldn’t wish Discord on my worst enemy, with all its weird gamer marketing language. And I certainly don’t want to work in a team where I’m that far removed from reality.
- hot_gril 4y ago
  I'm looking at the Discord UI now and don't see any gamer lingo except for the "welcome" messages. I can see how the UI could be overwhelming with features, and my older family members couldn't figure out how to use it the one time they tried, but Slack is even worse in that way too. And MS Teams was so bad that I couldn't figure out how to even log in. If it weren't for the security and reliance implications, I'd run a company chat over Facebook Messenger. Simple as.

selykg 4y ago

Go use Microsoft Teams for awhile and then tell me "Slack is quite crap." I'm stuck using Teams right now and it is an abysmal experience. There are definitely complaints to have about Slack, but it can be miles worse. Just today I was looking for a prior conversation to document it for the future. I selected a portion of the conversation so that I could paste it into another tool I use for documenting. I selected the text once and it deselected a good chunk of it. Repeat. Okay, clearly not working well. I had to copy and paste 5 times to get ~15 lines of text because if you scrolled at all it somehow deselected some portion of the text. I mean, honestly, what tool doesn't even let you easily copy the conversation? Teams is that tool. That's just one of the many issues I have run into today.

bayindirh 4y ago
Just because Teams is bad, and it's bad, make no mistake, it doesn't make Slack a good tool. Slack is just a resource hog which creates too much noise. Neither are good tools.
beebmam 4y ago
I couldn't disagree more with this post. Teams offers such a better solution than Slack for virtually everything, in my opinion. Slack's voice/video chat is a toy, and it's unbelievably slow and unreliable. I am so glad I don't work for a company that uses Slack anymore.
- progman32 4y ago
  It's very interesting how different people's experiences are. I worked for a company that used both Slack and Teams, and Teams always caused issues, was unstable, and had many video problems. Slack worked much more reliably for us. Perhaps it's a platform issue? Nobody in our workplace used Windows, everyone was either Linux or OSX.
  - version_five 4y ago
    I've found teams > slack for video and stability on OSX, but slack has a better UI. Both have been mostly unusable for me on linux though I think it may also be machine dependent (I had an XPS13). I've never tried them with windows

jxramos 4y ago

I’m pretty sure it’s a simplified pared down md.

folkrav 4y ago

Looking at Slack's own documentation on formatting messages, they don't even mention Markdown. I agree it's Markdown-like, but they at least aren't pretending it is.

jt2190 4y ago

Not sure if your threads contain a lot of images/media, but I find that having images collapsed by default improves performance immensely.

dylan604 4y ago
one company i worked with was horrible with the amount of GIFs littered throughout the threads. it was like a light shining down from heaven with a chorus of angels when i found the disable anims feature.

marmetio 4y ago

I was surprised when it nearly froze because people used too many of those reaction emoji gif things on a comment. How is a tiny cartoon more important than than being able to use the app? It's ridiculous that they apparently didn't prioritize tasks.

sacnoradhq 4y ago

Others that came through: - HipChat, Campfire (Basecamp) clone - FlowDock, which was superior to Basecamp and Slack - Textual - IRC And now there's Discord, albeit for different purposes. Workplace is an everything platform. The problem with each tends to be distractions, discoverability, bookmarking, an app/browser performance. You really have to have a strong culture of netiquette to use any of them AND access to video conferencing to have quick meetings, because trying to do everything over chat doesn't work.

happymellon 4y ago

> And the "markdown" text input oh my. Rarely have I seen a worse markdown input than in Slack Let me introduce you to Teams.

robertlagrant 4y ago

> Rarely have I seen a worse markdown input than in Slack Try writing code in Microsoft Teams. Slack is very decent.