Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fishkins | Hacker News Reader

For me, by far the biggest difference is the notifications. In HipChat, notifications are both buggy and almost completely unconfigurable[0]. If I sent a message to a colleague while they were offline, they would never get notified of it[1]. Slack notifications always work how I expect and are configurable to the degree I desire.

Slack also has a nicer UI and better integrations for us, and generally just always works how I want. I don't know if I'd call it a "revelation", but it's way better than any comparable product I've used.

[0] - I think HipChat recently added support for more granular notification settings, but I don't use it anymore. Also, it took over 3 years of this being their 1st or 2nd most requested feature before they addressed it, so I don't give them any credit for having it now.

[1] - They might get an email depending on their settings, but the HipChat app would never give a notification.

View on HN

We've been on hipchat for about two years. Never had a problem with offline notifications. I get both an e-mail instantly and an IM when I log back onto the chat client. I don't recall this ever being a problem or ever not being there.

I dunno what notification settings hipchat is missing, but I'm not sure I need whatever it is missing. If I get tagged in a message, I get notified. Not sure that I want more than that. We have our deploys and a few other things hooked up to hipchat - at first when we started using it we went crazy with the third party integrations, than realized we didn't actually need all the noise the integration notifications gave us and turned a lot of it off.

We don't even pay for it and we get all of this.

Slack is one of my most annoying and least-effective tools because every single message has a pop up that blocks off a corner of my screen.

Slack's notifications lack customization which makes them annoying. Either you get the whole package, intrusive desktop pop up and all, or you get no notification. Where's the option to have sounds but no pop ups? Where's the option to lump notifications so you don't get spammed?

totally agree about the lack of customization.

A portion of the difficulty is owing to them using a web app in a SSB (single site browser) instead of a properly native desktop app.

I would love to be able to tile different channel/message windows, like we all did with IRC clients. Unfortunately this is fundamentally intractable in an SSB-architected app (including Electron, node-webkit, et al.).

Agreed. I wrote a blog post outlining a way to get around this. (https://medium.com/building-things-people-want/slack-is-too-...) The gist: turn off all notifications then flip them back on by channel. Still doesn't address de-coupling of pop-ups and sound, though.

Loved the article. check out www.spacechatapp.com would love to pick your brains on how to filter through the noise. we're building it.

Your site shows cloudflare errors.

Yeah after we started hooking it up now I get all these notifications for builds, etc. I don't need any of this notifying me but I need notifications for other types of messages.

Right now I'm not seeing a difference between this and HipChat but everyone seems to love it so I'll use it I'm just kinda indifferent and unimpressed with it thus far.

you can do quite a lot of customisation if you split out automation messages into channels - each channel has per-user-device notification preferences

If you use OS X, go into System Preferences -> Notifications -> Slack and set slack alert style to "None".

There, you now have sound and no banner-style alerts. You can customise a lot more and all apps that are able to do notifications go through there.

Maybe you can't customize notifications extensively in Slack itself (I found them okay, yet slightly lacking), but if you're on a Mac, you can definitely comfigure Desktop notifications per App, which I also did.

Everything you said about notifications in HipChat is false.

I first used HipChat more than 2 years ago, and the notifications worked perfectly and were as configurable as I wanted them to be. Offline notifications worked well.

We tried Slack when it came out and couldn't figure out why anyone would use it over HipChat, since it had no native client at the time.

We have been using HipChat for the last two years for one of our two major products at work and have very recently moved to Slack for the other. While notifications on HipChat work most of the time, they are still very patchy. I personally use the Mac client, while others in my company use the web, Windows, and Linux clients and we've all been bitten by missed notifications on applications one too many times to actually become a nuisance for us. Until the very last update to the Mac client, I became used to frequently finding the client freezing up on me. The windows clients, on the other hand, is even more infamous for this. Plus, the iOS app isn't something I really look forward to using (judging by the fact that I've had it installed on my iPhone for far longer than the Slack app, yet I leave it signed out almost completely, while I enjoy using the Slack app).

I used HipChat on Windows, Mac, and Android for 1.5 years and never experienced any of that. My team didn't, either. Those issues must have started happening after I stopped using it. Maybe Atlassian hasn't prioritized HipChat after buying it.

They certainly appear to have been working on it, judging from the updates being released. I feel they have a long way to go, though.

Sounds like HipChat has the unfortunate distinction of being the Friendster of the chat space, sometimes the gods are fickle.

My current theory is that HipChat was purchased (and marketed) to be part of the Atlassian suite. They may have believed there wasn't enough upside in a chat client to market it as a standalone product.

For me, one of the reasons why I don't like Slack is that in moving to Slack from Hipchat, I lost configurability in notifications. Slack chat window notifications are terrible. They consume immense amounts of space, and yet aren't clearly colour-coded for relevance. Hipchat notifications were tight and concise, and could be clearly colour-coded.

A pattern I have seen in Slack that never happened in Hipchat is "Let's put notifications into the channel" > "ugh, this channel is impossible to talk in because of the notifications! let's create a new channel with no notifications". Kind've kills the point of notifications.

Aside: does 'notifications' need to become 'n10ns'?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com