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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

Frankly Slack's success is the utter failure of every alternative on the UX side. MSN messenger was perhaps wrong-footed by the shift to multi-device, but none of the other tools have such an excuse. It's not a generational thing, it's an incredible level of, there's no other word, incompetence on the part of the makers of major messaging software (Skype in particular).

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MSN had big flashing ads. When I first saw that I assumed I was dealing with another windows install with malware on it. I've paid for the OS, why have I got this freemium crap?

Slack has no way of letting me know who's read the messages. Come on, it's 2016. I asked them about this and they told me the only solution is it get each contact to add a sunglasses icon as they read each message! What a joke.

What does 'read' in a Slack context mean, though? If you scroll past it quickly, is it read? If you accidentally open your Slack window, is it read? A 'read' notification would just be a misleading user experience.

Read in the way a Facebook messenger message or a hangout message is read; you've got the "channel" open and the message is visible or is above the visible one. Clearly it's impossible to know whether a message has actually been read by a human but there Facebook/hangouts solution is almost perfect.

It's not visibility, it's focus (at least on desktop). If you don't click a messenger box, it will display the message but not acknowledge it as read (on the desktop client, on mobile it works based on whether the message is displayed while the app is open).

I think that's the right thing to do from a privacy standpoint. I don't want people to be able to tell whether I've read their messages to me.

Yeah I agree, I think people routinely underestimate the level of quality and amount of time you have to put into a consumer product.

A good example is Yahoo Mail... this product is used by so many people, and was supposedly overhauled a few years ago, yet it is mediocre in so many ways.

What email product isn't mediocre? This entire vertical needs an upgrade. Perhaps Email is Hard.

Gmail is good, but it got that good about 10 years ago, and hasn't gotten much better since. (Arguably it's worse in some respects.)

When Gmail came out it was a breath of fresh air... now it's just the bar you need to meet. It's sad that Yahoo hasn't been able to meet that bar in 10 years.

Fastmail!

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