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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

While there certainly is a lot of data, and it is presented very well, the analysis falls into the same traps as analyses of Google Trends data, particularly in the keyword analysis. Causation of changes in trends is ambiguous.

For example, YC applications are optimized for the highest probability of getting into YC by definition, and so it would be expected that terms on the application would be optimized for getting venture capital, not necessarily what is happening in the marketplace today. (The "Slack: King of the Enterprise Tools" slide is a good example; I'm sure the mention of "Slack for X" is a golden flag for some VCs)

A question about the chart presentation: why are some lines straight, and some lines smooth? (e.g in the Startup Competitors slide, Instagram, Airbnb, and Uber have curbed lines but Tinder, Whatsapp, and Snapchat have straight lines)

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> I'm sure the mention of "Slack for X" is a golden flag for some VCs

It's crazy how many people in the industry believe that Slack is already more popular than email, is close to overtaking email, or is growing faster than email.

The stupidity in tech has reached the level of being a moral hazard, where it really just incentivizes everyone else to be bad at their jobs.

I truly don't understand the hype around Slack. I work at an EMS provider, and we got a couple of our business facing teams to use it last fall. Maybe 2 people are actively using it now, the rest moved back to only email or never actually used Slack in the first place.

I've noticed a lot of business/corporate people really don't "get" slack the same way an older person is bewildered by something like snapchat. We have a "legacy" (for lack of a better term) Lync system that they are holed up in and the split along those lines is very noticeable. Those same type of people who are on the teams firmly on the slack side tend to stay offline until they get an email notification, answer the mention or DM and then disappear again.

> the same way an older person is bewildered by something like snapchat.

Damn. At just (now) 35, I'm apparently an "older person".

/me pours another glass of bourbon

31 and feeling the same. Snapchat is the most effective generation splitter I've ever seen

I wrote a blog post about my experience with Snapchat. Not even being a creator, just a story consumer.

Watched some great thought provoking snaps. The fact that I could neither share the video nor watch the snaps on my own schedule drove me crazy.

So I deleted the app from my phone.

It's like gluing a phone running iMessage to your computer screen. Useful for quick collaboration where emails can be clunky, interrupt flow, and inhibit dialogue. There's room for both tools depending on the needed communication medium.

Is it useful? Yes. Is it necessary? No. Could it replace email? No. What is the service worth? A lot, according to starving investors.

Every job I've held for 20 years has involved keeping a chat window open with my collaborators. At various times it was IRC, Jabber, AIM, iChat, HipChat; but now Slack is suddenly the one worth a jillion dollars.

The tooling and ecosystem around Slack are quite different than any of the others. (Admittedly I don't follow the IRC space much.)

I'm really curious as to what you're saying here:

"The stupidity tech has reached the level of being a moral hazard, where it really just incentivizes everyone else to be bad at their jobs."

I honestly don't know how Slack incentivizes somebody to be bad at their job.

In regards to the first sentence I assume you mean the venture capital industry? I'm not in that industry but I have to imagine that Slack is not more popular than email or close to overtaking email. I do imagine that it is growing faster than email as more internal communications move to that medium.

Slack isn't even close to email. "Worldwide email use continues to grow at a healthy pace. In 2015, the number of worldwide email users will be nearly 2.6 billion. By the end of 2019, the number of worldwide email users will increase to over 2.9 billion"[1]. Slack has a bit under 3 million DAU [2].

[1] http://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Email-... [2] http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/01/rocketship-emoji/

Right. I agree that Slack is nowhere close to overtaking email in absolute terms. But I suspect it is growing faster than email. Your figures project email users growing by 11.5% over the next four years. Slack is growing by that rate every quarter (at least).

Sure. Think it'll maintain that pace for more than a couple years? Especially given the strange interest in chat bots that people seem to also have.

I am honestly so perplexed by the bot mania.

Don't get me wrong, they have their uses, but how is this suddenly perceived as a multi-billion dollar market?

Indeed, it is baffling. Am glad someone else is also confused.

Not hard to grow fast when you're starting small. If I launched a new chat service later tonight, it'd be the fastest-growing communication technology in the world tomorrow, since it'd be going from one to two or three or possibly even four users. Slack would kill for a 300% daily growth rate!

I'm at UC Berkeley right now. Most the college organizations I know use it (including the hacker's club I was a part of). Almost every computer science class uses it for internal staff communication, which is pretty important considering that our intro CS class has 40+ course staff/assistants. Nobody wants to set up and use IRC, which is ugly, time consuming to set up, and not fun to use.

I hear Slack is also gaining a lot of traction for open source community discussion (although IRC is still common).

This is all on the free plan obviously, but guess what the next wave of tech startups are going to use (or are already using). This is not including the big companies that are already adopting it.

There's probably more usage of Slack among CS students than there is usage of bitcoin, VR, drones, or any other technology popular among hackers that people argue (rightly or wrongly) are poised to go mainstream.

> although IRC is still common

I am sad to see an open-source tech get replaced with a closed source one, but I am glad that the default IM system for talking about code is no longer one that prohibits multi-line comments.

Considering the amount of skilled time and effort that good UX takes, I suppose closed-source was the most likely thing to happen.

Being able to use inline LaTeX and Markdown is the killer feature of Gitter for me.

quick question, have you ever setup irc? it's actually really easy, and as far as clients for IRC go, there is such a huge range that it's hard to believe you really tried it. there are all the functions of slack and then a ton more. just an FYI, IRC is awesome and you own the data.

paying for chat is ridiculous IMO.

Nope. And why would I bother learning when I can just click a few buttons to get Slack? I'm pretty lazy and have no interest spending the weekend learning all the features of IRC.

Also:

> This is all on the free plan obviously, but guess what the next wave of tech startups are going to use

> I hear Slack is also gaining a lot of traction for open source community discussion (although IRC is still common).

The white elephant in the room is if there's really value there: Would most open source efforts actually pay for Slack as a group communication tool? I think the answer is no, almost by definition.

The NYC Ruby users group just replaced their email list with Slack, it's great, it's cut down participation by about 80%, messages that are not seen immediately go forever unread, and what was once a valuable community for me to reach out to as a freelancer is now worthless. But at least we're on the coolest new billion dollar valuation closed source tech. And we have some great new channels like #general that no one ever posts to. I can't imagine anything better.

This made me laugh because it's also exactly my experience with free community Slack. I suppose there is an argument for a more transient means of communication, and Slack's interface is certainly an improvement over IRC or awful, awful Google Groups, but...

Of course, if you want a better Slack experience, you can shell out an unknown multiplier of thousands of dollars per month for a paid version (which is never going to happen). The pricing gap for free/paid community Slack is just nuts.

Slack amplifies "fishbowl" workplace environments. Imagine if you're only allowed to discuss certain topics in certain channels, but what you can say in each channel changes often. And your boss can't cut you any...slack...about these changes, because his boss is watching all of these channels too, telling him who should say what where.

We've been coping by hanging out in private channels. And so the tribal knowledge remains hidden among a small cabal because management doesn't want it discussed. They prefer the illusion that we are...all-knowing or psychic or something.

What? Managament controlling information dispersal within a company?! How can any place work that way? NDA and GAAP rules limiting discussions to third parties but within companies...?! (shudders). Either the process would need to be trivially linear or the management need to be psychics to know what information is actually needed where.

Happens more than you would think... Key phrase is usually "on a need-to-know basis". It is difficult to argue with such phrase as it seems completely reasonable on the surface, but what happens is that someone has to decide which information someone needs to know. Such decisions are not without mistakes, and to top it off, there is even incentive to keep people out of the loop because information gives the holder some power. So it often happens that people do not get the whole picture and operate on limited knowledge, leading to bad decisions.

Crazy. I've worked in companies ranging from 10 to thousands of employees and never heard before of such a self immolating idea gaining wide acceptance. I must be lucky.

With my group, we started to use slack for email, but the transient nature of the chat did exactly what you describe.

We ended up finding Discourse, a forum system, and have been using that. Now, slack is more about simulating in person discussion (i.e. we rarely use it), and Discourse is more like emails pre-sorted by category. I have to say, it's working pretty well.

I think there's a chance of Slack winning this use case when they add one feature: threaded conversations / topics.

Zulip (https://zulip.org), Dropbox's Slack clone, supports threaded convos out of the box quite nicely.

Gitter is becoming standard in Developer community with Slack practically dying. No surprise given Slack's inferior UX. Fragmenting my teams and asking separate passwords for each? What a stupid idea!

Yeah I don't get the hype too. I used it once or twice. Then I was like "how is this revolutionary?". A new password per team. Nop bop pop.

Its just like music. Kids don't love your rock 'n roll until they get old enough to actually understand what the guy is singing about. So we get punk. Then we get punk bands, covering rock 'n roll classics. Then, we get punk rockers. Then, we get old rockers, complaining about the quality of the current generations' music.

This seems to be cyclic.

Does it also apply to the multiple team accounts with separate logins, or is it regarded a tolerable inconvenience amidst other amazing qualities?

Personally I think its very obnoxious, and quite punk rock of them. Not that there's anything wrong with punk rock, its just .. you don't necessarily want it in your cornflakes...

is growing faster than email

I'd assume that this is true - it would be astonishing to me if it weren't simply because of the law of high numbers.

Am I wrong about this and email is growing at ridiculous percent?

What even constitutes email growth at this point - more people gaining access to the Internet? Creation of new MX servers? Signups to Gmail?

Probably directly correlated to developing world internet penetration.

email is at least growing as fast as slack since slack requires you to have an email to sign up ;)

Not true since those email addresses often already existed.

I have 10+ Slack teams associated with my one email address

I think that what is happening can be described thus: waves of ignorance.

Every few years, generations of technologists evolve from their schooling, and come out into the workforce - competent, yes, but aware, no. Awareness of previous technologies is the problem: if you've never actually used e-mail productively, you may not be aware that people use it extremely productively, so you pitch an alternative - i.e. re-invent/NIH some 'replacement' technology that has a lot of fancy bells and whistles, but ends up re-implementing the stuff that your grandaddy programmers solved, decades ago.

Slack is an example of this - I see nothing in it that I can't do, effectively, with a well-run mailing list and well-configured mail applications, with company policies and, most of all TRAINING of employees/team-members on how to use it properly. The same goes for IRC. IRC and Email already solved the problems of Slack: its just that the mechanism (i.e. understanding) of applying those technologies is not evenly distributed.

It comes in waves, and I think it can be traced back to the timing of graduation schedules across academia.

Young ignorant founder here. If a good email practice can be obtained by taking all those measures, but slack doesn't need the understanding, training, policies etc then surely slack is the better alternative. Just because it 'can be done' with email doesn't make it nonconditionally better.

So you'd rather give monkeys a golden hammer than train humans to use any tool effectively? Very interesting, young ignorant founder ..

Hint: its the people, not the technology, that make all the difference in the world. Invest in the people and it won't matter what technology they use.

If tools are evaluated by their leverage, and if Slack needs less effort (in form of training, etc) to achieve the same result as email/IRC, then isn't it reasonable to suggest that Slack is better? However, I think it is interesting to think about the method they used to achieve that increased leverage. In Slack's case it may not be an entirely new set of features, but just more optimal designs and implementations of existing feature sets. Should that necessarily "count for less"? I would argue no, if tools are evaluated by their leverage.

Fully agree. It's unfortunate that these "trends" are actually trailing and imitating recent successes. It only goes to show that VCs (YC included) don't shape the future of technology, but rather try to squeeze money from their own investors by pitching ideas that relate to things they hope the latter are familiar with thanks to news coverage.

The analysis is limited to statements of what was observed in YC applications, not what is happening in the larger marketplace. This is exactly what you get when you look into a crystal ball: a warped view of your local environment.

> This is exactly what you get when you look into a crystal ball: a warped view of your local environment.

I love it. I'm stealing this. :)

There's a larger statistical significance issue here. Check the different scales + the degree of certainly is even worse when the you're talking about minute changes to a fraction of a percentage, year-over-year.

Made a quick file to illustrate: https://www.dropbox.com/s/uq0apjt69zadiii/YC%20Blog%20Resize...

The axis scales are fine as long as the comparisons are apples-to-apples. Since the charts were split between startups and nonstatups, I believe it's fair.

The "statistical significance" issue with using small percentages is fine as long as the sample size is sufficiently large. YC receives thousands of applications each year, which is enough...

...although in 2016, there's only been 1 round of applications so far, whereas other years have 2 rounds of data. Therefore the sample size might be smaller, which can create doubt in the "Slack is 850% better" conclusion. Again, I do not know the exact sample size to verify.

I get persuasive writing, but calling "Slack: King of the Enterprise Tools" because it went from 0% in 2014 to 1.2% in 2016 is absolutely an over statement.

Apples-to-apples on the chart? I'd bet a Tubman that 70%+ of the readers didn't catch the scale differences as they went chart-to-chart, following the writer down his/her path.

Everyone draws the line somewhere on this stuff, and I'm just surprised where Priceonomics (who's stuff is normally AWESOME) and YC placed their collective line. Then again, maybe I'm all alone out here with this concern.

---------- *If that wasn't bad enough, did they search for other potential "enterprise tools" or just the ones that are trending today? Curious if Yammer, MS Excel, MS Office, Jira, charted in an "significant" way?

With a couple of thousand applications per year, each one of those small percentages is going to have a 95% bound in the neighborhood of +/-0.5%. The closer a fraction is to 0 or 1, the more significant it is per given denominator. The bounds on some of these will certainly overlap y/y but the large swings over a few years are very much statistically different.

Also, if this analysis is on the full population of YC apps, there's no statistical error if you take it for what it is: trends within YC apps. Not every metric needs to be extrapolated to the maximum feasible population to be interesting.

Finally, the scales on the two graphs you resized shown changes of a factor of 5-7, not counting the first data points, otherwise even more. I'd argue that your scales are the ones that are misleading in this scenario. You'd be right if they had that scale for an 82% to 94% growth, vs. the 2% to 14% or .2% to 1% that they are illusrating.

Yes, it also shows how volatile people are when it comes to doing a startup.

I understand the usefulness of pivoting, but as it stands, people are pivoting across entire industries (into industries where they are completely inexperienced) for the sake of getting funding.

Some cross-pollination between industries is beneficial, but right now you have too much of it - It turns everyone into a snake oil salesman - All bling no substance... Everybody knows a bit about everything but nobody knows everything about anything.

YC encourages a breadth-first mentality which is subpar when it comes to encouraging deep innovation.

The YC decision process should be seen like a decision tree with the minimax (adverserial search) algorithm switched on... Applicants are YC's opponents, not their ally and they are always looking for ways to subvert the system.

Well, the terms section is certainly misleading. I prefer to see data where the plural is grouped with the singular. Looking at the chart, VR ranks above drone(s). VR has no commonly used plural, so without combining singular and plural terms, and without the raw numbers displayed, it's not a useful chart.

I'm incredibly surprised they didn't use stemming to combine singular/plurals consistently. It's totally standard in information retrieval.

I appreciate your contributions to HN and am interested that you're skeptical(?) as well.

We're looking at a few "wowee!" graphs that are showing the differences between fractions of a percent. I mean, the claim is "850% growth" of Slack... as it goes from 0% to 1% of "mentions" in some randomly associated keyword analysis. "AI" went from 0.41% to 0.7% of "mentions" in 4 years, looks like it's taking over! Blogging is no longer popular, because it went from 1.5% to 0.5%, but "messaging" is so popular now because it went from...zero to 1%?

What does any of it mean? It looks like the type of analysis where the conclusions are drawn ahead of time. I'd be more interested in seeing the diversity of replies; if only a small fraction of companies see, say, the big guys (FAANG) as competitors, who do the rest list?

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