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Comment by ajsharp | Hacker News Reader

Slack is an excellent product with a seemingly top-notch engineering team. But Slack has had multiple published security events the last couple of years. Including a DATABASE BREACH. E.g. someone either left a db open to the public, or didn't have ssh password auth disabled, or any number of no-brainer security practices.

Again, no hate for Slack -- growing as fast as they have is an incredible feat. But heavybit is, um, pushing the definition of "secure" with that title. LOL.

* https://slackhq.com/march-2015-security-incident-and-the-lau... * https://www.wired.com/2017/03/hack-brief-slack-bug-everyones...

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Slack is not an excellent product. When I'm using 3g tethered connection Slack experience is unbearable. It constantly loses connection. Why is simple text chat is so bandwidth hungry. I'm surw it's due to bad engineering. IRC was much more reliable on much worse connections.

People often confuse engineering and design. Slack has a very good design team, the UX is far above IRC or competing solutions and everything flows and works in a way that most users expect. The engineering itself is not the strong point, that's for sure. Slow, bandwidth hungry, memory intensive, strange syncing problems, security issues, etc.

It's certainly pretty. It reminds me of that quote by Joel Spolsky - "people ridiculously overvalue aesthetics and beauty when evaluating products. It's one of the reasons iPods, and, for that matter, Keanu Reeves, are so successful."

I don't think usability-wise it's all that great though. If you have multiple chatrooms in multiple slack organizations, it's a PITA checking on them all, for instance.

On Spolsky's quote, wouldn't that mean people undervalue aesthetics and beauty?

Engineers undervalue it, users overvalue it compared to other criteria. Mostly because users are not engineers and so have no way to look at why a product is engineeringly superior; they can only look at how easy/simple it is to use.

I really would disagree. IRC didn't have a lot going on, you had channels and PMs and that was kind of it. It was very easy to learn how to use because there was very little to learn.

Not to mention, in most clients, it took significantly less than ten seconds for the text to appear on the screen after you started typing.

There is a lot more to IRC than just channels and PMs - it's just that not many people have purpose to find out about anything else because channels and PMs work so damn well for their purpose.... communication.

While I agree and personally prefer IRC, people using slack use far more features than just channels and PMs. That's because slack is more discoverable and the features are generally conceptually simpler and more obvious for the average user than complicated IRC features. That's the UX I was talking about above - it allows more users to use more features and feel more comfortable that they know what is going on. The same really can't be said for IRC - most average users will request the help of an 'IRC master' if they need something they don't know how to do. That's probably not a good sign of accessible UX.

I am with you. Totally. I would only add one thing. Why does the (Mac) desktop client have to reauthorize while I am writing stuff and loosing what I typed up until then. Or even while being in a voice call.

Is 3g usable in your area? My experience with multiple carriers has shown anything less than 4g/lte is near unusable even on simple webpages. This is both in metro areas in the bay area and northeast cities. My speeds go down to what I would have expected from 56k days, those simple webpages (text w/pics, no video) taking 2-5min to load.

Yes, 3g is usable, I can browse any site without noticeable delays. But Slack experience is extremely poor. It require a really fast and low-latency connection. And just for a text chat - there're tons of other solutions that has no problem with the latency and bandwidth of 3G or even Edge. But I'm forced to use Slack. :(

I'm getting used to Heavybit producing crappy podcasts, for example they claimed my website had 100k users when it had around half that amount:

https://twitter.com/WakaTime/status/954541663463948289

Honest question, do you think a 2x factor of error is all that significant? Maybe it's just my EE background (where everything is measured in logs) but anything within an order of magnitude seems accurate enough for me.

50k and 100k strictly speaking are an order of magnitude different so what's your point exactly?

It's 2x not an order of magnitude.

2x is an order of magnitude in binary scales, which is what you should probably be using if you're working with computers.

2^16, 2^32, and 2^64 are a lot easier to understand than 6.5 * 10^3, 4.2 * 10^9, and 1.8 * 10^19

It's not about how significant the error, but that they don't care about their quality. When they interview someone without verifying that person actually works for a company, it shows they don't care about their quality.

They could fix it afterwards, but they don't even do that.

Are you being serious? Saying you have 100k users when you actually have 50k is not fine, no matter your background. Hell, is it fine if I take an appliance that works on 110V and plug it into a 220V outlet? I'm also an electrical engineer and measuring everything in log scales doesn't excuse lying.

Slack ruins all my laptops from $3000+ latest Macbooks to my HP Pavillion - it eats up memory like Crazy. Using Slack for 2 years now and they still havent fixed it.

Sadly it’s the future, now electron apps are mainstream. Im not sure what they are doing with all their billions

Maybe not an option for you, but I don't leave it running on my desktop and instead rely on the mobile app for notifications and then pop into the desktop app if I need to engage extensively.

>Slack is an excellent product

I used to think maybe it could have been before I was required to use it last year, but no, it's not. It is the worst chat application I have ever used (maybe tinder is worse heh, but at least the keyboard latency is below a second.) It's almost comical how bad it is.

Slack was described to me as IRC + tmux for people too stupid to figure out irc & tmux.

In my (limited) experience this seems true to me.

Could your view be slightly tinged by being required to use it at work?

I've used Slack for a couple years in purely open source / social / educational settings and can't really fathom how it could be described as comically bad. There are aspects I dislike, but overall it feels like it solves pretty well the problem it set out to address.

A lot of the hate seems to be around the the fact that it gives employers yet another method of disturbing work flow and creating accountability around meaningless metrics (response time or participation in pointless chats).

Instead of increasing productivity, it turns the entire workday into a meeting, with all the downsides of a traditional meeting.

But, again, those are all complaints about the setting and expectations surrounding the product, not the product itself. Slack is quite good at what it does, by any reasonable measure in my view.

If they had a top notch engineering team somebody should have tested their product on a non stable internet connection. Living out the country now and I now dream of going back to IRC just for the ability to read messages while offline.

These breaches were before Geoff (the interviewee) left Palantir and started at Slack, so it's possible things are in a better place now.

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