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Comment by ljm | Hacker News Reader

It seems it stagnated. There wasn’t a real competitor to it until Slack turned up and developed a fantastic integration ecosystem (I don’t think there would be such a focus on conversational UI were it not for Slack, whether or not they intended that). By that time it was already too late, HipChat is old school, Slack is the new hotness.

Anecdotally, anyone working in a startup with an opinion on design will know how shallow a judgment has to be to switch to a competitor. App is functional but has 2008 design? The less functional equivalent with 2017 design is better because it looks up to date

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There were also performance issues with HipChat, that Slack didn't have: messages went undelivered, load times unbearable etc. (at least in Sydney where we only just got speeds faster than broadband)

FWIW, I observed that 'conversational UI' and chatbots came from the western tech industry trying to 'learn' from the successes of Asian platforms like WeChat.

I observed chatbots in IRC probably before you were born.

I'm sure you did.

That's completely irrelevant though.

There's nothing new here but the packaging.

Yeah, no kidding. My last company was up in arms to replace HipChat with Slack even though they were 99% identical. There hasn't been a significant innovation in chat technology in like 30 years yet the business sector is more frothy than ever.

The core tech hasn't changed a ton, but slack is a good chat program for how people use computers in the modern age. If it encourages communication among your organization it's probably worth adopting, even at the higher price. I don't have numbers, but I was in an organization the switched and mobile use of slack was higher than hipchat.

Having extensively used both, Slack really is much better. Hipchat has a ton of reliability/usability issues and it’s clear _consumer-like_ product design is not Atlassian’s forte.

Also, HipChat circa 2016 was forced on my acquired company that had previously used slack. What a piece of shit that app is. HipChat just nuked the battery life on my stock nexus phone.

I had never before gotten in an argument about a chat app, but HipChat made me passionate about using anything else.

I use it at my work and it works reliably ok on the desktop, but yes I agree the mobile app (at least the iPhone one) is absolutely garbage.

That said from everyday desktop use it’s not bad. It’s nowhere near as unreliable for me as other posters are commenting about.

To be fair, Hipchat is missing a lot of features that Slack has.

That’s exactly the point, right? Slack turned up and offered more and HipChat didn’t respond in a meaningful way except to rewrite all their clients in JS. At that point they had a buggy client and fewer features, while Slack had an inefficient client with lots of features.

I was referring to the (weirdly opposed) example they mentioned with the better-looking-fewer-features.

Like what? 99% of usage is just chat rooms. I could hook in build notifications and post gifs. HipChat had voice and video years before Slack.

Hipchat is not very good at notifications and chat though.

3 years in, and still randomly missing messages for a while until it’s somewhat synched.

Whole ongoing conversations don’t appear on other devices if I don’t manually open them.

Getting notified on my phone while I’m on my laptop.

Lack of integrations is the most sailant thing to point st, but I think at its core Hipchap is also a very meh service.

Before I list everything: posting gifs is garbage. Things like giphy integration degrade the signal-to-noise ratio, and I rage against it in every chat app I use. Even in off-topic rooms it'll random make following a conversation annoying at best.

Anyway, hipchat's faults:

Search is garbage.

Editing a message is garbage.

Joining a room/messaging a specific person on mobile is annoying.

I'm not sure about how Slack handles it, but when a person leaves our company, our Hipchat chat history completely disappears. All those decisions we made with our old Product Manager via private message? Into the ether.

Want to delete a file you uploaded? Too bad. Maybe you can do it via the web interface?

Want to delete a message? Same deal.

We switched to Slack the day Hipchat went down for several hours.

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