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Comment by typon | Hacker News Reader

Oh c'mon. Slack absolutely destroys IRC in terms of usability. And that's what ends up counting in the end.

Slack is barely useable, and I use it every day. Grief includes:

- Huge, rigid, unskinnable UI. - Difficult, multi-step access to configurations and settings. - No OS integration therefore no desktop automation.

I probably should have stuck with Hipchat, but I jumped on the Slack bandwagon along with everyone else.

What skinning features would you like to see in Slack? You can at least set color schemes to help visually distinguish workspaces.

One of my grievances was the missing ability to remove or at least drastically shrink most parts of the UI. When I set the window to the desired size, the actual area where peoples messages appeared was ridiculously small. One would think that's not how you treat the most important part of your UI.

Which usability features are they? The 3 GB of RAM usage, the battery-draining, or the culture of “always-on” availability and interruptions?

Your failure to set your coworker's expectations for your availability or the failures of organizational culture being projected onto the messaging tool are not the fault of the messaging tool.

This ignores the fact that if you don’t respond to people contacting you you’ll get fired. As a salary you have no voice.

The market simply optimizes for whatever is easiest for a ceo to install and maintain.

How is this Slack's fault, again? Or is the argument that messaging systems should be hard to install so they aren't misused?

Seriously, what even is this comment chain getting at? If you work somewhere where always-on is a hard requirement, it doesn't matter what messaging system is used. Any place that would fire you for muting notifications would just as easily fire you for turning off email notifications.

In short: Let's stop blaming the damn tool for something that is the fault of the humans using it.

I’m blaming both: I’m blaming the humans who expect it, and the billion-dollar blob of JavaScript that enables it to be so.

Probably because Slack makes it easier to establish an "always-on" culture.

Literally any other instant messaging program would have the same effect if the culture is toxic enough to allow it.

Slack is no different other than name recognition and size.

Other instant messenger are primarly (yes, some companies probably use Whatsapp and co for work stuff) for family and friends. "always-on" is different here.

Slack is focused on business.

I hate Slack too but the same could have been said for Skype, MSN Messenger, ICQ, or AIM...

In countries that have actual work laws that wouldn't happen so easily.

Not only do we shape our tools, but our tools also absolutely shape us.

Your corporate culture shapes use of the tool a lot more than the design of the tool, especially when that tool's essential components are identical across the entire set of competitors.

Slack doesn't have some voodoo set of features that make it more problematic than Hipchat or Teams or Stride or Mattermost or (nn programs elided).

If your org sucks, your communication within that org will suck too. Let's not burn down the concept of instant messaging in the name of sucky orgs.

If you count the official program, then no. That Electron based garbage is unusable. I use Slack with the IRC gateway.

which has its share of problems, just from the top of my head:

- you will miss edits

- in some cases when people sign up with their email addresses, you now have "info" and "mail" as nicknames, because they signed up with info@example.org and only the slack client shows "joe".

- everytime someone pastes a snippet, you'll have to open it in a browser anyway (ok, minor issue)

Nope. Maybe for moneypigs but not for the people. Centralization and a proprietary protocol make Slack et al a net loss.

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