Comment by erikb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by erikb | Hacker News Reader

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> IMHO, if you want people to use anything else but slack, sticking your head in the sand and screaming "you can do all of that in IRC" won't get you anywhere and is equivalent to complaining about the very nature of humanity. It might feel good to scream out your weltschmerz, but it won't change anything.

This is not what the article says. The article says clearly that everyone knows we want these fancy UIs in open chat apps. But the problem is funding. You need to pay 10+ developers, each costing between $100k and $200k (50-100 without tax) for 1-3 years to get such a nifty UI and after that you still need 1-3 devs each year to keep up with all the changes in the IT world. Someone needs to PAY that to get such a nifty UI.

The article also argues correctly that you are currently paying for it by giving away your data which is worth a lot more than a few 100k USD/year. And all you get is a more nifty UI. Wow.

And instead of understanding that you are exploited you complain about how stupid the people are that fight for protection of your values. That is REALLY stupid. The same level a child complaining about needing to go to bed early than the parents while the loud and colorful ads try to keep the child in front of the TV until 2 am or longer.

Start acting like a grown up.

Calling it just a "nifty UI" really, really downplays the advancements and ease of use added to it. To the point where the jab at Slack is just childish.

You could have done without that last sentence.

True, was a little over the top. Thanks for the feedback.

The author can start acting like a grown up by making enough money to fund the development or shut up. If he knew users are already paying for Slack, then obviously he can do what grown ups like Slack did to get paid users as well.

why would [enough people] pay for slack if they didn't need information in a silo?

While I haven't checked for proof I wouldn't be surprised if the author is in fact spending a lot of his time not just blogging and informing about the situation, but also working on improving things.

I challenge you to do it better. Ah, screw that. I don't think you can, the way you talk. I challenge you to do something much simper: Read an RFC and try to provide interview style non-compiling code to implement it, then write a single blog post explaining what you did, applying a correct and reasonable free license to your source code and your blog post. That's something an untalented hobby programmer can do if he puts his mind to it.

I'm sure he is working on improving it. It's all in his article.

Still, he is stil "working on it". While Slack has already "delivered".

It is childish to say that whatever feature Slack has is "simply" something that can "just" be added to XMPP.

To me, the author's complaint of how Slack rips users of is the same as customer who complains when it takes month to "just" add a feature.

He himself hasn't even done it. He planned to do it, anybody can plan to do things. Anyone can be working on something that will change the world. Only few delivers. He complain about funding, while he is adding feature that he claimed was "simple".

Why does simple feature needs funding? And if Slack is ripping people of on feature that can simply be added on XMPP, then put your house on loan, create better XMPP client and earns millions of dollars. You don't need funding. That's what being adult is.

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