Comment by tabbott | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tabbott | Hacker News Reader

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Because just about every technical team needs the ability to do some sort of real-time communication, and Slack's UI is obviously better polished than the products that predate it (HipChat/IRC/etc).

If you're looking for a product built by top MIT engineers who spent years thinking about how to make chat actually productive, check out Zulip. I'm one of those MIT engineers, and I agree that Slack is a huge waste of time, for precisely the reasons you describe (here's our attempt at explaining how Slack wastes your time: https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/, and how Zulip solves those problems; there's more on our homepage).

The fact that Slack is, in most organizations, either very low-traffic or a waste of time is why we don't market Zulip primarily as "open source Slack" -- it really is a different product, designed to be amazing for a large, distributed team doing a lot of communication, without things becoming overwhelming.

If you don't believe me, read this awesome cartoon by one of our users: https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/986444234365521920

(As another reason for Slack's success, I'll also add that a lot of "Slack clone" products are pretty buggy; everyone underestimates how much work a high-quality chat experience is. Check out https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/subsystems/markdown.h... and https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/subsystems/events-sys... if you want to learn about the complexity of a few of the more interesting challenges.)

Did you really have to mention your “MIT” education twice to convince us that you solved a relatively simple UI problem?

I don't think it is a simple problem. Much like TODOs, everybody has their opinion about how a chat app should behave. Zulip seems fine, but it's not that unique either, there is also Twist and I can imagine that many of the other competitors do too. Note that Slack has threads too but they are different, Google Chat also has threads but they are not named.

Someone finally gets it! This is exactly what I've seen as horrible as a Slack user. Zulip looks great!

I didn't get why everyone was getting hyped over a product without threads when they were the most useful part of Flowdock, so I'm glad you're trying to think about it further.

But the flat thread model is still limited, particularly for complicated topics even a thread starts having the same problem as a channel where there is too much going on; have you thought about tree-structured threads, or some way of branching threads when there is a bunch of discussion happening on different topics?

I haven't really used Slack much, but one of the other places with lots of space for improvement in Flowdock was search, and Slack does seem to be investing there significantly, and I hope Zulip is as well.

We've thought about a tree-based model, but our current thinking is that a feature of that form would add a lot of UI complexity, for fairly limited benefit. One of the key things we'd lose with a tree-based model is the ability for someone catching up on a conversation to efficiently read it without a lot of jumping around between different views (or having to read a tree, rather than a linear history).

With Zulip's existing model, you can always fork off a side discussion by just starting a new topic, if appropriate adding links in one or both directions (and people pretty naturally do that when it makes sense to). Some Zulip users are fans of a convention to name a topic "original_topic.d" for a "digression" off a topic, but I think it's a much better approach to choose a topic that more directly suggests what the forked conversation is about.

(And I agree search is really important! If you're having lots of high-value conversations in a tool, it needs to be easy to find them later. Zulip's powerful full-text search has been praised as a lot better than Slack's since our very first prototype version of it. I think a big part of the reason is that the threads provide the context to make it easy to find the rest of a conversation. But we're always working on making it better).

A Julia Evans cartoon is high praise indeed. Good for you!

wow, this looks really really really good

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