Comment by nemothekid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nemothekid | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

If we want people to use principled technology, it has to be usable, full stop. As a developer, being able to say "I'm willing to sacrifice convenience, in the name of principle", is a privileged position - you know how to navigate software when it gets difficult - other people don't.

What I find a lot of people miss when comparing Slack to IRC, is that not everyone using Slack is a developer. The world doesn't consist solely of developers - and if your company is 30% of engineers, and the other 70% doesn't have the reserve to wrestle with XML, then your company is using Slack. Otherwise, you are simply choosing to sell out your friends and family in the name of "principle" as well.

Personally, I'm tired of the comparisons to IRC and XMPP. Both are garbage - time and time again its been show how difficult it is to create greate software on these protocols. Contrary to your final statement, there have been better open source applications - gitter and riot come to mind.

> What I find a lot of people miss when comparing Slack to IRC, is that not everyone using Slack is a developer.

I know plenty of non-technical people who chatted on IRC who were not developers. They just used the mIRC client on windows to do that. They also managed to configure their email and news clients to send and read email and browse usenet.

I simply don't understand where the idea of needing a technical background came from for using something like IRC.

> I know plenty of non-technical people who chatted on IRC who were not developers > I simply don't understand where the idea of needing a technical background came from for using something like IRC.

You don't have to be a developer but you do need a level of technical background higher than that of the average computer user. There are plenty of tech-savvy, non-developers who can get up and running with things like IRC. There are plenty more non-technical users who can't. Or at least wouldn't given the learning curve time commitment.

I'm the only person in my family who would be able to sign on to IRC in under an hour whereas they'd all be able to have slack up and running in a matter of minutes.

> You don't have to be a developer but you do need a level of technical background higher than that of the average computer user.

Unless the technical skill of the average computer user has decreased substantially in the last 10 to 15 years, that shouldn't really be the case.

It has. Everyone uses computers now for less technical tasks, and some pretty much only use their phone or tablet.

Time to learn something then.

Sure... they learned Slack.

Nothing to learn there.

That's correct. Because it's the FLOSS devs who need to learn to empathize with the ordinary user.

Disclaimer - A FLOSS dev here.

> Because it's the FLOSS devs who need to learn to empathize with the ordinary user.

If you were talking about using these protocols over a telnet session, then I would be more inclined to agree with that statement, but just installing an application, entering a server name and account credentials (the latter of which aren't needed for IRC), and connecting isn't any more difficult than creating an account on slack and connecting by entering the address in the browser.

Have you ever worked a support role for an application?

Regular users have amazing blind spots. Also you’re not giving slack enough credit for their smooth onboarding process.

> Regular users have amazing blind spots.

Of course, but I don't think that Slack has done a better job with this compared to previous solutions. In a lot of ways, it's worse given its performance issues. For example, I never experienced UI lag in a chat application until I used Slack (comparing it with UIs like a GUI IRC application, AIM, ICQ, MSN messenger, Yahoo messenger, Skype, etc). Second, auto-completion and search do not work like they do in previous chat applications (or other applications in general) due to infinite scroll and the default of doing a global search instead of just limiting it to the chat or group. Third, the fact that you're forced to join some channels because you were invited or can't leave a channel because you're the last one in it are other issues that come to mind.

Slack’s performance issues have nothing to do with the people using it’s abilities.

As much as it annoys me too, it appears that people actually using it have enough tolerance for it that it doesn’t matter.

I don’t think you realise how well you just made the case for using Slack instead of IRC or XMPP with that comment.

No. I expect a certain competence when using a computer. If this level of competence is not enough to even install a piece of software and configure the most basic settings, then this person should not own a PC, yet use one.

It's amazing that when it comes to computers, it is somehow acceptable to be dumb. It's acceptable to not learn new stuff. It's acceptable to not read in order to understand stuff. As can be read in the comments here.

Do you want to be ‘right’, or actually have users?

The whole ethos of startups and Silicon Valley has been around finding a market for your product. If people don’t want to use it then you can’t blame anyone but yourself.

Feel free to chat with yourself using an ideologically pure system... it’ll be lonely though.

I think this is to enable history and mobile, for example?

Granted, I have not used IRC for a while, but last time I checked, the story for getting message history was "start a irc client inside a screen session on a server you own". And there were no mobile at all.

(I remember writing a script which exported chat logs from my desktop client to text files available over HTTP... I'd then visit those pages from cell phone to see if I had any more messages. This is not the experience I would wish on anybody)

For history, it's either local logging or having an always on client you can connect to (like a bouncer), but most people I knew would just switch their client on, chat for a while, and then close it. They didn't really care much about history.

It was pretty much the same thing with newer chat services like ICQ, AIM, MSN messenger, etc. (though I think they started offering offline messages in later versions).

As for mobile, my older Nokia phone had a Symbian IRC/XMPP client that I could use without any issues.

> being able to say "I'm willing to sacrifice convenience, in the name of principle", is a privileged position - you know how to navigate software when it gets difficult - other people don't.

In the same breath though, saying, "I'm not willing to sacrifice convenience in the name of principle" is also a privileged position, because Iranians who live in the US/Canada are currently being banned. Convenience is something we can address in the future, but bans aren't.

The concerns people raise about Slack -- that until very recently it wasn't blind-friendly, that it takes away control of user data, that it can arbitrarily ban companies and users for any reason; none of those are theoretical deontological postering. They are entirely practical in the sense of, "there are people who are affected by this who can't join your community because you're not using a tool that's accessible to them."

I think that it's easier and preferable to teach my friends and family members to use open tools than it is to use something that blocks people of Iranian descent from participating in my community. Yes, that means my communities will be less accessible to tech-unsavy people. But that's a problem I can try to address in the future. I'm OK making their life harder for right now if it means not permanently banning people based on a random company's whims.

That is selling people out, in the sense that it's making a calculated decision about which people are most important to support right now. But if the Go community is using Slack, they're making the same exact same decisions to prioritize accessibility for some people. They're just choosing different people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com