I'm still in shock that Slack is a public company with shareholders and officers rather than what it should be: an open source utility bundled free with every Linux distribution.
Edit: The Slack employees and shareholders are out in force today.
Edit: The Slack employees and shareholders are out in force today.
Rimshot
Because you can casually browse through AppAcademy's alumni projects and find loads of them.
The heavily down-voted OP was merely stating an opinion that the "building" part of this is easy and that this kind of tool _shouldn't need_ some kind of large enterprise around it.
But just as much as people think building stuff is easy, engineers often have the inverse logical fallacy that the entire business stems from them and that things like sales, support, legal and HR are irrelevant.
What's stopping someone from creating an open source utility bundled free with every Linux distribution?
Making your own coffee is so much cheaper, but having such coffee available whenever/wherever you want (via a giant coffee keg like Ben on Veep) is a yuge PITA.
Heck, why is Hacker News even a website? We should be posting on Usenet instead!
;-)
Yes, I still use mutt and even rtin, but really appreciate that something like Mail.app is a viable alternative to Outlook or (shudder) webmail for work.
While I still think we'd all be better off if NNTP integration were more widespread, I understand that we're stuck in a local minima, and to some degree I understand why (in as much as we can understand any social structures).
It's frustrating, however, when people complain about Facebook or Twitter (or HN) when the only reason people feel powerless is because these platforms are predicated on being walled gardens. Interoperability and standards are almost by definition the only long-term solutions, whether it be control over data or (as the case in HN) simply the ability to control the UI and UX. So when people, particularly software developers, discount the value of interoperability and standards I can't really take their complaints seriously. And I don't. Their preferences lay bare.
And in many cases it's clear that what they value most about platforms like Facebook or Slack is directly or indirectly a function of these platforms being walled gardens, so generally speaking I vehemently disagree with all the anti-trust and regulatory rhetoric. It's misplaced, counter-productive, and even unjust.
Why did IRC lose? For one thing, it wasn't even federated, not like XMPP or (now) Matrix or even classic BSD ntalk. The bigger reason is abuse. Spammers and trolls have ruined everything. Walled gardens are castles that provide protection and consistency. If we want ecosystems to thrive outside the confines of castles society needs to crack down hard on abusers. Why is property theft punished so much more harshly than white-collar crime? White-collar criminals are like leeches, but unchecked property crimes are an existential threat. Spammers, etc have proven an existential threat, and while there are technological solutions they're generally more expensive than simply retreating to castles, even though in the aggregate we're all worse off for the centralization and walls.
Slack put lipstick on that pig and slapped a pricetag on it.