Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation
npr.org
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Their product-vision was clear, their execution focused on what mattered... and they didn't need to bend or break laws to succeed.
It's easily my favorite unicorn of the past decade.
Choose your customers.
I wrote a simple exporter using Slack api. It archives Slack from position of user, almost everything (like attachments).
But I'm not publishing it on GitHub because I don't want more people to use it, and don't want Slack to block mass api calls, and don't want slacks admins to know I written it and use it.
If you're using it personally, the limits on message counts are made quite clear. Exceeding them makes export difficult or impossible without paying. So don't exceed them.
A huge chunk of Slack's value prop (after decent UX) is exactly the fact that they have all of your communications. No chat admins, servers to manage and back up, or networking hell to orchestrate non-text content sharing in a multiparty way. Also makes corporate folks who pay for it happy as they have pretty good auditability/retention controls--not perfect, of course, but better than a truly p2p/federated solution, and again: no infrastructure management needed.
You don't have to be happy with it, but those are features, not bugs, and are valuable to many.
You also just, y'know, don't have to use Slack. Nobody is putting a gun to your head. If the hill you want to die on is "I won't work for any company/team that uses this chat platform", well, that's your choice (hell, there's not even an argument to be made about ubiquity making it a false choice; Slack has plenty of competitors, both paid/hosted and FOSS/federated, in active use by big companies). But don't pretend that a lack of local history or easy export is some sort of highway robbery or hostage situation.
Are you just trying to be infuriating?
What are you talking about then? All of my communications are either personal or employment related, almost by definition.
I mean they are already giving you the oppportunity to use a limited version for free, you can't expect them to give you one of the most useful features imho when you are just using their resources and infrastructure in exchange for nothing; it doesn't make any business sense.
If I'm a non-paying user of Slack (or whatever other SaaS with a free tier) I am not entitled to anything whatsoever, I'd be grateful for the fact that they allow me partial functionality at all.
Personally, I would just call that normal / decent behaviour. Alone, it doesn't mean you deserve a ridiculous billion dollar evaluation
"Well deserved" describes the outcome.
So you might say the outcome is well deserved only if decent behavior comprised the process.
As others have said, this 'Standard Export' doesn't include direct messages and private channels, so there's still some amount of 'hostage taking'
I agree. There is no law against half-assed, bloated Electron based desktop software that can bring even recent hardware to its knees.
There are plenty of lightweight clients that use the Slack API. I don't see why people complain so hard that the official client is heavy.
Weechat with Slack is a dream feels like the good-ole IRC days.
I'm not a fan of how much RAM or CPU it uses. I tried the desktop app hoping it would be better, but it seems like it's perhaps worse (I use Firefox, so
Because on Android at least the website detects that you're on a mobile device and switches to read-only mode. Correct, you can't even post a reply without fudging user-agent or installing the app.
Ended deleting the desktop client.
Office/company slack, project A slack, project B slack, ... and in no time slack starts to use more RAM than docker/VMs I am developing on.
As I do every day.
Every single day.
For the one single channel I join. with no PMs and no threads, no file transfers, no voice or video anything.
Maybe I wouldn't mind so much if it was astonishingly good. But it isn't. It isn't even basically competent, it's terrible. Terrible at scrolling back, terrible at editing previous lines, appalling at completing names properly, bad at search, and completely lacking at customizing when it displays 2MB animated gifs inline.
I would expect a 4Gb machine would mean I never have to check on a text chat client. Apparently not.
They didn't even run ads for the first three years of their existence.
What's more worrying is that we are rapidly moving away from an Internet based on open standards and into walled gardens.
This is made evident by countless technology firms and other industries.
Slack and other tools are solving a problem customers have and they should be compensated for it, especially given much of their users are profit oriented enterprises.
...while creating others: fragmentation and lock-in
I work for a telco. My assumption is that the profit margin for connectivity will first converge on zero and then it will drop below zero. There's so much value in the services above connectivity that connectivity won't need to be profitable.
Of course, nobody in my industry will want to talk about that, or even admit this is a real possibility, because it implies that connectivity will most likely be owned by those who make money on services on top.
If we think net neutrality is important today, we ain't seen nothing yet. And given how hard we have had to fight in the past to just about maintain some form of parity, I'm not extremely optimistic about the future.
Found the bug.
> there will always be much greater incentive to create a new and successful walled garden than to share and contribute to open standards
It's really a shame that most customers never learn and they keep accepting closed source/protocols.
While the world economy is quickly moving into endless vertical monopolies, history has shown that governments can sometimes wake up and restore competition.
Perhaps in 50 years using open standards will be encouraged e.g. by providing a tax discount
I don’t care. I just want my tool to solve my problem so I can focus on creating business value at my job. I am sure we could all make our own hammers, but time spent making hammers is time lost from using them.
I use a Mac. I'm part of the problem for having handed my money to an abusive, fraudulent company that is now squeezing all its users for more money for increasingly lower quality products. It used to be easy to buy into Apple's walled garden. But now choice of convenience over freedom is starting to cost me real money and that money buys less each year.
My Dad _just_ upgraded from an iPhone 5. Do you think his Xs won’t last as long?
I agree the laptop situation is a bit shitty. I hate the USB-C everything on my work laptop. Everything works fine on my personal computer but as soon as I plug my usb hub into a usb c adaptor everything stutters.
Love their privacy stance though. Best in the business for sure.
Also, what’s abusive? And what’s fraudulent?
Apparently their new monitors are very well priced. And building the same machine you’d get in a MacBookPro or different model ends up being more expensive or similarly priced.
I could be wrong, and I am, certainly, an Apple fan, but I will criticize when I think it’s appropriate and don’t hold views concretely.
I'm mostly talking about their laptops and their iMacs. The USB C connectors are of course inconvenient, but I actually like them. Again, the problem is that in their pursuit of thinness they ended up designing keys that are very sensitive to dust (and not very nice to use). In subsequent models they kept at it, so the quality of keyboards doesn't seem to be a priority. Some laptops have a tendency to develop display problems due to bad design. For instance blowing hot air on parts that can't take hot air or laying out connectors so that they will fail more easily.
Now these are design flaws, which brings us to the "abusive and fraudulent" part. If you want to get these things fixed under warranty you _may_ be okay. Except the process appears to be entirely decided by chance. For instance they have put moisture indicators inside the macbooks that not only react to liquid damage, but which turn from white to red (indicating moisture) over time depending on the humidity in the air where you use it. (Most people don't know how these things work, so they'll accept it). So they'll accuse you of having spilled liquid in your laptop and refuse to fix it even when this is not the case. Accusing their customers of lying isn't a very good way to behave.
In many cases they will also claim that your laptop is in need to expensive component replacements. Either because they claim that the component cannot be repaired or when their service technicians fail to correctly diagnose the equipment. The repair costs quoted are supposed to make you buy a new computer rather than fix the one you have.
On top of that they have the gall to claim that independent repair shops are somehow less qualified than Apple. Which naturally rings true in the ears of most people; they designed it so they should be the best to fix it, right? However, this doesn't seem to be generally true. Especially since Apple and their authorized resellers appear to have very limited diagnostic and repair capability and the qualifications vary.
When you do send in an Apple device, you have to be aware of the fact that it isn't Apple that repairs your equipment - it is a subcontractor. And they are not always the best.
Wich brings us to the bullying. Apple do their best to kill the independent repair market any way they can. Often by filing lawsuits against repair shops and then putting them out of business. When confronted with this they us their go-to excuses. Like protecting the consumer from unqualified repair shops.
They do this by denying independent repair shops access to the supply line - meaning they work hard to make it difficult to obtain spare parts and components. Compare this to, for instance, Samsung, which sell parts online to make it easy for repair shops to get the needed parts. In order to get parts for Apple products there is an entire market for broken laptops that are bought and sold to repair shops in order to provide donor boards for components.
Of course, then there is the fact that they seem to deliberately make things harder to repair or upgrade. For instance batteries that are glued in unnecessarily, increasing the chance of destruction if you try to replace them. Or soldering in components that the user may want to upgrade later (like RAM and SSDs). For instance on my mac mini the SSD is soldered in, but fortunately the RAM is socketed.
I became aware of the systematic nature of this about a year ago when starting to watch videos to learn how to solder surface mount components (I do a bit of electronics). I stumbled over people who repaired Macs for a living. I didn't come there for the rants, but when starting to research the issue a bit and speaking to a couple of people who also do this for a living, it became obvious to me how terribly Apple are behaving.
Two things struck me 1) diagnosing and fixing macs isn't rocket science. People are able to even as Apple tries to starve them for information. 2) most people don't know how electronics are fixed so of course Apple will get away with claiming they are protecting their users by not allowing independent repair shops to repair their stuff. Diagnosing and replacing broken components and cleaning up fouled circuit boards is not all that hard. Sure, you need the equipment, ability to read schematics and some ability to diagnose electronics, but there are people who do that for a living.
And you really do want to be able to pick your computer repair people just like you pick repair shops for your car. I use a mechanic I know and trust for my car - a guy who walks me through everything he does with my car and even shows me what he has done, and what he thinks should be done. I never use the brand workshop simply because those guys only follow procedures (which aren't always correct), I have no idea who works on my car and I have no insight into what is actually done or if the car is actually fixed or serviced correctly. If anything, my computer is even more important to me so of course I don't want some semi-qualified, random clown subcontractor of Apple, far away, to work on my computers.
The upshot of all this is that I feel very uncomfortable as a Mac user. Whenever I buy a Mac I am taking a huge risk. If something breaks I may not be able to fix it and the only option available to me might be to buy an entirely new machine. Even when the fault is due to a cheap component that takes 10-15 minutes to replace. Simply because Apple actively work to withhold spare parts from the market.
This is even more true if you buy one of their expensive models. The new Mac Pro may look nice, both in terms of specs, price and looks, but if it breaks, you have no way of knowing if you are going to lose your investment. Your machine may become completely worthless as a result of a trivial, cheap component breaking.
If I trusted Apple as a hardware vendor I would probably have upgraded my laptop to a newer model and I would probably have bought an iMac Pro rather than a Mac mini. But since I can't trust them I'm looking at starting to move away from Apple. My next laptop probably isn't going to be an Apple and my next desktop computer is probably not going to be an Apple since I need more power with less risk.
I'm really not fond of the idea of running Linux and having to depend on vmware to run Windows for a lot of the desktop stuff, but this may be the only viable route if Apple doesn't get their act together.
Enough text. Here are some videos.
Some reporting on Apple's fraudulent practices: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2_SZ4tfLns
Example of repair: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDjwYf_GzK0
Hate slack? Try mIRC. Oh wait what's a "netsplit"? What do you mean I can't paste pictures or code snippets without going to a 3rd party service?
Hate Jira? Try Bugzilla/Trac or a multitude of other bug trackers.
"Oh the design sucks" really? Have you tried writing a Win32 app and make it look nice? Ok, try it with Qt (old Qt). Cool huh?
* Netsplits would not be an issue, since most small to medium companies would use only one server. Even when they did happen to me in the past, the servers reconnected quite fast. I imagine a big corporation would be able to handle this rare failure case properly.
* DCC allows one to send files and since it's a direct connection, there is no 3rd party company in the US that's inserting itself in the conversation.
Jira is actually quite ok, I don't know why you're besmirching its name by comparing it to a bloated chat client.
since it's a direct connection it will never work in our modern nat'd/firewalled world, even between company branches (unless you have the whole company in the same VPN - but yeah don't do that)
Yes Jira is ok, it's just the target of (some) unfair hate like slack
I'm more a Unix person that a network person so it's possible I'm missing something, but I'm not sure what it is. Thanks for replying.
(and I think from the above description of my typical computer use at the time, it's quite obvious what I was doing, and how that would have given me plenty of opportunities to run into all sorts of (compatibility) issues)
In theory there must be some scheme for forwarding the port through a firewall on the sender side, which might be setting the sending device as "DMZ". Or you can put the burden on the receiver by using active mode.
mIRC should really support UPnP by now but I don't think it does?
It takes a lot of heat because it is very customisable and get locked down in large corporation.
I worked in company that ran an old shitty very version on underpowered server and disabled feature like rich text editing but force you through a 5 page wizard with in total tens of mandatory field to fill for any jira ticket. People at that company used an excel file on a shared drive to escape the jira hell.
Also there is the crowd of Agile purist that complain that Jira is too bloated for agile and ignoring the extra feature is not good enough because mostly "trust issues".
More recently there are stuff like plandek that create metric on your jira usage. In the wrong hands, this is modern day LOC metric.
Herding exists, but at some point I suspect the fact that more working business use the one rather than the other would have some meaning.
That being said, the good thing about mIRC / Bugzilla is that no-one prevents you from using them for your business, so go for it !
People who complain about these products probably aren't in the position to use something else, or they probably would have switched already.
I use IRC all the time, and IRCCloud makes it comparable to Slack.
I'd go with Github simplistic issues all the time instead of wresting with Jira. YouTrack from JetBrains is a reasonable compromise. Redmine is also ok.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Confluence is OKish. But Jira is absurdly bad. I'm talking about the UI for creating Issues and Epics etc. The front-end devs that wrote it simply didn't have the ability. The parser for entering markup such as preformatted code blocks just doesn't work a lot of the time. The newer "Visual mode" just doesn't work a lot of the time. It simply needs to switch over to markdown and use a 3rd-party parser and renderer. The Visual Mode preview doesn't render using a fixed-width font. have you ever clicked on the little "Link" symbol in the top right of the text entry box? Obviously that should copy the current URL to the system clipboard. But they didn't know how to look that up on StackOverflow and instead made it a normal link to the current page (so you reload the page accidentally), with the link title saying
> title="Right click and copy link for a permanent link to this comment."
! You enter `bq.` to quote a line of text. This is all just some crap that someone with no design sense or standards came up with after 10 seconds thought.
I'm talking specifically about the quality of the UI. It is far, far, below the quality of UIs put out by respected modern products.
As and end user, you may not (and probably should not) care about the historical context of its design decisions. But it's hardly the case that they hired a bunch of inept engineers. They've simply placed a large premium on backward compatibility and are still around today in large part because of that. Having said that, they really should find a way to support both Textile and Markdown if for no other reason than Bitbucket uses Markdown and it's confusing as hell having to switch between the two syntaxes if your company uses both products.
[0] -- https://textile-lang.com/
bq. commitment to not breaking backward compatibility
Backward compatibility with what? People's brains? We're talking about markup language and rendering right, which is not an API consumed by machines.
bq. it's hardly the case that they hired a bunch of inept engineers.
So why is the new "Visual Mode" WYSIWYG text entry mode so terrible? And why that absurd "link" icon in the top right of the text entry widget?
As for the link issue, I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to. I have an icon that looks like the Android "share" icon and that drops down a dialog with a link to the current page and a target user field. The link icon in the text entry field just adds a textile formatted link. I'm probably just overlooking something, but I'm not seeing what you described. And I never use the visual editor, so I can't speak to its quality.
I should note that I don't work for Atlassian and never have, so I don't have a horse in this race. But I have been using Jira since maybe 2004 due to its early adoption by the Apache Software Foundation. Jira is hardly perfect, but it's the least bad issue tracker I've used. At some level, I'm sure it's just a matter of preference. E.g., I know plenty of people that laud the GitHub issue tracker and I don't get it. It works well enough for small projects, but is too limiting for any project of non-trivial size, IMHO. I also find more than 2 or 3 labels in the issue list to just be a distracting sea of colors.
I hope you're able to find something that works well for you. I'll add that if you're using an on-premise version of Jira in your company, there's a high likelihood that you're running a dated release. I've found that some of the more aggravating issues people run into have actually been fixed, but not deployed in their environment. If you can find access to a running instance of the latest version, you might find it to be a more less frustrating experience.
Jira can work well or it can work very poorly. It really depends on what you're trying to do with it and what resources you're willing to pour into it. That's why some people love it while others hate it.
In all that time, the only thing I've really heard people complain about, was when it was slow or down.
You need to explain a claim like that.
On the face of it, the Slack UI works beautifully in Browser, Desktop and iOS clients. I'd quite like it to have code syntax highlighting. But really, what are you talking about?
It's not accessible. This alone destroys "beautifully".
But even beyond that, it's just not a good citizen or experience wherever it is. It's deeply single-paned and hence single-tasked: you can't open a conversation in a tab or separate window. And switching between conversations/threads/groups on any platform is much harder than it needs to be. Their quick-switcher is a quasi CLI bandage over this that increases cognitive load on the user.
The enterprise multi-slack experience is even more horrible as it expands that problem across multiple quasi-discrete instances.
On iOS it does unnatural things with text so you can't select portions to copy and paste.
On desktop it is so much of a resource hog it's our generation's version of Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping.
And this isn't intrinsic: none of this stuff was an issue when you could use IRC clients to access it. But they turned those off.
Firstly, lack of accessibility is lack of accessibility. Beauty is a distinct concept. Your comment reminds me of the sign on the Berkeley/Oakland border that reads "Animal rights are human rights". Both are highly desirable, but that does not make them synonymous or coextensive.
OK, It's never occurred to me that I wanted a conversation in a different window.
You use ⌘-k to switch channels. Partially drafted messages are retained. I think I prefer that to a mess of windows that I'd have to manage though of course I don't mean to impose my preference on you.
I have the desktop client open and it's using about 800MB memory between the main process and 3 helper processes. I agree it's a lot, but it seems 100% standard for modern applications. Everything seems to be built around the assumption that people have a $2000 laptop like rich westerners might. So I don't agree with it but I wouldn't single out Slack for criticism beyond any other modern consumer tech company.
I had people at my last job who had to quit Slack because of how hot it was making their laptops, and how much memory it was using.
At my current job, Slack is definitely one of my most rate limiting applications for how quickly I can get things done. Scrolling in chat, searching, switching channels- these are all actions that are extremely slow, and sometimes seem like they don’t work at all.
It's the same thing with the Swarm review CI tool. If you diff a big enought file, but still quite small for a conputer, it get slow or crashes.
Also the same thing with MS Teams. The prior conversion are not loaded at startup and if you scroll it shows place holders instead of the text for some seconds.
Price/sales = 42, bubble stock ...
And this is before we get into the fact that it devours RAM and uses more CPU than is reasonable, making it somewhat pathetic if you think of programming as a craft.
Other electron based apps like Discord perform better so I'm not sure why Slack is so crappy.
If governments weren't so concerned with party politics, infighting and staving off populist surges, we'd probably have a proper definition for a "gig economy" worker by now. A definition that would allow them to keep the flexibility that they appreciate so much, whilst still having proper worker protections for sick pay, holidays and all the rest.
They didn't start as a company for the sole purpose of exploiting legal grey areas, but they certainly have consistently done so since their inception.
>>> We had 575 Paid Customers >$100,000 of ARR as of January 31, 2019, which accounted for approximately 40% of our revenue in fiscal year 2019.
If my math is right, 40% of their revenue is concentrated in <1% of their paid customers. Is this normal in the corporate SaaS market ? I can only think of this as a huge risk.
I also saw that this is a direct listing and not an IPO. Again, I can only see this as a risk, basically because no underwriter will push the stock to investors. Is this so ?
Speaking from my experience of 6 months at a SaaS company this is about the norm.
Besides the usual 80/20 rule it gets more skewed at the top. And so even the product development was optimised to keep the top 1% happy. A ton of custom built features with hundreds of feature flags..
With Slack, if you have a few integrations setup or a bot or 2 configured, it's hard to move. Also the alternatives are terrible.
They don't need the cash but want to make it easier for stockholders to sell. Now also seems to be the time for tech IPO.
https://penguindreams.org/blog/tech-culture-shock-from-ameri...
A direct listing is an IPO. Underwriter's are not a requirement, as Spotify profitably demonstrated.
They've raised a _lot_ privately, and some of those rounds IIRC were described as just "opportunistic" by the founder - i.e., raise money while it's cheap. Also given that they have a VC arm it sounds like they have more capital than they can actually deploy in their core business.
All the integrations, and workflows that Slack has enabled for our company make us more productive.
I would hate to go back to what came before it.
IRC is complete trash and I don't know why anyone would use it in the same sentence as Slack. UX matters. It matters A LOT.
IRC has probably 95% of the features slack has, is completely free and has been around since 1988. Seems like a logical comparison to make.
And we are comparing a service provider/client/protocol to something that is simply a protocol which is a bit apples to oranges.
Assuming the same kind of provider exists in your company (IRC+BNC+searchable logging) and you standardised on something like weechat, then perhaps a comparison could be made.
Slack Pros:
- Voice/Video chat
- slackbot "remind" notifications
- Number of highly polished integrations
- Rich integrations (button prompts etc)
- Webhooks for bot integrations instead of needing to subscribe to RTM
- User tags ("out of office" markers, "in meeting" markers)
IRC Pros:
- Your data doesn't have to leave your site
- You can force connections to be on your intra-net
- Simple, well understood protocol
- Which is open, and not going away
- More potential to integrate authentication with your normal authentication provider.
- Rich moderation story
- Flexibility of client, even if we take weechat as the standard it's still possible to run another.
Is this fair? Maybe we should weight how much they're worth.
But for sure if IRC had the investment slack had then it wouldn't be "trash", there's work to bring it into 2019 too[0]
[0]: https://ircv3.net
One massive one being keeping history. Another is not being limited to text only, something people absolutely expect in this day and age.
UX isn't just graphical design, it's also feeling responsive, fast, and accessible. Something that Slack, in my opinion, gets horribly wrong.
Honestly, I can't find fault with it. It's such a basic and uncomplicated piece of software, I'm not sure how they could get anything wrong.
A lot of discussion from this post from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20227115
Slack is certainly no email replacement, and nor will I ever use it for such but in my experience and for the purposes I use it for, it is far, far more featured than IRC, unless you're using some uber IRC client that I'm unaware of.
I'm genuinely trying to understand out how anyone would think IRC is better than Slack and I speak as someone who used IRC from the early 90s up until only a few years ago when the communities I'm part of upped sticks and moved over to Slack.
However, for me personally, a major attraction of IRC is that I can easily use it from within Emacs, and automatically have the same Emacs key bindings available that I also use for navigating and editing files.
With IRC, I can therefore quickly copy and paste text between chats and programs, search the history etc., all in the existing Emacs session, using the same key bindings, with direct access to built-in features such as autocompletion, dynamic abbreviation and spell checking, and — importantly! — without switching applications.
We all have our own ways of doing things and I personally prefer to have applications run independently so I like my Slack client and my IDE and terminal etc. etc. separate.
I've always found if one tool can do it all, it's generally a worse experience than dedicated software applications and doing a Cmd-TAB (I'm on a Mac) is just as simple as switching to another window in a single application
Personally: responsiveness. Slack's native app on linux is slow. Switching channels has a noticeable delay, switching Workspaces takes seconds if you haven't used the workspace for a while. Starting the program takes ~8s on my machine (three workspaces, i7 with SSDs and 32G RAM).
For most IRC clients or Telegram, startup times are about as fast as Slack changes a channel, and there are no noticable delays when switching channels/IMs etc.
On both, it takes seconds to boot, and that's just to load the local cache. Syncing with the main server takes a few more seconds.
It has some good UI patterns. But overall, it's heavy and slow. It takes longer to load than the previous chat clients I used.
The nice thing about IRC is that everyone can use whatever client they like and it will just work. I preferred command-line UX (irssi) because most of my job is based around the terminal, others prefer desktop clients, while others prefer web clients, and all were available for our IRC server.
Our problem was that management wanted everyone on the same thing, and neither side (IRC vs Google chat) wanted to switch (they liked integration with web Gmail, we liked extensibility, and had already built useful plugins, like "run a build"). In the end, they didn't like our "less professional" plugins (Chuck Norris facts, gifs, etc), and we ended up compromising on Slack (we rebuilt some of our custom integrations).
We went through a year or so of adjustment, and now we're reasonably productive with it. However, morale is a bit lower, and I think we're a bit less productive than before, but that's really hard to judge. Honestly, I just wish there was some nicer looking IRC client. I don't like trusting Slack and would prefer the tried and true protocol that we can tweak and just pay for a flashier client for those who like such things. However, it's better than the previous situation where teams just didn't communicate in text because they couldn't agree on a medium, which led to more interruptions than the annoying Slack notifications (non developers tend to always @ the tech lead instead of letting it be answered by whomever happens to be looking at the channel).
I think it's wrong to blame IRC here. The UX of IRC is fine, it just doesn't have a flashy client (pidgin is really easy to use and available everywhere, but it's kind of ugly).
I can search my logs easily https://i.imgur.com/nTpoYs0.png (soon with even better integration, the prototype is a separate web app), and I can just open the web client or app on any device on this planet and instantly have all my logs and channels, and just chat: https://i.k8r.eu/54BPMQ.png
Of course, I use self-hosted quassel and quasseldroid.
Many other projects such as weechat and IRCCloud are also working on making IRC better than slack at everything it does — IRCCloud has a web client, mobile client, hosted team servers, a slack bridge, reactions, threads, emoji, attachments, and all you'd want from slack, natively.
Other projects such as IRC.com are also working on bringing the feq advantages Slack has back to IRC to make it more attractive.
The one single real advantage of Slack is marketing. They can call companies and spend a lot on money on getting more customers, due to the VC funding.
Respectfully, NO.
Providing a very useful turnkey set of features out of the box that are technically possible but fiddly and hard to use in IRC is in and of itself a huge advantage. This is why they're successful. This is why people use it. This is why people use it who barely know what a command line IS.
IRCCloud can even connect to Slack workspaces.
The only advantage Slack has over IRCCloud is marketing.
It's relatively ironic that I have to end up praising IRCCloud here, considering I'm contributing to a competing IRC client.
That makes it much closer to the open ideal than Slack is.
That sounds exactly like the infamous first comments on the HN Dropbox post. I'd rather pay someone to use their app than go through the pain of self-hosting and administering yet another service.
Quassel on the other hand is to Slack what Seafile or NextCloud are to Dropbox — definitely not as comfortable, as you need some knowledge to self host it, but it's easily doable for everyone on this site, and once it's set up, it's just as comfortable.
Of course, if one wants to use a hosted service, there are solutions like that — IRCCloud is pretty much identical to Slack, except based on IRC, and in addition to paid team workspaces, you can also connect to any IRC network and use the same features there.
So, you see, while it has some hints of the same attitude as the original post — and definitely, neither of these products is as polished as Slack, after all we can't make 380k$ losses a day, while Slack can — they fulfil pretty much the same purpose with pretty much the same ease of use
And of course work on single-click deployments and hosted services for more such products has already started
And that's where you lost sight of the big picture. Slack is _not_ for people on this site it's specifically for people out there: people who don't know and don't need to know what a protocol is, who don't care about netsplits, who couldn't be bothered to install some random stupid stuff on their machine and spend an afternoon configuring it just to be able to talk to their co-worker. We're not the target here. And yet it has convinced some of us because it ticks so many boxes by default.
And the only company out there that was able to stitch together more or less usable UX for a group messenger is Slack. IRC has no such killer app (sorry IRC fans!..)
What's wrong with the UX of IRC?
* Poor abuse tools, e.g. accidentally IP-banning web IRC gateways.
* No searchable history
* No scrollback / visibility of messages that arrived while you were offline
* No support for uploading images or files.
* No sharing of a single identity / session across multiple clients (e.g. phone+pc+laptop)
As a veteran IRC user I know you can mitigate these problems by getting a shell account on an always-on unix server and running Irssi in Screen over SSH with logging, automated NickServ login, a bot to provide !seen and !tell, sharing images via Imgur, sharing files by uploading them to my personal website, and so on.
Slack has simply looked at the big collection of bodges I just described and made them native features. And you don't even need to know to use Ctrl+Alt+2 to change between channels like you do with ssh+screen+irssi.
One sentence later:
> ...we scrapped it because only our software developer used it and other people in the company preferred something else (they used a mix of email, Google chat/hangouts, and text).
Clearly something was wrong with the UX if only one person was willing to use it?
This place is a parody of itself sometimes.
I realize I'm feeling (objectively?) "defensive" as an everyday professional IRC user for the last 10-ish years. That said, having tried many of the recent obese chat tools (which do have some nice properties), I still maintain the stance that IRC's clutter-free nature brings a certain tranquility and clarity.
Sure, IRC absolutely has its problems. However, as noted elsewhere[1], despite its flaws, IRC's strengths still shine with great luminence, when it comes to plain text-based communication.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20119407
- - -
It reminds of something I recently read in an essay called Coon Tree (written in 1956) by the inimitable E.B. White:
"Many of the commonest assumptions, it seems to me, are arbitrary ones: that the new is better than the old, the untried superior to the tried, the complex more advantageous than the simple, the fast quicker than the slow, the big greater than the small, and the world is remodeled by Man the Architect functionally sounder and more agreeable than the world as it was before he changed everything to suit his vogues and his conniptions."
I didn't quote the surrounding context (which itself is quite enjoyable) for brevity. But do read the full essay if you can.
</digression>
We'll talk about it 10 years from now when Slack is gonna be "old cruft" while IRC still gonna be there rocking.
debatable. It is just a chat app after all. Don't get me wrong, it is alright, but I am not sure I would ever call a chatapp "great"
> The valuation makes sense
16billion? To me it doesn't. It is just a chat app. People and businesses can move off it when the next chat app comes along with a new UI
To me, that sounds exactly like someone defending AppleTalk, AOL, ICQ, or Minitel. Focus on usability, not interoperability. That's what people want, right?
When it comes to communications, what matters even more than user experience, in the long run, is being compatible with everyone, even your competitors. There will always be customers who don't use your system, so lacking compatibility or federation will be a thorn in your side for as long as you exist. I've run out of fingers to count the incompatible proprietary chat systems I've seen die off.
Even Google has killed off a few of their own, and Hangouts is next. Just being a young smart agile tech company does not make you immune.
In 10 years, I bet people will be communicating over email, IRC, POTS/SMS, plus 4 or 5 new tech startups created by people who are in elementary school right now. Nobody's arguing that $(proprietary_system) doesn't make you more productive today (that's the point!), but they always have a sell-by date.
Yes. That's exactly what they want.
And furthermore, it'd be reimplemented almost instantly by Facebook / Apple / Microsoft / Google.
So I can see why they decided to chart a different path.
wait, how? It's not like there was/is a lot of ppl on IRC, just a handful, and it doesnt fit into their product (talking with strangers)
As has been mentioned here, Facebook is running out of strangers to connect: future growth will depend on adding new types of users.
Make something idiot-proof and the world will make a better idiot. And it looks like I'm the bigger idiot here because I don't understand the interface at all.
I'm in two servers for two open source projects but my ID seems to be different for the two servers and not federated for some reason. Or is it? I don't really know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yes there are all sort of workarounds like protocol extensions and what have you not, but then you add massive new friction to the system ("No sorry my client doesn't do OpenVideoCall2.0 it only does LibreAVConference0.3"). That type of friction isn't that hard to deal with if you have a bunch of tech savvy people with time on their hands. But it is no longer appropriate for todays web that is used by everyone.
> Indeed, cannibalizing a federated application-layer protocol into a centralized service is almost a sure recipe for a successful consumer product today. It’s what Slack did with IRC, what Facebook did with email, and what WhatsApp has done with XMPP. In each case, the federated service is stuck in time, while the centralized service is able to iterate into the modern world and beyond.
How so? Nothing prevent versioning a protocol and having experimental servers.
People no longer release protocols, they release products. The open net, the open web has truly died.
I wonder sometimes what we're missing because the conditions that let the web grow out of the internet have disappeared. What next leap are we missing?
IRC is an early protocol and wasn't designed for extensibility purposes. A new chat protocol just needs to replace it.
- Jami
- Matrix
- Signal Protocol
- XMPP
The better question: why aren't new and existing technology companies embracing these protocols and making them ubiquitous?
Personally I think it's because companies have a vested interest in creating walled gardens. The more users that are forced onto a platform, the more money they make. It's against their business interest to create a product that works with their competitors.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_instant_messagin...
Because they don't want to be at the behest of protocol maintainers to improve their product? Their goals and the goals of maintainers would never align.
Open source is great, but open source moves at slow pace compared to what a revenue-driven company can. There's a reason that most of the big open source projects have a company backing them.
Complaints about corporations capturing HTML are not new; Google is merely the latest in the line. (That's not to diminish the fact that it's still bad every time. It's just this isn't the first time.)
There's more to it than a simplistic "business interest" to explain it.
For example, the Signal protocol is free to use. No payments for patent royalties or software licenses required. Moxie Marlinspike's company Signal LLC (Open WhisperSystems) is a non-profit entity.
But notice that an organization that isn't pressured into making a profit and that's using an underlying free protocol -- does not want to federate with LibreSignal[0].
This an example of where the "openness of a protocol" runs into a hard reality of "closed wall of implementation". The protocols themselves can cost $0 but implementations (e.g. cpu+disk+bandwidth+staff) cost more than $0 which leads to complaints of it being "not really open".
If people do not examine the economic forces surrounding any protocol, they will always be perplexed why the internet is not as free & open as they think it should be. Even non-profit entities are not immune from economic forces.
[0] https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...
Pretty straightforward, really
It's a similar "lowest common denominator" issue with IRC, XMPP, mail and many others. Yes, XMPP can - in theory - do almost everything Slack does, but there's dozens of clients supporting a different subset of the protocol. Of course nobody wants to use it.
I haven't had any real issues with desktop or mobile apps either.
Custom emojis are fun, inline markdown is useful, but it takes a lot of memory for something that, to me, seems like it should be lightweight. We've had IM since the 80's, after all. There's a part of me that has a visceral reaction to seeing an IM client taking more than 100mb of memory (though to be fair they seem to be getting improving that a lot.
Overall Slack is a net UX improvement over everything that came before.
Great experiences come from true utility and functionality. Not putting lipstick on a pig and calling it The Next Best Thing That Will Make You Happy And Productive.
People ascribe too much credit to a protocol. The real issue is the funding model to support spending money on that protocol.
By focusing the lens on the funding, the web wasn't as "open" as people think. The so-called "open" web was a government project which wasn't fully open to the public until about ~1995. Before then, you had to work on government-funded projects (ARPANET & NSFNET). The "open" web was actually quite closed off to people that didn't belong to an institution to give them an ".edu" or ".mil" address.
>I wonder sometimes what we're missing because the conditions that let the web grow out of the internet have disappeared.
The "conditions" were government sponsorship to pay for protocols.
- Vint Cerf developed the TCPIP protocol -- but he was funded by DARPA (USA government). Mr Cerf didn't have to go to venture capital firms on Sand Hill Rd and get funding to pay the salaries of his team to build a proof-of-concept or "MVP". He didn't have to worry about not making payroll if his TCPIP protocol project failed.
- Tim Berners-Lee developed the http protocol and also HTML language -- but he was funded by CERN...which is one step removed from being funded by a consortium of governments[0]. Therefore, TBL didn't have to wear a "salesman" hat and pound the pavement begging enterprise customers to buy his "http protocol stack" so he could buy his expensive NeXT workstation[1] to help build and test the protocol.
Those are prominent examples but it doesn't mean people can't create new protocols on their without government help. The SSL protocol was developed by Netscape -- a commercial business. I believe the the git protocol was developed by Linus without a government grant. (Also note that http v1 was funded by CERN (government sponsored) but http/2 & http/3 appears to be mostly funded by Google (non-government sponsored).)
But notice what happens with "open protocols" like SSL and git: they eventually run into a wall where somebody has to spend money on it. The SSL protocol is free of royalties but the Certificate Authorities issuing certificates are not free of charge. The git protocol is free but enterprise accounts for Github are not. The ActivityPub protocol is also free but Mastodon servers are run by altruistic admins spending their own money or requesting Patreon donations. Somewhere, money has to be spent and that ultimately constrains what the "free web" will be. Releasing a "free to use protocol" is not enough.
Therefore, it doesn't matter if the old IRC protocol is free of charge. People still have to spend money on auxiliary features outside the scope of the protocol. Slack spent money on those extra features (e.g. searchable history, etc) that nobody spent on IRC.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN#Member_states_and_budget
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee#/media/File:Fi...
Reminds me of the "free as in puppies" angle.
AP doesn't have to run on HTTP, but any alternative has the same problem as anything else that needs its own client. Even browser support for FTP is on the way out, and it used to be standard.
> "Historically many key protocols, such as TCP/IP and HTTP, have come from researchers. Subsequent iterations of these protocols were often handled by nonprofit organization that tried to wrangle with more or less success the various commercial interests that sprang up around this protocols (the companies that were making and selling software and hardware based on them). The more money was involved the harder this became.
> "Now, however, we have a new way of providing incentives for the creation of protocols and for governing their evolution. I am talking about cryptographic tokens . . .
> "I can’t emphasize enough how radical a change this is to the past. Historically the only way to make money from a protocol was to create software that implemented it and then try to sell this software (or more recently to host it). Since the creation of this software (e.g. web server/browser) is a separate act many of the researchers who have created some of the most successful protocols in use today have had little direct financial gain. With tokens, however, the creators of a protocol can “monetize” it directly and will in fact benefit more as others build businesses on top of that protocol. Given this new incentive I expect a lot of resources to be devoted to protocol innovation."
~ https://continuations.com/post/148098927445/crypto-tokens-an...
If you wanted to make a modern, user-friendly chat application that relies on central servers, there's no reason not to base it on IRC.
(FWIW, /me has been using Matrix-based chat clients for group and individual chats at conferences. Quite happy with it.)
Slack is enterprise and workflow-oriented, Discord is community oriented.
FWIW, I've been using IRC for over 20 years.
There's moe to it, but this is definitely a factor.
China is chat-first culture, but neither DingDing, nor Wechat Work achieved the status that Slack has in the US/EU.
Problems with Slack in China: it's often blocked, it's unbearably slow, the apps are not in the stores, it's Chinese search is lacklustre, it's UI is centered on "longer" messages but Chinese language is very short so it could be optimized somehow.
I could easily imagine a Chinese company coming up with Slack-but-fast-and-easily-monitored, making that >$16B in Asia, and then coming at the US/EU markets with it.
Given the growing grassroots backlash against the entire Slack Way, I’m not convinced they have a long enough runway to pivot to a stickier product before something shinier comes along.
They may have to acquire their Instagram equivalent some time in the future, but I can easily imagine that their Enterprise Customers are here to stay.
They were simply the first company to do hosted chat well enough that it didn't constantly piss people off. I wouldn't call that a sticky moat.
If we need to switch to a different messaging platform, sending that same notification at a different api should be pretty trivial. And if it isn't, I don't know why we'd be switching.
- deal with the target platform's API
- deal with APIs of the many platforms that are being integrated
- maintenance and SLAs
I honestly doubt you can create half a dozen good integrations that require more than just notifications in a channel (for example, PagerDuty notifications and the like).
There is no chat/IM client on the market today that is superior to the pinnacle, which was circa-2000 AOL Instant Messenger. Every platform gets worse every year, except slack.
well put - and - even more so: hosted business chat. all they have to do is keep on keeping on.
I'm not sure that they're not just a feature. Even if MS teams sucks compared to Slack, the MS salesman can talk to the CIO of Megacorp and say they'll add it in for half of what Slack costs. They see X million in savings and suddenly the entire organization is using MS Teams instead of Slack.
Dropbox is also one the chopping block to be replaced by OneDrive. Until someone can break hard dependency people have on Office products MS suite will always come out cheaper than Office + $other_thing.
We route alerts through IM primarily, and are remote-first. I get that some folks here complain about their inability to ignore chat notifications, but there's a decent chunk of us that need to find our uninterrupted time where we can, not when we want.
A few weeks ago the startup I work for started using NextCloud as a stop-gap till we get O365 and OneDrive. It is ridiculously simple for us at-least to just copy over our entire Dropbox folder to the NextCloud one.
We have shared channels with Integration Partners, Suppliers, Enterprise Customers... These are extremely valuable ways of communication once setup, especially with simple file-transfer thrown in, etc. Leaving Slack would mean slamming the door in the face of these entities, something we're simply not ready to do for the cost-savings that ditching Slack would mean.
Enterprise users usually just use it for internal messaging.
If you’re big enough for Microsoft to care about you, you already have embedded SEs compensated based on OneDrive and Teams adoption. Your IT middle management pushes teams.
Your CIO is getting the cyber pitch based in the insecurity of your O365 implementation. The fix is to buy Azure AD or the next bundle (EMS), or maybe the E5 O365/Windows subscription.
MS and Google don't actually have to be better with their chat product, they just have to be usable and cheaper.
I think it is hard for cost conscious organizations with o365 to justify slack.
As a remote worker Slack is my office, essentially, and I think it's done an amazing job at being an office for remote first companies. I can't speak for Teams.
It's actually pretty good for managing discreet work streams, and even for organising personal work (kind of against the "Team" ethos, but having a channel for myself keeps my work visible and tabs keep important things to hand easily).
I think Slack aficionados overestimate how much investment most companies have in custom integrations and bots and things that increase switching costs.
I think your company should start working on that problem ASAP.
Look no further than YC darling Dropbox. For the same price you pay for Dropbox, you can get the entire Microsoft Office suite plus 6 TB of storage.
- Messages don't get delivered for hours on mobile. - UX is so bad I don't think they are even dog fooding. eg, copy and paste a code block and it will capture a bunch of meta information - teams aren't followed by default, so half the team had no idea the data was there - this means nobody uses teams but chats, which are only recently pinnable (!?!?) - the pages, plugins and sharepoint files is great, but too restrictive.
Compared to Slack or Zulip, it is still very behind. However, once our 70k organisation moved to office 365 and started using teams, we sheepled and didn't want the team to use a fragmented tool and bit the bullet. So yeah. Watch out for teams.
I haven't moved to it yet because I require a chat application that works and allows people to contact me.
Teams has it's own issues, but messages getting delivered isn't one of them.
If Lync (Skype for Business) is any indication, building well-working enterprise messaging is hard. Unless cost-cutting is your central concern, you want your internal communication to use the best, least-friction tools. Here Slack has quite an advantage.
99% of value of Slack for our team is in the text-related features.
Seriously, Flow is good stuff.
Also, Google Chat. AFAIK it's free if your company is already using the work version of Gmail, though don't quote me on that. It's out now, and does the job well enough.
My current employer went with Google Chat, I think mainly due to the cost difference with 10k+ employees.
Or Salesforce Chatter. Enough companies handing Salesforce good money that adding this on makes sense.
The product is compelling enough that Microsoft is trying to position their clone as the lynchpin of everything in O365 that isn’t mail.
It’s a platform that is attractive to all sorts of players. Apple has a huge enterprise business that they completely ignore. Google, Cisco, other enterprise plays are easily imaginable.
I see Slack as more akin to something like Excel, where people who really depend on it (in a way much more than person-to-person chat) go beserk if it's taken away.
The overall level of polish on similar apps has risen since then so that’s less of a differentiator, but I still refer to Slack as a great example of polish and consistency in product, with mostly great UX as well
I'm not sure how I feel about the valuation. I'd like to see how the user base, especially the ratio of paying users, has been growing. It feels likely that most of the companies that would have been easy to convert have already been converted. I expect CAC to go up and payer conversion to stagnate at best. I don't see how they can 2-3x their revenue this year (unless there are drastic, risky changes).
In addition, the slow iterations on the mobile and desktop clients, and the meteoric rise of Discord are enough cause for concern. I don't see how this investment would have legs.
I do worry about Slack's pricing since there is a vast chasm between their free plan and their paid plans. I use Slack to run some open source and hobbyist communities with thousands of members and if for any reason we were forced to switch to a paid plan (at $x per user) we'd be forced to go elsewhere immediately.
Discord has better options for channel control.
Slack has better integrations with software development tools
"Information You Provide: We collect information from you when you voluntarily provide such information, such as when you register for access to the Services or use certain Services. Information we collect may include but not be limited to username, email address, and any messages, images, transient VOIP data (to enable communication delivery only) or other content you send via the chat feature."
"Data We Collect Automatically: When you interact with us through the Services, we receive and store certain information such as an IP address, device ID, and your activities within the Services. We may store such information or such information may be included in databases owned and maintained by affiliates, agents or service providers. The Services may use such information and pool it with other information to track, for example, the total number of visitors to our Site, the number of messages users have sent, as well as the sites which refer visitors to Discord."
"If you do not wish to receive personalized advertising that is delivered by third parties outside of the Discord Service, you may be able to exercise that choice through opt-out programs that are administered by third parties, including the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA). Our Services currently do not respond to “Do Not Track” (DNT) signals and operate as described in this Privacy Policy whether or not a DNT signal is received, as there is no consistent industry standard for compliance."
From the Discorc Privacy Policy: https://discordapp.com/privacy
I say this as an avid user of Discord, which I use on a daily - dare I say hourly - basis. I'm perfectly fine with them collecting data on my gaming habits and the harmless stuff I talk about with friends. I don't think I would be okay with running a business through them, especially one in a similar vertical.
At NuCypher switched to Discord from Slack.
It's not particularly tailored, but certainly cultural influenced. There are maybe a feature or two that make more sense for gaming, but it's very useful for business.
The Discord voice features are particularly useful and are in use every day at NuCypher.
Slack also has a disastrous "feature" wherein any user can cause the SlackBot to send a message to another user. In an open instance (which Slack seems wont to discourage), this means that a user can easily impersonate another user and purport to be sending messages in an official capacity.
> I have used Slack extensively and it appears more professional.
I don't even know if I know what that means in 2019. As far as appearance, Discord is much more fun. Is that what you mean?
Slack doesn't seem particularly professional to me.
Could you tell me more about that? How is that done and is there a way for workspace owners to prevent it?
The slackbot has limitations in that it looks different from a regular user and will identify it as slackbot if you click on it, as well as tell you who created the webhook to allow the integration.
It's not a problem.
> t might be a problem for people using the free version to host public communities, but that's not Slack's target market.
But these two are not mutually exclusive. Many business use cases eventually require a public community chat, and Slack is a dead-end for them. Discord on the other hand has served us well.
But the issue around professionalism that you bring up is certainly valid. I don't want to have to maintain separate accounts for work vs play (unless there's a seamless way to switch between them, like for Google, but currently there isn't), but currently there's no way to present different personas to different communities from the same account. Some examples:
- Can't change avatar based on server: https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600...
- Real account name shows up on profile even if you provide a different nickname to the server: https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/219070107-S...
I think they're still super laser focused on their core demographic of gamers rather than trying to expand into professional use and compete with the likes of Slack. You can certainly still use it in a professional capacity and it generally works great, and is better than Slack in some areas, but the lack of effort put into catering to those use cases definitely shows.
FWIW, I currently work around the issues around multi-account management using Firefox's excellent containers feature (using 1 work container to segregate all of my work accounts from personal ones without also having separate views of history).
Thanks for your response. It is good to get feedback from somebody who has used Discord as I am just about to launch a new community on Slack. I will stick with Slack for now.
Not sure what sort of community you're launching, but if it's for coding definitely check out Spectrum. The Apollo team made a great post about their search for a new community platform and landed on Spectrum due to a couple of reasons that might apply to you as well: https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-...
TL;DR: The product itself is open source, it has a mechanism for longer-form discourse like traditional forums as well as real-time chat, and is fully index-able by search engines.
Wish you the best on your launch!
Nobody has to use voice. In many communities, most don't. But as the above said, it's a super frictionless way to talk if needed and is a lot less formal than "starting a call/meeting". You just publicly hop into one of a dozen visible channels and anyone else can hop in with you to discuss an issue or just hang out mostly-not-talking.
Then, join any random server and there can be dozens of distinct channels, many of which are meta-on-meta channels: rules, announcements, shout-box, bot-sticky messages, bot commands, and a plethora of other noise, on top of the multitude of automated bot messages you get over time.
Discord bots are out of control. They remind me of the days of IRC and eggbot scripts and eggbot hosts: every channel went out and bought a cheap VPS or eggbot host to run their scrappy little bots. Except somehow worse and incredibly annoying.
I don't think Discord is ready, or even trying to be ready, for enterprise use. Not yet!
People have been asking about if for awhile (a year plus) now.
https://sec.report/Document/0001628280-19-004786/
I do agree that product iteration has been slow. That's been a big problem for Slack, and it's my biggest speculation on their valuation. As someone who has seen inside the company (don't work there), their engineering teams have a ton of technical debt they've been making their way through and trying to set right.
It's a platform - I can see a world where almost everything in the workplace is embedded into Slack or integrated with it. They can take their cut of all of that.
They really seem to have gotten a lot of Google Wave ideas to catch on and have even kept some IRC bits. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Congrats to the team on this massive valuation. Makes a lot more sense to me than Snapchat at $19B...
Having done this at my previous startup it's very, very nice (in my opinion), but also, enough setup work that even supposing you were tempted to change to another platform you'd be reluctant to.
We waited for ever for threading to come to slack... and when it landed we were so disappointed.
An even more applicable comparison is the HN thread about the Dropbox announcement. "What? This is just [IRC|rsync] with gimmicky bells and whistles."
And even though blogging, threaded forums for discussion, chat rooms, email, etc. all already existed, it still has been enormously successful despite seemingly being drastically inferior to any of them in every way.
Things don't have to be better or even good to succeed, they don't even have to be difficult to clone. A bit of luck at the right time followed by a snowball effect and they can be huge. $28 billion for a textfield? Sure, why not?
Since then, when I think that some startup has a blown-up valuation, I recall that moment.
I really don't understand why companies like Snapchat and PayPal don't do the reverse - add Facebook-feature to their product! Surely Snapchat would be more useable if it had profiles, friends, etc. (i.e. if it became Facebook-lite, in other words, Instagram clone). Sure, (some) users will revolt, but you don't need to force it down their throat... make it opt-in, or privacy-preserving, or something, and make sure that it's genuinely useful!
I hope he tries to make another MMO.
I am seriously withholding my urge to spam question marks on this page as they are dancing around my head.
Around the time the MMO failed, they received the grant from the second application. They had something vaguely similar to photo-sharing chat in the game, related to discussing inventory items, and decided to transition to that as a photo-sharing IM client and use the grant to get it off the ground.
> As part of the game, they’d developed this interface where players could create an inventory of objects that they would pick up. That inventory looked like this sort of shoebox of photos. You could drag those photos into group conversations for other people to see and you could annotate them. And you could share the photos with other people. And that was the idea that Caterina and the people on her team wanted to transition to.
(from 2.)
As an aside, I highly recommend listening to the full interviews, as she has an interesting background and some good perspectives on tech in general. She also just launched a podcast that considers the ethics of some new tech developments [3].
---
[1] https://tim.blog/2019/02/21/the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts...
[2] https://gimletmedia.com/shows/without-fail/rnh444/the-accide...
This level of adaptability might explain part of their success. Rather than naively sticking to your original vision, identifying where you have the opportunity to create value and changing direction based on that insight.
What makes me long on this stock is their position as leader of the Work Graph.(0) SAP and Salesforce have strong positions as trailing indicators of workplace knowledge (this is the information/ process that matters most to us) but Slack and to a lesser extend MS Teams are leading indicators of WHY the information/ process matters.
(0) -- https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609319/slack-hopes-its-ai...
One of my favourite things about slack is /feedback and the fact that someone will get back to me within 24hrs. There is no product of this scale that has such a low barrier to feedback/questions/bug report.
https://venturebeat.com/2019/06/19/mattermost-raises-50-mill...
You don't even need a client because you can read https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2812 and then use telnet. Just remember to respond to PINGs.
Because I find it to be already better than Slack. Took a few commands to set it up at work on our own server. Convenient, fast, and has the good bits from the Slack UI.
We used Slack on a few projects, but the thought of using a third-party to host corporate development discussion was an absolute no-no in the long run.
It's staggering how fast people are to pay for something when there's a cheaper (or free) alternative out there, these days.
> We used Slack on a few projects, but the thought of using a third-party to host corporate development discussion was an absolute no-no in the long run.
> It's staggering how fast people are to pay for something when there's a cheaper (or free) alternative out there, these days.
How can you characterize the price as free? Do engineers at your place of work have so much free time that they can spend it setting this stuff up? What happens when chat goes down? Are you going to invest in becoming experts in running the app? All these are considerations that factor into the total cost of ownership, which oftentimes is far higher than the posted sticker price.
You're right that it does take some effort to self manage. We try to make it as easy as we can with a single Linux binary and lots of documentation.
One of the most common scenarios for Mattermost is deploying into a private network, that's invisible to SaaS services.
The software that runs manufacturing plants should never touch the internet. Neither should the backends of financial services companies, and many other industries.
Developers in those companies need to have some way to collaborate, and integrate with their DevOps toolchains and legacy backends, and Mattermost is getting increasingly popular there.
Every open source Mattermost server has all the core features of Slack, including Slack-compatible keyboard shortcuts, and Slack integrations via webhooks. Every Mattermost server can host hundreds of Slack-compatible teams, and every month over 10,000 servers are downloaded.
Also, if you've installed GitLab already, you just turn on Mattermost as a feature in omnibus. It's really simple to start. When you get to a few hundred users and IT needs to add some more admin and permissions there's some additional setup, but then you can go to hundreds or thousands of users from that setup.
The thing that drives me nuts is the pricing model. Why don't they just let users pay for themselves? Then I could be paid on all of the slacks that I use for $10/mo or whatever they charge.
> For the fiscal year ending January 31, 2019, the company reported losses of $138.9 million on revenue of $400.6 million. That’s compared to a loss of $140.1 million on revenue of $220.5 million the year prior. [1]
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/slack-first-quarter-financ...
I don't understand valuations.
Doubling revenue without increasing losses is a great sign.
That money is all the cash flow in some entire minor industries. It’s the GDP of some minor lower/mid-economy nations’ cities. Their losses are equal to half the entire GDP of Palau.
Maybe I’m detached. But I don’t understand the cash flow in chat apps today. It’s absolutely bizarre amounts of money for something that can and will easily be replaced in a few years, as always happens.
I think comparing the valuations of a US company HQ'd in one of the most expensive cities in the world, that has created a tool that is used by nearly all organizations around the world for communication is well worth the crazy valuation.
They’ve lost nearly $150 million in a year. How? What does that money even go to? Even paying their devs incredibly generous wages and benefits, server costs, advertising, deals with businesses, etc, I can’t imagine the losses being that big. It’s insane amounts of money to burn through.
[1] https://ir.tesla.com/node/19771/html#CONSOLIDATED_STATEMENTS...
If Airbus decided to pay twice as much for planes would you say they should be valued higher?
While there is intangible benefits that come from deciding to setup shop in one of the most expensive cities on Earth I'm far from convinced a messenger app company couldn't thrive elsewhere.
What they offer is not unique nor difficult to create. Doubt they'll ever manage to pull in $1B a year to justify that price, the required business model for it would have their customers looking elsewhere overnight.
Beyond executives and the board? Marketing. I'm now at a much smaller F round startup that blew $350k+ on the RSA conference and another $150k+ on expenses for said show. The return on that is miniscule.
Where does the money go? I feel like most startups I've been in have been very good at funneling the funds exactly where they want it. Profitable doesn't seem to be the goal anymore, but more of to sink as much cash into executive pockets as quickly as possible.
Musk was the highest paid (and that was incorrect, he was not paid that much - that was the max.)
Ooooh, I need to Google to see if this has happened. Obviously investors and analysts would prefer to have those talks privately to avoid alienating anyone important, but it has to have happened sometime.
[0] https://sec.report/Document/0001628280-19-004786/#s5328ABFAF...
As for the easily being replaced part, Slack will just buy up any competitor while its small. Just like how Facebook did it with Instagram and Whatsapp. Facebook is deemed uncool by the younger generation but not Instagram and Whatsapp.
Most of the features are a no-go in large enterprises and from what I've seen, enterprises will also choose better tools for some of that functionality (like zoom over slack video).
S&M:
- Sales people aren't cheap
- Marketing tech isn't cheap
- Advertising isn't cheap (especially when your investors say "SPEND IT ALL AS FAST AS YOU CAN")
- Steaks/strippers with clients isn't cheap
These valuations just seem nuts.
Stay up? I was at a company that was on Hipchat, and we really liked it, but the amount of downtime got to be semi-unbearable. We switched to Slack and it had much better uptime.
I was at a startup, we used a mix of Hipchat (business types) and IRC (developers). A marketing/social media guy who was buddies with Stewart joined and insisted we should all switch to this, and there we were, dogfooding Slack (this was closed beta days).
Hard to beat free user acquisition.
There was nothing groundbreaking about Slack, and there still isn't. There are a lot of naysayers on HN scoffing at Slack for basically being a worse form of IRC, which is silly and wrong, but also right in that there is nothing groundbreaking about the tech. But products don't need to be groundbreaking to win. They just need to be better than the rest, and perhaps generate the necessary "reality distortion field" that convinces people that it's the next natural evolutionary step. Once you convince people of that, they don't go back to HipChat.
You could try and cobble together something similar from an IRC server plus ten different programs, but most companie would rather pay Slack a wee amount than maintain a Frankenstein's monster.
Mobile applications with notifications, conversation threads with +draft/reply (IRCv3 draft), multimedia attachments (IRCv3 idea), authentication with SASL and standardized account management (IRCv3 draft), etc.
Look at what IRCCloud provides, and what IRCv3 is doing.
That's what normal people see when they read your message.
Even if you want to self-host, there are solutions — get any server, run
docker run \
-v /path/to/folder/where/you/want/to/store/the/config:/config \
k8r.eu/justjanne/quassel-docker:v0.13.1
Uber is still making losses in almost all markets it’s active in. Slack is making a 380'000 $ loss per day. Amazon hasn’t made a profit a single time in their entire history.
The Silicon Valley model of "let’s gain a monopoly by giving away a product and outspending everyone on advertising, then monetizing it" doesn’t reward the best product. Never has, never will.
And companies grown the traditional, honest way, making actual profits of course can’t compete with that. If I opened up a supermarket giving away everything for free, of course I’d have more customers than the supermarkets who have to make money.
But it was never too much in the red. It shouldn't be placed together with Uber.
I think to many highly technical people Slack is a “reinvented” irc. But I was ok IRC stealing mp3s from bots in the 90s. And I’m on Usenet now.
Slack is nothing like IRC.
I haven't used Slack since 2016 so I don't know if it's changed, but the threads were such a disappointment when they came out. I suppose everyone was hoping for some similar threading that Flowdock has, but Slack threads simply just hide the discussion.
I agree that Slack beats HipChat and IRC for work communication, but that's about it. I prefer even the new Google Chat over it, and that definitely has warts of it's own.
Some people want total threading, others want a flat flow.
Slack seem to be treading a very careful line between the two extremes
I lived in IRC in the late 90s and early 2000s. IRC is fantastic and open and federated. But if I want to get things done with a team, I'll pick Slack everytime.
infamous dropbox comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
After using Telegram for work at my previous job, switching to slack now with a new company is jarring. Their absolute dogshit electron apps constantly hog system resources and take forever to load. Also Telegram is free and has a far better audio and video chat and again, free...
I find it mind boggling companies pay for chat. Both discord and Telegram provide all the same features, incl bots and do so for free, what gives?
If you know how to do this, please share.
If the basic tech behind those products met the needs of business users by itself, these companies would never have succeeded.
It's not about just the technology. It's about wrapping that technology in a good user experience for end users and an easy management experience for business customers. That is really difficult, and Slack deserves credit for doing it so well.
Making big money requires productization. Sleek UI and interface that the end users see, plus marketing and selling.
Even when someone is the first with tech and prioritization, it does not mean they succeed in the long term after the field matures. I don't have high hopes for Slack in 5-10 years. Neither do I see Dropbox or Netflix justifying current valuations in the same time period.
The user experience for both these tools haven't been great for me, but streamlining them for casual computer users evidently has a lot of commercial value.
However, as we have already seen Dropbox has already been commoditized and is looking for a reboot. I see the same thing happening with Slack. It will be the king for a while but it has no moat.
Companies jumped to it very easily. Everybody just started using it. And the moment something better comes along Slack will be forgotten.
I think this is different from Facebook. Company employees come and go so they don't value what they put on Slack very much. And for companies the history on slack is also not very important.
Well that's how I see how Slack is being used inside different companies.
Invaluable means very valuable. From the rest of your comment, I'm not sure that's what you meant?
AOL IM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Chat, SMS...all killed IRC. Sure, there's a small niche of users out there but it's a deserted island for the most part.
Does resource consumption matters to me? yes, but that is because I compile stuff, run VMs, do simulations, like many other developers.
My grandma or dad at his office? they could do just fine with 1/10th of their resources.
This is not an argument for wastefulness, but the reality of business world and the value of computing resources.
"Rid Belly Fat NOW! Click Here!"
2019, celebrating the eleventh consecutive "This is the Year of Linux on the desktop"...
Edit: Native apps require more maintenance which adds to the delta in experience. If a single app is created (web) there is no delta.
However, it’s significantly harder to build several native apps for each OS/platform with the same level of polish and functionality than a single web app that will work on all of them.
Deployment is another PITA that makes App Store model desirable for the vendors. For Apple and Microsoft it's even better because they get a cut, they curate their platforms and have the upper hand over vendors lest they become competition.
Slack however is borderline unusable. Ghost processes, background workspaces silently closing and not delivering notifications, processes pinned at 100% CPU, silent crashes, pauses while typing, and even sometimes character drops.
I've tried it on three laptops from two vendors all with 16gb of memory, 100% SSD and an i7.
I've got Mac user friends that tell me they've never had any of the above issues, and I believe them. I've used it on a Mac, though not as a daily driver, and it's fine.
It just feels to me like Windows is a second tier platform for Slack, where they're fixing the bare minimum to not lose market share.
At least it’s not another Box spinning beachball.
The reality is, that most of their user base is completely fine with performance as is, which I agree is not ideal. But it's good enough. My guess is that they will gradually fix issues by benefitting from Electron improvements, swapping out bits of js for more efficient WASM based stuff, etc.
Mostly native app strategies are an extremely bad idea for small start ups these days. You triple the cost (or worse) of your development and inevitably you are going to do better on some platforms than others. I know people obsess about native on platforms like IOS but I find it interesting that there are quite a few unicorns out there succeeding with glorified electron/react native code bases. Slack is basically shipping a web app packaged up as an electron app on Android, IOS, Mac, Windows, and Linux. You can run the thing in a browser pretty much without loss of functionality.
I've worked for companies 1/2000th that with native binaries on all 5 big platforms (linux/win/osx/ios/android).
Why is that the right time to go public? Once the company has an obligation to move towards profitability, doesn't that expose its investors to the risk of another startup subsidizing the same product or service with VC money, undercutting the new established brand?
Like if slack wants to become profitable they probably need to push more people to the paid version of the app, but then won't another company just make a clone and convert some VC cash into a runway with which to poach slack's userbase, and eventually file an S1 saying "we're not profitable and may never be"?
I'm struggling to understand why this keeps working, because no one seems to have a problem with it at all.
That's over 40x current revenue for a company that lost almost $400,000 a day last year.
No matter your concerns about Slack, once you’re in a company using it you have no choice but to embed yourself completely.
It's on you to manage your interruptions (it's easy to kill them totally, or to customize what you see). If you just take it all, then yeah, I can see that being a living hell. So like, don't do that.
We were pretty invested in ChatOps which I thought was great. Being able to issue commands in any sort of war room situation with a group of people was definitely helpful for that sort of triaging. Of course, the downside being that depending on Slack to be up to do effective operations isn't super appealing to me.
Of course people have been doing this with IRC forever, but Slack is a definite improvement on this front over Skype.
I definitely don’t feel pressure to answer Slack messages when I’m actively working on something, though. I imagine it’d be pretty bad if we had that kind of environment.
Don't use the application versions of any of your apps. Instead, open up the web version of all of them and keep all their tabs in one browser window.
For example, my "notification window" includes my gmail, slack, outlook, and the web client for my mobile texts. I keep the window minimized until I have a need for it, and keep the vibration off on my phone during work hours.
Some people at my company get interrupted by slack all the time, and they complain about it.
I disable all notifications except for @-mentions and DMs (and then I only have desktop notifications; mobile is disabled). If I'm expecting to not want interruptions at all, I go to DnD mode for a bit.
And yet, when I tell people this, they just somehow claim they can't do what I do for some hand-wavy reason, and continue to complain.
Having an automatic transcript of all discussion was the most amazing resource. Now I, along with everyone else, have to rely on faulty memory, which leads to more meetings to continually check that we understand each other, and longer meetings as it takes a lot longer to convey ideas. Quite frankly, it is a disaster, in my opinion.
But perhaps in both of our cases we are simply resistant to change.
> Having an automatic transcript of all discussion was the most amazing resource. Now I, along with everyone else, have to rely on faulty memory, which leads to more meetings to continually check that we understand each other, and longer meetings as it takes a lot longer to convey ideas. Quite frankly, it is a disaster, in my opinion.
> But perhaps in both of our cases we are simply resistant to change.
Voice chat is almost always faster for me as it is easier to have a discussion and potentially whiteboard. If people aren't taking notes during meetings (or snapping a quick photo of a whiteboard drawing) that doesn't sound like a communication problem but a personal one.
Where I find the opposite. The ability to stop and craft a message that is precise gets the job done immediately, rather than the continual back and forth to confirm that each party understands what happens to be uttered in the moment that is inherit to voice chat.
> If people aren't taking notes during meetings (or snapping a quick photo of a whiteboard drawing) that doesn't sound like a communication problem but a personal one.
A personal one shared by everyone, I guess. Meeting length and frequency has increased substantially. And not only the meetings that I personally take part in, but observed company-wide.
I imagine familiarity is key. If you come from an environment where voice communication is the de facto method, you are going to get good at that style of communication through practice, and then anything else is going to seem less performant. In my case, we spent many years conducting textual communication and gained plenty of practice at it. Now, voice communication is the unfamiliar ground.
Before there was always someone moving around to talk to someone else or internal E-Mails which are equally bad.
We use slack sparingly and only have a few channels with many people. Most things happen in private channels. We always "idle-ping" other team members first and do not expect an immediate response.
The result is a much calmer office. People move around less and there is less chatter. And we still have the option to use group chat if required.
We even added a channel where new commit messages are automatically posted. A wonderful thing to keep informed about what's going on and you can take immediate action if you see something strange.
I think this all falls apart if our team size would increase. But I believe for teams with less than 25 people slack is perfectly fine. Above that size notifications probably start to be annoying.
That was an amazing implementation of an application.
Would LOVE for someone to buy Screenhero back from Slack and bring it back to life. Truly a shame as it is.
Are they worth 16B? None of the armchair investors here know their financials (addressable market size, user growth rate, expected ARPU etc). Until a careful analysis done, I would caution you against coming to a quick conclusion.
Slack for urgent matters, email for asynchronous communication that isn't quite as urgent. Email is also better for things that the recipient may want to refer back to in the future.
Regardless, I wish that my co-workers would stop sending a message only saying "hi, name" and then waiting for me to stop working to respond before they type their actual question. "not only am I going to interrupt you, but I'm going to make you acknowledge the interruption before making you wait while I SLOWLY type the actual incomplete question".
<Grumble, grumble, I hate when people misuse Slack>
Atlassian bent over backwards for Uber, but just enough to make it functional. It was incredibly bad. Notifications would sometimes never arrive, or arrive hours delayed. Chats would take minutes to load. Messages would sit, spinning, waiting to be sent. It was like using 2G on your phone.
Uber eventually replaced it with a (forked) Mattermost cluster.
That was my hipchat experience a few months ago. Thankfully I don't have to use it anymore
On desktop I am not getting the "unread" grouping but mobile I do.
The drafts feature is on both and can't be disabled.
Both of them break habits of where my channels are. It is terrible UX.
The "threads" feature on the sidebar allows you to reply to a thread but if you get a counterreply you need to click to see it. A better flow can be found if you click the channel name on top of the thread -- there's no indication like a timestamp or anything this jumps you to the thread in the channel -- and then click the thread link in-channel and then answer in the sidebar -- now the conversation flows without further clicks. Do I need to mention how terrible UX this is?
The threads feature is pretty close to useful, but it still buries information and it isn't clear to other users in a channel when a thread becomes "live" again unless they explicitly follow the thread or make a comment. Both of those actions require excessive clicking on the desktop client (at least for Ubuntu).
The most frustrating part for me is that keyboard navigation for threads is nonexistent, and it forces you to weave in and out with your mouse.
We ended up switching to zoom for video chat because it worked on phones as well as computers and handled slow connections (US<->Australia) much better than Slack's electron chat.
The fb foray into a phone market with that device was an utter disaster and a joke.
The fb phone basically introduced one “feature” ‘the circle profile pic’ and the physical phone was chintsy and lame....
Go back in time to the danger device. The hiptop was cool, and all, but even then there was a miss. Regardless of the fact that danger became android... there was still a miss.
We beed a messaging only platform device.
This need has not been solved.
If a slack-first device existed where i have topical channels for things and branch channels, but i can dm and pm and mm people.... thats the device i want.
Just give me a slack-first os on a device and ill be ok.
Even that seems like a lot to spend, and that is just the loss...
I wonder where the money goes.
Granted it is a big impressive product but still it would be interesting to track expenses for a company as they approach unicorn status.
Cost of Revenue: $51M
R&D: $157M
Sales & Marketing: $233M
General & Administrative: $112M
[Source: their S-1]
But Slack seems to actively prevent me from using it on Safari on my iPad.
It keeps trying to make me install their app.
Is there a way to try their web interface it on an iPad?
Is that high? Low? about right?
Well, it depends if Slack made $100 million in sales and is flat, or if it did $2B in sales and is doubling every year.
(I assume that it doesn't have earnings because its still growing and plowing all that money back into the business)
It sounds like their business model thus far is that of p2w mobile games. Nearly all of your users are minnows, but some are whales.
I don't know if any of this is true. It doesn't really sound believable that we're paying that much, tbh.
We all preferred Slack but the cost was just ridiculous and no one could justify it. Teams came for 'free' with all the other Microsoft stuff we were already paying a licence for.
Which one is overvalued?
https://www.fastcompany.com/90289512/exclusive-wework-to-reb...
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Stewart+Butterf...
Experiment for slack fans: Start talking about something in a channel with ~20 people. Then ask a friend to ask another question in the same channel. What happens? A mess. You now have 2 conversations modeled with a single stream of single-line messages, with no context. One someone starts a conversation in a channel every single other user in that channel now has to wait. (or risk being pushed up past the fold, which people never scroll to)
Chat just isn't how work gets done. Or how knowledge is transferred and, most importantly, retained.
- They managed to disturb millions of worker to an attention-driven work culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate.
- They managed to change chat from a set of open protocols to a single closed app terribly written in JS.
- They managed to make a lot of people absolute convinced advocate of Slack so that a lot of hyped startups have now to use Slack de facto or risk mutiny and have people create Slack channels on behalf of the company without any oversight.
So yeah I don't blame them but I blame every company that falls for this. I'm convinced that we will see Slack retrospectively as something that destroyed productivity. I will agree that Slack can be useful when used correctly but I never saw a place that used it without it becoming that "attention driven" growing monster.
While I understand where your complaints are coming from, I encourage you to think about the fact that so many companies are "falling" for them.
You and I might care about disturbances, "attention driven" work culture, open protocols, etc., but not everyone is a software engineer. The world is bigger than that. Clearly, some people quite enjoy Slack. I'm not saying it's the most optimal product, but perhaps being optimal is not as important as it seems.
Slack's chat nature as the OP points out favours instant messaging over batching up replies, which, like many bad habits, appeals to the reward portion of our brain but is genuinely unhelpful in structuring work. There's a reasonable (and increasing amount) of evidence that multitasking and context switching can lower your working IQ by 10 to 15 points. Deep Work by Cal Newport does a good job of going into the detrimental affects that distraction from workflows has on people.
It's sad you have to point this out. What works for a some might not for a dev.
I suspect a lot of frustration fundamentally revolves around trust. If there is a lack of trust, it must get compensated with an increase in visibility. Slack just happens to be a decent tool to provide visibility.
Story time: in a company I worked for, the Most Senior Engineer requested to be exempt from participating on Slack as the only person outside management, and skip the daily stand-ups. He did get a lot more done. I envied him quite a bit - mostly because our stumbles and challenges (just normal development stuff) were very visible and prompted lots of nervouse queries from PMs and sales people via Slack about why our tests are failing and why we needed to refactor code, whereas he only needed to show the end result of his work after a few months. Even if we had both experienced the same amount of 'challenges', his way of working gave him a lot more credibility because he got to control the narrative where his solution emerged working as designed (because any development hurdles he may have had were invisible to our PMs and sales). However, he did have a lot of pre-existing trust with key people to pull this off in the first place.
I hope I get to a point in my career where I can operate like that.
People also love cocaine.
If many companies are falling for this, it actually means it is not good for workers, only for the company.
Some of the other more obvious emotional issues include procrastination and imposter syndrome. Everyone experiences these emotional swings. Experienced workers learn how to manage them. The earlier the better.
There are lots of things broken in the space of "work." Teaching younger workers how to deal with emotions is one of them.
That's close to saying "bullets don't kill people, the hole in their vital organs does".
The thing is, text-based communication tools are problematic compared to face-to-face communication, even in people who know how to "manage their emotions", because they hide non-verbal clues and make statements easier to misconstrue.
Face-to-face communication may be ideal, but it has huge overhead and limits. Compared to the scale of communication text (especially one over the wire) enabled, I think the world is much better off with the tech than it would be without it.
Now Slack per se, that's another story...
That's a very high expectation.
In reality the opposite is true, the less human interaction there is, the more people polarize around their ideas.
And has empirical evidence, of people communicating in text mediums, from USENET to modern social forums, proven the above?
What the empirical evidence shows me is that there's a (possibly very large) chunk of population which I would call unreasonable on a good day, that I only get to observe on the Internet, but can't ever find in meatspace. I know what's going on over at YouTube comments, or /r/all, but such people are all mysteriously absent from my meatspace circles, with no effort on my end to specifically identify and avoid them. I sometimes see them speaking unreasonable things when I pass them by on the street, but that's the limit of my exposure [0].
It's kind of similar to what Scott identified[1] as "dark matter people", except they seem to be inhabiting all the non-niche Internet forums.
Point being, if you exclude unreasonable people, text-based communications are fine. If you include unreasonable people, I wouldn't trust face to face communications either; if someone wants to abuse you with words, they can do that just as well in physical proximity.
--
[0] - Actually, the closest I've ever been to talking with such people was the couple of times during my university years when I ended up on some completely random party with people I didn't know. This suggests to me that there's a strong but barely noticeable filtering/selection effect in meatspace social networks. School selection, or workplace selection, aren't random enough to break out from it.
[1] - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin..., C-f "dark matter".
And it doesn't occur to you that it's the nature of the communication (online vs face to face) that might be a factor in this?
I don't need to care about the emotional states of the people I work with. There's base-lines of professional conduct and courtesy. If I reasonably follow those, then I'm good.
And what if your boss is just an asshole? What if the reading you take of the person on the other line isn't just a misunderstanding? This person really is being a jerk, then what? You be a professional. You don't have to take excessive abuse, you can quit. You can warn the customer that you will end the call (and you can carry through with the threat.) Being a jerk isn't necessarily abuse though.
Don't take things personally. Do your job. Work the process. Quit if things aren't working for you. This requires an orienting yourself to an environment which works differently from your home. It requires managing your emotions so that you aren't taking an existential threat level analysis with every non face to face conversation.
It's a different situation if I'm talking to my wife or children. Those are personal relationships.
If you see everyone answering slack messages at 10pm, you’re likely to do the same unless you’re strong-willed.
- Chat apps have been around for a while but now that Slack has been so widely adopted working remote has become a lot easier.
- Screen sharing for pair programming where everyone has the client installed and we don’t have to convince anyone to pay for it is great. (I’m very sad Slack is shuttering this service though)
- When I’m in the office I find that people who used to interrupt me by walking up to my desk and completely detailing my work are more polite with a Slack message now. That is much easier to delay even if only for a few minutes when needed.
- large meetings where it is tempting to completely tune out can still be productive if I can interact on slack.
Your points are all valid for some but it’s only one side of the coin.
I see where you're coming from. But anecdote time.
The immediate communication fixed something for us which would previously be a more disruptive tap on the shoulder, or alternatively an only once a day processed e-mail. Slack gave our devs time to finish their thought, write out that line of code, before tabbing to Slack to see what's up.
Because you see, I love my team, but they're not perfect. Just like the vast majority of people they're imperfect beings working with imperfect information. And in order to get them to output quality code (as in, does what it needs to do, bug free, without incorrect assumptions about data) they need to communicate to each other and me. We can't wait until a PR to catch they didn't fully understand these data models setup by another guy. Nor can we wait until a PR to realize someone took the wrong approach trying to fix a problem.
Someone getting disrupted might mean someone else can progress with their task. What I'm trying to get at, I need my team to communicate and communicate often. We have plenty of issues, just like any team, but most of them come from the lack of communication. Slack, or any other similar platform allowed to strike somewhat of a happy medium where the barrier to communicate isn't too high nor too low. It's less formal and faster than an email. And keeps a better log than an in-person conversation would.
Added bonus, it also helps us to have a more liberal 'work from home' policy.
The only thing that allows you to have a liberal work from home policy is a healthy company/team/corporate culture.
Slack has become the worst possible amalgamation of email and telephone. When previously minor things were discussed asynchronously over mail, only major and immediate issues warranted a phone call. Now all kinds of noncritical correspondence gets pushed to an instant messenger application, where every issue has to be paid attention to immediately.
That's interesting. Any idea how could they possibly do that?
The exact same reason why people initially loved Facebook and spent so much time on it?
do I absolutely really need to know that a Docker build has completed on the project channel?
Do I really care?
But it gets rewards points to those involved in that build: "Look! I did something good! I deserve a treat"
I experience quite the opposite. With in-person communication, people barge in, demand you drop what you're doing now and answer their question/conversation.
With slack, you can answer them when you need a break or have finished something up.
Having realtime chat has saved me countless hours of participating in e-mail threads that end nowhere, at the same time as helping me be less interrupted as I tell people to send me a message first and if it's really urgent to interrupt me.
I don't care about Slack as a company but I'm happy that a IRC-like chat ended up in the mainstream and is useful for my day-to-day.
Isn't what you are describing the de-facto use case of a mailing list?
In Slack or any IRC-like chat I can keep track of the channels that interest me, I keep track of live operations, my team's public channel to see if there are stakeholders having issues with our systems, our private channel for internal team discussions (even more when I'm working from home). The engineering announcement channel to keep track in realtime of changes being performed to other systems or our infrastructure and getting quick status updates.
Yes, e-mail could be used for all of that, it would also make my inbox completely useless.
There's a field on emails called subject.
Linux kernel is still developed using mailing list, I can imagine only a few things harder than that, still the kernel team manages to work on it just fine, without being in the same physical space.
Channels are just another way of labeling stuff...
> (even more when I'm working from home)
emails have been distributed, async and remote-aware since the 60s.
I'm really genuinely curious to understand why people keep making this point, while that's one of the most irrelevant feature of Slack.
I'm not saying email is perfect, just saying that your points are not a unique feature of slack, anyone of them have existed for decades.
> Yes, e-mail could be used for all of that, it would also make my inbox completely useless.
Just like channels on Slack after a while.
BTW https://www.mattermost.org/ offers the same features Slack offers, but I guess people are not switching because mattermost is not a recognized brand.
Just like people don't buy Nike shoes to ditch them for equally comfortbale but brandless flea market shoes.
It's a shame that tech people are so fashionable.
EDIT: formatting
Unfortunately for us, tech people, business decisions are taken on ease-of-use and other features that we don't tackle when we focus on the technical aspects of products, companies don't want to invest to roll out their own infrastructure, for anything, that is why the cloud is a thing. It's the same with a chat app, if a company can pay another company and offload all of the liability and responsibility to an easy-to-use product, they will do.
I don't know why you are ranting with me. I have used mailing lists before, I have used IRC before and I know what kind of workflows each can improve on my 15 years of career.
E-mails don't cut it, it's not the same ease of use, I don't care if technically I can achieve the same results, the interface and interaction is different and this is enough of an improvement for a product to have its place over another.
Good for the Linux Kernel to keep being developed on a mailing list, the rest of the world doesn't and is better if another tool can improve communication, be it IRC, Mattermost or Slack.
Create a product better than Slack and push it around to solve this problem, don't try to preach this to me, a mere cog in the system that is trying to be productive.
We're working on getting more awareness around Mattermost as an open source Slack-alternative.
We just raised another $50M to invest in our product, on top of $20M we announced 4 months ago. Compared to the $1.2B Slack's raised, it's not that much--but we think dollars in open source can do more.
Our market is enterprise, particularly enterprise DevOps, so there's not as much brand marketing going on.
If Slack were Nike, I think Mattermost would be like the manufacturer of business-style shoes people wear into banks, governmental agencies, manufacturing companies, etc. where sneakers don't typically go.
We want to be just as comfortable and functional as Nikes, but our priority is to make our users and customers look good, and make them successful and build their brand, not promote our brand.
Our brand is to serve.
Email threads tend to become illegible messes too, at least in the circles I'm in. Different formatting, different quote styles, and there's one email chain nowadays where the background color turned black so I can't read it without highlighting the text. There's also the thing where it's far too easy to CC people, which, granted, is a thing in Slack as well possibly but it's not yet ingrained in Slack culture in most places to make big group chats with all kinds of managers and only tangentially involved people. A lot of email is written in cover-your-ass mode with excessive formality and CCing a lot of people.
I'll take a direct message anyday when it comes to day to day stuff. I prefer important announcements, events, etc to still be in email though.
Before there was always someone moving around to talk to someone else or internal E-Mails which are bad, too.
We use slack sparingly and only have a few channels with many people. Most things happen in private channels. We always "idle-ping" other team members first and do not expect an immediate response.
The result is a much calmer office. People move around less and there is less chatter. And we still have the option to use group chat if required.
We even added a channel where new commit messages are automatically posted. A wonderful thing to keep informed about what's going on and you can take immediate action if you see something strange.
I think this all falls apart if our team size would increase. But I believe for teams with less than 25 people slack is perfectly fine. Above that size notifications probably start to be annoying.
1. use /mute judiciously. especially on the main chats. only unmute important "#500" style channels. People immediately learn to @you when relevant.
2. disable notifications for everything on mobile: DMs, @here, @channel, @yourname, anything. No notifications whatsoever.
3. Put "Notifications disabled -- in case of emergency, please call me: <phone nr here>" in your status. I've had one person call me ever and it was completely justified. He saw the status, called me and said, "sorry I'm calling but it's an emergency and your status said to call." Great.
4. Disable all notifications on your desktop app, as well. On Mac OS X, don't even have the red app button show up for unread messages. Just check Slack once an hour (or what you want) and deal with any DMs / @mentions / outstanding chat. In reality, you'll automatically check whenever you have mental downtime, or during a conversation. This just allows you to stay in the zone when you are.
This has significantly reduced my Slack-stress. I enjoy it far better now, on my terms.
Most importantly: if someone is frustrated by your poor response time, explain! "I'm very bad with distractions, I need this to cope. If it's an emergency, please call :)". People are good people, they understand.
I hope this helps anyone :)
When someone @heres or tags me I only see the red dot on the favicon when I'm already in my browser.
On top of that you get tons of resources back on your machine!
Instead we got Slack.
At least its success made developers take Electron seriously for desktop apps.
At my workplace, we are a team of 7 (in a research project, it's academia but I don't think our way of organizing things is too different from a small startup), we have been using Slack for like a year and we have a sane relationship with it. Yesterday I think there were like 2 or 3 messages in our Slack, no more were needed. At other points (with looming deadlines, etc.) there is more activity, but it's always activity related to work that needs to be done, and my feeling is that it mostly reduces the amount of email, and sometimes also substitutes private messaging that some of us were using for work-related issues. Which is a plus for work culture, because we keep work and leisure separated. And as there are no notifications outside working hours, I think it has actually been positive for work-life balance, compared to using email or other messaging systems.
I don't know if it's a matter of team size (I can imagine that Slack may be more prone to becoming a behemoth in a huge team?), the personalities of the people using it, or that companies/teams where Slack is problematic already had a problematic work culture in the first place. Maybe it also helps that we don't have the paid plan at my team, so since logs are not stored, we use it for immediate teamwork and we instinctively shift to email or other means for important stuff that needs to be on record or consulted later. But for whatever reason, for us it hasn't become a growing monster. I'm curious about the factors that make it a blessing or a curse.
There has always been distractions in office. Colleague would just walk over to you.
Now you get message. You can choose what you check and when. And reaction that is not immediate is usually fine. At least at my company.
And best of all, I don't have to be in same office to be able to communicate. I'm not even in same country, yet we can work realtime with team.
edit: lol, this is downvoted? nice.
One way of getting that would be 800m users generating profit after expenses of $1 each every year.
This is a chat app that is completely and totally replaceable with irc. No really it is. $800m per year in clear profit.
Is that really feasible in any way? How? What's the bait and switch here? (With facebrick it was the surveillance nobody knowingly agreed to. Is there something like that here?) Can anyone do a back of the envelope calculation to make this price make sense?
It isn't.
I know Slack probably needs to justify its valuation in front of some people, but Slack is not different from Facebook and Instagram in this regard: They offer nothing unique or technologically superior. The whole point of their business is hoarding users to the point that it's the "default" app in their given context.
I'm not saying it's bad. If they didn't do it, someone else would have done it anyway.
Slack just works and their UI/UX is on point, everything is intuitive. Their client is slow and eats RAM, but I totally see that it's more useful than other chat applications.
Skype for Business doesn't save the conversation and is useless (it mails it to you ...), for example.
EDIT: I do not imply that venture capitalists poses some insider knowledge. It is not necessary. It's just the fact that when bullshit companies with bullshit product, that generate losses instead of profit get valued at $16B (other recent examples include Lyft and Uber) it means that economy is in crazy state, and it does not take much to induce panic. My guess is one of these unicorns will fill for bankruptcy soon, thus pushing the market over the edge.
Yet, I have no real evidence that points me to its truth. The thinking seems to be predicated on VCs having inside knowledge or excellent speculative skills. That might be true, but presumably they're not the only strong speculators.
Are we seeing other major players move out of tech? We're certainly not seeing massive liquidation in general.
It does, however indicate that the VCs think that the company in question has peaked.
Unless the argument could be made that somehow, going public is going to really boost Slack's business going forward and was the only way to do so.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1100683/000089161800...
Pets.com paid $10.5M for pet food then sold it for $8.7M, while needing $23M to keep the lights on that quarter.
Compare to https://sec.report/Document/0001628280-19-004786/ :
Slack, unsurprisingly because it sells software, has positive gross margins rather than negative gross margins; they're healthy at ~80%. They appear to be able to turn $1 of sales and marketing spend in Year 1 into > $1 of software revenue in year 2. Their churn rate on a dollar basis is 43%. Excuse me, -43%; a cohort of SaaS customers paying $100M in year 1 will pay $143M in year 2 due to growth in number of seats more than offsetting churning accounts.
There is no price at which a rational person should want to own Pets.com. There is, very clearly, a price at which a rational person should want to own Slack.
This price is not that.
EDIT: So I looked it up and it looks like something useful for a lot of remote workers that need constant, instant contact with people working on the same stuff at the same time. To me that's a pretty niche market. If I thought the phone or email wasn't good enough, I might pay $5/month for such a service. But irc works pretty good still today.
IRC isn't worth $16B
That said, $16B seems to be about 4x more than I would have expected.
There’s a disclaimer these unicorns put in their S1s - “we are not profitable and may never be” - Atlassian probably didn’t have to do that.
That should count for something right?
"We may not be able to sustain our revenue growth rate or maintain profitability in the future."
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650372/000155837015...
> Slack has nothing like Jira, BitBucket, or Trello.
And thank goodness for that, because those are awful as well.
Jira I've always hated... gawd. Just something about the way it does thing... so complicated. Hated that product.
BitBucket is what it is - almost never used the web interface.
Confluence is their other product... also not great and just a bit annoying to use for some reason.
You don't think it's Mission Critical?
This is an insubstantial business, doing an even more insubstantial product, with a sole criteria of it being a "big thing" being some smart banker analyst saying so — that's a hello from dotcom bubble era
At such valuation, it will take them ~100 years just to earn its price from ads sales
MySQL is a nicer alternative to managing really big CSV flat files on a filesystem.
Facebook is an RSS, address book, message share.
Etc.
>nothing is worth anything
Very zen, worth rethinking the value of this statement too.
Take away the shallow value judgements like 'just' and you better get to the real quality differences.
Take away the shallow value judgements like 'just' and you start conversations about the depth of a thing instead of emotional discussions defending your positions.
The entire slack userbase could vaporise within weeks if slack made a wrong move. Slack doesn't really bring anything special to the table.
Slack takes a problem users have ("my coworkers keep bugging me with stupid questions") and makes the problem worse, because now your coworkers can see that you're online and demand instant answer :)