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Comment by solidasparagus | Hacker News Reader

Slack didn't clone text chat. They took the best parts of text chat, Facebook (reactions), Reddit (threads, edits) and terminals (simple UI for applications) and merged them into a single tool. I'm currently using HipChat and the difference is night and day. Slack makes large, busy chat rooms coherent in a way that just isn't possible with other text chats. And because of that, it opens new completely new possibilities (channels to support customers, channels to use as long-term references, etc.)

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> Reddit (threads, edits)

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.

Yeah threads still suck. They claim they've investigated it and it was the best solution but I totally get lost with twenty threads over five Slacks with ten channels each.

IMO the small changes they've made have really helped. I like how they keep off topic conversations from overflowing into the channel, and the little notification about unread threads helps me not forget them. Plus you can go back to conversations you missed and add to them.

I get the impression that threads (like browser tabs) are a very individual thing.

Some people want total threading, others want a flat flow.

Slack seem to be treading a very careful line between the two extremes

That was a great ad for Slack, but I don't think it's true. I've never had any issues with any other chat app. Many people still use Facebook chat and IRC and the functionality is basically identical between each of the new chat apps (well, except you can do way more with IRC).

I want to respectfully challenge this - many people do still use those tools and still will. But the user experience in Slack is objectively better, especially with large rooms with frequent content (as the OP mentions).

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.

Still, it is not worth $16B. It's straight forward existing ideas crowbarred into a modern webapp that really any 10-headed team of highly talented web programmers could come up with and implement within a month or so. So it is maybe worth 10 * $100 000 / 12 = $83 333, so it is overvalued by a factor of 192 000. Highly indicative of an economic bubble.

> a modern webapp that really any 10-headed team of highly talented web programmers could come up with and implement within a month or so

infamous dropbox comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

I know, valuation in tech is most often about reach, not so much about the technology itself. This raises the important question whether anything should be allowed to have as much reach.

Objectively better than the garbage the GP mentioned but objectively worse than Telegram.

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?

I haven't used Telegram much, but as far as I can tell, Telegram has almost none of the features I pointed out as the core strengths of Slack.

Lowly Skype does just about everything Slack does. Though, they added "channels" after Slack.

After months of trying, I still haven't figured out how to have two coherent support conversations in the same public room/channel at the same time outside of using Slack.

If you know how to do this, please share.

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