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Comment by granshaw | Hacker News Reader

There’s no money to be made in creating and building on open protocols. Without money to be made there’s no funding. Without funding there’s no way to create great experiences. Without great experiences nobody will use the thing.

Pretty straightforward, really

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Great experiences are dependent on funding? Going back to IRC, many of us had great experiences on there. USENET was a fountain of great experiences. All text mode. Or do you mean "great experiences" as in the kind of thing depicted in Subaru commercials where they are selling the car as a gateway to beautiful mountaintop sunsets and beach picnics?

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.

Try to get the average office worker to use IRC today and see how far that gets you. It really behooves Engineers to put themselves in the shoes of actual users once in a while

Nobody is saying IRC is the greatest thing in the world today. It was very effective in its time, and it existed (and continues to exist!) without a profit-driven motive.

It was effective for orders of magnitude less users than that of current chat apps.

Great experience for a tech nerd vs great experience for your average desk jockey. Nobody is stopping us from making new protocols, continuing to use IRC, etc. The reality is software is no longer a niche thing - its just another part of mainstream business. There are still "power user" versions of formerly-niche domains.

On the other hand, I don't think anyone accused slack, with multi-megabyte webpages and even worse mobile app, of being a great experience. I think I used it once, and said no more.

Do these things matter to most users? The non engineers at my work have never complained about slack.

They do. Non-engineers just tend to blame the age/quality of their company issued hardware rather than the problematic software causing performance issues.

I've met only a few programmers IRL that complained about slack, and even then it was for ideological reasons, not user experience reasons. Everyone else, most programmers and all non-programmers I know like the user experience.

I haven't had any real issues with desktop or mobile apps either.

I use Slack for work, and while it was an order of magnitude better than the dumpster-fire of Hipchat (which it replaced for our team), I still think that the interface is kind of "meh".

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.

I'm not sure what about the experience you had a concern about. Slack is the de facto user experience standard right now, with everyone from discord to teams copying it.

The Electron-ness and memory usage of the app on desktop are certainly annoying, but the UX is still far better than any terminal-based or open source GUI for IRC. It was better than HipChat when my company moved to Slack 4 years ago.

Overall Slack is a net UX improvement over everything that came before.

Microsoft Teams is pretty good.

And with all those problems it's still significantly better than the competition.

I wish I could upvote this comment 1000 times.

That is a very hot take. You're under the impression that nobody thinks slack is a great user experience? What?

And yet, as a counterexample, HTML and HTTP persist. Maybe things aren't as straightforward as they seem.

With QUIC, even TCP is getting replaced because of the need to innovate despite protocol ossification. It's almost impossible to improve TCP at this point due to non-compliant endpoints and middleboxes.

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 don't get how your point is a counter example to the parent's argument? I think there is a lot of money to be made in building on HTML and HTTP. For one, a faster HTTP protocol directly means more cost efficiency in hosting and streaming content, better customer conversions, etc.

IMO, HTTP and HTML are counter-examples to the statement 'There’s no money to be made in creating and building on open protocols.' because they're open protocols that have attracted a great deal of money, and plenty of people creating and building on them.

By that reasoning (which I mostly agree with) making it cheaper to build great experiences is a good thing to do.

And yet open-source has exploded.

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