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Comment by ashelmire | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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.

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

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