Hacker News Reader

Comment by msbarnett | Hacker News Reader

Aside from the obvious issue that a ton of devices don’t have user upgradable RAM, are we really this comfortable with feeding constant consumerist abandonment of old devices through our own sheer laziness as developers?

“It only uses 8% of 8GB of RAM. If that’s an issue consumers can buy more RAM or throw away their devices and buy new ones” is soon phrased as “It only uses 8% of 16GB of RAM. If that’s an issue consumers can buy more RAM or throw away their devices and buy new ones” and soon after etc, etc

At some point, preferably before we start saying “it’s just half a terabyte of RAM to run a chat app”, we may want to step back and question this circular justification for ever increasing bloat and ask ourselves when enough is enough. There’s been no real gain in functionality in the past 10-20 years of chat app churn, just an enormous explosion in RAM and CPU requirements.

View on HN

If there has been no real gain in functionality, then why is Slack hugely popular while IRC is used by almost no one?

Perhaps you aren't giving credit to functionality that is important to people other than yourself?

Extra features aren't the reason why Slack is so huge.

What is the reason?

You could make a pile of shit popular if you had similar access to Silicon Valley funding and marketing machines.

> If there has been no real gain in functionality, then why is Slack hugely popular while IRC is used by almost no one?

The main, really only, features that Slack has that IRC doesn’t is easy account onboarding and (crucially, for business) offboarding, and persistent messaging. This has been discussed to death, publicly, by organizations like Mozilla. They were also smart enough to offer themselves for free to startups, which largely undermined hipchat, which had the same basic value proposition over IRC, and allowed them to build a hip reputation and network effects in the startup crowd.

Are we really going to pretend that those features are why the Slack client consumes tons of RAM and a fuckload of CPU cycles? They’re entirely server side, for christ’s sake.

ICQ could do all of the above on a 32 Meg Mac 20 years ago. The bloat isn’t related to the reasons it “won”, or why it continues to be popular. Network effects, the fact that if your company mandates it you have no alternative, simply insulates them from suffering many ill-effects of their bloated, laggy client software.

Lots of different chat software had easy onboarding & offboarding as well as persistent messaging before Slack and none of it was successful in the same way.

Like I said, networking effects and currying a hip reputation are a huge part of why I think they got big. In large part nothing about what makes them big strikes me as technical in nature.

But sure, ok, so let’s hear your theory on why they got big and how it requires all of this client side RAM usage. So what is it?

IME Slack at big companies has mostly been a ground-up initiative by engineers that were sick of important discussions happening in long email chains. It's strange to read that network effects or entrenchment made Slack so huge when 5 or 6 years ago they didn't exist :/

IME as an engineer who’s been around the block, before Slack we were using Hipchat, and before that Jabber or IRC. I have not noticed a significant change in features (gifs, bots, integrations were all there through all of those), just changing fads, but by god if the performance and responsiveness of the chat client de jour hasn’t been steadily declining over time.

Mostly what drove orgs I’ve been with from one to another has been pricing (Slack having a free tier ate Hipchat’s lunch, like I said), and “buzz”. Slack was the hip thing to get on in 2013.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com