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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.

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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.

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