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Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

> I want to immediately stop using this software but have no choice

As someone who never got into slack, and never found it appealing... How so?

If it is the primary method of communicating within your team/company, then you will find it difficult to not use it, or rather you will be left out of major decisions/changes.

You’ve described the pathology and first reason to NOT use chat for anything important. What am I supposed to do? Sit on the chat all day so I don’t miss anything? I’m on a team that does this now. I ignore the 100 to 1000 plus messages and memes a day and I have missed “important decisions”. It’s a net negative imo.

That may be so, but that's a seperate issue.

If it is the primary method, you'll miss stuff.

Whether it should, is another matter, and running a one-man rebellion from within is probably not the most effective way to change that.

This comment literally illustrates the pathology described by its parent. Not all organizations are cults run by cliche fascists who crush subordinates who make that kind of criticism.

I work on a remote small team, but we work on a highly complex, large code base.

We rarely pick up a phone, and we do not use email. Everything is 100% Slack.

This works well for us. You can bring in only the people you need, you can "star" messages and channels that are important, and none of us have any time to spam/meme the channels, so it's 100% business. We integrate the JIRA slackbot to keep abreast of what is going on in JIRA.

It all "just works" for us.

If your team is sending memes all day, that's a cultural problem. Slack is exposing the problem, not creating it.

My employer uses Slack. Our team channels are almost completely devoid of cruft. There are office/location based channels that contain more bloat, but those are easy to ignore and typically don't contain critical information. All of the "all employee" type channels are locked down.

Good point, I guess they could stop using slack and eventually get fired.

Why so snarky? The parent poster asked a valid question, and "my organization relies on it and de-facto mandates its use" would have been a good answer.

I'm confused, do you honestly believe the person I was replying to doesn't know that Slack is critical comms infrastructure at a LOT of companies?

Why would this person know that? Speaking from personal experience, I myself did not know how critical it is for some as I do not use it day to day (I heard some anecdotes sometimes, but that's it), rarely ever used it, and only recently experienced it in a setting were it was Slacks all the down.

They previously looked at Slack and never found it appealing, they are replying pretty deep into a massively popular HN thread and their question was a pretty snarky "How so?". Maybe my snark was unjustified but I'm comfortable with it.

"How so?" isn't snarky at all to me. It's a rather legitimate question one may pose to somebody who just said they'd stop using a product but can't. The answers could be one of a wide variety, like vendor lock-in, network effect, contractual obligations, or company policy, no viable alternatives (because...), or something entirely unexpected.

I'd actually be interested in the answer from grand-poster as well, if only because I am a curious asshole.

> I'm confused, do you honestly believe the person I was replying to doesn't know that Slack is critical comms infrastructure at a LOT of companies?

As the person asking that question, no. I've heard it's used by some people ... for things.

Just like I've heard some companies use IRC for chat, and some open source projects use Discord where you can join if you feel like it.

I have no idea what its primary use-case is, who its primary audience is, and to what degree it's more critical than IRC or email or intranets to anyone.

Does that answer your question?

Yes. Now, no snark, just advice.

Your comment started off about you and was dismissive of Slack. Saying "How so?", in general, is not handled by people as a genuine and sincere question, it's usually laden with an "I don't believe you" vibe, especially with the dismissive nature of the lead-in.

If you had asked instead:

> "I've haven't really used slack, didn't really see the use case. Why can't you stop using it?"

You would have received a better response.

> Saying "How so?", in general, is not handled by people as a genuine and sincere question, it's usually laden with an "I don't believe you" vibe, especially with the dismissive nature of the lead-in.

I don't believe that. I think it is a perfectly fine question, and don't find anything wrong with the way the post was worded. Based on my personal experience, I think my interpretation is the general one.

From my 30 years management experience, your personal experience is not what I've seen. Maybe works in small teams but not with strangers; too short, too abrupt and provides little to no context about the desired answer.

For example, in the case above, was the "How so?" directed at the "immediately stop using it" part or the "have no choice" part? Both?

> Saying "How so?", in general, is not handled by people as a genuine and sincere question, it's usually laden with an "I don't believe you" vibe

That sounds like an extremely regional interpretation, and does not consider that the question was asked in good faith, something the HN guidelines specifically ask you to assume[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I've never worked at a company that uses Slack. I don't particularly understand what people use it for or how what as far as I can tell is a glorified IRC channel is allegedly so important to some teams. Get a whiteboard.

Funnily enough I was hired on a 12 month contract as a software developer.

Four months into that contract I was moved over to a struggling 'Slack' enabled project, to help them work through their ever growing backlog.

I knew someone working on that project and discussed with them the project's use of Slack only to realise it was nothing more than a talk fest and not for me.

So when the project manager approached me, asking if I would like to join in on the Slack discussions, I declined.

Needless to say that did no go down so well.

However, I stuck to my guns and 12 months on my contract was renewed.

To this day Slack is still not part of my daily development life.

99% of the time, Slack is nothing more but a glorified, shitty messaging client. And most people I know don't even know why they're using slack, it's just that it's the tool they think everybody uses, and they don't really see why they should look elsewhere.

Because Slack killed their XMPP and IRC bridges, so the only way to connect to is via the official interface.

> so the only way to connect to is via the official interface.

Not true. There’s several alternative clients.

They all use the same "interface". XMPP/IRC would be different interfaces. I can use whatever client I want, not some client that is specifically coded for Slack.

I don't need ANY changes in my XMPP/IRC client to connect to a server.

But the reason why Slack discontinued XMPP/IRC is clear. They want people to use their shitty app/website.

In a conversation thread that’s all about “UI interfaces”, feels a bit pedantic to me to harp on defining “API interface” as your only valid “interface” definition, especially as there’s a plugin (https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack) for a popular IRC client to integrate with Slack’s “websocket interface”.

Yes, but parents

>so the only way to connect to is via the official interface.

was clearly not about the UI but rather their HTTP way of accessing Slack. And right now there is no other way besides that.

Actually, that’s not clear either (even if it was GP’s intent), it’s simply your bias coloring your perspective. Other folks could easily define interface as the Slack apps, especially in the context of this thread.

Many folks I’ve talked to don’t realize there are alternative ways to connect to Slack still once the XMPP / IRC endpoints died. They think the only way is using the Slack developed apps. Thankfully, that’s becoming more and more not true each day.

Pedantic Point:

Re: > rather their HTTP way of accessing Slack

Slack uses Websockets. Websockets != to HTTP.

"connect" seems clear to me. But anyway, doesn't really make much of a difference.

>Many folks I’ve talked to don’t realize there are alternative ways to connect to Slack still once the XMPP / IRC endpoints died. They think the only way is using the Slack developed apps. Thankfully, that’s becoming more and more not true each day.

Which are? Using a proprietary Websockets API is not "another" way if even the Slack app is using that (not sure). The main difference to XMPP/IRC is, that with the later ones not a single line of code needs to be written (not from me and not from IRC/XMPP developers). Just use the client you like, set server and credentials and you are done. That's why there are protocols.

>Slack uses Websockets. Websockets != to HTTP.

port 443 is close enough and http is needed to start anyway :P

Not really. You can use their API and implement a client like the ones already mentioned: wee-slack, ripcord, ...

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