Slack Is Fumbling Developers | Hacker News Reader

Slack Is Fumbling Developers

swyx.io

38 pointsgregdoesit10 comments

I got PTSD reading the list of sign-up complaints; it goes double for the extra hoop-jumpery of adding 2FA for each newly created account. Icing on top for the obligatory email unsubscribe 3 days later when some rando "welcome" bot mentions me and Slack feels it important to email me to let me know that I'm welcome and I should post a message if I have any questions

Zulip, or even Mattermost a little bit, offers unlimited hosting for open source communities, and not this "we're going to throw your messages in the trash" stupidity that Slack is doing. It's a grave disservice that Slack is doing to those communities

I think the quote the author is looking for is by Chris Dixon.

"What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years"

https://cdixon.org/2013/03/02/what-the-smartest-people-do-on...

author here! thanks! i was! thank you

Personally I prefer Discord for community chat because search is not limited to the past 10k messages. I wouldn't trust Discord for work chat (weak privacy). For work chat I prefer self-hosted e.g. mattermost.

how does the security compare slack to discord?

The security (e.g. passwords, 2FA, etc.) is roughly equivalent between Slack and Discord. In both cases you're hosting your messages on someone else's server.

For privacy, Discord has a bad track record, so as a business, I'd choose Slack over Discord. But I definitely prefer self-hosting communications infrastructure.

Slack is crossing the chasm. While early adopters shed it for Discord (and others), Slack is gaining mainstream users and mindshare.

Is it really, though?

in my experience, the mainstream is going for Microsoft Teams, and overwhelmingly so. Any org who has not significantly bought into Slack yet is very unlikely to ever do it, because Teams is now “good enough” and effectively free. Which I guess is why Slack is trying to kill Teams with lawyers rather than features.

Slack has likely jumped the shark.

agreed on all of this - Slack is really tough to build a community on top of! Kurt’s quote in that post is very true; the moderation/role stuff in Discord makes it super appealing for building any sort of large community.

i’ve been working on a new discord server for people building mailing lists[1] and newsletters and built out an opt-in software channel section where people can opt into #mailchimp, #convertkit, etc. channels without any sort of moderation/admin input needed. it’s a really nifty “self-serve” thing that i’m pretty sure i wouldn’t have been able to pull off with slack.

fully expecting “discord communities-as-product” to be a big thing over the next few years as they’ve built a great platform to do that sort of thing.

[1]: https://www.mailinglisthackers.com/chat

Slack is making the conscious decision to not build their product for this use case. And I think they're right to! It's absolutely fine that alternatives exist for developer communities. Making Slack a massive, amorphous application that appeals to all use cases would be a quick way to kill it.

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