Hacker News Reader

Comment by Orou | Hacker News Reader

I actually liked Hipchat. It did what it was supposed to do - provide instant chat with colleagues - without the overhead and frills of Slack. It was simple and reliable. I'm not sure why it was so disliked.

View on HN

The memes were also better

Hipchat memes were the main upside of the product, differenciating it from the market. They were 500x500 squares, not tiny emojimemes like in Discord or Slack. You could truely express an opinion. It was heartwarming.

Then they decided that they wanted to look serious, and reduced the meme size to 32px. That’s when the product fell out of fashion, because it was just like Slack with fewer features.

IIRC Hipchat had a lot of outages when Slack was becoming popular. I'm sure there was more to it than the meme image size.

Thats why we switched from Hipchat to Slack. Slack's client for the Mac was so terrible at the time but we couldn't deal with the outages of Hipchat. I remember you could see the underlying browsers context menu if you right clicked in the original Slack app.

Have we regressed back to drawing things on the (cave) walls??

Thousands of years of linguistic progress out the window...

What do you mean by linguistic progress? AFAIK there isn’t any evidence that human language was much different during the cave painting era than it is now.

wat?

On the flipside, "a picture is worth a thousand words"...

I would say a picture is worth a thousand words for things that can be pictured. Most things actually can't, hence words.

Underrated point

> It was simple and reliable.

What is hard about slack? We use channels for the "group" stuff and IM for quick and dirty chats, otherwise just pick up the phone and call. I personally just prefer using email, but the kids like their slack/discord/whatever

I had a friend complain it was eating their battery, and my phone battery started acting weird around the time I installed it. Seems better now, did they ever confess to a problem?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com