Comment by lerela | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lerela | Hacker News Reader

I have been using Google Chat as part of our Google Workspace subscription and it is just terrible. Channels are inconsistent if you add users that don't belong to your org, the possibility to edit or delete a message seems totally arbitrary, it is not even possible to reply to a specific message (making discussions a real mess), video calls are handled completely separately through Google Meet, and the list goes on. It looks like nothing has changed in over a year so I'm surprised to see that Google is still pushing it, yet not fixing the basic flaws that make it barely usable for anyone who previously used Slack or any modern messaging entreprise tool.

We finally switched to Discord last month, the lack of integration with the Google Suite is a pity but the experience with Google Chat for a small organization was just too painful and not understandable.

I'm wondering if you somehow pinned your org to an old version. I'm, as a googler, on pre-release and Chat is obviously changing a lot. I doubt I will ever like it, but "nothing has changed" is the polar opposite of what I'm seeing.

I did nothing of the sort (on purpose at least!) but apart from minor cosmetic changes, we are still stuck with the limitations I mentioned and to the best of my knowledge I did not see real improvements over the past year (but I might have forgotten some).

However, I've just tried again to be sure and I'm still unable to create a group chat with someone outside my org (that I've added to a channel), unable to reply to a specific message in a conversation, unable to edit some messages. As an admin I am also unable to perform any kind of moderation in a channel (arguably, that's not a showstopper, but it is weird not to have admin rights over my organization chat). Also, switching back and forth between two conversations still shows a very noticeable delay with a spinner which really hampers the experience.

Hopefully the changes you see in the pre-release will be deployed soon and fix some of those issues.

The integration with Meet is actually the only feature I do like.

It’s not Googles style, but I’d love for someone at Google to explain Chat and why they think the current UI is any good.

Can confirm. I've been woken in the night a fair few times from someone half way across the world writing @all in a channel discussion...

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