Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

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>What problem exactly did it solve?

If one answers that with just "workplace chat messaging", Slack looks redundant and unnecessary since the world already had IRC, ICQ, AOL AIM, Yahoo Chat, Skype, etc.

E.g. in the early Facebook years (~2005), Zuckerberg and his team used AOL AIM as their chat system at work because Slack didn't exist. Early Twitter is another example where Jack Dorsey and coworkers used AOL AIM for workplace chat. (Indeed, Jack even said he got inspiration for Twitter from AIM's "away status" feature)

So we have to find the differentiator of Slack that attracted businesses to adopt it instead of just using IRC or Skype:

- Slack lets people subdivide the chat space into "virtual rooms" or "channels" as a 1st-class concept. This is something that the older AOL AIM, Skype, Pidgin client, etc didn't do. This feature is helpful for businesses because you have multiple projects or teams where multiple people collaborate with various subsets of employees. The older chat systems enabled 1-to-1 messaging based on userid but not on "topics" with 1-to-many participants.

- Slack userids are scoped to the company which is more acceptable for private chats within the business. In contrast, the userids in AOL AIM were global ids and therefore not constrained to the particular company's communication. (Slack added ability to chat outside the company recently in 2021: https://www.google.com/search?q=slack+chat+with+other+compan...)

- IRC had topic channels but corporations don't want to hassle with admins setting up internal IRC servers and plain IRC doesn't have desired features such as chat history without additional effort (i.e. IRC bouncer). In contrast, using Slack for workplace chat is just a few clicks in the cloud.

In short, Slack had a combination of some extra useful features and near-zero admin (cloud).

> - Slack lets people subdivide the chat space into "virtual rooms" or "channels" as a 1st-class concept.

In my opinion this is very much a double-edged sword. At my organization we have one person (maybe self-appointed) who, when seeing a question asked on a more general channel, invariably responds with something along the lines of “have you checked #super-niche-channel-probably-only-useful-in-this-exact-case?” When I see one of those questions pop up, I usually try to guess the particular sub channel that he’ll try to redirect the asker to but am rarely successful.

But my org may just be using slack wrong. We do have thousands of channels and the same order of magnitude employees. Maybe guidelines about the granularity of channels would be helpful.

Or maybe Slack is just not for me: e-mail is my preferred method for asynchronous comms and I prefer phone calls for synchronous comms because I think the slight friction in having to pick up a phone to make a call helps limit throughout and improves quality of requests. And for info repositories I prefer a curated wiki page to discussion threads for both search and comprehension.

> And for info repositories I prefer a curated wiki page to discussion threads for both search and comprehension.

This point is so important.

Some folks seem to think that chat threads can serve properly in this role but in my experience both Slack and MS Teams are nearly useless in the role of "info repository."

XMPP was also years ahead and even federated! At my employer we self hosted a server after AIM and it was great. Lack of persistent history was just a plugin away. Adium was also a nicely polished client which also handled AIM, so the user transition was easy.

Sadly I think Slack was largely marketing and timing: federation was nontrivial (unlike email).

But there were already other comparable solutions that existed and had adoption at the time -- eg. HipChat. I get why something like Slack or HipChat beat IRC, but what did Slack do differently than the existing offerings that enabled it to beat them all out so easily?

Having used both at the time, it was all about UX and marketing.

Back in roughly 2015-2016, some of friends were using Slack at their company and were making fun of how antiquated and uncool HipChat was — even though HipChat had all the same functionality. HipChat had the advantage of being a fast, native app, while Slack was a slow Electron wrapper around a web page. But Slack nailed the UX. It had the aesthetics of a generation of "post-Web 2.0" apps that were coming out that were more real-time and shipping as Electron apps. HipChat just looked old school. Pretty soon my company was on Slack, too.

It also helped that Slack quickly got support for a much richer set of integrations with other apps. HipChat had a bunch, but I think Slack realized this would be the number one way to beat the competition, and they spent a ton of effort on building out this side of the platform. Slack, of course, also had the advantage of focus; HipChat was made by Atlassian, who had a lot of different products to spread their focus more thinly.

Around the same time we saw a similar battle between Google Hangouts and "old school" apps like WebEx and GoToMeeting. The latter were/are native apps, rock stable, but fundamentally uncool. Hangouts was browser-based and super flaky, but somehow cool because they were the latest generation of web UX.

What's interesting right now is that Zoom, a thoroughly clunky and uncool native app (very similar to WebEx or GoToMeeting in that sense) has somehow gained enormous market share, despite the existence of decently mature web-based alternatives. Maybe because Google managed to mess up its chat/videoconferencing so badly.

I think Hangouts beat WebEx because you could invite someone to a meeting and they didn't need to download or install anything to join.

And I think Zoom beat Hangouts because you could invite someone to a meeting and they didn't need to create an account to join.

My company was using Hipchat in 2016 but it was also an web browser (maybe it was nw.js?) wrapper with the following deficiencies compared to slack and we were very glad when they got acquired and we switched:

- Horrible text editor compared to slack (no inline code, no syntax highlighting, lists barely worked, undo barely worked) - notification preferences (per channel) we’re lacking. - no threading support - UI was laggy compared to slack. - there was an very limited set of emojis. - no good mobile app. - few and limited integrations (notably I use GitHub, Jira, and Outlook integrations for slack).

Still hipchat was far better than Teams is today.

Zoom’s media blitz at the start of the pandemic + phone number style meeting IDs is what propelled them to the top.

No log-in required — just enter the 10 digit code and your name.

Arguably one difference between hipchat and slack in 2015 (when I was using hipchat) was slack nailed their design/UX. In turn it influenced the later generation of chat programs (discord, microsoft teams, etc). And they have good marketing.

Threads get a lot of credit, but I think a big big value add was custom emojis--hard to understate the value of transforming local workplace memes/jokes into emojis and make them instantly accessible to anyone else in your workspace.

I am experiencing some form of Poe's Law reading this one.

Particularly due to the choice of the word "understate."

My company switched to Slack pretty early (mid 2014). IMHO the secret sauce was the volume and quality of integrations so you could pretty quickly turn it into a real-time feed/joint timeline of, well, everything.

The other secret sauce Slack had in 2014 was that hipchat was _constantly_ in a state of outage. There’s probably an opportunity given then number of outages Slack now sees.

> Slack userids are scoped to the company which is more acceptable for private chats within the business. In contrast, the userids in AOL AIM were global ids and therefore not constrained to the particular company's communication.

I know for sure that AOL[1] and Yahoo [2] had enterprise messaging services available for some time, but I think they had both shut down that option because of lack of uptake before Slack was started or at least before it rose to promenence. I'd guess MSN had that feature too, but I don't specifically remember. Segregated scopes being the only option makes a big difference though, and timing is also important; Yahoo was making cool products and killing them because there wasn't enough traction only for the market to show up later for years before Google made that cool. Startup idea: look through old Yahoo new product press releases for ideas that worked but were before their time; if Google did it years later and abandoned it, then it's been shown that an independent team can build it, so you probably can too.

[1] https://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/18829405/aol-final... https://www.computerworld.com/article/2564773/aol-phases-out...

[2] https://www.internetnews.com/enterprise/yahoo-extends-im-to-... https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/yahoo-soups-... https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/yahoo-scraps...

I agree with all points. I'm curious if the makers of Slack actually thought these were the critical differentiators they needed to build to succeed from the beginning, or they built "just another chat app" when they started and eventually had an aha moment

Slack the messaging app was actually the pivot off of an unsuccessful MMORPG. They were writing it for their own internal use. Motivations were somewhat different than you are envisioning.

And the founder's (Stewart Butterfield) earlier company, Flickr, was also a pivot off another unsuccessful game. Man just wants to make games but gets too successful building billion dollar companies.

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