Slack: A redesigned Slack, built for focus | Hacker News Reader

Slack: A redesigned Slack, built for focus

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41 pointst3rabytes37 comments

Just publish an open and fully documented API so folks can build their own clients (or use those written by folks they share UX opinions with) and these constant redesigns that will inevitably break folks' muscle memories and piss people off won't be necessary, come on, Slack!

Anyway, can't wait to have to re-learn a bunch of stuff for Glossy IRC yet again...

Unfortunately, IRC does not allow a lot of modern features that we take for granted, such as seeing a channel's history upon joining, roles, reacts, or message editing. Last I checked, the latest IRC spec doesn't support most of these either. It might be worth working on something open and new

I'm strongly of the opinion these days that channel scrollback history is an anti-feature. Anything that depends on Slack Search to be found, is in formation that should be captured in "hard documentation" - markdown docs in a git repo, Notion,even Google Docs or whatever.

Roles do "somewhat" exist in IRC, in the sense that you can have ops and admins, but I suppose it's not quite as fully-fledged as something like Discord's roles.

Reacts and editing indeed don't exist. Reacts are something I've pondered what an IRCv3 extension for might look like - maybe I should poke at that some day in prototype form.

Message edits, well. Sure, you don't have them. You can send a follow up "s/foo/bar" kind of text, and some clients will even understand that as an edit of your last message, but of course it's not perfect.

Anyway. I'd be fully happy if Slack disappeared tomorrow and we all went back to IRC, but I realize that I'm both technical, and someone who grew up on IRC. It wouldn't be perfect for everyone. But damn do I wish that reality could exist.

Isn't hard capture the same as scrollback history?

> I'm strongly of the opinion these days that channel scrollback history is an anti-feature. Anything that depends on Slack Search to be found, is in formation that should be captured in "hard documentation" - markdown docs in a git repo, Notion,even Google Docs or whatever.

I am of the same opinion, but Slack's original advertising focused on how Slack could become a repository for information (rather than information being distributed over emails, Confluence, docs, Git, etc.)

> rather than information being distributed over emails, Confluence, docs, Git, etc.

Now information is distributed over slack, emails, confluence, docs, git, etc…

I've said this before:

At $company, we used an IRC server. Only the IT department used it.

Then we ran an ejabberd XMPP server. Some of the front end devs used it on occasion.

Now we run a Zulip server, and everybody uses it all the time.

Killer features:

- full function web client. No point in using the electron app. Mobile clients are usable, a little nicer than mobile view of the web client.

- self hosted, meets our security policy.

- channels and topics.

- markdown

- fast

- images. I thought this would add nothing, but it turns out that there are lots of non-cute-animal uses.

- each client can turn emojis off

Zulip is great - I used to work there, even. If I could ever convince $dayjob to move over, I'd be fine with that over IRC, sure!

> It might be worth working on something open and new

Matrix is extremely mature and supports all of the things you mentioned and more such as bridging to IRC servers.

I frequently see people complaining about IRC and features it doesn't lack or warts in the protocol from age, but those same groups never mention Matrix as a viable alternative. Do you know why that is?

You mean like the one at https://api.slack.com/apis? You can build your own client today if you want.

Sadly third party apps need to be approved by a slack workspace administrator. I wanted to use wee-slack[0], but neither my work nor any of the community slacks I’m a member of, e.g. kubernetes, had any third party clients enabled at all.

I figured the likelihood of an admin enabling it at my request was zero so I didn’t bother asking.

[0]https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

That's how it should work. Slack offers APIs, and the administrator of each instance controls the level of access you get to them. Remember that the data in Slack doesn't belong to you, but rather is the property of your employer.

Oh i totally agree! It’s just unfortunate that it means a tui slack is not a possibility, even for slacks that are fully public.

My company also does not restrict slack on unmanaged devices so its not like they’re mitigating data exfiltration meaningfully. But, even with such a lax policy, officially sanctioning a third party app has implications.

Then Slack doesn't have an "open" API as I described, at least not one that's a first-class citizen alongside their Electron app (or the app-dot-slack-dot-com equivalent). I can either use my own client, or I can't, for the purposes of addressing my "I'm tired of dealing with whatever UX Slack's designers mandate I have" complaint.

I used to use wee-slack, then I worked places that wouldn't allow its installation, and then suddenly I kinda wished work cultures would just move back to emails, mailing lists, and some light ephemeral thing for IM (quite possibly IRC). Because at least then, user experience doesn't have to be dictated by someone who has absolutely no idea how you want to or like to work.

> move back to emails, mailing lists, and some light ephemeral thing for IM (quite possibly IRC). Because at least then, user experience doesn't have to be dictated by someone who has absolutely no idea how you want to or like to work.

Not sure if you have used corporate email in the last 15 years but admins do absolutely dictate what clients you can or cannot connect from.

I have worked for exactly one company in my entire decade-ish long career that mandated how I connect to email / disabled IMAP, and have exceedingly little patience for places that would disable IMAP without strong reason (for example a law firm or health care company, I could understand, but for the vast majority of companies? A policy mandating that laptops and phones must be encrypted at rest and locked with secure passphrases is going to do more than mandating that I connect to the Gmail web interface rather than the Gmail IMAP interface from the same exact machine on the same exact network - especially if "app passwords" to bypass 2FA have to expire periodically, which I'd also find reasonable)

I managed O365 for my last employer and we enforced exchange login. Granted we were part of the defense industrial base and would fall under your exceptions, certainly. But, if a company is making even a minimal effort to prevent company data ending up on unmanaged devices its a nobrainer to disable imap, as much as it sucks for the end user.

In the end we did have to make singular exceptions for certain developers because outlook’s absolutely pathetic plaintext support was causing issues when they were contributing via the LKML. But that was a significant business justification as opposed to a workflow optimization.

I think that slack and focus contradicts each other... never managed to find out the benefits of slack, most of the time it's just a noise...

Out of the box, I would agree. With notification settings set up across channels, I would disagree.

I agree. I can manage my notifications across more channels a lot better in Slack than in MS Teams

I lose focus when editing messages in Slack because their input box does not respect things like the keyboard's home and end keys which turns simple changes into confusing chores. Unfortunately, their support staff told me that basic editing is not a priority and will never be addressed

This annoys me every single day, have logged several bugs for it but haven’t really gotten anywhere.

Honestly, I do find that Slack helps me focus.

I can pretty easily make sure that I ignore non-critical rooms, and only get notifications if someone @‘s me.

It would be really nice if as a user you could suppress all @here, @channel etc shouts and only enable them for a few specific rooms.

Overall Slack + 100% remote work has massively improved my focus and ability to get things done while remaining social and involved.

You sure you don't want to get lost into MS Teams? Where you lose chats all the time and can hardly paste codes and links without it all going wonky?

Joking aside, I am will you on the 100% remote + slack fondness. I'll also regularly mute all if I'm trying to do a deep work session for a couple of hours.

MS teams is a dumpster fire, no one should be forced to use that piece of crap for communication.

Teams doesn’t even implement scrolling backwards through message history correctly - it’s like some kind of janky game of precise mouse control to see if you can get it to stay still on the message you’re interested in.

Well, what's the alternative? If you expect someone will write you an email and wait 2 days for the reply, then you're in for a disappointment. They'll just call you.

We do use XMPP, and by default I disabled notifications for all groupchat rooms so I get instant notification for 1-to-1 chats and can respond and ignore the rest. In Slack it's quite common (from my observation) to ping lots of people at one time and also create channels for all sorts of notifications (build failure, like it had to be _instant_... what for?!)

You can customize notifications in slack and leave only 1:1 if you want https://slack.com/help/articles/360056534254-Manage-notifica...

I find having easily accessible feed from monitoring tools pretty useful.

I love slack , but they gotta get their game together , this year I have personally seen around 4 or 5 outages, what annoys me the most is the way the app fails, it simply greys out text that you just sent , images take forever to upload (if they ever upload) , i think if you gonna have this many outages maybe build something into the UI

quit redesigning it and spend the effort making it use MB of RAM instead of GB

if BitchX and mIRC can do it, Slack can do it, but they have to try

Would love for them to improve on that front but they have little incentives to do so.

Best way to focus is to not use slack.

Vertical tab bar and more submenus. Gotcha.

See also, this submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37063576

I wished they'd simply start fixing their bugs after a decade.

So now it looks more like Teams.

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