Show HN: SlackRevert, a Firefox extension to revert Slack's new design | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: SlackRevert, a Firefox extension to revert Slack's new design

addons.mozilla.org

20 pointsapimade16 comments

What on earth were Slack thinking when they rolled out this new UI - it is an absolute disaster! They took something that was OK and made it terrible.

The worst thing from a functional point of view was hiding all your workspaces behind the logo of which ever workspace you happened to be in last but the UI as a whole looks like windows vista or something - fischer price my first GUI.

Oh my god I'm so glad I found the console localstorage setting to revert it back.

   export SLACK_DEVELOPER_MENU=true
   open /Applications/Slack.app

CMD+Option+I to open dev tools and in the console run:

   localStorage.setItem("localConfig_v2", localStorage.getItem("localConfig_v2").replace(/\"is_unified_user_client_enabled\":true/g, '\"is_unified_user_client_enabled\":false'))

Then CMD+Shift+R to reload.

   localStorage.setItem('localConfig_v2', localStorage.getItem('localConfig_v2').replace(/"is_unified_user_client_enabled":true/g, '"is_unified_user_client_enabled":false'))

Don't you risk a permaban from all of Slack by using this? https://slack.com/acceptable-use-policy says:

> Do Not:

> attempt to reverse engineer, decompile, hack, disable, interfere with, disassemble, modify, copy, translate, or disrupt the features, functionality, integrity, or performance of the Services (including any mechanism used to restrict or control the functionality of the Services), any third party use of the Services, or any third party data contained therein (except to the extent such restrictions are prohibited by applicable law);

Everyone says that, every website has tos against scraping but search engine scraping for seo is welcomed and encouraged against their own policy so who cares. This Firefox addon does the change client side so how does that affect the org?

It's not a service you're config changes to - it's the local client software on your machine.

Even if it was the service - you're not reverse engineering, decompiling, hacking, disabling disassembling or even really modifying it.

What's so objectionable about the new UI?

It’s incredibly awful if you have to be in multiple workspaces.

previously all workspaces appeared in a single column so you could see at a glance which workspaces had updates and could prioritize work accordingly. This allows for passively staying up to date.

Now all workspaces are collapsed under a single icon. So you see a single “update” but can’t see which workspace without interacting with the app. Now looking for updates is an active process.

This doesn’t even save space since the sidebar is still always there, and now there’s just more white space.

I’m in ~10 workspaces for vendors and developer communities that I need to be involved in as part of my job. This has absolutely tanked any sense of productivity. I can no longer see what’s happening at a glance.

Additionally they’ve made it so replies in threads are the same notification badge level as a DM. Previously it was white, now it’s red. So not only did they make it hard to see what workspace has a DM, I can’t actually tell if something is a DM or not.

I don't have the new design yet in any of my servers, but this sounds nearly identical to the iPad layout, which I've grown accustom to and don't mind.

Sure but are you multi tasking for work on your iPad with two apps up at once? The context matters because in a single active app scenario, you don’t have the same interaction considerations.

You can reverse the flag if you want to force the new UI on your local. I've updated the About section of the addon which shows you how to do that.

> which I've grown accustom to and don't mind

This happens in every redesign. People push back and claw their way to use the old design, eventually it becomes completely inaccessible. Three years later and the same people will complain about the next redesign again.

That sort of paints the people in the light that they don’t have a legitimate complain though.

Like yeah, enshitification gets normalized and you learn to live with it. But that doesn’t mean it’s fine either.

Slacks done redesigns before that were well received because it didn’t affect its functionality in the workplace. This does.

I’ve had zero problems with any of Slack’s previous design changes; I’ve welcomed many of them. But rolling all Slack orgs into one is a sudden and dramatic problem.

Slack seems to be walking back their mistake 10 years ago of requiring independent logins for each workspace.

In slacks new product vision, you don’t sign into multiple workspaces, you sign into your “home” workspace and get invited via Slack Connect to other workspaces.

This seems to be reinforced by collapsing the workspace picker and making unreads in other workspaces less obvious.

Was it a mistake though? Independent logins are great for separation in a professional context. I don’t ever want my work workspace, vendor workspaces and personal ones intermixing.

Managing them in a single app was fine because it kept them distinct. Their new vision is directly at odds with real world professional use

I agree at the time it wasn’t a mistake. It allowed for vast adoption with Slack needing to implement the complexities of a single login accessing (for me) about a dozen workspaces.

But from a revenue perspective in 2023, it is a mistake. Of your list, which of work, vendor, and personal likely is a paid account? I’d argue in 2023 they only care about work and vendor and that is what they are optimizing their experience for at present. Now that adoption has saturated and the curve has flattened, the strategy of personal or even open source workspaces has served its purpose.

In short, now that they’ve got their hooks in, I’m sure they’d be happy for the personal workspaces go elsewhere, leaving just the paying professional context, and single login login, interacting with vendor/partner contexts.

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