Unified Grid: How we re-architected Slack for our largest customers | Hacker News Reader

Unified Grid: How we re-architected Slack for our largest customers

slack.engineering

34 pointsGavCo21 comments

All I know is they rearchitected Slack recently so that now the mobile app feels asynchronous, in a bad way. Like, you tap on things and they don’t get marked read — in the local app! — for seconds. Also, the unread count badge doesn’t match what you see when you open the app.

Slack used to be a really impressive user experience, but it has degraded significantly, not in UX design (though that’s also highly arguable) but in flakiness.

> used to be a really impressive user experience

This is becoming a tale as old as time itself.

I remember when GitHub was so fast I preferred it over Visual Studio for browsing the codebase.

That sounds kinda weird but at the same time understandable in scalable, worldwide, asynchronous and distributed applications, in that "mark read" is not a database query but a task that gets added to one or more task queues that eventually lead to a data update which in turn eventually leads to a local state change.

That said, apps that talk to queue / async based backends like that should employ optimistic updates, that is, mark as read and presume that goes alright, instead of wait for an update. That said, given it's a new architecture, maybe that'll be implemented eventually.

>All I know is they rearchitected Slack recently so that now the mobile app feels asynchronous, in a bad way.

I feel like Office 365, specifically outlook, is like that probably for similar reasons. Unread counts and such on the mobile app are never right, and it was fine when our servers were on prem and I was using the mobile app.

They put in all this engineering effort, but as a user in multiple workspaces in a large enterprise grid, this unified grid rework has been a strictly worse user experience.

In a large org, if I am in multiple workspaces, that often means they are completely separate contexts and unifying them makes it harder to look at exactly what I want.

So this solves the problem of when each department in an enterprise creates a workspace and the CEO wants to unify the departments. What happens when each department in an enterprise creates its own org grid and the CEO wants to unify the departments?

I'd like to be more positive about this change but it was extremely disruptive to existing workflow. Oh that channel that had third party people? It's now in the ether. That project that only existed in one workspace? Mixed right on with your everyday channels. Want to context switch? Too bad! Impossible to prioritize that stack of notifications at a glance. The limited clarity I was able to build around is now a fog. Its making me find email as the best communication path since nobody else is using it.

We're probably the end of life phase for slack. Is there a new IRC-but-pretty already in place that will be great until a little while after it goes public for billions?

edit: I was reasonably impressed with Zulip recently

Mattermost is very easy to self-host

Now that this work is complete, maybe they will finally fix Slack's input box so that Home and End keys work properly

Oh man, I thought I was the only one! It really is maddening to not have these work as expected.

Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E work. On macos w/ Karabiner you can remap Home and End to those for the Slack app.

Ctrl+A is ‘select all’ though

On Windows and Linux generally, yeah. On MacOS, Command+A is "select all"

My problem is that copy/paste strips out the newlines.

So copy this:

  line1
  line2
  line3

and paste into the input box becomes:

> line1line2line3

(browser slack on macos)

Does “Paste and Match Style” (cmd-shift-V) work? I use this key combo (or the alternative binding, cmd-option-shift-V) all the time in various apps to paste more “directly”.

actually, some pastes give no text. Then you try paste and match style and get the text... with no newlines. sigh.

AFAIK it's because they override the input box behavior depending on the os detected. If you use web slack but override your user agent to windows/linux, you might be able to get the original behavior back.

Interesting. I'll have to give this a try. I have been using the desktop version, but if this works, it will be a good reason to switch back to the in-browser version

Now make the app suck less. It has turned into a needlessly complex experience where I have to expend more mental energy than should be required to find what I’m looking for.

Does that architecture will empower that small organization to support their app on iOS versions older than 2 years?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com