Slack is just the worst – and I've used a BBS and 14.4k modem | Hacker News Reader

Slack is just the worst – and I've used a BBS and 14.4k modem

14 pointssincethebbsera6 comments

Here’s some honest feedback from someone who's been sitting behind a computer screen since lotus123, Wodperfect, and Qbasic.

First of all, pick a direction and stick with it. You’re in a chat and you scroll down for recent items. You try to find a DM in an an endless sea of software integration driven messages so you go to “recent DMs” and naturally start to scroll down —but no, you scroll up to get to new messages here.

So you find one you think you've been looking for but now you have to scroll down once again to see the more recent message, and painfully slowly.

Waiting for the slow app to reload every message along the way that you mistakenly scrolled the first time, but now in the 'right' direction to get back to where you started.

Can you just hit Control+End? Or click that arrow and expect it go to the end? Of course not. You keep on scrolling as it loads, painfuly one page at a time, because you’re up against a "Lazy loader” – the result of what is more accurately called lazy development.

Why all of this? Becasue you can't find what you're looking for in the first place. It would be nice to be able rid yourself of of these 'robot' chats coming up from one of 3,000 absolutely useless software integrations. Who needs to get messages from Excel? or a screen capture app? It's integration just for the sake of integration – with zero value added by likely 2,500 of them.

Its all just NOISE.

Useless noise that now takes up a footprint on my pc of over a gigabyte on day one to support it all while burning through CPU cycles and my electrical bill with patch upon patch of poorly thought out system overhead to support apps I don't now, and never plan to use.

IMO, its not even worth trying to fix. Its fundamentally broken and built using a worst-practice approach to application development.

Time to rethink and start over.

Humbly yours

I can only post a couple times per day now, and I've already posted a few times today, so I don't know if this will go through. Thanks Tom. But I'll try anyway.

I fully agree that software has gotten substantially more complex. There seem to be far too many levels of abstractions on top of abstractions. I do miss the days of QBasic, and that's why I'm working on the product I legitimately need to release before the end of the month.

But not every layer has the same level of low quality. For example, you brought up lazy loading. It actually can take a lot more work to properly support lazy loading, unless your framework supports it. I'm not sure what Slack uses beyond just Electron, but even in vanilla JS it's not easy to get lazy loading working properly, although the animations are very easy to get wrong with canned code.

On the note of Electron, I'm very happy to report that the last time I checked the size of my Release build for my pure Win32 app, it was sitting at 312 kb total, as a single standalone .exe file. It will of course be a bit bigger than this when I finally release it, but still, there's something so satisfying about making something with such extreme minimalism.

If you had said “Slack needs a (lurker mode) way for you to fully mute a channel you’ve joined, where absolutely under no circumstances do you ever get any notifications or badges” I woulda been with you on this.

hey fair enough. The rant has been a long time building... I'm just sharing my personal experienece, which I get isn't not going to be perfect but from a persective of it shouldn' have to be this way. Appreciate the feedback!

That is a long rant that amounts to "My organization doesn't use this app well".

Slack is just a tool. Nothing more, nothing less. The problems you are describing is bad usage of the tool. Integrations have been over-done in your org, clearly. But aside from you wanting another keyboard shortcut or two, I see little here about the tool itself. (Even the memory complaint is not typical... my install takes less than half that.)

It is totally fine if you don't like Slack. It has warts. All software does. But I highly recommend figuring out which of your complaints are truly about Slack vs. about your own organization.

You're quite possibly right - but you couldn't implmenet something so poorly if the tech didn't allow for it. You couldn't deploy skype this way - it was made to communicate, only microsoft could take it down. And for me - How much work should it require ... it feels like being dropped into a jungle and needing to find your way into a field.

I have no idea what you are talking about.

> Its all just NOISE

Yes, this whole rant.

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