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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the most common complaint against Slack that it's not optimized enough for what it does ? That's how I read the rants against its electron app, and people are already choosing the electron app against using it straight in the browser (as they'd do for Gmail or Calendar for instance)

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Slack is one the most slick and pleasant pieces of software to use. It's big success as well as the fact that it's acquisition cost was one of the largest software deals ever – tells of itself – it's certainly a fine piece of software made by fine engineers who used react and electron with a certain amount of dignity. People who rant about tools like react or electron affecting their performance just don't want to understand that it's organisation and people behind the tools who are responsible for their performance.

Slack is the best of a bunch of trash options. That doesn't make it good. I shouldn't be able to accidentally select every widget in an app as though it were text. But with Electron apps, that's just normal.

Slack puts a nicer shade of lipstick on the pig than Teams does, but the lips still belong to the same thing.

>Slack is the best of a bunch of trash options. That doesn't make it good

Well, that's a valid framework too, but by the practical standard of goodness – the best of trash is actually good — because you don't judge goodness against some abstract ideals, but against available choices. Both are valid frameworks, but only one is useful in practice.

> I shouldn't be able to accidentally select every widget in an app as though it were text.

I absolutely should. I hate how many applications have a UI that won't let me copy-paste an error message to search for, much less a menu item; who could possibly have thought that was a good idea?

I'd make an argument about the need for Slack to go beyond.

As you point out it's wildly successful and is the backbone of many groups internal communication. Many companies would just stop working without Slack, that's a testament to the current team's efforts, but also something that critical would merit better perfs.

I'd make the comparison with Figma, which went the extra mile to bring a level of smoothness that just wouldn't be there otherwise.

Slack is a slow and clunky app using well over a gig of RAM, the UI abhors standard MacOS conventions and can’t even use the operating system spelling dictionary.

It’s best in class because everything else is worse. It’s a sad state of affairs.

> Slack is one the most slick and pleasant pieces of software to use

I've never heard anyone say that before!

Never heard anyone complaining either./

Try meeting people who use slack?

I do for the past 10 years or so ;)

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