Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonmales | Hacker News Reader

Coming from Slack for a number of years, there is an initial shock of missing out of the 'slack way of things'.

The killer feature is everything is a stream/thread. I argue that is a better UX over Slack, but it takes some getting used it.

As mentioned, Slack is way more polished.

View on HN

> The killer feature is everything is a stream/thread. I argue that is a better UX over Slack, but it takes some getting used

I personally can't stand it. _However_ I just learned today that it can actually be disabled, which I would do if I was deploying a zulip instance for my team. We are all very wired towards the crackhead energy of just.. a chronological chat and a competent search.

You can just not specify a topic and write your messages in "general chat", nothing stops you from doing this.

we want topics allowed in certain channels only (ie #announcements) so that's probably what we'll use this feature for which certainly was not there when we tested maybe a year ago or so

The nice general chat UI and per-channel permissions for it were new in Zulip 11.0 last year: https://blog.zulip.com/2025/08/13/zulip-11-0-released/. So probably you tested not long before this got built.

That's new.

True, though even before this we just made a chatting topic with the name "general", that worked just fine while still letting people make other threads for long discussions.

> Coming from Slack for a number of years, there is an initial shock of missing out of the 'slack way of things' [...] takes some getting used it.

I have a theory for why some people love Slack and others love Zulip (Completers -vs- cultivators) which I shared in a sibling thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46960569

Curious to hear what you think.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com