Dear Slack | Hacker News Reader

Dear Slack

zedshaw.com

4 pointslucisferre5 comments

I haven't read his other blog posts, but in this one he seems to come off as arrogant and a child, in a sense, by arguing for some kind of feature addition without actually explaining how it would benefit any users other than him and (more importantly) how it would actually benefit Slack. Slack might not listen regardless, but it's a turn off to read the first paragraph and to try to not think of some whiny 16 year old.

It's sort of his style.

http://programming-motherfucker.com/

> without actually explaining how it would benefit any users other than him

He seems to make it pretty clear: "You give me a place to send them, and when my students join they punch in the required credit card and then they’re done." This sounds like a more streamlined signup process than what his users currently go through, which involves signing up somewhere else, paying, and then receiving an email with a link enabling them to sign up (again) at slack.

> how it would actually benefit Slack

Again, fairly well spelled out: "I promote it, I do the hard work of being in there, and you get to skim your $6.67 or however much the plan costs off the top of the signups." So free promotion, somebody else drives user signups to your product.

Third, by my reading, the author is implying that this setup would be useful for many others who want to offer a good chat service for online learning, paid support, or a multitude of other reasons I can't think up. It sounds like a great idea to me.

Finally: you'll probably get more out of the internet by being more concerned about content than tone.

I guess, yes, there is a benefit to Slack in the sense that they would have more signups overall. But what I was really going for was that it wouldn't benefit them on a large scale, meaning that people that do stuff like what he does would have to move to Slack, which is most likely not going to happen without large incentive. I doubt that he has enough "clout" to drive a noticeable number of people to Slack over a long period of time. The only way that this would change is if Slack marketed itself differently.

> Third, by my reading, the author is implying that this setup would be useful for many others who want to offer a good chat service for online learning, paid support, or a multitude of other reasons I can't think up. It sounds like a great idea to me.

Yes, but Slack isn't really built for some of these purposes and it shows in the way that people see each other within the app. I.e. I see all of my coworkers within Slack, which is not what you want with tech support. I can see it being useful for a student-student interaction, but it would have to be augmented to allow specific student-teacher collabs because all people (at least in the way I understand) are on the same "level" and can see everyone and all the channels, which might be counter-productive to learning because it becomes like AIMing your classmates at that point.

> Finally: you'll probably get more out of the internet by being more concerned about content than tone.

Thanks dude! When I use the Internet next time I will be sure to think about this comment. :-)

Would be an awesome feature to have

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