Of course, if you want a better Slack experience, you can shell out an unknown multiplier of thousands of dollars per month for a paid version (which is never going to happen). The pricing gap for free/paid community Slack is just nuts.

We've been coping by hanging out in private channels. And so the tribal knowledge remains hidden among a small cabal because management doesn't want it discussed. They prefer the illusion that we are...all-knowing or psychic or something.

We ended up finding Discourse, a forum system, and have been using that. Now, slack is more about simulating in person discussion (i.e. we rarely use it), and Discourse is more like emails pre-sorted by category. I have to say, it's working pretty well.

Zulip (https://zulip.org), Dropbox's Slack clone, supports threaded convos out of the box quite nicely.

Is it useful? Yes. Is it necessary? No. Could it replace email? No. What is the service worth? A lot, according to starving investors.

Damn. At just (now) 35, I'm apparently an "older person".

/me pours another glass of bourbon

Watched some great thought provoking snaps. The fact that I could neither share the video nor watch the snaps on my own schedule drove me crazy.

So I deleted the app from my phone.

Every few years, generations of technologists evolve from their schooling, and come out into the workforce - competent, yes, but aware, no. Awareness of previous technologies is the problem: if you've never actually used e-mail productively, you may not be aware that people use it extremely productively, so you pitch an alternative - i.e. re-invent/NIH some 'replacement' technology that has a lot of fancy bells and whistles, but ends up re-implementing the stuff that your grandaddy programmers solved, decades ago.

Slack is an example of this - I see nothing in it that I can't do, effectively, with a well-run mailing list and well-configured mail applications, with company policies and, most of all TRAINING of employees/team-members on how to use it properly. The same goes for IRC. IRC and Email already solved the problems of Slack: its just that the mechanism (i.e. understanding) of applying those technologies is not evenly distributed.

It comes in waves, and I think it can be traced back to the timing of graduation schedules across academia.

Hint: its the people, not the technology, that make all the difference in the world. Invest in the people and it won't matter what technology they use.

I hear Slack is also gaining a lot of traction for open source community discussion (although IRC is still common).

This is all on the free plan obviously, but guess what the next wave of tech startups are going to use (or are already using). This is not including the big companies that are already adopting it.

There's probably more usage of Slack among CS students than there is usage of bitcoin, VR, drones, or any other technology popular among hackers that people argue (rightly or wrongly) are poised to go mainstream.

I am sad to see an open-source tech get replaced with a closed source one, but I am glad that the default IM system for talking about code is no longer one that prohibits multi-line comments.

Considering the amount of skilled time and effort that good UX takes, I suppose closed-source was the most likely thing to happen.

The white elephant in the room is if there's really value there: Would most open source efforts actually pay for Slack as a group communication tool? I think the answer is no, almost by definition.

paying for chat is ridiculous IMO.

Also:

> This is all on the free plan obviously, but guess what the next wave of tech startups are going to use

"The stupidity tech has reached the level of being a moral hazard, where it really just incentivizes everyone else to be bad at their jobs."

I honestly don't know how Slack incentivizes somebody to be bad at their job.

In regards to the first sentence I assume you mean the venture capital industry? I'm not in that industry but I have to imagine that Slack is not more popular than email or close to overtaking email. I do imagine that it is growing faster than email as more internal communications move to that medium.

[1] http://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Email-... [2] http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/01/rocketship-emoji/

Don't get me wrong, they have their uses, but how is this suddenly perceived as a multi-billion dollar market?

I'd assume that this is true - it would be astonishing to me if it weren't simply because of the law of high numbers.

Am I wrong about this and email is growing at ridiculous percent?

This seems to be cyclic.