Actually, Slack really sucks

Re:Actually, Slack really sucks by existencebox on Wednesday July 13, 2016 @01:53PM (#12088198)

For me the first part that you agree with as well is the kicker. Slack has started eating the world, but the fact that it has only partially succeeded makes it feel way more painful. My gaming groups are on slack. Various (discontinuous) work groups are on slack. Various open source groups are on slack. But not _everything_; meaning either I have to have yet another desktop app (call me a curmudgeon but I really like to minimize how many moving parts I have going) or constantly click through alert emails to the online slack tabs. As you say there's a use case for that, but when I find it eating use cases that I otherwise would have perfectly functional, lower friction tooling for (email alerts, dl's, etc) I start to get frustrated; especially when it makes it far harder to organize the content between multiple distinct slacks + other silod communication channels when compared to e.g. mail filters.

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Re:Actually, Slack really sucks by eridius on Wednesday July 13, 2016 @01:57PM (#12088239)

I'm surprised your gaming groups are on Slack, given that Discord is basically a Slack clone that's geared specifically for gaming and seems to be really popular.

Edit: Discourse -> Discord

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Re:Actually, Slack really sucks by schlarpc on Wednesday July 13, 2016 @02:14PM (#12088400)

I don't particularly like Discord (which I assume you meant) because I don't see a monetization plan for them that doesn't screw over their users. With Slack, I know that they have enterprise customers that essentially pay for the free users. Discord has nothing like that, and I can only foresee two outcomes: running out of money or selling out their users. Charging for their service won't really work, either, because gamers are a pretty price-sensitive group in my experience and Slack is still free.

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Re:Actually, Slack really sucks by eridius on Wednesday July 13, 2016 @03:15PM (#12088847)

Yeah I meant Discord. Not sure why I typed Discourse there.

You have a great point about monetization. My understanding is that their monetization plan is to start selling things like sticker packs (e.g. how other messenger services get monetized), but I don't know how likely that is to succeed.

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Re:Actually, Slack really sucks by existencebox on Wednesday July 13, 2016 @02:16PM (#12088414)

Wonderful case in point; one of my groups is on slack, whereas my serious raid group is on Discord (which I assume you meant :) ) and a third group is on TeamSpeak; up until recently Mumble was in the mix as well. It's really a portmanteau of silly apps to keep track of.

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Re:Actually, Slack really sucks by eridius on Wednesday July 13, 2016 @03:18PM (#12088871)

Yeah I meant Discord.

Having a mixture of groups is hard. When I was playing Destiny, my group there was actually using GroupMe (which is pretty awful for a variety of reasons). I actually created a Slack and wrote a GroupMe<->Slack gateway, though it kept breaking because GroupMe's API stopped sending messages until I cycled the connection, and I eventually had to shut that down when Heroku changed their free tier (which coincided nicely with me losing interest in Destiny).

My current WoW guild (of which I'm a casual, not raiding, member) uses TeamSpeak, and I don't know why they're not on Discord. It's annoying enough that I don't usually bother to join it.

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