I'm 39. I've been in technology in a professional capacity for 22 years, longer now than perhaps a few folks on HN have been alive. I wrote my first computer programs over 30 years ago, started online with local BBSs and then eWorld and then the internet.
I've seen a lot of stuff come and go. The tech industry as a whole has, over the last decade, adopted an especially frenzied pace that looks an awful lot like someone lost in the woods, freaking out, running in different directions trying to figure out where they've been and where they're supposed to be going.
There's nobody I can wag a finger at and say, "see, you didn't learn the last time 'round", because with a constant influx of new people, there's always a big group of folks that will adopt the latest thing because it's the latest thing, and have no memory of the last 30 years of latest things, and haven't been stung before when the latest thing fizzles out and takes a chunk of your time or infrastructure investment along with it.
Slack had advantages, sure. But it's hardly the first time that some service has come along and offered advantages over the tired old thing -- all except for a public, common protocol -- and then decided to take their ball and go home and to hell with everyone else. My staid desire for things being built on open protocols and available to people who want to self-host it doesn't come from some hardnosed ideology, it comes from years of, "oh no, this shit again."
Unfortunately, comments like yours tend to dismissively shout down the comments from the been-there-done-that folks, and so we're locked in a particularly self-defeating Eternal September that's costing the tech industry an incalculable amount of money.
In my more cynical moments, I wonder if a cadre of old farts oughtta start getting together and giving the less experienced folks the advice they want to hear, just to see how long it takes them to catch on: "building infrastructure out of walled gardens is a good idea, because they are commercial businesses and will be able to offer you more features than the slow-moving open source alternatives that haven't changed much in a long time".
This starts off strong, but then ...
>I'm 39. I've been in technology in a professional capacity for 22 years, longer now than perhaps a few folks on HN have been alive. I wrote my first computer programs over 30 years ago, started online with local BBSs and then eWorld and then the internet.
If I were typing this in slack, this is where the first :facepalm: emoji would appear.
This is the mentality that caused the now-semi-famous HN post in the early days of dropbox, arguing that it was useless because with a combination of [ simple CLI tools that nontechnical people have never even heard of ], you could create the "same" functionality.
Say it with me: Being so simple that utterly nontechnical people can use (edit: not just 'use', but 'deploy and administer') IS important functionality. That's what made Dropbox, and it's what's made Slack. You don't have to be an IT pro to deploy it successfully. You don't have to be a programmer. You just click half a dozen buttons, all of which are helpfully color coded so that your unwillingness to read any text on the screen won't be an obstacle.
Yes, there are things you lose when you "build infrastructure out of walled gardens" -- but the reason some people prefer cathedrals vs bazaars is that they often have much lower barriers to entry, and for many people that is a worthwhile tradeoff.
> the reason some people prefer cathedrals vs bazaars is that they often have much lower barriers to entry
There's nothing inherit about these "cathedrals" that require them to be walled gardens. Slack could have been an open protocol, but they decided not to be.
But would you say that they're _not_ investing in the product? They're improving on search, their API, adding new integrations with Github, etc. Those might not be the things that matter the most to you or other HN users, but they are investments in the product.
Have you used their client?
nit: inherent.
That's a strawman - no one said dropbox was useless to everyone: this is not about how simple it is to replicate the functionality, but who controls the data. The point gp was raising is that surrendering control your data to a 3rd party company has costs most people do not consider until it's too late - and this happens time and again ("oh no, this shit again"). How many stories have you read about downtime, account bans/freezes, and companies winding down or sold with little or no notice and no way to retrieve your data? Is it a worthy tradeoff for a shiny UI?
But, they handled it well and they've never screwed over their users and they have partially resolved the long-standing file transfer problem (https://xkcd.com/949/).
So I still have those concerns, but overall it's a great service and I've recommended it to a few folks over the years.
It helps also that there are some open alternatives on the scene now, so if you make Dropbox some critical part of your infrastructure, it's feasible to switch to something else if Dropbox suddenly decides they want to focus only on the smartphone market.
Slack had the ease-of-use and feature advantages -- which I acknowledged -- but it was too young and there were no open alternatives that matched it feature-for-feature. That made it dangerous to rely on too much. i.e., I'd still use it, but I wouldn't make it the de facto communication system for a company.
So yes, a bunch of "old farts" are a good a necessary corrective in our hype-driven environment. I agree with the assessment that slack is just another walled garden and comes with all the problems those bring. I even agree with the "open protocol, optionally self-hosted" conclusion. I just don't like the conclusion (not explicitely stated by you, but definitely by others) that that open protocol should be IRC and email, and that the UI for them needs to be pure text.
Put a bit shorter: the people have chosen between $SLACK over $OLD_STUFF, so if you want to use something open and still sway them then you'll have to change what's on offer vs slack.
Converse.js looks like a prime example of doing just that, as does e.g. conversations. I'd much rather we get our shit together and build jabber into something usable and beautiful than go back to IRC and email.
I work with a guy like that. I've got a lot of respect for him, but yes, his approach to things causes a lot of headaches for other techs in the company. (He likes to send config files by email ... inline, after gzipping and base64-ing them.)
There's a middleground. If more people tried harder to rely on software they could truly own, vs SaaS, it would force more companies to release open source APIs and libraries and all but the crankiest old farts would shut up.
I like things to be easy too, but not so much when it bites me in the ass later.
Your suggestion for extending jabber seems reasonable.
Year of the Linux desktop never happened, KDE semantic desktop never happened, Python in Chrome never happened, Self never took off, Lisp never took off, we're still writing coffee like we did in the 90s. Nothing happened as much as we hoped it would and we have to just go with what we've got.
This year I'm dropping Linux at gone and going to Windows, after 15 years.
Kinda funny since I feel like windows is taking more and more weird turns since windows 8 regarding UX, UI consistence etc. From win 95 to win 7 it mostly felt like consistent evolution, but now it seems they tried to modernize different parts of the OS over night and none of the designers and devs involved were allowed to talk to each other.
I think the "fuck it I'm old, don't care anymore, just want it to work and look nice" goto solution is still the Mac, even in 2018, even after all those recent os x mess ups (I'm old, don't care, etc., get it?)
I think there's a simpler explanation: people are trying to find new business models. The old model of individuals paying tens or hundreds of dollars for software is slowly dying, and it's on full display in the iOS app store where even $5 is perceived to be a lot to charge for an app. So we need new models. The rise of SaaS is tied to that shift. in-app purchases and related psychological shenanigans are related to that shift.
The SV elders, like Peter Thiel of Palantir, now more than ever seem to favor rent-seeking business models and started selecting for those businesses 5 years ago. To course-correct, someone in technology will have to discover a new business model. I'm personally betting that we'll see a backlash and new models wherein people pay so there is no chance of data harvesting (going back from SaaS to standalone software)
I don't believe there is a dichotomy between IRC and Slack. In fact, Rocket Chat and Mattermost show that locally hosted platforms can be developed openly and serve a similar purpose.
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
The truth is that no closed platform will ever reach the universality that email has. The prevalence of various chat platforms looks like a race to replace sms. At the current rate, there may be no winners, and only losers.
I think he was talking about HN users who argue that IRC does everything slack does.
He's definitely honing in on a group of people who should support federated solutions and instead evangelized the opposite. Ironically there's a similar frustration with using the proprietary GitHub service rather than open source git sites like GitLab
That's the right answer, I'm very skeptical of people saying "this can be done in XMPP" but when it comes to the actual implementation it falls short
Edit: also note the author updated the article and Emoji Reactions are still not supported in XMPP but are in development
^ this.
A lot of people are so mad at Slack and extolling the virtues of XMPP and IRC and fully forget that there are about zero clients for either XMPP or IRC that have the same functionality (consistent across multiple platforms) as Slack.
Yes, I'm fully aware of exactly one client for Android (Conversations) that supports mobile-friendly XEPS. And yes, I'm fully aware of IRCCloud, a closed-source, proprietary 100% web-based product on top of IRC (all the things that people seem to hate about Slack. Go figure)
My understanding is that many of IRCCloud's Slack-like features are based on the open IRCv3 standard. If this standard ever takes off (fingers crossed...), IRCCloud will have a lot less vendor lock-in than Slack does.
Hard to imagine it will for Slack's audience. Slack is serving the case for the non-technical folk extraordinarily well right now. A significant amount of their user base doesn't care about standards or IRC channels. They just want a consistent, well-designed product that does the things they need it to for work. They've never opened a terminal in their life and they don't need the terminal-irc-gateway that this recent change has killed off.
But many IT departments require on-premise hosting, which Slack doesn't offer. Users don't care about open standards, but maybe their sysadmins do. If IRCv3 can capture this audience, it has a chance to co-exist with Slack.
Less and less IT departments do that now, since so many things move to the cloud. When you have all your stuff in Gmail and Google Docs already, having Slack is a no-brainer.
In the meantime people will chose other platforms that provide better and more consistent experiences.
E-mail is about as terrible as IRC and yet it just won't die.
At least with email you're able to send messages to those on different "networks".
That's very true. Products fail. So instead of blaming others for failing to provide integrations, I would look at what made these products popular in the first place. Unfortunately most discussions around XMPP and IRC rarely actually discuss this.
Speaking of Skype. You can actually see how management fails to understand the popularity and features of other communication platforms in each release. It's funny and sad at the same time.
Did we read the same article? This article had nothing do do with IRC knee-jerk reactionaries.
The author's main point is that Slack results in a walled garden and information silo'ing of our conversations.
The author then went on to provide a potential antidote to that problem by discussing a javascript project they been working on.
This is not what the article says. The article says clearly that everyone knows we want these fancy UIs in open chat apps. But the problem is funding. You need to pay 10+ developers, each costing between $100k and $200k (50-100 without tax) for 1-3 years to get such a nifty UI and after that you still need 1-3 devs each year to keep up with all the changes in the IT world. Someone needs to PAY that to get such a nifty UI.
The article also argues correctly that you are currently paying for it by giving away your data which is worth a lot more than a few 100k USD/year. And all you get is a more nifty UI. Wow.
And instead of understanding that you are exploited you complain about how stupid the people are that fight for protection of your values. That is REALLY stupid. The same level a child complaining about needing to go to bed early than the parents while the loud and colorful ads try to keep the child in front of the TV until 2 am or longer.
Start acting like a grown up.
I challenge you to do it better. Ah, screw that. I don't think you can, the way you talk. I challenge you to do something much simper: Read an RFC and try to provide interview style non-compiling code to implement it, then write a single blog post explaining what you did, applying a correct and reasonable free license to your source code and your blog post. That's something an untalented hobby programmer can do if he puts his mind to it.
Still, he is stil "working on it". While Slack has already "delivered".
It is childish to say that whatever feature Slack has is "simply" something that can "just" be added to XMPP.
To me, the author's complaint of how Slack rips users of is the same as customer who complains when it takes month to "just" add a feature.
He himself hasn't even done it. He planned to do it, anybody can plan to do things. Anyone can be working on something that will change the world. Only few delivers. He complain about funding, while he is adding feature that he claimed was "simple".
Why does simple feature needs funding? And if Slack is ripping people of on feature that can simply be added on XMPP, then put your house on loan, create better XMPP client and earns millions of dollars. You don't need funding. That's what being adult is.
What if they do see the difference and don't see the value in it? This is worth considering.
> where I can post images/videos inline, use proper markup etc
I don't want someone else putting inline videos or markup into my feed. In IRC people post links, most of which I happily ignore at very low cost because they're not important to anything.
That is of course your personal choice, no arguing with it. I'm thinking of projects where communicating with/about videos and images is an integral part of the work. Think image processing for example. In that context a message of the kind "Hey, I tried this new method, look what I got as a result [image]" can make tons of sense.
If you don't need images, you don't have to use them. If the person on the other end of the chat insists on sending them anyway, why are you talking to them? :P
That’s absolutely ok, as long as they understand that and that at some point the value is in network effects too
We'd likely still need a client wrapper on top of it all.
I think ideally such a client could be implemented as a plugin to an extensible terminal emulator, which might help to keep the project small and prevent Jabberification.
There are quite a few IRC clients that do this automatically, fwiw.
"..just plain refuse (are unable?) to even see the difference between a chat like slack. ...the user experience will be a different one."
Underlying this is (unusually) a way some technical people think, and the way most bureaucracies think. Bureaucracies will often "checklist" requirements, see that it does all the things "users have identified as important," use cases they think these apply to and go on that information alone. They only consider stuff that is tangible & legible.
By that checklist method email, whatsapp, Twitter, slack are IRC and such are essentially the same. Some may tick a.minor box that the other does not, but basically they all get messages from A to B (sometimes to B, C & D).
It's even worse in this case, because slack is social software and the conventions people form as users are very impactful on the UX. This compounds differences.
When Dropbox was originally announced in a "Show HN" someone said:
You can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.Work had a private irc server that required all sorts of client certificates to join, forget non-technical people -- it wasn't very good for technical people either!
For the record, I don't like Slack very much. I just disagree that IRC or IRCCloud are acceptable alternatives.
I regularly speak to people like that, who just plain refuse (are unable?) to even see the difference between a chat like slack (or telegram, or mattermost, or or or...) where I can post images/videos inline, use proper markup etc, and a combination of IRC and email. "But you can just send images by mail!" they shout. Yes, you can. But the user experience will be a different one. And it doesn't even matter that I personally prefer the slack-like UX. Many other people seem to prefer it too, that's what matters. For anyone who's only mildly technical, setting up IRC is only a small hurdle, but it's one of many.
IMHO, if you want people to use anything else but slack, sticking your head in the sand and screaming "you can do all of that in IRC" won't get you anywhere and is equivalent to complaining about the very nature of humanity. It might feel good to scream out your weltschmerz, but it won't change anything.