When used properly (not lazily), Slack is a great place to organize communication between teams. At worst its Skype with a way better UI...what's wrong with that?

* it has a history I can actually search. Skype used to have this, but removed it when they rewrote it in Electron. !@#$ you to whoever at Microsoft decided to get rid of that; I used chat history search every day as part of my workflow.

* it has an API/plugin ecosystem. Admittedly, that's a walled garden so it's a double-edged sword. But for businesses that's awesome. Skype used to have an API but that's been deprecated. Conjecture: from abuse?

* it has security. I can log on to a private Slack and know that the people in there belong there. I can search for people on Slack and know that I'm communicating with who I intended to communicate. On Skype, you search for your coworker by typing in their name and you end up finding some other person instead. Hope you didn't just reveal corporate secrets to China.

Slack doesn't come without its own set of gripes, for sure. Let me enumerate some of them:

* Information density isn't configurable. I want a teeny tiny font. It's better than what Skype has become but still not as configurable as chat clients from the 90's

* Resource hog. Seriously, we've gone so far backwards it's appalling. Chat clients from the 90s didn't need anywhere near as much memory or CPU as Electron does and they were just as functional (sans audio/video/link preview).

I'm sure there's others but I'm tired

But I agree it works like shit, half the conversations aren't there and I can't figure out a pattern or why.

Just zoom in/out with Cmd-+ / Cmd--, it's just a browser after all.

You get to decide if you want to communicate asynchronously.

As for devops alarms, those should be firing on multiple protocols and platforms anyhow.

Anything else can usually be better accomplished by announcing "office hours" during which you can be reached 1-on-1.

However, many people fall in to the latter, and Slack handily beats the competition there. There is also an element of having nice and polished features baked in that appeals to many people. Want it on your phone? There's an app. Want to search? Baked in. Want convenient chat bots? Click a button.

To be sure, all these things are possible in IRC and other lo-fi chat protocols, but getting them set up is easy on Slack. I see this as similar to the argument of Linux vs. OSX. Linux can do practically anything OSX can, but it requires tweaking and setting up. It's a battle of pick-and-choose vs having it all baked in.

I also don't like using chat at work. It's not because I want less interaction, it's because I want less interruption. Email has a norm of asynchrony where I can respond to email when I reach a good point in my current task. With chat, the other party is presumed to be sitting staring at the screen waiting for my reply, so I have to drop what I'm doing to respond.

I don't think the latter is good for my overall productivity.

What do you think has caused that expectation in your mind? Do you wish that for the people you’re chatting with? Have you worked with people who do expect that? Honestly curious.

I wonder how my growing up with it, and in chat rooms with mostly tech-savvy folks, has affected my use and expectations of it, too.

> Have you worked with people who do expect that?

Yes. Manager expects it to be like talking to you across the room. You answer there and then. If you slack him though he doesn't expect to reply immediately and gets annoyed if you interrupt him to say you really need an answer.

> Do you wish that for the people you’re chatting with? Yes, saves making a telephone call.

There again, if I Slack someone, it'd better be important not time-wasting.

OK, maybe not literally staring at the screen.

> What do you think has caused that expectation in your mind?

I think the structural analogue and communication style — even the name! — of chat is a verbal conversation. In a conversation, you say as little as needed and then pause for the other person to take their turn. Each utterance is pretty short so that you give the other party a chance to respond.

If you do that asynchronously, it takes forever to work through a sizeable quantity of content.

In email, the analogue is written letters. The expected asynchrony is high and in return the writing style accommodates that: each email is usually a roughly complete though with possibly some paragraphs. Since you know the person replying to you can reply to individual sections, it's OK to put out a complete thought. You don't have to shorten it to give them a chance to interject.

Phones reduced that price point - but it still has a cost to me.

Now IM / Slack has flipped it on its head - the cost to the interruptor is negligible but the cost for the interruptee is their mental derailment - and no ability to judge the overall benefit of helping until it is too late

Plus I don't really see the win - for real time co-ordination it's hard to beat a mass phone conference ( we are doing a complex release with phased rollouts and devops watching the traffic - then get your headsets on, and everyone must hurry up and wait)

Slack is just secondary for that - useful for spelling out what has been said but otherwise ...

For letting others know what has happened - that's called an after the fact report or "email".

So really i don't see the use case except it means that when like the phone, i reach you i am confident of a reply in a given time period - that may well be defining facto

It's the "check it" that's a mess in a high-volume environment.

E-mail threads that can be seen to branch, and in a pinch I can skip irrelevant branches once I've determined their vector.

But each Slack channel is a continuous stream of text with a tiny scroll slider. There's no possibility of skipping a couple of pages of messages unless one just seaeches for direct mentions, at which point why bother? If it's important they'll just ring / call / e-mail..

I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp, but ever since we got the bandwidth and CPU necessary for the internet to not be a primarily text-based medium, the illiterates took over and that was the end of that.

Tasks belong in tickets, long-term documentation/policies/meeting notes/etc belong in shared space (wiki), and discussions are faster and more productive in realtime (in-person, video call, or chat). E-mail might kick some of this off, or be used to schedule, but that should be it.

The problem I think most people run into with the realtime discussion is failing to document the outcome of the meeting -- and that of course goes into a ticket or long-term docs. A meeting with no notes or outcome might as well have not happened.

Real-time discussion is great if you don't have to think about what you're going to say before you say it. Unfortunately, that places a very, very low upper limit on the level of depth and consideration that a discussion can reach. Some decisions are hard enough and some situations are nuanced enough that you need to take your time with them, enough that the additional cost of making all of that time strictly synchronous can grow exponentially.

It also excludes large categories of people, including introverts and non-native speakers. I've worked with a number of people who just flat out did not or could not participate in real-time face-to-face discussions, but who could express themselves masterfully via email.

Of course, the "faster! instant! now! now! now!" crowd don't even have the patience for slower, deeper, better-reasoned discussions, which is why they shy away from any form of communication that has any more depth than a tweet or a PowerPoint slide. Slack is great for these people because they don't even have to string words together to communicate, they can just click on a reaction emoji.

Sure, some things (operations, for instance) have genuine urgency to them, and I think real-time communication is essential for situations like that. But if you're doing work that will have an impact on the span of months, quarters, or years--either major strategic business decisions, design, or project development--you're better served by thinking deeper instead of thinking faster, and deep thought is exactly what the long-form written word was invented for.

There are so many examples of teams successfully communicating state, sentiment and other information among each other with memes and videos an what not.

Also, to help people blow off steam. We don't need to be absolute productive units operating at 100% all the time.

Goofin off is healthy

The internet is such a large collection of knowledge, I just wish more people used it to improve themselves, or at least their understanding of the many different things we have in the world.

I tend towards being an introvert, and I'm not always good at coming up with an argument on the spot. I recognize this, and I will often end the real-time discussion by literally just saying "Ok, I need to go think about this before we discuss it anymore. Let's come back in a day or two." Just like you don't have to respond to e-mails the instant they come in, you don't have to do it for real-time or chat, either.

I will also do the same to others when I can. For example, yesterday I suggested a new approach to how a certain part of our product works, and pitched it to the team. There was only minor feedback so I just said "okay, go think about it, and I'll bring it up again later", so I will probably ask tomorrow to see if anyone has further thoughts on it. It's amazing what sleeping on ideas can do.

The thing I'm really trying to get at here is real-time doesn't mean "now! now! now!". There's absolutely nothing wrong with several meetings over the course of days or weeks or months. For strategic and key design discussions, there should absolutely be documentation written between those discussions. In fact, that's basically the way I operate: discuss, document, give time for people to review, and then discuss again, repeating as much as needed.

There's people that are opposite and want the response "now!", and don't want to take time to think through problems -- but I would guess there's a large overlap with the type of people that come over to your desk / call you and say "I just sent you an e-mail, did you get it?" and then only read the first sentence or two of your reply anyway.

The reality is that email fails to serve the purpose for complex discussions that involve many people, especially when you're using a rubbish email system like outlook.

Another form, be it meetings, chat, forum, whatever is required for this... and to be fair, gmail and the like offer some form of searching and sorting nested threads...

...but your complaint is broadly the same as the argument against having meetings in general.

Certainly, it is an oppinion, but not helpful or realistic.

Slack is disruptive, but 'just use email' isn't the answer.

Seriously, go read the lkml archives sometime, and go tell the authors of one of the most important and high quality pieces of foundational software in the world that they would be better served with something like Slack.

Most work communication is usually within our issue tracking system

We use slack very lightly,

- most of our conversations are face to face but anumber of remote employees, and slack is used instead of face to face. Often for video calls

- copy pasting things to other people

- a sort of mini internal HN where links are posted to interesting things in the dev world and we discuss

- prodding people "Oi, my PR is still waiting .... " "did you setup ... ?" etc

- telling people where we went to lunch so they can find us.

EDIT: Whoops actually Shared Channels is the feature I was thinking of: https://slackhq.com/introducing-shared-channels-where-you-ca...

I wonder how much of this attitude is a result of poor email client UIs. I switched over to using notmuch for my mail about a year ago, and I now consider email to be a great place for discussions: I can search my entire history almost instantaneously, far faster than with Gmail or Inbox.

> The problem I think most people run into with the realtime discussion is failing to document the outcome of the meeting -- and that of course goes into a ticket or long-term docs. A meeting with no notes or outcome might as well have not happened.

I definitely agree here. This falls under the heading of 'things we used to know as a society that we've forgotten.' Every meeting should have an agenda, even it's just a single agendum 'discuss $FOO,' and every meeting should have some sort of minutes, even if they're just 'discussed $FOO, decided to pursue course $BAR.'

I think the attraction of email is it looks like it short-circuits the need for this. "It's all in writing in the email trail" makes moving fast look easy (no realtime meeting that then has to be written up, the document amended on people's feedback etc). But understanding is missing and misunderstanding happens.

I'm starting to move an organisation's planning from emails into meetings and specifications. They are resisting massively because it "wastes" time. Given every project up to now has changed spec twice after launch, I see time being saved if it's correct at launch.

But again, it can be learned by everyone, it just takes time and effort.

But if you have to choose a medium of conversation, are you better off choosing one that excludes introverts, non-native speakers, and people who aren't loud and obnoxious enough to command the room? Or would you rather exclude people who lack the patience or intellectual ability to read or write more than two or three lines of text at a time? Which choice allows deeper and more thoughtfully considered ideas to enter the discussion?

I'm loud and obnoxious enough to thrive either way, but I really don't want important professional decisions to be made by the "rofl tl;dr" crowd.

They are just different mediums. Long form is better for getting across new ideas that have to be explained for the first time, but a medium like emoji allows for incredibly dense communication with single glyphs once the meaning has been established

With email, how can I subscribe to conversations I'm interested in? Mailing lists are nice, but we have no real way to make mailing lists that start and stop on the fly like a chat channel in a way that is searchable to the entire organization during or after the fact.

What email list system allows for quick creation and the ability for everyone in an organization to know that a conversation is happening and how to join with the ability to get all the context necessary in a chronological order? (Reading threads can get really repetitive in a mailing list, especially when trying to get up to speed on an issue.)

You get to all the requirements, and you end up with a discussion board instead or a new product that is to email lists what slack is to chat.

Email is great for some things, but there's a reason people use slack instead even when they already have email.

I hope you all do well with this!

Isn’t that what subject lines and mail archives are useful for?

Nobody has put together a simple solution in the mail domain. Maybe there's a market for it - turns out someone might pay for it if it's better than the slack experience.

There's always newsgroups, which use NNTP (which isn't that dissimilar to email). They have existing groups in a hierarchy that can be subscribed to. It doesn't really give users the ability to create new newsgroups in the fly though.

This would also be acceptable IMO. Any medium that enables asynchronous long-form written communication has advantages that are fundamentally impossible for any synchronous chat medium to match.

It turns out that listservs have successfully done this for decades. If there was even a fraction of the effort invested in this communication style as is invested in reinventing IRC with emoji and reaction gifs, I'm sure it would be even better.

Additionally, all this bloat and lack of structure makes it hard to search the text for both humans and machines.

Not saying that Slack is better, it addresses some of the structuring and some bloat problems, but adds distraction and encourage discussion bloat instead.

Is it a chat client? A knowledge base? A conference call? A command line? Who knows!

Which is totally why Slack isn't popular with businesses. /s

Just because you personally haven't found it useful, doesn't mean hundreds of thousands of other business users haven't.

I tried emailing longer form things at my current job and rapidly hit a cultural wall: people _do not like_ getting long emails, or emails with more than 1 or 2 replies. Slack people apparently have no problem with because it's "lighter weight", but I struggle to see how always-on disruption is lighter weight than check-it-a-couple-times-per-day email.

I think a deeper problem is lack of delineation of responsibility and adequate planning. Slack & other "always on" communication systems make it easy to say "why plan? I can _just ask_ when I need to know something" or "we'll have a conversation" rather than specifying & recording or relying on a more rigid interface like a ticketing system.

tl;dr: get off my lawn you dang kids!!

I wish there were more people who were in the "newsgroups should be used for substantive discussions" camp. They're better than email in that context.

I am flooded with automated notifications that basically are "who gives a shit". I think the main reason I use email is for password reset. When you receive 1-2 thousand emails of non-spam but still unimportant cruft, it gets ignored or overlooked.

Email is pretty much dead to me as a meaningful way to communicate.

Sidenote: the term "ping me" needs to go away.

Part of this is a UI problem, but it's still a problem.

I didn't say Slack is the answer, either. Just that email isn't a serious competitor to Slack.

Maybe mysterious quasi-state actors will steal your secrets and outcompete you decades from now, but they could probably do that anyway. The SEC will certainly fuck you up right now if you can't demonstrate adequate controls on regulated employees' communications.

Important/immediate discussions take place in person, or on slack. (Or hipchat or sametime or lync or windows messenger or hoary old ICQ for all I care...)

I find that happens an order of magnitude more often in Slack than email. The number of times important things here don't get done on time (or at all) because "Oh, I must have missed that in Slack...)

That's a very harsh attack and I'm sure you're aware of all the nuances you're conveniently skipping over. I'm not sure how you think this adds to the discussion at all.

That's pretty arrogant. Perhaps people have different communication styles than you. Not better, not worse... just different.

The dialup-era Internet was mostly text and a little bit of pictures. There was good text, bad text, and lots and lots of fanfiction, but at least it was text. Even if you went to The Onion, there might be one goofy photoshopped photo but you had to read an actual article with real paragraphs to get the jokes. Now everything is a video, or a picture, or a meme, and everything longer than 140 characters is “tl;dr”. That’s a cultural decline akin to when television displaced reading in the mid-20th century.

I can communicate in either style, so it’s not a personal thing from my perspective—except, since I can communicate in either style, I can also tell which style is more conducive to deep and meaningful discussion.

(But I realise I'm well out on the losing end of this argument, even in groups of old-school hard core technical friends/colleagues, I've been given the "crazy look" when suggesting we just use irc for chat... )

I'm not doubting you, and I acknowledge that I hear that kind of thing with some frequency, but I've not seen Slack (running in Chrome on Ubuntu) use anything like those amounts of resources.

I've had a pretty busy slack client running for several days, and it's using 204,484K of memory and 2.0% of one CPU.

    USER        PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ    RSS TT  STAT   STARTED      TIME COMMAND
    fubar      2922  0.0  0.1  61648  26668  2  S0+    19Mar18  22:58.73 weechat

Re: Slack resource utilization: I'm not passing a value judgment as much as expressing confusion over multiple claims I've noticed about Slack utilization that is far, far greater than anything I've seen.

I personally love Riot and Matrix as a "modern IRC".

It does require having your own server to host it on though.

That's nice for you personally, but how does running an inhouse bespoke IRC server have anything to do with whatever line of business your company is in?

IRC is just a particular implementation of chat. The only thing keeping it relevant is the several hundred thousand people currently connected to servers.

Within a more defined context, such as work communication, adoption network effects become irrelevant. You can just build your own system and set everybody up to use it.

If I want high latency, high bandwidth, there's email. If I need low latency, high bandwidth, that's an in person whiteboard session or a video call.

That does mean I think Slack is overhyped... but that also means I think Slack does something valuable. Just maybe not as valuable.

1. No markdown support and half-assed code highlighting support. 2. No (real) message editing. 3. Silly parenthesis based emoji.

Its search is better than Slack’s; its performance is better than Slack’s; its integrations are better than Slack’s; its client memory and CPU usage are better than Slack’s (whether in a tab or as a real, native app); its group video chat is better than Slack’s (does Slack even have video chat integrated, with screen sharing?). Most importantly for us, its price was 4x better than Slack’s all while offering better features, performance, etc. The only thing it didn’t win out on was hype. (It should also be noted that HipChat could also be bought in a self-hosted configuration, which allowed for HIPAA compliance, something that Slack won’t even bother competing on. I didn’t need it, but hey, it matters to some people.)

Slack is an overpriced distraction monkey. They’re selling it like it’s the whole enchilada, but it’s a damned feature bullet. I personally cannot wait until Slack is dead, because it’s the worst chat service I’ve ever used (and I love full-featured integrations).

Now, I have to find a replacement for HipChat that won’t cost us US$200 per month for our office (if we pay a year in advance, more if we don’t).

I think even though the industry is fairly nascent, a lot of team messaging products seem to occupy unique sweetspots. It's probably just a case of which product suits an individual's/ team's working style more. In fact, I have seen different people rate the same set of features in contrasting ways.

That said, a lot of stuff which you mentioned resonates with features we feel are critical as well (integrated group video chat with screen sharing, seamless integrations, better pricing, among others). We have had a bunch of Hipchat users migrate to Flock over the past few months using our migration tool. Per the reviews we got, they found the transition pretty seamless. If you want to give us a try, reach out to us at support at flock dot com. We do have some offers for Hipchat/ Stride users :)

Letting a strappy upstart have access to that data is a completely different story.

Really IRC just needs some well designed clients, I don’t like any of the offerings I’ve seen for iOS or desktop.

https://ircv3.net/

It's changing a lot for some time now.

https://ircv3.net/irc/

IRC is interesting, but it doesn't solve the use case by itself. (IE, as a user I can easily look back to the entire history of the channel regardless of when I joined and can search every message that was ever sent on the server - or every message in the last 12 months even.)

I use that daily.

Maybe in a few years. I say maybe, because XMPP is an IETF RFC, and frankly, it sucks.

XMPP is a well-thought-out protocol, and a lot of the XEPs are great features. The problem I always had with XMPP is that XEP support is unequally distributed among clients, and the fragmentation really undermines the amount of cool features XMPP has to offer. As a (made-up) example, Psi+ might support video calls, but not server-side history, and Pidgin only supports server-side history, and Adium is the only one that supports Service Discovery...if I want both, I have to pick a client, and possibly have to use two clients signed in with different resources.

As a possible solution, we could have a "logo program" for XMPP, where a core set of XEPs are required to call yourself an XMPP client (this is the case already IIRC), and you get rights to call yourself "supporting XMPP-Enhanced" if you support these other XEPs, and "supporting XMPP-Full" if you support all of these XEPs. Something like that might work, but you'd have to have a way to actually drive development toward these features.

XMPP could be used to build a service like Slack (with its own clients, specific feature set, etc.) that may or may not be federated and it would still have the benefits of using an open protocol (even if it's not federated I can use a more accessible client, a client on a platform they don't support, less work to get up and running because libraries exist, etc.)

I'm hoping the Compliance Suites will become something like you mentioned in the future, but I'm no longer the author so we'll see what the new authors do with it: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0387.html

That way you could very easily coordinate a common target for XEPs. Clients which would not support the newest features would still work with the others but users could simply see which clients support the state of the art features. And for developers it would make it easier to identify and skip old XEPs (e.g. how many XEPs are there to confirm a message has been received? Which is the recommended one for new implementations?).

You may not prefer it, but it objectively does not "suck".

I challenge you to consider whether your perspective applies to the 99% of people who use Slack that are not developers writing software. For those people, email is often not a place where well-argued discussions happen. It's usually a place where chat-like communication happens, slowly, and in an ill-fitting interface. For non-developers, let's take a operations associate for example or a logistics manager, or someone else whose job is to coordinate and communicate frequently, Slack plays a very different role than it does for devs.

Unfortunately for you, and others like you who don't like Slack, if 99% of your company wants to use it, you'll almost certainly get pulled in. Unless your department or team explicitly opts-out, you'll get pulled into the same platform the rest of the company is using.

This isn't to say you're wrong -- just to say that we must not judge the hype around Slack, or it's clear successes, as a fad if we're only judging it based on the experiences of the kinds of people who frequent HN.

Not sure what it is about HN assuming software devs are somehow intellectually and professionally superior to others.

Dunno but this thread is full of a bunch folks rather arrogantly assuming their way is the One True Way.

Slack (and hipchat) didn't get big for no reason. It's because it fulfills a pretty big need. Tons of people in my company use & love Slack... Last company was a big hipchat company...

However, it's definitely true that email is typically used both for "serious and well-argued discussions" and for chatty threads along the lines of

  Thanks.

  BTW How are we looking for this month's revenue target?
  
  >No idea, maybe the data load didn't run last night,
  >I'll look into it.
  >
  >>This report looks broken, the opportunity I closed
  >>yesterday isn't in there, what's up?

So, the tens of thousands of teams paying for Slack either aren't having serious conversations or have decided the opposite. Here are some things I think you are undervaluing about team chat:

- It replaces many meetings and phone calls that are more interruptive. - It helps distributed teams with legitimate needs for casual collaboration. - It reduces an enormous cost of people being blocked waiting for email answers to simple questions that could not be anticipated.

The disadvantages of team chat can be avoided by discipline, but the benefits above require an assistive tool.

While we are at it, if you can't distinguish Slack from other team chat solutions, here are some things I think you are undervaluing:

- ease of onboarding for teams and individual users - scalability to large, active teams - Enterprise IT management - automatic refunds for inactive users - integration and third party app community - Dev community supporting custom integrations - strong mobile and desktop experiences

All of the above are super important for companies adopting, even though they're not about the core channel-messaging interaction you experience day to day. None of the alternatives check all of these boxes, and only teams is close.

I'm a dev at Flock, and an ex-user of Slack in my previous company, I hardly miss anything Slack had that isn't there on Flock!

If you're looking for a product built by top MIT engineers who spent years thinking about how to make chat actually productive, check out Zulip. I'm one of those MIT engineers, and I agree that Slack is a huge waste of time, for precisely the reasons you describe (here's our attempt at explaining how Slack wastes your time: https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/, and how Zulip solves those problems; there's more on our homepage).

The fact that Slack is, in most organizations, either very low-traffic or a waste of time is why we don't market Zulip primarily as "open source Slack" -- it really is a different product, designed to be amazing for a large, distributed team doing a lot of communication, without things becoming overwhelming.

If you don't believe me, read this awesome cartoon by one of our users: https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/986444234365521920

(As another reason for Slack's success, I'll also add that a lot of "Slack clone" products are pretty buggy; everyone underestimates how much work a high-quality chat experience is. Check out https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/subsystems/markdown.h... and https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/subsystems/events-sys... if you want to learn about the complexity of a few of the more interesting challenges.)

But the flat thread model is still limited, particularly for complicated topics even a thread starts having the same problem as a channel where there is too much going on; have you thought about tree-structured threads, or some way of branching threads when there is a bunch of discussion happening on different topics?

I haven't really used Slack much, but one of the other places with lots of space for improvement in Flowdock was search, and Slack does seem to be investing there significantly, and I hope Zulip is as well.

With Zulip's existing model, you can always fork off a side discussion by just starting a new topic, if appropriate adding links in one or both directions (and people pretty naturally do that when it makes sense to). Some Zulip users are fans of a convention to name a topic "original_topic.d" for a "digression" off a topic, but I think it's a much better approach to choose a topic that more directly suggests what the forked conversation is about.

(And I agree search is really important! If you're having lots of high-value conversations in a tool, it needs to be easy to find them later. Zulip's powerful full-text search has been praised as a lot better than Slack's since our very first prototype version of it. I think a big part of the reason is that the threads provide the context to make it easy to find the rest of a conversation. But we're always working on making it better).

When Slack is down for a few hours, I know start-ups that feel it in the gut.

As a social tool, Slack is one among many, but social tools for work are becoming huge because they enable passive knowledge transfer. Employees can spy on others' conversations to see who knows what and that knowledge makes companies more efficient.

Something's lost and something's gained in living every day, but Slack isn't a fad and it's not going anywhere.

Slack didn't invent those qualities. It's not unique in that regard.

What Slack does do better than most is provide a half decent interface for real time chat amongst groups of people. Personally I'd prefer vanilla IRC because I'd then get to chose my chat client but in terms of official clients go by, Slack is better than most (though that's really more of a criticism about Skype, email, etc than a compliment to Slack. I mean how is it that so many collaborative tools have such poorly designed UIs?)

The rest is a cultural problem that exists will all communication channels (including email). Ask people to be mindful and not use @channel all of the time (you can disable @channel if it is abused). Ask people to keep their chats to relevant channels. e.g. Daily interesting links do not belong in #general, please keep it to #random. Stuff like that.

Also, encourage people to move long complicated topics to a thread (to not annoy everyone in the room). Or ask them to compose a larger email or wiki page on the topic.

There's like 3000 people in there. Sometimes shitloads of conversations are happening at once. The people that refuse to use threads aren't cool, they're just co-opting literally the entire channel for just their conversation.

I see it as a forum, where you browse threads and click into the ones you want to discuss in. I guess other people see it as a bloodless Colosseum, may the loudest win.

If there is already a lively topic ongoing in a room and I need to jump in with another topic, I write a message and say "Hey I have a question, can someone help me?" and then I immediately start a thread with myself so people see that it is a thread and click it to respond rather than just spamming the room.

I have always wanted to try out twistapp and see how it is with their "Thread first" UX mentality.

In my current team that uses Slack, I just made it a policy that all conversations have to be in threads. If they're not I just flip a shit until people give up and make threads again lol. Most people don't care enough to retaliate, so that happened a few times and then everybody got used to the system; this is basically an approximation of Twist now (where the destructive behavior is super easy to commit... sigh)

Things we were looking for:

- Separate work / personal accounts (i.e. not just Skype, Telegram, etc.)

- Decent native apps for macOS, Android and iOS, bonus points for Linux and Windows

- Reliable notifications across those platforms

- Tracking unread messages across platforms (i.e. you get the whole history everywhere, everywhere knows what the last message you read on any device is)

- Some basic niceties like the ability to drop images into a chat and have them show up across all devices

That's it, really. Aside from the last one, that's almost the definition of group chat. It doesn't sound hard. All self-hosted alternatives failed.

Things that couldn't hack it:

- Jabber

- IRC

- Rocket.Chat

- Mattermost

- Zulip

- Matrix / riot.im

It seems mostly the Achilles' Heel is apps and reliable notifications. This seems like it shouldn't be that hard, but almost everything fails there. Most platforms couldn't reliably have message show up punctually on all platforms. Sometimes the clients took 15% of a laptop's CPU idling. Often messages just wouldn't show up until you explicitly opened the app on mobile.

So, like I said, now we use Slack. And we're mostly happy. I had to fight the dork impulses to start writing my own version of this and get back to work that mattered.

Hipchat did this amazingly well. There was a strong guarantee that a notification would be delivered - either email or app.

I don't think a lot of others do it well. It seems that everyone is mucking about threads and UI and emojis.

I've had many times where I was looking at a DM room with someone in Hipchat, with the window focused, and it was still sending me emails with every message from them like I was AFK. This is especially common on the mobile apps, both Android and iOS. I'd often be chatting on my phone at lunch, and come back to my computer to find 50-100 emails of every reply I'd gotten in Hipchat.

Its one of the best marketing coups in recent history and I'd love to see more analysis on how it was pulled off.

I parachuted into an org which had a not-great email culture and took up Slack as a replacement. It was amazingly great.

In the early days of Slack we had Office Communicator in Microsoft. But because they thought of themselves as essentially MSN messenger for business they didn't do the things Slack did with their clear vision. Ultimately both apps existed to send text/files/images to people in realtime but Slack communicated a vision of how this should work while the rest just let you figure it out yourself.

At my company, we used to use IRC for internal communication and have since transitioned to Slack. The primary difference I see is that in chat, we see reactions to certain messages, in-line paste snippets, and links that use a slack redirect service.

I don't really see much utility in reactions. In-line paste snippets could just as well be a link I could click on to display the image or document in an external application I launch. And the slack redirect service makes it much harder to search my browser history for the document I was looking for.

I've also noticed that in the browser I use (Firefox), slack will, after a few days of using it in the same tab, become very laggy and non-responsive. This requires me to close the tab and open a new one to free up whatever resources were causing it to slow down so much. This was never a problem in the local application I used for my IRC client.

I'm not very impressed with Slack.

As an early employee of a startup, I remember the day we had to setup the initial infrastructure. For the majority in the room, Slack was an absolute requirement. They didn't wanted to have the ability to chat, they wanted to specifically use Slack, like a badge of honor.

Steward Butterfield pushed private beta invites to his well connected Silicon Valley social media friends, who then imposed it in their startups because “it’s what everyone else is doing, it’s going to revolutionize communication”. Rinse, repeat.

Source: a social media ninja wizard friend of Butterfield worked in the same startup as I did in the private beta days. I found it to be yet another internal chat app at the time, but my CEO drank the kool aid right away.

Before that though yea I didn't get the point.

* You can respond in a delayed manner and not appear rude.

* Complex stuff can be previewed before submission.

* The subject and thread organization adds more fine-grained control than you usually get with Slack channels. The #team-name channel might have discussions on several topics at once, not all of which affect you, and no easy way to filter them. On a message board, it's easy to break out a new thread even if people are subscribed to it by default.

* Slack search is ugly because you come back two months later and have to pull the info out of a tangled discussion with unrelated stuff in the middle.

And part of the hype might be how easy it is to add emojis and have a little fun. It's important, too.

This past year at Inbox Awesome, one of Slack's team leads asked the audience how many there used Slack. Of the 300 or so people there, around 75% raised their hands. Next he asked for a show of hands on how many people felt that Slack made them more productive. Not a single person raised their hand. It's on video at around 17:30 here:

https://livestream.com/accounts/9197973/events/7910977/video...

On the day to day level, it crashes even more than Slack, and syncs badly.

The pettiest and weirdest part is it doesn’t signal edited messages. The editing window is super short, but it still feels like being moonlighted when you read something and 2 secs later it’s a different thing.

You cannot edit comments in Hipchat. I can talk about other issues as well but not editing comments is a deal breaker for me.

HipChat works with Pidgin, which doesn't support edits, I imagine you'll see something similar as with the Discord edit feature when you're connected via Pidgin (you get a new message, prefixed with EDIT:).

There was a long thread I didn't follow at all about how that was how it was supposed work.

That's when I switched to Slack.

It often fails to notify of new direct messages, I suspect thinking one device was active when it was received.

• Gchat was effectively deprecated

• AIM is gone

You might be surprised how many companies now use Slack that have NOTHING to do with IT an/or software: everything form PR agencies to manufacturing.

I wouldn't be surprised if half of Slacks user base is now people who were using Gchat or AIM. All the major players who offered free chat basically got out, and Slack was kind of the cheapest cross-platform alternative. Even at the end of it's life million of people still used AIM daily for work, and then it suddenly went kaput.

And with respect, you cannot speak to any culture other than the few you've been a part of. I can say with some authority that this is not a problem at my workplace.

The reason IM has proliferated is precisely because it's instant and usually targeted. Email is a pain in the ass and usually serves as a dumping ground for irrelevant messages. If your culture demands that you treat a fundamentally asynchronous tool as synchronous, that's a problem with your culture, not the tool.

I see it as something similar to the rise of open-spaces. Now there is a backslash against it because people finally realize that it was overhyped and that open-spaces are maybe not always that good.

Regarding emails, I disagree with you. It is still my go-to channel for deep technical discussions on difficult subjects on which you need to reflect. With emails, I have no pressure to respond directly. When I respond, I will write multiple well constructed paragraphs where I explain why I would do this or this technical choice. Emails are archived easily and can be reread and referenced later.

Slack is a dumping ground of irrelevant messages, the opposite of your experience.

I would not hold my breath.

There's one side of it that's less organised then a proper email chain. There's the other side that replaces the physical water-cooler and allows people to join public conversations they'd otherwise not be aware of.

IRC is great and I am using it for 14+ years already. It's stable, fast, efficient and secure with lots of options. I've written a lot of IRC bots in many languages because protocol is so easy and every language have library/bot for IRC that can be easily expanded with your logic/code.

Before there was a cloud and big data, we used IRC for handling distributed services as high availability central orchestration to which many services/servers connected that had IRC bots running on them. We had control over many machines and services from IRC channels, with full authorization/authentication, logging channels, you could run commands on one server or on many same time, you've seen real time error reporting or when node went down.

It worked great and still works great.

I used to run IRC on the server in the screen session, but this is unusable on mobile. And setting up properly was a total PITA.

Slack is great. I don't need to waste time writing bots because all of the tools I use already have simple integrations: GitHub, Box, DropBox, Intercom, etc. Doing all of that within IRC is a pain. For example: responding to an Intercom conversation from within Slack. I can set up Slack for an org in literally minutes. With IRC? Not literally minutes.

Most IRC clients support unicode. Also, I've never had an issue just using an internal pastebin to share code-snippets with other devs. If we needed to work on code together, we would use an application like remote desktop or a shared screen session.

I absolutely cannot see why people still recommend IRC today for work use. It can pretty much only do text for the moment you're online and no we don't have time (money) to hack IRC to meet our needs.

Not inline, but you can share link to the image or send it to other person/persons via DCC directly, that's what you do on IRC.

> Can you rapidly search the history?

Sure, no problems with that, all the channels we use are logged and ready for advanced search.

> Can you customize alerts?

Yes.

> Does it work reliably on mobile?

Works for us.

> You're debugging something and you want to share a screenshot, inline, how does that work on IRC?

I already answered that.

> Can you start audio or video calls with room participants?

We don't do that on IRC.

If Slack works for you then great, it doesn't do anything for us. We have different workflow than you, which doesn't mean it's worse, it's just different. We don't need integration with dropbox, intercom etc, because we don't use them and we have IRC integration with tools we use already. We host all our tools and infrastructure and we need to control the whole stack.

I didn't said anywhere that new startup should go with IRC (unless you are already familiar with IRC with your team). I've shared my experience and opinion about IRC. We had infrastructure built around IRC already, we have a lot of experience with IRC and whole team knows IRC very well. I know some other teams that use IRC and they don't have any problems either.

You can always paste a link to an image hosting service and launch the viewer as a separate application. I don't really see why viewing the image in the same application as the rest of the text is seen as an advantage. If it's inline, it would eventually disappear from the screen as more messages are posted.

> Can you rapidly search the history?

I can use grep on the locally stored log files.

> Can you customize alerts?

That depends on the client.

> Does it work reliably on mobile?

The IRC client I have on my Nokia phone works just fine.

> You're debugging something and you want to share a screenshot, inline, how does that work on IRC?

Normally, you post a link to an image or pastebin service that shows the problem.

> Can you start audio or video calls with room participants?

You would have to use a separate application for that. FWIW, I use Slack in Firefox and that feature (at least the last time I tried it), didn't work. I had to install chrome to get it to work.

> image service

Now the data is outside, not an option.

> grep logs

How do you tell a designer to use grep on her iPhone? I can't even figure that out myself.

> use other devices for audio / video

And now what is the point of keeping IRC?

> Now the data is outside, not an option.

The company can easily host it's own image service. The one I work for has had one for over a decade.

>> grep logs

> How do you tell a designer to use grep on her iPhone? I can't even figure that out myself.

How do I get a Slack client on my Nokia N9? Contrived examples can work both ways.

A lot of conversations which happen in a workplace revolve around these tools, and have updates in one place not only save time but also encourage conversations around these updates.

Disclaimer: I work for Flock, an alternative to Slack. We are currently rated as #1 slack alternative on Product Hunt and PC Mag.We have a import tool so that you can import all of your data from HipChat on to Flock.

IRC, MSN Messenger, AIM, and Yahoo Chat were definitely used by both groups. None of them required a lot of resources to run.

This is once again entirely up to the business that deploys it. We use Slack and punish people who use Slack as a project management tool; we have Basecamp for that.

It comes to setting boundaries and consent, which is something en vogue in the 21st century and something I guess a lot of humans didn't get trained on when they were young.

But yes, the thing I hate is the expectation that I'm monitoring it or have notifications firing. Notifications are off all the time. If you need to tell me something important either email me or come and tell me. Slack is not the place for that.

I like Slack as a chat product, but it's very far from a productivity tool. It's often a productivity nightmare that operates to interrupt deep productive creative work.

Slacks API and number of systems with built in integrations blows the competition away.

Sure phpbb is a little clunky but at least I can use it as a knowledgebase.

Newsgroups were far better than phpbb :), and they were more easy to search IME.

I am regularly Cc'd into conversations that have 10 or so people and multiple topics lasting a week.

Search is pretty good too

Anyone can buy a pair of pants. Look beyond the functionality to understand why people do things. It can be social signaling, wanting to be part of a crowd, or dozens of other reasons.

My wife is an architect. She made me see this.

Wait a second... what's the alternative to pants?? :p