Because they’re not idiots but rather people with different priorities and backgrounds who were underserved previously. You might disagree that this is helpful but it’s unlikely that you know more about Slack’s users than their UX team. Treating everyone involved with respect is a much better strategy than what you’re doing.

I suspect Slack is aiming for the customers they would like to have in the future at the expense of the customers they actually have right now.

Then provide an option. There's no need to cripple some of your users for the sake of others.

Why does that justify conforming the user to the software? Software, especially web software, has this magical quality of doing different things for different people even at the same time.

> Treating everyone involved with respect is a much better strategy than what you’re doing.

They're not treating the users who prefer markdown formatting with respect at all. It's basically: "fuck those guys, we want to cater to a different audience".

in my experience it is not uncommon for product development to involve assertions that “some of the users are not the most tech savvy”. i’ve seen this as justification for cutting scope, which i can agree with in many situations even if i disagree with the reasoning. over all, cutting scope had been the right move.

that said, i take exception with these claims that the user is “an idiot”. it comes off as arrogant to me.

Is it not what we already have, with touch screens? One big button that can cater to every monkey on the planet?