Are you saying that sending messages back and forth involves a lot more complexity that you don't see or that Slack does a lot more than just messages?

I don't think they even do that well, it's a complete nightmare finding anything on slack beyond the last 24 hours.

What Slack did well was branding and marketing.

That's interesting. Any idea how could they possibly do that?

only if you haven't tried slack.

It never was? The Android client takes 10 seconds to start, runs my device hot and the UI is so bad that the first time I tried to respond to a thread I couldn't figure out how to get out of the thread view.

The desktop client uses 1GB of memory gobbles my CPU and takes 20 seconds to start.

The "least bad client", the web client still takes 10 seconds to start, for no obvious reason. Last week I looked into it, it turns out that every time the client makes a request to the server it the TTFB is 300 to 500ms, on a connection with 40ms ping. So their backend is just as fucked as all their clients.

Even their email notifications don't work: every time I click on the link they send me it doesn't take me to the mention!!!

They did corner the market so clearly they must be doing something, but really I just can't see it. I'm completely stumped.

While I have literal never discussed Slack with someone who likes it. Actually not completely true: at my last company one developer thought it was great but after a few months I heard her curse it as a "place information goes to die". In my experience it doesn't scale beyond a very small number of people who know each other well. Sending commands from its command line is not as easy as simply sending them from, you know, the command line (which is scriptable).

As a side point it astonishes me that after all the money they raised and people they hired they can't get video working on mobile, just laptop/desktop.

I claimed multiple things. Unless you think the single assumption being wrong in magnitude (I still maintain the majority of their customers were American) completely upends the entire thesis, then you're trying to treat this as some counterexample which... doesn't work here.

> Slack does a lot of things, but its UX is actually pretty piss poor due to the bolt-ons (threads is just about the worst implementation I have ever seen), walled garden, weird account things (magic links~ if you want to see your other workspaces make sure you use the same email everywhere!), security (goodbye decent realtime bot api) and the client which feels slow despite using more resources than it should given its status as a program that needs to always be running.

I'm not discussing the UX here I'm trying to talk about what Slack is doing differently than AIM.

Because it's an Electron app, i.e. another copy of Chrome.

Actually for all the money they've raised I can't understand why the Slack apps are so terrible. I use Mac and iOS versions, and they still can't show useful activity badges; video doesn't work on ios...what are the spending their billions on?

I never made that claim.

> They're killing it for a reason

Sure, but who knows what that reason really is. I've gone through numerous cycles of "best chat app ever", and they're pretty much all in the dustbin now. I just don't see anything about Slack that makes it any better than several alternatives other than the number of users. In fact it's objectively worse than alternatives in several ways. The video and regular calling for example is pretty terrible on anything less than a high speed internet connection. In general the app often fails to load on weak WIFI. I can still use Skype, Discord, Gittr, Facebook Messenger, Signal, et.al. on coffeeshop wifi, but not Slack. You don't need to be a genius to see that this is a problem.

I used to think maybe it could have been before I was required to use it last year, but no, it's not. It is the worst chat application I have ever used (maybe tinder is worse heh, but at least the keyboard latency is below a second.) It's almost comical how bad it is.

Well, that's not true. That is easily refuted by it having been replaced at least once.

> It's like saying Windows is not difficult to replace. Technicaly true but practically false.

While you may believe that Slack offers something that other solutions lack, that simply isn't true. I know of two companies which have replaced Slack, one with a commercial offering, and the other with an in-house solution. Rewriting most of Slack is a week-end project.

Slack, over time, actually locks a company more and more into their ecosystem, since to have history you must pay them. With many other solutions, including 50 year old email, messages can be stored locally and filtered as is beleived to be appropriate by each user. If all you want is a chat bot with channels, then use Slack, and throw it away when you're finished.

This does not reflect my experience - I can't make a video call from teams to someone on Zoom; I can't chat with someone on Slack. My iMessage client loses all kinds of functionality when I send a text to someone using Android. I could go on.

I worked at a place that dropped Slack for Teams. Everyone believed that Slack was the better product, but the company already bought Office which bundled Teams while Slack cost money. It's the most obvious anti-competitive practice I've experienced.

You're splitting hairs. They are both chat apps for crying out loud.

Slack grew as fast as it did because it got pimped to us by VCs and thought leaders and then wannabe thought leaders and down all the way to the bottom rung of the societal ladder. Great strategy by Slack but there is nothing special about it (the product).

But this is kind of an absurd critism. Who wants a real-time business-oriented operations chat system where you don't know about incoming messages by default? Can you imagine people complaining about not knowing about new messages for minutes and support staff having to inform people that you have to turn those on manually? Slack wasn't engineered to suck you in, it's acting in the only rational and useful default for what it is, a standard established by every chat client I've ever heard of before it. It would have been a product that didn't work by default. If slack was missing a seeing you wanted, I could understand, but at some point you're just blaming a chat tool for being optimal for chats because your organization wants you to respond unreasonably quickly or because you're not muting channels or snoozing or not using the settings to the fullest.

I'm not so sure. I got us using Slack at work, and that was after about 12 months of hearing ads for it. It is IRC plus a slick UI and integrated bots, but putting all that together with a web UI and a dedicated client and phone apps makes it multiple times better than regular IRC for the common person.

I don't use twitter. I only started actually using my Facebook account I've had for many years last week, after finally deciding it's curring me off from people to not use it. I've never used Instagram or Snapchat or any of those other newer things. I'm not what you would call "people willing to switch to the next big thing". Quite the opposite in fact. At this point, the new users of slack are hearing about it from other people that are themselves 3-4 people removed from those early adopters.

That said, Slack isn't a perfect snowflake. It's a simple idea executed well. The reason I was so for it once I finally bothered to check it out is because my prior experience with IRC let me immediately see the value they had created by combining IRC and all the extras for IRC together in a nice package, and made it accessible to less technical people.

> The reason I use Slack is because it is better than any of the alternatives, but I wouldn't hesitate to switch to something better if it comes around.

Same here on why I use it, but I would hesitate switching (given most my usage is work related). If Google had a good competitor, we would probably switch, since it was our solution to crappy support for what we need in Hangouts, as all our other stuff is in Google Apps. I imagine a lot of people/companies might feel the same way with MS if their stack is dominated by MS products. For those that already have a fairly heterogeneous environment, there's probably less reason to switch to the major names, but I imagine those groups are already fairly on board with trying new tools to find what works best, so have little allegiance.

Edit: s/seeing ads/hearing ads/. I think a really good case could be made that Slack was genius to market on podcasts as much as they did, and on the ones they did, and that might have been instrumental to their growth.

Having never used Slack, this statement astonishes me. It is difficult for me to imagine a worse UX/UI than Discord is.

I never thought I'd live to see the day where Slack was the most performant of any given alternatives, but I suppose that was short-sighted.

Initially, it was better than alternatives. So the draw was that it actually did something useful. Now, it's where everybody is, so FOMO is a big part of it now.

I've never used Slack, so it's just my hunch.

That's pretty dependent on which way Slack decides to go in terms of facilitating large Enterprises' needs for absolute control of and visibility into communications platforms. Monitoring and governance of Slack is, at present, a goddamned nightmare. The third party tools that currently exist are, in my experience, somewhat unreliable, and all of them are crippled by the fact that Slack's API drastically limits visibility into the platform. I've worked with more than one very large Enterprise customer with special compliance needs whose Slack instance(s) are one foul-up away from having a regulator rain down fines/sanctions, and in every case Slack is pretending like the issues don't exist while my customers shove their head in the sand. And compliance aside: the Slack API doesn't even have methods in place to deal with things like emoji-react trolling on read-only announcement channels, and a plethora of other little features required to control toxic and obnoxious behaviors.

I love Slack to death, but it's not an Enterprise product yet.