

Dear Slack - lucisferre
http://zedshaw.com/2015/02/02/dear-slack

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calcol
I haven't read his other blog posts, but in this one he seems to come off as
arrogant and a child, in a sense, by arguing for some kind of feature addition
without actually explaining how it would benefit any users other than him and
(more importantly) how it would actually benefit Slack. Slack might not listen
regardless, but it's a turn off to read the first paragraph and to try to not
think of some whiny 16 year old.

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beardicus
> without actually explaining how it would benefit any users other than him

He seems to make it pretty clear: "You give me a place to send them, and when
my students join they punch in the required credit card and then they’re
done." This sounds like a more streamlined signup process than what his users
currently go through, which involves signing up somewhere else, paying, and
then receiving an email with a link enabling them to sign up (again) at slack.

> how it would actually benefit Slack

Again, fairly well spelled out: "I promote it, I do the hard work of being in
there, and you get to skim your $6.67 or however much the plan costs off the
top of the signups." So free promotion, somebody else drives user signups to
your product.

Third, by my reading, the author is implying that this setup would be useful
for many others who want to offer a good chat service for online learning,
paid support, or a multitude of other reasons I can't think up. It sounds like
a great idea to me.

Finally: you'll probably get more out of the internet by being more concerned
about content than tone.

~~~
calcol
I guess, yes, there is a benefit to Slack in the sense that they would have
more signups overall. But what I was really going for was that it wouldn't
benefit them on a large scale, meaning that people that do stuff like what he
does would have to move to Slack, which is most likely not going to happen
without large incentive. I doubt that he has enough "clout" to drive a
noticeable number of people to Slack over a long period of time. The only way
that this would change is if Slack marketed itself differently.

> Third, by my reading, the author is implying that this setup would be useful
> for many others who want to offer a good chat service for online learning,
> paid support, or a multitude of other reasons I can't think up. It sounds
> like a great idea to me.

Yes, but Slack isn't really built for some of these purposes and it shows in
the way that people see each other within the app. I.e. I see all of my
coworkers within Slack, which is not what you want with tech support. I can
see it being useful for a student-student interaction, but it would have to be
augmented to allow specific student-teacher collabs because all people (at
least in the way I understand) are on the same "level" and can see everyone
and all the channels, which might be counter-productive to learning because it
becomes like AIMing your classmates at that point.

> Finally: you'll probably get more out of the internet by being more
> concerned about content than tone.

Thanks dude! When I use the Internet next time I will be sure to think about
this comment. :-)

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hashtag
Would be an awesome feature to have

