
The Slack Social Network - MindGods
https://stratechery.com/2020/the-slack-social-network/
======
TheRealDunkirk
> Teams is particularly effective as a way to prevent a Microsoft customer
> from even trying Slack.

You sure about that, Ben?

Teams has been a disappointment for my group. We need it. At least, we need
what it is on paper. But it's been so bad that my (Microsoft-loving) boss
asked me to write a groupware web app specifically for our workflow, so that
we wouldn't have to try to make that shoe fit any more.

The fundamental, universal problem that Microsoft is trying to fix with Teams
is a problem of their own making: Office. Everyone LOVES to make Office
documents. Can't write a memo without Word! Can't add a series of numbers
without Excel! Can't have a meeting without a slide deck! So every non-single-
office-sized organization has mountains and mountains of Word, Excel, and
PowerPoint files that lie scattered around various, obfuscatedly-shared
directories, with absolutely zero ability to find the thing you KNOW is "out
there" somewhere. They tried and failed to fix it with SharePoint. They tried
and failed to fix it with OneNote. And now they're failing to fix it with
Teams.

Ray Ozzie fixed it with Groove, 15 years ago, then Microsoft acqui-hired him,
and threw the product away. Good work, there, Ballmer.

~~~
JoshTriplett
I've seen firsthand that Teams _is_ effective at drawing attention from Slack
and similar. People want a persistent chat service. There was a strong push
for Slack, or _something_ like it. Some companies push back, but if there's
enough momentum and demand, eventually infrastructure needs to provide some
solution. And if a company is already a Microsoft shop, they'll provide Teams
(with its full integration with everything else they're already using) rather
than considering something like Slack.

~~~
gav
A former employer bristled at the cost of Slack[1]. Why should we pay for
Slack when we already own Teams? Everyone will just use Teams.

About a week later I was on 4 unofficial Slack workspaces.

They also mandated Teams for meetings, which was both terrible and
particularly hostile to external invitees, so everyone just used free versions
of Zoom instead.

[1] Less than 0.07% of my base salary

~~~
thinkharderdev
Yeah, the one killer thing that slack has is that there is a free tier which
is perfectly usable. Organizations can try and force everyone to use Teams but
in practice they can't stop people from just spinning up a free-tier slack
account for their team. At the end of the day it's just not worth fighting it
anymore if everyone is determined to use slack.

~~~
tharne
> Organizations can try and force everyone to use Teams but in practice they
> can't stop people from just spinning up a free-tier slack account for their
> team.

Unless you work for a large corporation or really any business that takes
security seriously. Many of these businesses will quickly fire employees for
conducting company business on non-approved applications or sites. Major
security issues there.

~~~
prepend
Those companies are bad. There’s ways to train users and secure material on
slack. Picking bad tools and firing users for trying to work around IT rules
punishes innovation and results in worse employees.

I used to work for a company with 200k employees that banned any use of google
apps. In 2009. Even working on a different company’s doc was banned. They
threatened firing. It was ridiculous.

One day a partner was presenting from google drive. One of the IT execs said
“you can’t use google drive” during the presentation. The partner asked what
he should use and the IT guy said something about opening a ticket with AV and
emailing the presentation.

The partner kept going and the It guy said “no seriously, you’ll be fired.”
The partner laughed, kept going and said “I’ll risk it.”

~~~
freehunter
Have you ever seen a news article talking about a data breach? They're posted
here pretty regularly, and most big news outlets discuss the more important
ones when they happen.

I only ask because your comment sounds like you don't think security is a
concern for businesses. It is, so much so that worldwide, companies who have
been breached spend close to $4 million cleaning up after the incident [1]. In
the US it's actually more like $8 million to clean up after a breach. And if
you read the report, data leaks (like customer info sitting in an unsecured
Google account) account for half of all breaches.

[1] [https://www.upguard.com/blog/cost-of-data-
breach](https://www.upguard.com/blog/cost-of-data-breach)

I'd like you to understand how Google Docs poses a risk to businesses. Imagine
you want to share a customer list with someone else in your company, but you
don't want to use Word and OneDrive like IT has approved. So you put it in
Google Docs. Now sitting in your personal and unsecured Google account is a
list of your company's customers. Maybe some pricing info, maybe the email
address of a contact at the company, that kind of stuff. Now your personal
Google account is compromised. It happens all the time, but this time the
hacker finds your company's info. Maybe they sell it to one of your
competitors and your company loses business. Maybe they use it to spear-phish
your customers. Maybe your company's customers get breached because you put
their information in an unsecured location.

Now lets say this goes on long enough that other people are using Google Docs
too. If prepend can get away with it, so can Anne from accounting. And Ben
from HR. And now the SSNs and birthdates and home addresses of all of your
company's employees are in the hands of some lucky hacker who guessed that
Ben's Gmail password was "Benjamin123".

Does that warrant firing? Doxxing everyone at your company, putting your
customers out of business, and putting your own company out of business, just
because you didn't like the IT approved solutions? I'm sure there are easier
ways to destroy your company and put 200k people out of a job, but I can't
think of any off the top of my head.

~~~
prepend
Security is a big concern of mine. Real security, not fake stuff where an
employee can initiate a breach by posting something to slack.

If I can screw up and post company financials, ssns, whatever sensitive stuff
to Slack, then that is a big security risk. And Slack isn’t my company’s
problem. The problem is training, and digital loss prevention, and access
controls.

If company IT approved solutions don’t meet business needs, then I think
that’s a bit security risk. To prevent people from posting inappropriate
material, we need effective tools.

Should the partner not have given his presentation?

The solution, I think, is to identify docs with SSNs wherever they may be on
network and major cloud vendors and redact them, or remove the files when they
are uploaded.

In the partner’s case there was no sensitive data in the presentation. IT
should know that and help users. If the solution is to ban cloud docs in 2009
with no solution then I think that creates more risk because rather than
trying to adapt to using google drive and training users how to use it,
there’s a lot of shadow functions.

There is risk in these tools, my point isn’t that we must allow everything. I
think we have to support common use cases and banning functionality needed by
users, and used by competitors, is actually riskier than supporting enough so
that users can do their jobs.

~~~
freehunter
>not fake stuff where an employee can initiate a breach by posting something
to slack

This alone tells me that your first sentence is not true.

Do you work in IT security? Have you used DLP tools? Have you seen the process
to certify technologies for use and secure them when they are being used? Have
you seen the _cost_ of those tools, and how much time/manpower it takes to run
them?

If Google Docs is not approved for company use, how does the security team
identify SSNs in Google Docs? They don't. So the security team approves Google
Docs and buys a product to monitor Google Docs. But now people want Dropbox,
which means more cost. And Box, which means more cost. And OneDrive which
means more cost. And Bobby only uploads his stuff to S3 buckets, which means
more cost. All of these services cost money and all of the tools required to
monitor them cost money too.

And while the security team is spending tens of millions of dollars per year
(probably a low number actually) to monitor all these approved cloud storage
services, Maria uploads a thousand W2 tax forms to her personal Gmail account
and brings down the company anyway. Or if Gmail is blocked, she puts it on a
USB drive and loses it when her car is broken into. Or if the security team
locks down USB storage, she prints the documents and accidentally leaves the
folder on the bus. Or if there's a DLP tool watching the printers... she
shares it in a personal Slack channel so she can work on it at home.

Security is hard, and the mindset of users who say "you can't stop me" makes
it almost impossible. The security team needs to be right 100% of the time,
but an attacker only needs to be right once. The risky part isn't banning
functionality, it's employees who refuse to follow the rules. And in any job,
if you refuse to follow the rules, you get fired.

~~~
p2t2p
> Or if there's a DLP tool watching the printers... she shares it in a
> personal Slack channel so she can work on it at home.

And here we are. An idiotically simple use case that is not covered by IT.

If instead of locking the shit out of infrastructure people in IT in your
story focused on providing a comfortable solution to work on a document from
home, none of that would happen.

It repeat of the story with passwords. Muh security guys establish rules that
your password should be a crazy something and you must rotate it every month
and then are surprised that those passwords end up to be written on sticky
notes beneath the keyboard.

Try to be human-first and address use cases and nobody will need to use third
party tool to get on with their work.

------
conroy
I maintain an open-source project with a few corporate sponsors. As part of
their sponsorship, companies get Slack-based support. Shared channels have
made this process incredibly easy. Since they already use Slack, I just create
a shared channel in my organization and invite them. They get to decide who is
in the channel. Even if you get added later, you can see the whole chat
history. It's extremely valuable for doing cross-organization work.

------
matchbok
Slack is popular because it makes people think they are doing work or are
being productive.

When in reality tons of people spend more and more time "chatting" and trying
to communicate in Slack than... actually working.

The whole idea that chat is a good way to get most work done isn't true, IMO.
It's inherently synchronous and a terrible way to manage time.

~~~
coderintherye
>When in reality tons of people spend more and more time "chatting" and trying
to communicate in Slack than... actually working.

This has always been the cases. Offices are social environments. Chat
formalizes some of that communication, which is actually quite useful. But it
doesn't suddenly make a chatty, distracting co-worker less chatty or more
productive.

I don't think anyone is arguing that chat is how most work should get done,
but rather that it a good tool for promoting legible communication and good
communication is one of the most important factors in driving effective work.

~~~
matchbok
Maybe. But most channels I'm in devolve into multiple cross-team chats that
are interspersed and impossible to navigate if you aren't reading the messages
as they come in.

Hell, searching for _topic_ of discussion that happened more than a few days
ago is pretty much impossible in Slack.

~~~
coderintherye
My experience of Slack is that their search has gotten better recently,
especially when using some of the filters available. That said, I would also
agree that search is probably a key area for them to improve on.

~~~
matchbok
That exactly. The whole idea of a chatroom as a searchable archive doesn't
make sense to me. Chats are quick bites of information that make sense "right
now".

------
naringas
Stratechery quoting Satya Nadella:

> Sometimes I think the new OS is not going to start from the hardware,
> because the classic OS definition, that Tanenbaum, one of the guys who wrote
> the book on Operating Systems that I read when I went to school was: “It
> does two things, it abstracts hardware, and it creates an app model”. [...]
> what’s the app model for it? How do I write an experience that transcends
> all of that hardware? And that’s really what our pursuit of Microsoft 365 is
> all about.

Isn't this basically what the web is (or could have been?) all about?

"An application experience that trascends any device"... isn't this the web? I
can access it in my smartphone (the real personal computer device), my laptop,
ipad, you name it... All of these of course powered by "the cloud" (somebody's
server on somebody else's giant datacenters)

Microsoft's purchase of github seems clearer and their overall strategy seems
very coherent. To be the best web's (understood as an OS) vendor and tooling
provider.

At this rate they'll be eating the lunch Google could have had but can't quite
get...

It seems that Google is dangerously close to a crisis even if they cannot
percieve this over all their ad revenue.

Google original's innovation which got them to where they are now is basically
their better technology. But how good is google search today? IMO it is way
worse than it was around 5 to 10 years ago.

~~~
verganileonardo
How is Google worse than 10 years ago?

I would agree that they are doing shady moves that can hurt search quality,
but overall, the results look much better today than 10 years ago.

~~~
rhizome
This is honestly not a shitpost, I truly feel that Google isn't doing anything
better than they were 10 years ago. Search has noticeably declined in the past
year, and I am regularly struck by how readily they will rank matches based on
removing parts of my query over results that include all of the terms. Every
Google Android app I use asks for some kind of interaction every time I start
one up. "Got It!"

This happens most surprisingly when navigating with Maps. I have shortcuts for
destinations I regularly use, and the number of times I've tapped one of those
and had Google cover 90% of the screen with restaurants nearby and the
announcement of some feature and the "start" bar across the bottom...my
conclusion has been that Google's Maps UX philosophy is based entirely on
discouraging use while driving.

~~~
pmiller2
Re: Google maps, the recent change where the map orientation changes when the
phone changes orientation was almost enough to get me to quit using it. I just
want to lock in my preferred orientation and forget about it, not have to
fiddle with my phone because it got bumped, the car hit a bump, or something.

~~~
rhizome
I wonder if that's related to this...bug? feature?...where at least once per
minute (in Android) there's what is something like a spontaneous app swipe to
itself without having touched the device. This infects other apps too, so it's
been hard to figure out where it's coming from but I'm pretty sure it's caused
by Maps. Like there's a hypervigilance in the attention the app pays to
rotation.

------
mrkwse
As someone who moved job between a huge (>20k employee) org that had Slack
(alongside Exchange, I believe was moving to G-Suite) to a smaller org (<1k)
on Teams, while I miss some of the fun of Slack, generally I'm not desperate
to switch back.

Video calling (aka 2020's must-have) was always less than idea with Slack
(prior org used Zoom for it) and the threaded interface was a mess (one
colleague always replied to threads with the 'show in main feed' (owtte)
option checked, which had the clumsiest UX of all time, with the main channel
repeatedly interrupted with a linked header from a previous message). I do
miss custom emoji and more diverse reactions (I long for a thumbs down
particularly, I regularly disagree with suggestions without feeling sad/angry
but have to add a text response).

Now, any time a OS technology/etc. points me to a community Slack I'm hugely
hesitant to join, the interface is unfamiliar and loud since the recent
refreshes, and the difficulty to actually leave once one has joined is
substantial (along with public emails which often lead to spam).

------
binarysneaker
Hoping the Microsoft Teams devs are following these comments. I've been a long
time Slack user in multiple large orgs, and I'm using Teams in my current role
for the first time with multiple teams, total headcount around 100.

Things that need love -

1\. The UX. The navigation bar, tabs along the top of the chat window,
separate chats and groups, ugh. In Slack, the navigation panel is tidy and
chats and groups are in one consistent place, the chat header is minimal and
functional.

2\. Message formatting. Pasting code into a message doesn't automatically
change the style to monospaced, and there's no syntax highlighting like in
Slack.

3\. Pasting a picture or attachment into the chat waits for another ENTER
keypress before sending, presumably so that you can add some text alongside
the picture. This seems counter intuitive, compared to the behaviour in
messaging apps (whatsapp, fb, signal, etc).

4\. Experience parity across all versions/platforms. It bugs me that Teams for
Web is incapable of video and phone calls. But worse, the Linux version
doesn't have feature parity with the Windows version. Useful tools such as
remote control and video call background blurring don't exist.

5\. More emojis! There are so many times when I've tried to use an emoji and
it's just not there. Slack has this pretty well covered, as does every other
messaging app out there.

6\. @channel usage. If I type @channel, when the message is posted, it's
converted to the channel name. So I type "Good morning @channel, just to let
you know...", Teams will convert the message to "Good morning General, just to
let you know..." \- that makes no sense when you're reading it! Who's
"General"!?

7\. The General channel. WHY?! I can make it read only, I can't hide it, I
can't rename it. UGH.

8\. Sending a new message. I can type Ctrl+/chat name to start a new message,
or click the icon (WHY is right aligned at the top of the navigation pane?).
This should be as easy as Ctrl+K name messsage, like in Slack.

9\. The linux version seems to run 2 threads, both using around 800mb of RAM.
I wouldn't mind so much, but one of threads seems to be just for the system
taskbar icon.

~~~
ilrwbwrkhv
I find the fact it waits for enter to be pressed before sending the photo very
intuitive.

~~~
screye
If anything I strongly prefer it

------
dijit
I'm going to be honest, this post is a very long winded way to state the
obvious.

Businesses already using some kind of microsoft software that get something
"on top" which is "like slack!" are never going to switch.

It doesn't matter that teams is basically sharepoint+email+skype (and not, as
slack is: an IRC-style chat system) and it certainly does not matter that
bringing bots to the platform is eggregiously painful.

It only matters that business executives and people that have never stepped
outside of the microsoft ecosystem perceive it as "being the same" and "being
included".

~~~
santoshalper
I'm not really sure I follow. I'm a long time IRC/Slack user for personal and
side projects, and my company adopted Teams a couple years ago. The core chat
functionality is very comparable and we use it regularly for exactly that use
case. Every team (organized or virtual) owns a Team with multiple chat
channels that most use all day long for talking.

I am not implying that they are equally good - Slack has a huge advantage for
power users with non-MSFT integrations and bots, but the core "channel-based
chat" use case is pretty much 1:1.

~~~
dijit
I'm very interested in how this works.

For full context: teams came out during my current employment and I have not
moved to another company to see it used any other place.

From my understanding; at least how it's configured for my company... A
"channel" is more like a series of threads, reminiscent of a forum post per
message which can be replied to. This is what I mean when I say it's like
email; it's heavily thread based.

"Chats" are ad-hoc, un-ordered and will become inaccessible/removed when they
cycle out of the sidebar (as in, you can have 20~ chats, the one last
interacted with the longest ago will be dropped if you add a new chat).

Voice calls work well though.

------
andersco
Our organization was recently forced to switch from Slack to Teams. In Slack,
there was a sense of spontaneity and fluidity to the experience, allowing for
countless types of emojis and integration with services like giphy that made
collaborating fun.

With Teams, it’s all business. No more #random channel or water cooler chats.
Not sure which of the tools actually is better but personally I really miss
Slack :-/

~~~
brown9-2
I’m confused by this, can’t you just create the #random channel you wish
existed in Teams?

------
divbzero
To me the product weaknesses of Slack have been:

– Video chat integration (not as seamless as Teams)

– Threading (not as good as Zulip)

– Information discovery ( _i.e._ slow search)

In addition, Slack faces a bigger challenge that the “moat” described by OP
might not be as defensible as the author suggests. I’m not convinced that an
“enterprise social network” is a key feature sought by users of chat apps, and
even if it is Microsoft has the stronger hand with its Office 365 user base
supplemented by LinkedIn.

------
Jonnax
I'm so shocked at the positivity about Teams.

At my company we use it and there's a timeline to shut down Skype for Business
in favour of it.

The app is incredibly slow, doesn't have tabs so if you're in a chat, then you
want to reference a file you're making in the tools you have to click out of
it.

Teams chats and 1 on 1 chats are another "web page" to load.

Clicks load as fast as my 1mbps internet connection in 2004

Skype for Business is still used for chat even though we're told by IT to
transition because the app is so slow.

I just see it as crap clone that Microsoft coded together in a messy hurry to
copy Slack, and then included it free in their Office subscriptions.

The conversations around using slack are that it's really expensive in
comparison to free.

Why isn't that anticompetitive?

~~~
jerf
"The app is incredibly slow"

I wish the forces didn't align to make every "enterprise" application drop
performance down the priority list to somewhere around position 20 or 30. I
understand how it happens, but I don't have to like it.

Slack has been slowing down on me lately too. It seems like every couple of
months, the amount of time between typing someone's @name and it finally
resolving is growing longer, meaning I have more time to type more stuff
before the cursor snaps back to just after the @name.

(I wish there was a "hey, be less rounded and polished and deeply nested in
HTML tags and be _fast_ " mode....)

~~~
divbzero
I understand how performance isn’t a priority but would argue that it _should_
be: The users of enterprise apps are typically employees whose time is
valuable. That ought to be an important consideration for those who control
the purse strings.

------
ProAm
Do people really enjoy slack? We're forced to use it, but if I had a choice I
would not. It's similar to FB, everyone is on it so you have to use it but its
not good software.

~~~
jdm2212
> It's similar to FB, everyone is on it so you have to use it

FWIW, that's the article's thesis.

For my part, I've never used a chat or company communication tool that was
better than Slack. Not saying it's good or that I "enjoy" it. But it's the
least bad option available AFAIK.

------
parliament32
>the company doesn’t win just because it bundles, or because it has a superior
ground game. By virtue of doing everything, even if mediocrely, the company is
providing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts

This is also why Atlassian is so popular in enterprises. I don't particularly
like Jira or Confluence or Bamboo or Bitbucket/Stash, but they're "good
enough", and the way they work together is effectively magic.

------
hacym
I don't like Teams, but am forced to use it for work because they don't
support Slack. They don't support it for a pretty practical reason: they've
spent a lot of time vetting Microsoft's security, SLAs, etc. So have our
customers. Slack is a new variable that introduces more work and cost.

Leadership basically sees Teams as a version of Slack that is already
integrated into Outlook and Office. Slack doesn't offer enough for them to
switch to it. That would also require clearing it with all of our customers,
too, for communicating about customer projects.

Microsoft has something Slack doesn't have: a built-in customer base that is
already fully committed to their products.

~~~
teej
I see these as reasons why Teams doesn't have to compete on usability or
features. Their customers literally can't use anything else.

------
throwbacktictac
"And even when it comes to the cloud, the choice for startups is usually
between AWS and Google Cloud Platform. Microsoft is out-of-sight and out-of-
mind."

I thought Azure was number two in the Cloud-as-a-service game.

~~~
ByteJockey
It's possible that startups are not representative of the market as a whole.

Intuitively this makes sense, I've seen an out-sized number (compared to their
market-share) of enterprise products hosted on Azure. To the point where I'm
usually surprised at how low their share is. I spend a lot of time working
with large companies, so one way to square this would be large companies being
more likely to use Azure than the average.

------
esch89
I agree that there’s a need for communication / collaboration tools that allow
easy work across organizational boundaries. MS Teams permissions to allow for
outside collaborators is painfully complex.

But Slack Connect, while better than Teams, still doesn’t get the job done
well. So Slack’s so called “competitive edge” isn’t that competitive.

For outside collaboration / communication - I like AirSend (www.airsend.io).
It’s a lot simpler than Teams or Slack - less integrations, but perfect for
people who work across organizational boundaries on a regular basis.

------
cjblomqvist
I've never tried Slack, uses Teams (and have used IRC and lots of other chat
programs). Can someone clearly and concretely explain the differences/benefits
of Slack over Teams? Would love to understand. At they moment they feel the
same to me, more or less the same as IRC (except for some non-important
details, except for maybe Teams integration with the rest of the MS ecosystem
and how easy it supposedly is to add "extensions").

~~~
outworlder
You can try Slack for free.

------
SergeAx
Slack is the worst piece of tech I forced to use in years. It is also an eye
opener for wishful thinking myths like "better products will eventually win
the customers". But it is still no wonder they lost to first competitor with
similar feature set and slightly better user experience.

------
markshepard
Correct me if I am wrong. Slack connect is available only in paid slack
versions. When you collaborate across organizations than the assumption is all
parties have paid slack. That most likely will not be the scenario when you
collaborate with third parties. That is the big problem here.

~~~
jschwartzi
Teams really killed it in this department. For example my junior sent an email
to a vendor, and the vendor replied to him on Teams. No complex integration
was required. It's just if you have Teams you can contact them.

------
indigodaddy
How is security going to be handled with Shared Channels? Eg, there is a ton
of private/proprietary information that may not want to be shared between
companies/partners/vendors. Now I can just send a file through chat to a
vendor (presumably, not sure what will be allowed and not be allowed) ? This
makes me nervous. But I guess this could always be done via email between
companies/vendors/partners, so the onus is still on the individual to be
responsible and follow internal company policies in making the determination
about what to share at the end of the day.

------
didip
While we are talking about Slack, do people use MatterMost in their org?

The idea of self hosting Slack is appealing to me. But I don't know how close
it is to Slack.

~~~
jasonblais
Hi didip, glad you asked!

Mattermost is an open source Slack alternative - it's got the same core
features, familiar user interface, Slack-compatible integrations (so you can
migrate them easily if you choose to), and more.

The added benefit with self hosting is privacy, customization - and basically
full control of your data.

If you're curious to know who uses Mattermost, you can check out
[https://mattermost.com/customers/](https://mattermost.com/customers/) for
some examples.

------
lmeyerov
Reasoning stopped short:

\- On the business social network side, I now get as many Teams invites as
Slack invites. Teams won the bigger social moat. Hard for a #3 to enter, and
sounds like Slack quietly lost #1.

\- On the tech community Slack side, Slack community features are hostile, so
pushed to discord and friends. Slack is losing their base ('love').

Interesting times for one of the oldest internet technologies. Or.. were for a
second there.

------
btilly
If you want something that does chat and does it well, go with Discord over
Slack.

While Teams doesn't do anything good to write home about, it avoids one giant
misfeature of Slack - the fact that if I start typing a message, get
distracted, then come back to Slack later, the person or channel that I was
chatting in is gone. Into the invisible Drafts section.

I never want this behavior. And there is no way to turn it off.

~~~
libraryatnight
It doesn't do the drafts thing anymore. Well, it does, but it doesn't move it.
It stays in the normal location and also goes to drafts. So you don't have
that jarring moment where you scroll alphabetically and find missing
dm's/channels.

~~~
btilly
When did it stop? I saw it this morning from something that I had started
writing last week.

~~~
rjmorris
I noticed a few weeks ago that it had reverted to keeping my draft in its
original location (in addition to putting a copy in the Drafts section at the
top). And I confirmed just now that it still does that.

------
forgotmypw17
Slack claims to be an open platform, yet their platform is _closed_ , and they
took away IRC features, one of the few things they could claim as being "open"
about the platform.

I'm not about to try using Teams, but I'm also not about to use Slack, and for
mostly the same reasons.

Closed source, centralized platform, and "you must use our frontend". Fuck
that.

------
55555
Does anyone know a Slack alternative that supports one-click voice and video
messages? Slack has some clumsy integrations but nothing one-click.

My team recently switched from Telegram (yes, seriously) to Slack and you'd be
surprised but for small teams Telegram is great. Specifically, the fast easy
video notes save management time and prevent confusion.

~~~
maguay
Discord may be the closest, with its voice chat rooms. It's not designed for
work chat per se, but can work ok as a Slack replacement.

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samfisher83
From what I understand Teams is pretty much free with office. That is why my
company switched. It's hard to beat free.

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ravedave5
Nobody told this guy - you can make team chats across organizations. Actively
use this for working with other orgs.

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wilsonrocks
We do this all the time with clients

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aahhahahaaa
All these large companies seem to be fighting each other to create the
internet

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aripickar
I think that the biggest thing about slack is just how nice it is to use. I
remember first trying it for groups in college, and it was a godsend compared
to most messaging services.

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vmateixeira
Not that Teams is better but I feel like Slack started to die the moment it
removed IRC and XMPP support. That was their only clear advantage over the
competition.

The inability to turn off notifications shouldn't be a feature. People (at
least me) want more work time, less noise.

Voice/video chat is completely broken (at least for Linux).

Having to very often "clear the cache and hard reload" on the "native" app,
makes me feel I'm using a bloated browser tab.

How, with all those quirks, do they want to compete with Teams - (from a well
established company with such a big user base?

(edit: clarification)

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irrational
My company uses both. Slack is used for intra-department communication, Teams
is used for inter-department communication.

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ForHackernews
Chat is a feature, not a product.

RIP Slack: It turns out IRC-but-with-emoji isn't really that compelling.

~~~
saagarjha
Chat is absolutely a product. In fact, there’s a number of companies that do
nothing but that!

~~~
u801e
Products like MSN messenger, AOL instant messenger, Yahoo messenger, ICQ, etc
are either no longer around or are far less popular than they used to be.

~~~
dewey
You realize that just because some companies in a space go out of fashion
doesn't mean the market is shrinking? MySpace also went away and Facebook
seems to just fine instead.

There's a lot more messengers than ever before. Signal, Matrix, iMessage, FB
Messenger,...

