Compared to existing and free software chat solutions[1], Slack however looks like such a kindergarten tool. It has a terrible performance. Every time one switches a channel, it basically burns a CPU. The loading of messages when scrolling down a channel with many message is not working well, not pre-loading enough messages to make scrolling a smooth experience. Instead one has to wait half a second or so until the next 20 messages or so are loaded, then scroll, then wait again, then scroll ...
And the "markdown" text input oh my. Rarely have I seen a worse markdown input than in Slack. Maybe on Bitbucket or Confluence it is worse. It is as if they have decided to not use any existing and perfectly well working markdown parsers, but instead get an incapable team of engineers to reimplement a bug-ridden one with missing features. One cannot even insert an image at any place in the message, but only at the bottom. That means one needs to refer to the image in the message, when otherwise one could have simply had the picture in that place where it is relevant. It is such a headache for anyone more familiar with markdown. At this point just give me a plain text input, that has any normal off the mill markdown parser to properly translate my text into a message.
Oh and they still have not managed to implement voice chat according to standards properly, so that it works in all modern browsers. While other more feature full chat programs like Discord had this solved for years ago, Slack is still the same old shit. Now I have to start ungoogled-chromium every time I want to enter a "Huddle" and navigate to their website, where they will bug me with their incessant popup asking me to use their desktop app, which I have to decline every. single. time. because chromium does not remember to block such popups from websites.
Go use Microsoft Teams for awhile and then tell me "Slack is quite crap."
I'm stuck using Teams right now and it is an abysmal experience. There are definitely complaints to have about Slack, but it can be miles worse.
Just today I was looking for a prior conversation to document it for the future. I selected a portion of the conversation so that I could paste it into another tool I use for documenting. I selected the text once and it deselected a good chunk of it. Repeat. Okay, clearly not working well. I had to copy and paste 5 times to get ~15 lines of text because if you scrolled at all it somehow deselected some portion of the text.
I mean, honestly, what tool doesn't even let you easily copy the conversation? Teams is that tool. That's just one of the many issues I have run into today.
- Slack is so easy and fun to use that we use it for things we shouldn't be (fun channels, fun integrations). It creates too much noise and hard to extract signal. It ends up being distracting past 100+ people company.
- Teams is so bad that people try not to use it. It forces you to use it minimally because everything is terrible. It actually ends up being more productive than Slack.
Here's my problem with Teams: the search is terrible. I know I had a conversation with someone (but maybe I don't remember if it was just them, them and a few others, or a meeting chat, or a team chat), I know what it was about, I know a few words from it...and I can't reliably search for it. Useless.
And now they have just flipped the interface so you scroll up for new and not down. With no warning and no notification so for the first day no one could find any current conversations.
And the terrible "Teams documents" so we can lock away documents behind a specific chat. If anyone should be having layoffs, it is their UX folks.
It's cheaper yah, but each time I lose ten minutes it costs me more than that.
That was part of the pitch at work - "oh, over 3 years our total savings is $200k" or something. Great, but if each dev loses 10 minutes a month, or is frustrated and less efficient for an hour, that costs us 5x that.
Teams creates knowledge siloes which is worse than Slack. Every company I have used ends up with people creating various "Teams" and channels under them, then everyone just creates group chats all the time because it's easier.
I believe this is a rendering optimization leaking through to UX. It's a bit of a pattern in recent MS UI, especially their "productivity" web apps. Another example I saw a couple years ago: Ctrl-A in Outlook Web Access only selects the visible messages + a small number above and below the visible messages, because the selection logic only has access to the currently-rendered items. That's my guess, anyway. I've implemented controls with this so-called "virtualized rendering" technique and it was a nightmare to retrofit to existing controls.
Just because Teams is bad, and it's bad, make no mistake, it doesn't make Slack a good tool. Slack is just a resource hog which creates too much noise.
Just because MS Teams is an even worse train wreck does not automatically make Slack brilliant. The whataboutism when people criticize a program that they happen to like is wild. The complaints in the GP are exact complaints I have. I'd even add having to type a space before using a slash character when all you want to do is type a path to something.
Yes, MS Teams might actually suck worse, but don't try to diminish valid complaints about something else that also sucks
I couldn't disagree more with this post. Teams offers such a better solution than Slack for virtually everything, in my opinion. Slack's voice/video chat is a toy, and it's unbelievably slow and unreliable. I am so glad I don't work for a company that uses Slack anymore.
It's very interesting how different people's experiences are. I worked for a company that used both Slack and Teams, and Teams always caused issues, was unstable, and had many video problems. Slack worked much more reliably for us. Perhaps it's a platform issue? Nobody in our workplace used Windows, everyone was either Linux or OSX.
I've found teams > slack for video and stability on OSX, but slack has a better UI. Both have been mostly unusable for me on linux though I think it may also be machine dependent (I had an XPS13). I've never tried them with windows
The biggest problem with Teams is everything outside of chat/video that it tries to do.
Did you know Teams had apps? Inside of it?!
90% of the problems I encounter with Teams (bad UX, crashing, freezing, corrupted sessions) would be removed if they deleted every feature outside of chat/video and more loosely coupled themselves to Office365/Exchange.
I think the Linux thing is machine dependent. I used a Dell Latitude something-or-other (7490? idk) for about 3 years, but it was the version that shipped with Ubuntu. Rock solid on Slack, and Teams mostly just had company-wide issues for us. But my colleague with the same model laptop and same Ubuntu version had no end to trouble with both Slack and Teams - turns out, the Windows version of the laptop had different internals and it struggled mightily. It was mostly GPU issues. Just thought that was interesting, mine is probably not a useful anecdote.
But did you ever try to search for a message in a conversation, and have it give you just the message you wanted, without any surrounding context? Or have you ever tried to scroll through chat history, only for it to lazy-load 10 messages at a time, making you spend 5 minutes scrolling constantly to find a conversation from a few months ago?
Teams would even lose my messages completely from time to time. It was honestly hard to believe how janky it was.
Well, if you have the opportunity to choose, it's a bad choice to surrender your communications to a commercial globally centralized black box both professionally and privately. Moving to Zulip, RocketChat, Matrix/Jitsi, etc. instead of Slack, Discord or even Signal/Whatsapp should be the long-term goal for everyone.
Adobe has already started to feed its customers' data to its AI. Who says, other providers won't take advantage of broad contracts and terms in order to avoid informing their clients.
One big hurdle to this is how there's no widely-used open standard. Many corps don't want to commit to something niche that might lose support, but if there were many interchangeable services for the same kind of chat, it'd be a different story. The standard used to be XMPP, but I used to work with that closely and can rant for an hour about every reason it failed, and maybe any new standard would have similar problems.
Part of my criteria for a work IM tool is something that non-techies can actually use. I wouldn’t wish Discord on my worst enemy, with all its weird gamer marketing language. And I certainly don’t want to work in a team where I’m that far removed from reality.
I'm looking at the Discord UI now and don't see any gamer lingo except for the "welcome" messages. I can see how the UI could be overwhelming with features, and my older family members couldn't figure out how to use it the one time they tried, but Slack is even worse in that way too. And MS Teams was so bad that I couldn't figure out how to even log in.
If it weren't for the security and reliance implications, I'd run a company chat over Facebook Messenger. Simple as.
Looking at Slack's own documentation on formatting messages, they don't even mention Markdown. I agree it's Markdown-like, but they at least aren't pretending it is.
- FlowDock, which was superior to Basecamp and Slack
- Textual
- IRC
And now there's Discord, albeit for different purposes.
Workplace is an everything platform.
The problem with each tends to be distractions, discoverability, bookmarking, an app/browser performance. You really have to have a strong culture of netiquette to use any of them AND access to video conferencing to have quick meetings, because trying to do everything over chat doesn't work.
one company i worked with was horrible with the amount of GIFs littered throughout the threads. it was like a light shining down from heaven with a chorus of angels when i found the disable anims feature.
I was surprised when it nearly froze because people used too many of those reaction emoji gif things on a comment. How is a tiny cartoon more important than than being able to use the app? It's ridiculous that they apparently didn't prioritize tasks.
And the "markdown" text input oh my. Rarely have I seen a worse markdown input than in Slack. Maybe on Bitbucket or Confluence it is worse. It is as if they have decided to not use any existing and perfectly well working markdown parsers, but instead get an incapable team of engineers to reimplement a bug-ridden one with missing features. One cannot even insert an image at any place in the message, but only at the bottom. That means one needs to refer to the image in the message, when otherwise one could have simply had the picture in that place where it is relevant. It is such a headache for anyone more familiar with markdown. At this point just give me a plain text input, that has any normal off the mill markdown parser to properly translate my text into a message.
Oh and they still have not managed to implement voice chat according to standards properly, so that it works in all modern browsers. While other more feature full chat programs like Discord had this solved for years ago, Slack is still the same old shit. Now I have to start ungoogled-chromium every time I want to enter a "Huddle" and navigate to their website, where they will bug me with their incessant popup asking me to use their desktop app, which I have to decline every. single. time. because chromium does not remember to block such popups from websites.
So basically Slack is quite crap.
[1]: https://github.com/zulip/zulip