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posted by martyb on Sunday July 09 2017, @05:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the slack-off dept.

Benjamin Pollack has blogged about why he hates the proprietary chat tool, Slack, which competes with IRC. He covers six points as to why you should too:

"Yeah, that’s right: there’s finally something I feel so negatively about that I’m unsatisfied hating it all by myself; I want you to hate it, too. So let’s talk about why Slack is destroying your life, piece by piece, and why you should get rid of it immediately before its trail of destruction widens any further—in other words, while you still have time to stop the deluge of mindless addiction that it’s already staple-gunned to your life."

[Ed. addition] I had troubles accessing the site, even wget failed to download anything... but lynx.exe on Windows 7 Pro worked on the first try!?! For the curious, here are the six points from the blog post alluded to above:

1. It encourages use for both time-sensitive and time-insensitive communication
2. It cannot be sanely ignored
3. It cannot be sanely organized
4. It's proprietary and encourages lock-in
5. Its version of Markdown is just broken
6. It encourages use for both business and personal applications


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  • (Score: 2) by Lagg on Sunday July 09 2017, @06:14AM (3 children)

    by Lagg (105) on Sunday July 09 2017, @06:14AM (#536762) Homepage Journal

    Which is to say it fuckin' doesn't.

    Still though it's not exactly intrusive. You just open a window and the tab will get an asterisk or other icon when new messages are in.

    1. Yeah, but this is one of its usecases. This is why there's so much webhook shit. It's part notification thingy.
    2. I have the phone app installed for on call purposes. If it was not for that alert I would just have it sitting in a second browser window that I tab to when I want to check. It's pinned and the favicon/title changes when there's new messages/highlights.
    3. True
    4. "To the extent I can do anything, I need to write directly against the Slack API, rather than using something commonplace like XMPP or IRC". This doesn't make any goddamned sense or should anyone that wants to do bot notifications write a dedicated daemon bot that sits in IRC. Which... Why would you do that
    5. It's not meant to be markdown, part of the language is a table format and other such extended syntax in the same vein as mediawiki.
    6. No the almost-identical-clone-with-voice also known as Discord is what tries to get you to use it for personal applications. Or perhaps any of the 5-6 other almost identical apps that probably make point 4 moot. Especially if you go after Matrix [matrix.org] which solves the lockin feature entirely with similar or better feature sets. Including IRC bridging.

    This blag rambles more than I do.

    Not that I like slack in particular or make defense of it. But my usecase isn't personal. If it's trying to get me to use it as such it's doing a bad job. I find it hilarious that the post's conclusion - from an ERC and org-mode and therefore emacs user - is both that it doesn't do enough and does too much. And speaks of one-size-fits-allness.

    Fucking emacs users you guys I swear.

    --
    http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 09 2017, @06:36AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 09 2017, @06:36AM (#536766)

    1. The fact that they're bundling "This is our quarterly all-hands agenda" with "Holy shit, guys, the server room is on fire - and by the way, burning with pretty blue-green flames, check out this pic!" is part of the problem. Use case my cute otherkin ass. It's an antipattern for communication.
    2. ALERT: yiffy vixen wants hot equine seed NOW ... oh, wait, that wasn't the alert you wanted? Too bad, you got it. Hope that on-call money is good.
    3. Tragically, devastatingly true. Which exacerbates 1 and 2.
    4. I won't try to answer your "why" in its own right. Instead I will point to the fact that people keep doing it to serve their own needs, then refer you to the results of an activity known as "research" which may be done in a place called "the real world".
    5. Yeah, everything has its own damn wikiscript or markdown or markup or markmyterritory. It's still annoying - but not a killer bug.
    6. You must have missed all the coy you-can-totally-use-this-for-your-book-club-and-furry-pic-circles crap that Slack have been, and are, putting out.

    So, it's lousy for important business communications, which was the point of the fucking article.

    • (Score: 2) by Lagg on Sunday July 09 2017, @07:24AM

      by Lagg (105) on Sunday July 09 2017, @07:24AM (#536773) Homepage Journal

      So what you're saying is that the author has a problem when he attempts to use something for a usecase it wasn't designed for? Interesting, and also expected from emacs users! Muaha!

      --
      http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 09 2017, @01:52PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 09 2017, @01:52PM (#536820)

      ad pimping Slack to furries [youtube.com] (SFW?)