You must have used a different Slack than I did. It was much heavier than a simply chat app should be and it always had annoying, but rarely game breaking, issues. When Salesforce bought them the enshittification began in earnest and it quickly went further downhill. Luckily, due to said downhill turn I was able to get my company to stop using Slack altogether.
There is only one slack chat app used by businesses and while I agree they started adding more useless features after the buyout, I would absolutely still put it at the best app experience I’ve had overall.
Edit: how do you feel about discord? To me that is the absolute shittiest app I’ve ever used, but I’ve noticed people who tend to hate on the apps I like also tend to like discord.
Obviously there is only a single Slack app, it was a common sarcastic phrase. What it implied is that your experience differs so wildly to mine and many others that there must be some other secret Slack app that one of us got :)
And it wasn’t just “more useless features” that happened after the buyout, though that definitely happened. It was things like the forcing of the free pro trial to try to push people into using said new useless features (we had been saving the trial to be able to export the full chat history when we left) and all the new fun bugs related to all the new features. Also, they loved moving around the UI, adding and removing things, etc. It got bad enough that I had to stop using the native client and use a web browser and use extensions to modify the page payout to get it back to how I liked it.
I guess I was very aware of these issues because I use a lot of different chat applications and I see all the places that they should have been doing better. I had already trialed several other options (hipchat, mattermost, google chat, ms teams, matrix/element, whatever zoho’s chat was called), but was sticking with it because moving your company to a new platform is a huge hassle and I knew would likely not get another chance to do it if I chose poorly. In case you’re wondering, we eventually went with Matrix/Element because it was finally good enough and was the most private as long as you have the infrastructure to host.
Also, Discord is the most vile POS chat service I have ever used and I refuse to ever use it again. It is disappointing how popular it is and how many of my friends use it.
I was trying to also communicate cheekily, also in my case to reinforce the stark difference in our experiences. I understood you.
I can relate to a few points you are making to some degree. I think my view of slack is largely shaped by having to use Skype and then hipchat for a company I used to work for. Both of those were absolutely shit. In fact if I just read your description of slack issues out of context, I might think you’re talking about hipchat. That fucking thing was the worst I’d used at the time. It was common to not get notifications or messages and the UI was dog shit too. Slack kind of resolved all the issues I saw in hipchat and mostly improved over time. But clearly not everyone felt the same. I’ve never used Matrix, maybe someday I’ll check it out.
We can agree on discord. Never for one moment have I understood the UI, and every time I used it I pretty much always had mic detection problems. And that was on Mac, windows, Linux, native, and web app (even when trying in various browsers).
I did try out hipchat when looking for a Slack replacement and… it did not get chosen for a reason heh. Crazy as it is, we still use Skype for meetings because our CEO and his also-a-CEO brother refuse switch as they just barely understand Skype.
haha my condolences. I’ve had to use skype every now and then over the past few years. Every time I tell myself it must be better now, surely. I swear to god for every improvement they make (stability mainly), they introduce 5 new idiotic design decisions.
You must have used a different Slack than I did. It was much heavier than a simply chat app should be and it always had annoying, but rarely game breaking, issues. When Salesforce bought them the enshittification began in earnest and it quickly went further downhill. Luckily, due to said downhill turn I was able to get my company to stop using Slack altogether.
There is only one slack chat app used by businesses and while I agree they started adding more useless features after the buyout, I would absolutely still put it at the best app experience I’ve had overall.
Edit: how do you feel about discord? To me that is the absolute shittiest app I’ve ever used, but I’ve noticed people who tend to hate on the apps I like also tend to like discord.
Obviously there is only a single Slack app, it was a common sarcastic phrase. What it implied is that your experience differs so wildly to mine and many others that there must be some other secret Slack app that one of us got :)
And it wasn’t just “more useless features” that happened after the buyout, though that definitely happened. It was things like the forcing of the free pro trial to try to push people into using said new useless features (we had been saving the trial to be able to export the full chat history when we left) and all the new fun bugs related to all the new features. Also, they loved moving around the UI, adding and removing things, etc. It got bad enough that I had to stop using the native client and use a web browser and use extensions to modify the page payout to get it back to how I liked it.
I guess I was very aware of these issues because I use a lot of different chat applications and I see all the places that they should have been doing better. I had already trialed several other options (hipchat, mattermost, google chat, ms teams, matrix/element, whatever zoho’s chat was called), but was sticking with it because moving your company to a new platform is a huge hassle and I knew would likely not get another chance to do it if I chose poorly. In case you’re wondering, we eventually went with Matrix/Element because it was finally good enough and was the most private as long as you have the infrastructure to host.
Also, Discord is the most vile POS chat service I have ever used and I refuse to ever use it again. It is disappointing how popular it is and how many of my friends use it.
I was trying to also communicate cheekily, also in my case to reinforce the stark difference in our experiences. I understood you.
I can relate to a few points you are making to some degree. I think my view of slack is largely shaped by having to use Skype and then hipchat for a company I used to work for. Both of those were absolutely shit. In fact if I just read your description of slack issues out of context, I might think you’re talking about hipchat. That fucking thing was the worst I’d used at the time. It was common to not get notifications or messages and the UI was dog shit too. Slack kind of resolved all the issues I saw in hipchat and mostly improved over time. But clearly not everyone felt the same. I’ve never used Matrix, maybe someday I’ll check it out.
We can agree on discord. Never for one moment have I understood the UI, and every time I used it I pretty much always had mic detection problems. And that was on Mac, windows, Linux, native, and web app (even when trying in various browsers).
I did try out hipchat when looking for a Slack replacement and… it did not get chosen for a reason heh. Crazy as it is, we still use Skype for meetings because our CEO and his also-a-CEO brother refuse switch as they just barely understand Skype.
haha my condolences. I’ve had to use skype every now and then over the past few years. Every time I tell myself it must be better now, surely. I swear to god for every improvement they make (stability mainly), they introduce 5 new idiotic design decisions.
The only consistent think about Skype is the way it continues to break in new unfun ways.
Boo. Microsoft buying it did little to improve it, and everything to make it worse :/