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Comment by jasongill | Hacker News Reader

Congratulations to the Slack team; a great product that has generally become better over time. Let's hope that going public doesn't change them too much (although things like the new logo debacle don't inspire confidence at times)

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I think we're already seeing a backlash against the always multitasking, loss of focus culture that Slack has become the poster child for in the SASS space. Just like Facebook or Twitter, Slack is engineered for constant dopamine-fueled engagement, which quickly turns it into a bad and ultimately unproductive habit for companies that use it. I am already seeing competitors like Level use Slack as a warning example and I think this is just the start of Slack's problems.

Weird opinion. I only know 1 colleague of mine who gets distracted by chat. For me, and for most people an efficient team collaboration tool (Slack) is a game changer though.

Maybe you haven't been following the news but this is a real concerns and there have been several tech companies that have even moves away from Slack.

There was a logo debacle? I saw it as the standard "complaining and moving on" which happens any time any popular product makes any change.

Slack is a junk product.

It is good enough that it got cloned by Mattermost. No one recreates shitty software.

Chat is nothing new - there are tons of versions. Chat needs to be customizable. People can be annoying.

You mean Slack cloned IRC with markup and pictures

And history. And search. And attachments. And video calls. And a decent experience for non-power-users. And a decent integration/API story. And multi-person DMs. All of which are immensely useful features.

I get that HN likes to think "it's just chat", but a decent chat application (having used gChat, Slack, IRC, AIM, …) is way more nuanced than that.

The point was it is unfair to say that Mattermost cloned Slack. Many of these technologies aren't unique to Slack.

If it were that easy, everyone would be IPOing their Slackalikes right now.

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