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If you reintroduce Markdown mode now using CommonMark, programmers will just be happy that they can use Slack effectively again and as a bonus, you’ll match GitHub and everywhere else programmers hang out.

Please please do, Slack. I filed a support request already asking how to turn off the new editor.

While we're at it, let's have syntax highlighting of inline non-snippet code blocks.

Slack probably has statistics which indicate that by now their largest user group is non-techies. And i'm assuming that if you look at paying customers, the amount of non-technies is probably even larger. People who are probably not even aware of this thing called markdown. So if you need to increase revenue replacing markdown with wysiwyg will make sense to UX and product management.

Sadly I think this is just another case of product adoption largely being driven by techies in the early stages because they loved it, and later in its growth stages realising their market is now way more mainstream and designing their features as such. And now we're alienated by the same product we helped spread.

Twitter is another obvious example I can think of.

Yes, and most of us would do the same thing running a product, if it means more profits. Optimizing for Shareholder value...

What happened to self-respect and the desire to provide a quality profit that makes people's life better?

Nothing to do with self respect This is a completely accepted and promoted way of growing your product. See for example the strategies outlined in “crossing the chasm”. Techies are in this case the early adopters, and now that slack has crossed the chasm, they are targeting a completely new user group, the early adopters, with a new set of needs and wants.

Time to move to a new product which still focuses on techies.

Until that new product "crosses the chasm" too?

As a member of user minorities - the "tech savvy" niche and "knows software can be ergonomic, and expects that" niche - I'm already avoiding using new "innovative" products. The story is always the same - people with needs are used as tools to drive initial adoption, and then the product self-destructs trying to chase the lowest common denominator.

FWIW, I wouldn't even be using Slack if I weren't forced to, like probably most of its users. Regular employees don't have much say in what companies use for chat, nor do most people in communities in what tool was used to start them.

I'd do it for a boatload of cash but not any less. Your core tech users are still selling your product for you, free of charge. Unless it's abuse/fraud/security mitigation there's usually a way to keep your technical customers happy along with your new user base. It obviously has a cost but if you're making dramatic changes that alienate your early adopters I'm sure that those changes are going to do some needle moving in terms of increasing your profits. No one would do something like that on a whim...

That cost does need to stay within reason though. And something crazy like maintaining divergent architectures/infrastructure isn't really reasonable either. But on the bright side the technical folks might be understanding of these sorts of tradeoffs.

Why not try to satisfy both kinds of users? Options and customizability are a thing. One-size-fits-all seems to be the current software trend, but it wasn't always like that. Maintaining a piece of UI that was already there shouldn't be that expensive.

Options and customizability usually introduce complexity, which scares away your less techy users.

Which is fine, because we'll go on to discover a newer, better, competitor.

Well, actually more like 3 newer, better, competitors.

And then we'll have endless arguments and religious wars about which newer, better, competitor is the best.

But we seem to enjoy that, so all good I guess. Go team Geek :)

Exactly - Slack has matched the formatting in WhatsApp, which pretty much everyone outside America uses. Far fewer people have even heard of Markdown.

It's still really annoying though.

A lot of people in America uses WhatsApp.

It's by far the most popular messaging platform in Brazil[0][1]. In other places in South and Central America it's also about as popular as in Brazil, so I suspect the majority of internet-connected people in America use it.

That said, WhatsApp is not a tool I use mostly on the computer to talk to my tech friends and co-workers, where I need efficient ways to communicate both using pre-formatted/code lines and in natural language, where things like bold, italic, quotes, etc become important tools to convey the right message.

[0] https://labs.ebanx.com/en/articles/special/whatsapp-in-brazi... [1] https://hbr.org/2016/04/the-rise-of-whatsapp-in-brazil-is-ab...

In English, “America” refers to the USA, 99.9% of the time. (This is not just true in the US but also in the UK and I am pretty sure other English-speaking countries too).

What is called “América” in Spanish and Portuguese, we call “the Americas” and consider to be two continents (North America and South America), not one.

I have no opinion on which usage is “correct”. Just pointing out that the person you’re replying to almost certainly used “America” to mean the USA, not the land mass that includes Brazil.

Actually Slack _hasn't_ matched the formatting in WhatsApp, they've gone and done the exact opposite of it. WhatsApp's input box isn't WYSIWYG.

Excel is the tool used most widely by paying customer non-techies.

Excel also happens to be the software with the most arcane UI on Earth.

'Making sense' is not the issue here, motivation is.

And I don't think removing a power-user feature and replacing it with something half-baked will motivate your user base.

P.S. WhatsApp uses a markdown-like UI for formatting: https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/android/26000002/

Somehow, its non-techie users aren't complaining.

Interesting , wasn’t aware of the markdown support in WhatsApp.

Most people I know don’t even know WhatsApp supports Markdown.

That said, none of them are complaining because it’s a chat program. You don’t need heavy formatting in a chat program, it’s meant for short and fast messages, unlike email.

As such, I don’t believe people will spend a lot of time formatting their input in Slack, unless they really are thinking people will replace their email with Slack.

Agreed, isn't slack only popular because of "cool" tech startups picking it up initially?

65 of the fortune 100 companies use slack.

That seems unrelated to the parent point.

But how many of them do so after acquisition of a cool tech startup? :-)

I’m always a little wary about these claims. For example I worked at a Fortune 500 before and I created a setup on an app like Slack using my corporate email account.

There is a big difference between “used by company Y” and “used by tiny team X inside company Y” (probably without IT approval).

True, my team happens to be slack but the company actually employs Teams as a chat solution.

I'm sorry for your loss. Teams is truly a horrible experience. "It's like SharePoint for chat" said no happy person ever.

We're getting teams which I'm a bit excited for since it is going to be a company wide replacement for Lync/Skype for business and no developer here has ever used Slack, IRC or anything like this.

gosh I hope they pay you well...

It's COBOL, but my first software development job. It's a good pay for a novice-dev in Sweden ($44k/yr and our currency has dropped by 1/3 compared to the USD).

I like the language and environments, and it's fine that almost all developers are close to retirement, they are great libraries of knowledge after having worked in the system for 20+ years.

It's mostly the legacy ways of working around here that are an annoyance, communication by email and having to wait for order- and project numbers before starting any development, instead of being allowed to develop improvements that can just be implemented when/if they get the ok.

The wait time does allow me to create some automated tests of which we had absolutely none, that other young developers here also benefit from.

I'm gaining knowledge and the system seems to be getting replaced in not that long, at which point my fiancée wants to move back home to the states, but health insurance woes has kept me from looking into that.

Sorry to end your excitement, but it's basically identical to Skype for Business.

As I understand it MS has been covering the two (in both features and design) so that at some point one or other will be deprecated, but that in practice all that means is a name change for those users.

Not really.

Group chats in Skype don't happen, messages are stowed away in outlook under past conversation history and everything you send on Skype for business is a new conversation @tagging the recipient (singular in almost all cases). And everything to be brought up with multiple people thus ends up being an email chain after the Skype convo.

Hahaha we migrated from Sametime, so it's honestly not too bad

Agreed, just saying x is used at y is meaningless, especially when that company is a multi headed hydra like google or MS. I see it so often with languages these days but I'm pretty sure you could find a team in a huge company like MS programming in TCL all day.

You can prove anything with case studies.

They didn't until after it became popular with startups, however.

I made a small CLI tool I use at work specifically because their formatting is almost-but-not-quite-Markdown.

Just stick to CommonMark, for god's sake. Atlassian, Slack, take a look at Github's editor experience because it's fantastic compared to yours.

I wish we could do GitHub style syntax highlighting. Is that part of commonmark?

That's exactly what Reddit recently added, when they wanted to become more newcomer-friendly, and I have to say that it works pretty well!

I am in a similar position. It is almost always the technical people in a company that sets this stuff up, thus you are losing the goodwill of the decision-makers, which is unfortunate.

Never put your customers back in a buying position! Learned this from @dhh. Especially when the minority rule applies to them.