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Comment by young_unixer | Hacker News Reader

I'd focus on improving performance. The web version is so unusably slow that I don't know how Slack is still taken seriously as a company

How is a multi-billion dollar company incapable of implementing a web chat in a competent way?

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It’s as if they’re running a gigantic-scale, totally unique collaboration platform the likes of which the world has never seen, during a period in which a global pandemic has increased the use of the platform massively, leading to scaling challenges that anyone outside of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Dropbox, Slack and a mere handful of other giants would scarcely comprehend...

I'd give them that credit had Slack not always been a slothful sludge of molasses. For years.

Any app in which I can type faster than the characters appear has deeper issues than scaling.

> It’s as if they’re running a gigantic-scale, totally unique collaboration platform

No it’s a centralized SaaS IM/chat platform with a very slow web client and no native clients, because it’s not a standardised internet protocol surrounded by a healthy ecosystem.

And yet, a company that is about a quarter its size and entered the race 2 years later is able to beat them in features, performance and stability, even in these trying times.

All of that and they don't have Enterprise contracts with SLAs!

(I'm talking about Discord)

Anecdotally, Discord is down and unresponsive far more than Slack ever has been. I would never run Discord as the main method of communication at a large company. It might be fine for when I game, but it's unreliable for anything serious.

Here's some data to back it up:

Slack's uptime is 99.95% from August to October[1]

Discord's uptime is 99.85% from August to October[2]

[1] https://status.slack.com/calendar [2] https://discordstatus.com/uptime?page=1

Perhaps there is some regionality to the issues? I live in Brazil, and Slack is often somehow unavailable: images not loading, message delays, failure to load threads, and the built-in bot commands (not third parties) not responding. And mainly, voice calls having all sorts of connection issues imaginable.

In the last 3 months our team has had to (against company policy) fall back to Discord to be able to do our daily meetings about 6 or 7 times.

I wouldn't run Discord on a large company either, but not for stability's sake, but because their (free) screen sharing is possibly the worst if you want to share a desktop rather than a game (it is very much optimized for low delay, and the downscaling makes text unreadable).

I'm forced to use Slack for work and I notice that there's a multi-second delay between my keyboard input and when the characters show up on the screen.

I believe you, but I think you're hitting something completely unique to your setup and external to Slack. I've never seen antyhing like that, what are you running it on? Do you have ways to inspect to find where the bottleneck is?

> I believe you, but I think you're hitting something completely unique to your setup and external to Slack.

That's entirely possible, but this problem has persisted throughout multiple versions of Firefox and Fedora. For all I know, it could be due to the VPN connection, but even then, the VPN connection isn't that slow. Zoom video conferences still work reasonably well over it.

You must use a different Slack than I do, because I use nothing but the browser client and have had zero issues like this or the parent comment. Get up in arms about the outages, because that’s a bit more justified, but this feels a bit contrived?

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