Hacker News Reader

Comment by tbenst | Hacker News Reader

Slack fosters vibrant (free) communities in open source and academia. I fear these are not long for this world.

Slack has no moat. It won the market by dint of excellent marketing and a good enough product with a little design panache. Admittedly, this has been really hard for it's competitors to match 100% but really no chat platform has had any major innovation in like 20 years. They have mostly all failed due to a combination of network effects and poorly-conceived monetization strategies. Slack is hot, but it's not going to last 10 years.

I think one of the most important aspects was that Slack was flying under the radar of procurement, IT and security. Anybody could just setup a nice place for their team to start chatting and sharing documents - even across organizations.

Aren't people already preferring Discord? I saw a lot of Discord links in the past few months and nobody even talked about Slack.

When are people going to realize that software is largely a fashion industry? Slack was in style, now it’s not. Right now Zoom is the hot new thing, give it half a year and it’ll be out. None of these products do anything functionally different than their predecessors, it’s just aesthetic.

I don’t think software would be so fad-oriented if there wasn’t a culture of infinite growth and expansion.

I think Zoom is actually appreciably better than the competition. And I also think there's still a lot more space for video conferencing to innovate. Company's like Zoom that sell integrated conference setups can integrate themselves pretty thoroughly into an enterprise.

Can’t wait to go through this same exact routine in a few years lol

Discord is an interesting case compared to Slack. Slack is, from my understanding anyway, built out in PHP. Fairly lingua franca for the web.

Discord, on the other hand, seems to have built a "technical moat" of sorts for themselves by using Erlang/Elixir and other non-standard tech. Suppose SF or a company like them were to acquire Discord. If and when the staff were to leave once their vesting period or whatever is over, who would take over the codebase from them?

In practice I’m not so sure I think that’s really a concern, especially for a company like Salesforce. They could probably just afford to let it stagnate while they dangle massive salaries in front of the few that could actually maintain the codebase. And it’s not like everyone would leave immediately after the acquisition... but definitely very soon after haha

They can easily migrate to Discord or Matrix.

They signed up for this by using Slack in the first place. I don’t mean to be anti-corporation, just saying the wise move for keeping communities around for the long haul does not involve tying yourself to the life of a SV company.

I hate to beat the dead horse but IRC sounds great for such free communities. If it’s just about connecting people without the need for historical data or discovery, IRC is great and won’t die when [tech company] folds

So did IRC and mailinglists for many years, people will move on to the next platform du jour.

as an avid IRC user in the past... discord and slack added considerable value in the form of built-in search history, voip/video chat, integrations with other platforms and games. IRC was a great tool during the 90s and early 2000s for me, but going back would just be a nostalgia trip for me.

i think the constant comparison between the previous gen chat platform of IRC and slack/discord is just extremely tiresome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com