Hacker News Reader

Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

Zulip is amazing. I'm of the opinion that Slack is actively bad for work, because it encourages ephemeral, disjointed chats that you can't easily find again later.

Zulip is fast, light, and is a much more natural way to chat. The "river" of messages that you can zoom in and out of is just fantastic.

View on HN

Start treating it as async as possible, and the situation will improve. If team members get the impression you will always respond immediately, it will lead to a lot of wasted time and lack of concentration.

The thing is Slack's UX is geared against that. We can treat it as async, but the moment someone sends a second message about the same topic to the room, you're done, the conversation starts diverging.

It's also dog-slow, I have to wait for it all the time. Editing a message is an exercise in futility.

I recently had to take screenshots of some 2 Year old messages in Telegram, WhatsApp and MS Teams. In Telegram it took 3 minutes to scroll through thousands of messages and load all that data, in What's app it took 25 minutes, and in Teams I never succeeded

This is on an 8-core machine with a gigabit connection in 2021.

On my 2017 Xeon workstation and in Telegram, I can just press the Find shortcut, type a keyword and get results from back in 2015 in a manner of 1-2 seconds. It's amazing.

Almost like software should actually work

Of course. That's what I was saying. It boggles my mind how something that basic is so hard in other apps.

On my 6 year old mobile phone, I can do the same thing in Signal. Takes seconds to find arbitrary strings in years long very active conversations.

Honestly, I've no idea how we can accept bad performance in Teams and Slack. I can grep hundreds of megabytes of text in seconds on a raspberry pi. You have to actively try to make your software shitty to not be able to do that on a modern desktop.

I am with you but I don't think anybody deliberately makes software shitty per se. It's more like "not my damned problem" and everybody picks a framework or a library for basic stuff and piles them on top of one another.

I'm not quite sure I understand why you would need to scroll for 25 minutes to find an old message in WhatsApp when search is available.

My first guess would be because what you're looking for isn't tagged with unique keywords (maybe just a vague idea of a date), or because pulling up a single message may not pull in it's context "grep -A/B/C" style.

I needed evidence that 2 years ago I was in touch with that person - what was sent didnt matter, nor did i remember contents of the message at all.

If what's app was not crap you could search by date, but I had to scroll.

Ok that makes sense - I think the best solution in that case is to try to think of a word that you may have used around that time and search for that - then if you get the right year you can at least scroll from there.

Even so, I think WhatsApp's scroll is pretty fast especially compared to Teams. Teams only seems to be able to store 1 page worth of content in memory at any one time which makes scrolling for anything even an hour back excruciating.

You scroll whatsapp for a bit, and then it takes 30s to load messages. Telegram scroll is Instant, and trully endless, like a native app loading text should be

You'd think they would use the scroll bar like text editors do on huge documents. Just jump back to that point and keep +/- several screens rather than the entire freaking buffer. I wrote that for a basic text editor that I wrote for fun and it wasn't actually hard and would open gigabyte size documents almost instantly because I was only ever loading about a megabyte of info rather than the whole stinking file.

Not sure what you mean about Slack encouraging disjointed chats. It supports threading too and people use it almost all the time at my work.

I agree it is hard to find things again, but that's mostly because Slack's search is pretty bad, not because of any inherent properties. It's no easier to find old emails or old IRC messages or even wiki pages.

Gmail search is pretty great.

I don't concur. If there is - and it's extremely ironic - a badly implemented feature in GMail, that's manual searching and especially filtering.

Please tell me what I'm doing wrong because it works just fine for me?

True, but I can't use Gmail at work so that doesn't really help.

A lot of people don't get threading. I'm in a small but active channel for our work team. It's roughly 15 people in a large company so it works well for us to engage and share. The problem is two others thread correctly, the rest just SPAM the main thread and when they do get the inkling to thread a reply it's often a new divergent thread off of a small conversation that someone threaded out earlier to be polite to the main.

But the worst... The worst offender on our team thinks all of their replies must be seen by everyone. So they use the "Also send to #mainthread..." for every message they send. It's almost as if training on async chat is required for some as there's a total disregard for etiquette from some.

You realize all this thread etiquette you say your teammate doesn't "get" are preferences you have that you've built up?

The problem is Slack, not your coworker. Slack's threads are conversation killers. Your coworker doesn't want to get siloed into a discussion in a thread with only the people who saw the first message, but Slack encourages that.

Sorry you're mad. Zulip does solve this problem one way.

If there's a thread that someone needs to be in our team is very inclusive. We just @ them into it and it's not an issue.

I'm not mad. And there is an etiquette. I'm not blaming Slack - if you use it with some constructs in mind for how to keep conversations succinct and in their own places for others to easily find and use later - it works out better for all involved. There is value in using a tool in an efficient and repeatable manner that benefits all. This isn't a matter of being right or wrong. There are values in a user base being consistent in how they use a, mostly, unstructured tool - especially in the case of this example.

Unfortunately abusing a feature that's meant for other use cases and is not there to always be used ("Also send to #...") can be used incorrectly, and in this case it is. Everyone who needs to be in the thread is already there. It's just broadcasting to everyone who doesn't need to be the statement they've made.

I don't actually believe Zulip solves this problem, but it does look interesting for a number of other reasons.

Yeah I think that if your team doesn't understand threading, Zulip will be even worse. Zulip's threading model takes many people a few hours to get accustomed to, even if those people are comfortable with threading in other clients.

You just have to tell them. It might feel rude but you can do it nicely. Our work has a :please_use_threads: emoji (a needle and thread) which is a nice polite hint.

> you can't easily find again later.

I sometimes have problems to find the new message I know I just got a few seconds ago due to how "non read messages marker" and "threads" (or however they call it) interact.

I never understood why people where so hyped about slack while there most times where better alternatives.

And let's not even get started about slacks audio/video chat function which is by far the worst I had used in recent times. Even the unliked MS Teams is miles better for voice or video chat. (Just to be clear I never used MS Teams for anything but voice/video chat.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com