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Comment by darkteflon | Hacker News Reader

We tried Zulip about a year ago. There were loads of things we loved about it - the threading model in particular - but the learning curve was steep for non-technical members and the mobile app lacked a couple of key features (share sheet integration was the big one, from memory). We also looked at Quill, which had a similar threading model but … was bought and then sank without a trace. We ended up on Slack, which is a total car crash. Can’t find anything.

It was frustrating because Zulip felt like it was so close to being a great - and unique - product. Might be time to take another look and see if it’s there yet. It’s a really great community, friendly and very responsive on GH issues.

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Head of Product for Zulip here. I'd love to dig in deeper to understand what's confusing to non-technical folks as they are starting out, so that we can keep working to improve the product and documentation to address it. If anyone is up for a chat, please reach out by email at support@zulip.com, or in the #feedback stream in the Zulip development community (https://zulip.com/development-community/)!

Hello there, thanks for the offer, very much appreciated and characteristic of the Zulip community as a whole.

I actually did open and/or add to issues on GH, and actively participated in the development Zulip instance on the issues that came up for us as a team. I found the community to be very receptive.

I just want to reiterate, for anyone coming across this thread now or later, that Zulip really is a fantastic product and open source project. The main uphill battle for us was getting non-technical people to buy in to a paradigm of effectively “filing” their messages up front. That’s not some kind of problem with, or criticism of, Zulip as a product. For messages to be in correct context, the sender needs to _put_ them there. To want to do that, it helps if they buy in to the paradigm in the first place.

“Why do I have to do this?”

“Because it makes it possible for anyone to come along later and get the whole picture.”

“Okay, that’s worth a bit of friction up-front.”

It’s really a people thing - not a Zulip thing.

Just 2c from our little team.

Best of luck and thanks for all your great work. We’ll definitely be checking it out again soon.

Thank you for elaborating and for the kind words!

My view is that there is a UI issue here, but I can't come up with a suggestion of how to improve it.

People get their head around MS Teams very easily and fundamentally the only difference between Zulip and Teams is that you are required to put a title/subject on your thread in Zulip as supposed to Teams where it's optional.

In Teams the value of this is clear whereas in Zulip you need to understand the goal. I've always thought that with a bit of a step back UI adjustment to Zulip things could be clearer.

What made the learning curve higher for non-technical members on Zulip than it was on Slack? It’s been a few years since I used Zulip, but I don’t feel like it had a particularly different level of complexity.

I think the fact that you must give a thread topic to send a message.

It's not particularly difficult concept, but different from every other chat app. And for a large user base being confronted with this demand "when they just want to send a message" is frustrating.

Zoho Cliq solves this by using ML to parse the message and give a suitable name. It's suitable 7/10 times, and the remaining 3 - it either doesn't matter that much or is trivial to rename.

Zulip should try that if they haven't already.

I hadn’t heard of Cliq. Do you have lots of experience with it? What do you think of it?

Disclaimer: I work for Zoho, but in a different team.

I find that I really like it for work. But for informal interactions (gaming etc) I like Discord better because of the voice channels. In Cliq they're "calls" and feel much more formal.

Yeah that’s consistent with what we found. The threading model is so powerful, because even large teams that are mainly async can actually find stuff they need, _in context_. That’s really difficult or impossible in something like Slack, Discord, etc, and the value of that can’t really be overstated.

On the other hand, you’re asking people to buy into what is essentially a completely different paradigm than what they’re used to. Maybe it’s more like a loosely-structured wiki than a chat app.

I really like it, though. I feel like it deserves a lot more attention than it seems to get.

> And for a large user base being confronted with this demand "when they just want to send a message" is frustrating.

Isn't it a conceptual framework thing, though?

People have no problem putting a topic when sending emails, and they are perfectly capable of following grouped conversations, as for example in Outlook.

Maybe it would be enough to present it as "a mail application where you can also do chat on a reply thread", to create the right expectations?

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