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Comment by fiddlerwoaroof | Hacker News Reader

The thing I don't understand about Slack is how the core functionality seems to have continuously degraded since I started using it in ~2015. When I started using it, its core message sending features basically didn't have the issues with delayed messages or failure to send that I had experienced with competitors. Now, I routinely have to reset the app/clear the cache and go through various dances to get files to upload reliably (add the file to a message, wait five or ten seconds, then hit send). It's nice to see these technical write-ups about improving the infrastructure behind Slack, but I'd like to see fewer feature launches and more stability improvements to make the web, desktop and mobile apps feel like reliable software again. (nice to haves would be re-launching the XMPP and IRC bridges)

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Not to “works on my machine” you, but I…genuinely do not have these problems. I’ve never heard it from my team either. So we could at the very least say it’s not a widespread global issue.

Even the percentage of nerds that would want IRC or XMPP bridges back would have to be vanishingly small. I’d be annoyed if Slack reimplemented such functionality because it no doubt slows down future development. Slack has a number of mechanics that do not carry across to IRC or XMPP, and they did when they killed the bridges. I’d be annoyed if new features were compromised to increase compatibility with this blatant nerd vanity project.

So, it's workspace and user/device specific: two of the workspaces I interact with regularly have these problems and the problems also show up intermittently for some users and not others. (Anecdotally, my experience is that Matrix/Element used to be annoying compared to the Slack experience and now I mostly prefer it to Slack)

I would be fine with the understanding that the IRC bridge was missing functionality (and it always was). Although threads might make it impossible to implement in a nice way now.

As far as new features go, I don't want any new features in Slack: it worked exactly like I wanted it to seven years ago and the new stuff is nice, but not worth the degradation in user experience.

I’m gonna go to bat for Slack on this one and say the “Later” feature they added recently has completely changed my workflow for the better. It’s so simple, but removes all the cognitive overhead of feeling pressured to deal with specific messages real time, else I forget about them. Now I just throw the message in Later and get back to it when I’m free.

I haven't used Slack in a long time, but isn't this just the normal enshittification cycle that occurs with all Internet products? The founders got a nice exit several years back, I doubt they stuck around at Salesforce for long, so it's natural that the product would deteriorate over time.

Slack IRC bridging in the 2014/2015 era was great. We had a lot of people who spent their whole workday in a terminal window and weren't interested in running a web browser in the background continuously just for a chat room.

> Isn't this just the normal enshittification cycle that occurs with all Internet products?

Yeah, although one can dream that some SaaS company would do htings differently

>isn't this just the normal enshittification cycle that occurs with all Internet products?

No! Stop diluting this word.

> No! Stop diluting this word.

Yes, you're right, I'm misusing it.

However, I think that there is a phenomenon that happens to a lot of tech products that is more general than what Doctorow is talking about. There is a certain type of person who is attracted to building a new thing, and there is a different type of person who is attracted to a thing that is already successful. Pioneers and Settlers, as a former colleague of mine described it. In the context of Internet services, pioneers care a lot about attracting users initially so they tend to dwell on every minor detail. Settlers care a lot about stability, so gradual degradation over time (e.g., in performance, in other measures of quality) is tolerable as long as its rate is controllable and well-understood.

I think that Doctorow's thesis is a special case of this where greed is the driving factor behind the gradual erosion of quality.

This is the Cory Doctorow sense of the word, is it not?

(Or, now that I notice your username, maybe you’re making an ironic joke, since complaining about the misuse of the word enshitification is a meme now?)

enshittification of the word enshittification?

They support much much larger workspaces now, and support team to team shared channels, so the problem space is much more complex than 2015.

Not saying they shouldn’t fix their reliability. Every other week it seems like they have an outage with this or that.

The Flickr style commit to production multiple times per day seems to have its limits. Perhaps longer canary and slower rollouts would help.

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