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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

Slack is one of those curious tools that seems to take off despite doing nothing particularly new or innovative. We started using it due to some colleagues who raved about it. I haven't come across a feature yet that we've used that hasn't been part of IM / IRC clients for more than 15 years. The main feature of it seems to be that it's new, so when you first start using it only the 5 other people that you are collaborating with right now are on there, so it starts off feeling more productive and focused than other tools.

But then, I thought the same thing about Twitter (how is this not worse that every other IRC / IM service I've ever used?) and look what happened there.

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Honest question, outside of writing your own bot are there any real IRC integrations for even half of the services Slack integrates with? It's really useful to set up monitoring services in a dev channel where we can not only read errors, but share code snippets with pretty formatting, Github integration to let us know when a PR has been opened to fix the issue, and then Trello to manage features too.

Not to mention the integrations outside of developers. I haven't worked in enough large companies, and never as a nontechnical employee so I'm not sure what sales teams were using for communication but I doubt IRC was their cup of tea. I imagine they used a lot of email, maybe some CRM communication but that's still not as useful, or rather I imagine it's less useful than Slack. Having a single place to discuss Stripe purchases, hiring with Breezy, MailChimp et cetera that isn't a gigantic email forward sounds seriously useful and I don't know that anything like that exists on IRC.

There are alternatives like HipChat, but they clearly didn't it the mark the way Slack has.

You make a good point about all the integrations. I might be in an minority situation, but none of the people who are enamoured with Slack that I work with are using any of that stuff. It's just instant messaging with a sprinkle of file sharing to them. It seems to me the biggest thing, as others have pointed out, is the polish and the native apps. For example, Hangouts does most of it, but Google has killed of their native apps and the in-browser experience is really suboptimal. Having a simple, dedicated, well designed native app really makes a difference.

While you're right in a broad sense, I think in fairness slack has a lot of polish where others tools don't -- they get a lot of UX details right that seem "obvious" because they are getting them right. But they're actually far from trivial.

One thing they get really wrong is embedded code snippets. The formatting, chrome, and UX around snippets is not as good as HipChat.

If you gist the snippet beforehand, the experience is almost identical. This is obviously an extra step, but then your snippet isn't 100% tied to Slack. I have an app installed that gists my clipboard with a keyboard shortcut, and copies the link to my clipboard, so it's just an extra key chord.

Eh, it gets the basic monospace-preserve-whitespace stuff right. It's good enough for me 99% of the time, and if it isn't, I normally want to be debugging somewhere other than a chat app.

What Slack does very well is giving a good enough experience for programmers to do shop-talk, and ample opportunities for chatbot yak-shaves, it's also perfectly well usable for non technical people. I work for $ENORMOCORP, and after a couple of brave pioneers among the tech people, now everyone's falling over themselves to get their teams a Slack instance. (As others have said here, the ability to have multiple instances is pretty fundamental to this dynamic - we have team-specific Slacks, product specific, project specific and what have you. I certainly would not want some more 'old fashioned' colleagues seeing that NSFW bollocks people keep wiring into the tech specific chatbots...)

This strikes me as a pattern with some potential for growth - tech people driving adoption among non-technical colleagues. I reserve judgement on whether that's $3bn worth of potential.

I think we can flip this upside down and frame it in terms of "what are they doing wrong wrt the product and design"?

I think the list will be much shorter for Slack compared to its peers.

Notifications of documents? Integration with a variety of services is new.

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