Slack Chats

[davidw]

Right now, the top post is about how FoundationDB got acquired and promptly taken out of circulation.

This is currently 2nd, and is written with the idea of helping people form communities on top of a proprietary system.

Slack seems like it might be a good thing for companies, but for public stuff, I'll continue to stick with IRC.

I'll add: this site seems like a cool idea and good work by whoever created it, but I'm just averse to building on that particular foundation.

[Uberphallus]

Not even for companies, IRC IMO would be much better, the only issue is, as always, you need someone responsible for the infrastructure: not only servers, but scripting for Jira/Dropbox/NameYourCurrentTrendyPlatform integration.

-No single point of failure.

-No dependency on a different company for a vital points of your business.

-No private info stored on a 3rd party system, in a different state and potentially a different country (legal nightmare to ask for damages).

-Distributed system. Local servers give lower lag for multisite companies, internet access outage means netsplit, not inability to communicate.

-Already existing indexing and searching features if desired.

-Many bots to automate/notify/interact with insane amounts of stuff.

-Thousands of IRC clients, with enormous customizing features, for every conceivable platform, that do as much and even more than all these "this is how communication should be" solutions.

-Bridging IRC to XMPP/Sametime/etc plugins/apps to interoperate with other companies.

I can sort of understand Slack for a small company, but if you have your own server infrastructure, no, I can't.

[asb]

Building on this - what happened to Mibbit? Axod used to post on HN regularly with really impressive load and growth stats https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=axod. It seems that after Freenode blocked it, progress rather stalled. To me, with some UI polish mibbit could very well have solved many of the IRC UI issues

[joshdance]

My company used HipChat, Slack, IRC, and a few others. I hated using IRC. The amount of functionality that you get from Slack is so much better than IRC, I ok using their proprietary system. And if Slack gets acquired/killed/defunct, someone else will step up and fill the void.

[orthecreedence]

Exactly what I thought as I was reading through the topics on the site..."Most of these sound like an IRC channel" (or hell, a subreddit).

Definitely love Slack for team communication but I don't think it would work as well for public chat.

[benjamincburns]

It may look like it, but this isn't the Slack (team chat sold at slack.com) you're thinking of.

Top post on there right now:

    A quick note from Jeff Morris Jr. (founder of Slack Chats):
    Slack Chats was created to help you meet interesting new people.
    We are not created by, affiliated with, or supported by Slack
    Technologies, Inc. Thanks for your awesome support! :)

I smell a rebranding coming. If it wasn't for that post I would've assumed this was something from Slack Technologies. Even the logo is so similar...

Worse yet, this is building negative brand recognition for Slack Technologies at the moment, as the UI polish isn't what we'd expect from the Slack team, and their page isn't keeping up w/ HN traffic.

[saurik]

Multiple people here seem to be confused by this project, drawing conclusions about Slack itself from its functionality and performance, or in one case trying to reason about its privacy policy based on the one from Slack.com. Despite leaning heavily on Slack's name, this is not an official project: it is some random designer who threw together a website that exposes people to Slack's product for a purpose (public chats) which Slack currently does not support: both implicitly in the way they set up their features and pricing, and explicitly when asked, such as for the article that came out about them in The Next Web today.

> I asked the company how it felt about these communities popping up even though it’s not exactly sanctioned and a press relations person told me that “it’s great that people are putting Slack to good use” but unfortunately “these communities are not something we have the capacity to support given the growth in our existing business.”

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/03/24/slack-is-quietly-un...

I would say "using other people's names in confusing ways that border on impersonation should maybe be illegal", but of course it is: Slack is definitely popular enough in this space to deserve implicit trademark status. (And, before someone invokes the standard whine of "you can't own a word like Slack", trademarks are not about "owning words": they are about protecting people—the people who see the word, not the people who use the word—from being deceived, either on purpose or on accident, by someone using a name within the same highly-restricted context in a way that is confusing.)

(edit: I am glad to see benjamincburns also noted this in his comment elsewhere on this post. I noticed his comment after I had written my comment, and I figured I provide some useful detail on this not even being a sanctioned use, so I decided to leave my additional comment. He is also soon a great service now of replying to some of the people to clear up confusion.)

[benjamincburns]

> I would say "using other people's names in confusing ways that border on impersonation should maybe be illegal" ...

I think this is a textbook example of trademark infringement all wrapped up in a nice neat little package. It shows how brand protection shouldn't really care about the intent of the infringing party. It's so overt I'd have to assume it was due to naivety, but that doesn't make it any less damaging.

The fact that it just doesn't "feel" like a service that might follow from the team who brought us Slack-the-team-chat-product just serves to establish Slack Technologies' ownership of their brand, and their need to protect it. If their marketing and PM teams have seen this, I'm sure they're cringing.

That's not to say that it doesn't offer value. I'm sure that if the branding issue wasn't so overt, we'd all be cheering it on as a Show HN style MVP.

[vacri]

If someone says "you can't own a word like Slack", ask them to compare apples(.com) and oranges(.co.uk)... :)

[petercooper]

So the thing I've wondered about.. if you create an interesting community on Slack, what's to stop them pulling the rug from under your feet and eventually start charging everyone? Their free offering is really good and I hope the paid users will subsidize it forever, but then I've seen what has happened with other services over the years..

[dexterdog]

Slack doesn't strike me as the kind of company that would do that. So many of the users of the general group slacks also use it at their place of work. Slacks pricing model doesn't work for this in the sense that if they wanted to charge for everybody then every user would have to once for every slack that they are a member of which would kill the large public slacks.

[wamatt]

Maybe this is a silly question, but how do you login?

If one needs to be invited, is that a standard process the visitor can initiate?

[fnayr]

It seems to require an invite from the owner of the community or members. The owner either gives you their contact details or require you get an invite from one of the members directly.

This is frustrating for me, an iOS dev wanting to join the iosdevelopers slack, because it requires an invite, and I'm a solo dev. So, though I have apps with millions of downloads and a decent amount of iOS dev experience, I don't really have anyone I know in the community.

[burger_moon]

I clicked on a discussion and at the bottom was a register button which directed me to a new page with another link at the bottom to register with twitter. Seemed to work for me.

[07a]

I'm concerned that websites which abuse Slack like this are going to ruin Slack's free tier for those of us who rely on it for more legitimate purposes. I cannot possibly comprehend the mindset behind someone who would choose to use Slack for these purposes when IRC has existed since the 80s and accomplishes the same task much better. Nor do I understand why we are leaching onto Slack when Hipchat has existed with a similar free tier for a while now.

And it is abuse. From the company itself: "these communities are not something we have the capacity to support given the growth in our existing business." [1]

[1] http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/03/24/slack-is-quietly-un...

[psychometry]

Have you used the Slack desktop and mobile apps? It's patently false to claim that IRC does these things just as well. There's nothing abusive about a company becoming successful by providing a better UX than an ancient alternative technology.

[lowboy]

I haven't seen a cross-platform IRC client that is as nice as Slack. The embeds and integrations are nice and I like being able to edit typos. Having seamless integration between my desktop, phone, and tablet is great.

[s73v3r]

"I cannot possibly comprehend the mindset behind someone who would choose to use Slack for these purposes when IRC has existed since the 80s and accomplishes the same task much better."

Define "better". For many people, Slack is easier to use, has a better UI, and is better supported on mobile devices.

[BinaryIdiot]

I'm finding this app very, very slow and kinda quirky. I also noticed it'll let you send comments to the server and even response positively without being logged into the system but I don't see the comments actually being displayed so I'm guessing they're silently being ignored?

[joekinley]

So it's basically another internet forum?

[hrktb]

A lot of things are basically internet fora I think.

If it was a stupid concept to start with I'd understand sceptism. But new takes on top of IRC seems a good idea, and from the time I spend chatting on my projects, I'd welcome a solution that would bring even 10% more efficiency to the current process.

[prottmann]

Yes, like reddit, ycombinator, facebook, whatsapp and all others.

[Kiro]

How few seconds did you spend on the site? Your comment makes no sense.

[joshfarrant]

I'm a big fan of Slack, so hopefully this turns into something interesting.

Shameless plug: If you use Slack on Chrome my Chrome Extension, #Clicky, may be of some use to you, it's the fastest way to share your current page to Slack!

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clicky-for-slack/b...

[benjamincburns]

This isn't from the team which produced the "Slack" to which you're likely referring.

[buro9]

What's the privacy policy for Slack Chats?

I cannot find one on that domain, but I wonder if it's the same as the one on Slack.com https://slack.com/privacy-policy .

That policy isn't aimed at protection of end user data, but rather at compliance with regulations around corporate communications.

[benjamincburns]

> I cannot find one on that domain, but I wonder if it's the same as the one on Slack.com https://slack.com/privacy-policy

Not the same company. See my other post(s).

[icebraining]

Slack Chats seems to be just a directory of Slack groups; I doubt they're getting any of the chat data.

[mozillas]

What if HN would have been a private Slack Chat?

[ChikkaChiChi]

This isn't Slack; it's a site created on http://postatic.com which seems to be an online community generator.

I think the reason this is getting so much traction on HN is because of a false association.

[mundanevoice]

Is it me or is it very very slow?

[chippy]

It's not just you. But this may not be indicative of the slack experience.

[doomspork]

You should look into a 500 Internal Error page, right now you're spitting out a stacktrace and code: http://www.slackchats.com/%3Ca%20href=

[ishener]

I get 403 forbiden

[kokey]

Someone from South Africa also reported that he gets the same.

[Ono-Sendai]

If someone wants a website with realtime chatting, per subject, with snappy performance, then they can try my website: http://suprsede.com/ </plug>