Comment by yellow_lead
10 days ago
There's already Zulip, Mattermost, and many others. Building a chat application should be considered a tar pit problem IMO. A lot of success relies on network effects and familiarity, and the product looks deceptively simple.
It's unlikely you can build one that is better than Slack without years of investment. Even if you do, it's still an uphill battle.
> Building a chat application should be considered a tar pit problem IMO
Yes. For example Discord originated as a side-project for a team who were supposed to be building an MOBA. That’s why if you try to build a discord chatbot or custom command or whatever, the servers are called “guilds” etc.[1]
Slack was also developed by a team who were supposed to be developing a video game.[2]
[1] https://docs.discord.com/developers/resources/guild
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)#History
Zulip is awesome \m/
I recently started looking into Zulip and while I can see that it is a complete product its mobile UI is so cluttered and funky I don’t understand how anyone could use it. The desktop web UI seems OK but try this on your phone: https://zulip.com/new/demo/
They have the iOS Safari problem with the keyboard and body scroll, tiny icons, super busy UI. I was hoping to help some folks move off Discord to something else and Zulip is not what I would volunteer to do support for when the users are not techies. Heck, as a techie my eyes glaze over looking at it. I really wish it was slicker and more usable but it simply isn’t.
That UI is surprisingly ugly! Windows XP vibes but not in a good way
We've been using Zulip for ~5 years, I won't describe it as awesome.
E.g. it takes a minute to open a chat on mobile, but only few seconds on the web. No idea how it's possible if they use same underlying DB.
In fact a full text search over years worth of communication is faster than loading latest DM from a specific person in a mobile app!
And not much improvement over years: few things became nicer. But mobile app was always dogshit.
Yes! I also don't know why losing zulip is so insanely slow!
Zulip is pretty weird compared to the rest, it's always hard to tell what's even going on with threads within threads within threads. Far more experimental than all others which are basically all the same.
There's also Discord of course, but they've recently announced their impending implosion.
Author here. You guys are reacting like engineers - it's not the raw features, it's the critical mass that only a rare few like openai can attract. I don't care that someone else is already trying to build a slack killer. They do not have critical mass.
> A lot of success relies on network effects and familiarity, and the product looks deceptively simple. It's unlikely you can build one that is better than Slack
i agree that you and i can't build one. openai can. article argues that because it can, it should.
There's network effects and then there's core competencies. OpenAI has not demonstrated their ability to create software that is not a primary use case for LLMs. Chat is absolutely not a primary use case for LLMs, and so far LLMs have been sold as a value-add for traditional software.
The argument that OpenAI has the critical mass to dethrone Slack can be made for just about any other product with an 800-pound gorilla market leader. Windows, Office, Photoshop/Premier, Search, GMail, Figma, etc. Thus far, we have yet to see OpenAI build anything like these at scale, and there's no reason to assume their successes in the LLM space will translate.
I agree that they should build killer apps like these, because they are at extreme risk of being commoditized by smaller, better, faster genAI systems, but I don't think anything they do currently shows that they can.
"You guys are reacting like engineers" is a very wave-y dismissal of the many practical questions raised about why exactly OpenAI should expand into a product that's tangentially related (at best) to their core competency of AI.
The chain of logic in the article is explicitly spelled out as: Sam Altman said OpenAI will grow into new products -> Altman says to tell them what these products should be -> You say: Slack sucks so.... how about Slack?
I think most people, engineers or otherwise, reading the article have an understandable reaction of mostly bafflement as to why we are even talking about this, specifically, to begin with?
Mattermost did a rug pull though.
Hi @consuln,
Mattermost team here. Agree we could have done a better job communicating. The change started in 2023 and we had made a lot of effort to work with the largest unsupported deployments early.
They were very aware of the direction ahead of the August 2025 announce. From then, there was still over a year of support during the transition: https://forum.mattermost.com/t/mattermost-v11-changes-in-fre...
Our understanding is that the organizations most impacted were those using the unsupported Mattermost commercial version, not the open source version. The commercial version of Mattermost is offered in Docker, K8, etc.
If you look into the license of the Mattermost instance you ran, what is the "Enterprise Edition" (i.e. commercial version that upgrades into paid offering) or under MIT license (open source licensed offering, bundled with GitLab omnibus)?