Comment by dbt00
9 hours ago
"A slack that doesn't suck" doesn't exist, and whoever thinks Anthropic of all people are going to build that has no idea how this is going to work.
Slack has massive lock in due to cross-organization connections. The only way you're going to get people off slack is to build a 10x better mode for collaboration than river of shit chat, and while such models probably exist, you also have to convince people that they are better.
I wish whomever tries this the best of luck.
How google hasn't been able to do this with messenger is beyond me.
The external partners on our slack are almost all logged in via gmail or other google workspace. We are on google workspace as well.
If you are on Google Workspace, just use chat.google.com: it's not bad. All it takes is just a benevolent dictator (or more realistically a bean counter) at work saying they don't want the company to pay for Slack in addition to Google Workspace.
Google decided to build a new chat app every two years instead of keeping the good bits of the original chat app they had and evolving it. It was endlessly frustrating to me when I was at Google. Google's security team ended up banning Slack access after several teams started expensing it.
It doesn't seem like building something that works well would be that hard; we've had nearly 40 years to learn from IRC, AIM, and others. Why can't I run my own chat client that does what I want? Oh, because you gotta lock people in. Sucks.
It is impossible to believe the self-own on Google's messaging platforms. At one point, it seemed that all of my acquaintances used Google Talk. Then years of shutting down perfectly working applications, sometimes without any real user porting. There were even identically named products existing at the same time.
However, I am sure a few Googlers got some tasty promotions out of the mess, so it was all worth poisoning the well.
cries in google wave
+1, google wave might have been the best thing Google ever made.
There was a guy here plugging his slack alternative that was heavily AI based and people here loved it. I don't remember the name unfortunately
the fact nobody wants to admit is that social is the opposite dimension of productivity that’s why slack and teams are terrible product that try to combine both