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#off-topic
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2020-06-14
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hindol10:06:21

Is http://www.flyingmachinestudios.com/programming/the-unofficial-guide-to-rich-hickeys-brain/ the origin of the famous quote, "Every time I watch one of his talks, I feel like someone has gone in and organized my brain."?

vemv18:06:52

quite sure it was a comment in Hacker News

hindol18:06:47

Do you remember which one?

vemv18:06:30

nope sorry

vemv18:06:54

but it also could be that article as well :)

mloughlin08:06:24

one result 🙂

hindol08:06:37

Nice. And it points back the same article I linked: http://flyingmachinestudios.com/programming/the-unofficial-guide-to-rich-hickeys-brain/ I think this is it then.

sova-soars-the-sora18:06:31

did slack really kill irc with custom emoji?

sova-soars-the-sora18:06:51

😛 i'm wondering what features from IRC were lacking... people wrote whole chat bots in IRC script

dominicm18:06:43

I think it was probably the web ui and mobile app. They've always looked good and been polished through.

seancorfield18:06:07

@sova Remember that Slack is aimed at companies and has a lot of access control and moderation facilities that businesses want in a communication tool.

Alex Miller (Clojure team)18:06:16

It was having a walled garden with good ui that companies will pay for

Lennart Buit19:06:03

yeah, I guess its also the convenience of a hosted chat platform that doesn’t forget. I’m sure you can get that with IRC as well, but Slack has it out of the box.

seancorfield20:06:08

And, for us at work, the easy integration of Slack with all the other systems we use: MS Office, Jira, New Relic, etc, etc.

dominicm20:06:05

Integration came later, no? The api was much lighter to begin with. Closer to irc bots.

dominicm20:06:19

The real question is, who did they steal market from? Who were their competitors at the time? They entered what most would have considered a saturated market and absolutely dominated.

andy.fingerhut20:06:30

'steal' seems to be a pretty loaded term here. 'earned' seems more appropriate, unless the Slack company actually somehow forced others to use their product, by law, which seems unlikely.

dominicm21:06:56

I think the term steal works well in a competitive ecosystem. They stole users from the companies. Although they also earned it.

andy.fingerhut21:06:35

They persuaded users to switch to another system. No theft was involved 🙂

Daniel Tan01:06:11

irc is pretty hard to get to as someone from a generation of GUIs, since it doesn’t support images by default

Daniel Tan01:06:28

nor sound, nor code

sveri09:06:32

Nor anything. I loved IRC back in the days, but for normal people it's just not a thing. If you manage to install an irc client and if you manage to connect to the right server and finally the right channel you are instantly turned off by the leave / join / whatever messages that are turned on by default. Let alone some channels mute you by default unless condition is satisfied and what not.

borkdude20:06:24

I was at a company which used Hipchat before Slack became popular. Wonder if that still exists

dominicm20:06:05

And many of its users don't like it. That's one of the reasons the market was prime for the taking. The market was saturated with poor options.

☝️ 3
borkdude20:06:24

on wikipedia they speak about it in past tense 🙂 > HipChat was a web service for internal private online chat and instant messaging.

dominicm20:06:26

Discontinued! They partnered with slack, ha!

phronmophobic20:06:20

group chat is just really useful for work. at the places i worked, we tried gchat, irc , hip chat , and email. slack was, by far, the best option

borkdude20:06:01

why doesn't Zulip catch on?

sogaiu23:06:16

it's not pretty enough

Mattias20:06:24

I think it is, community by community. No idea why so many are still in free-users-are-the-product-Slack-land...

phronmophobic20:06:36

never tried zulip. how does it compare to slack?

seancorfield20:06:19

When I worked at Macromedia (2000-2006), we ran our own private IRC server internally and used it extensively for coordination of IT releases and for general chit-chat. When Adobe bought us, they wanted to shut that down, as I recall. They were fine with a more "corporate" system 😐

seancorfield20:06:42

I like Zulip. It's the only other Clojure community that I keep open all the time, and it's probably the most "successful" alternative to Slack for Clojure at this point. The free plan has unlimited storage and search. We archive nearly all channels here into topics under the slack-archive stream so you can go there and search for Slack history.

borkdude20:06:59

and it's open source, which means, if they ever go out of business, someone can still host it and load up all the archives and we can continue?

seancorfield20:06:11

But not enough folks have joined the Clojurians Zulip to create a tipping point.

seancorfield20:06:14

@borkdude I think a lot of people completely underestimate the cost and effort in hosting such a solution. Any number of companies might step up and offer but then we'd be dependent on that company not going out of business.

borkdude20:06:49

why is IRC hosting free, who pays for that btw?

borkdude20:06:54

freenode that is

seancorfield21:06:41

It's a federated system, right? So lots of groups can host IRC servers and it doesn't matter if one goes out of business because there are others.

andy.fingerhut21:06:15

Zulip has caught on, for the data science Clojurians. I think the complete true answer for why it hasn't caught on for many other Clojurians is simply: "the aggregate of many individual decisions is such that most have chosen Clojurians Slack, probably in most cases because that is where the most active conversations of knowledgeable people occurred when they chose a chat system to discuss Clojure"

andy.fingerhut21:06:12

I am no good at predicting the future of many individual decisions like that, but I suspect the only thing that would change that is if Slack went out of business, or degraded the features of its free service so much that people actually cared.

David Pham21:06:45

Of if Rich or Alex or Sean or David or any important figure says they will only stay on Zulip, there would be enough momentum

andy.fingerhut21:06:23

Sure, but why would they be motivated to say such a thing?

andy.fingerhut21:06:55

I mean, if they aren't actively unhappy with Slack for some reason, why not join in where the majority of Clojurians on-line chatters are?

seancorfield21:06:17

Rich isn't active on this Slack (I don't see him listed in the member accounts at all). Alex and I are just as active in http://ask.clojure.org and ClojureVerse and I'm certainly active in Zulip (I'd have to double-check how active Alex is there).

dpsutton21:06:54

He was active a bit when rebl was announced. Haven’t seen him here since

andy.fingerhut21:06:46

As even further off-topic, I have the strong impression that people who ask why the majority are making what they consider irrational decisions, are missing out on many of the actual reasons that others are making those decisions. (I am not here claiming that the percentage of human decisions that are irrational is tiny -- I am saying that I believe the percentage of irrational decisions is overstated)

David Pham21:06:50

But the analysis is correct, if the devs from the libs were all the time on zulip, I would go there more often. The data science forum is more lively there.

borkdude21:06:19

What if Github introduced some kind of chat system based on their hosted projects.. would that make a dent in Slack's market share? </speculation>

sova-soars-the-sora21:06:40

@dominicm one vote for polish + aesthetic. @seancorfield aha, they had a customer in mind! @alexmiller a vote for walled garden with good ui aimed at companies. sounds like they had a target audience and were uncompromising on UI. Nice lesson for any competitor. "Who is your customer?" IRC did not really have that question pinned down. So slack is actually the professional IRC. Interestinnnnn. @lennart.buit one vote for out-of-box readiness. That's gotta be there for any application trying to make money. @smith.adriane there is a need for group chat that has hitherto been unaddressed. talk about finding product/market/fit/demand...

borkdude21:06:41

Microsoft has something called Teams. I literally didn't hear about this before the corona crisis, but a lot of non-technical institutions use this (schools, etc.)

sova-soars-the-sora21:06:06

Microsoft Teams will remind you of its existence if you own a microsoft product, don't worry.

sova-soars-the-sora21:06:26

Zulip sounds awesome, let's have an Exodus.

borkdude21:06:06

The exodus thing has been tried a few times. It won't happen unless this slack is actively closed probably.

sova-soars-the-sora21:06:14

Being able to search all the questions and history is awesome -- but costs $$$ on slack, and could theoretically be free with something like IPFS... i think slack probably has excellent margins but hosting forever-history is its own challenge.

seancorfield21:06:45

Most channels here are logged to the ClojureVerse Clojurians log app and to Zulip -- you can already search a year or two of Slack history on either of those @sova

Lennart Buit21:06:15

I guess that moving from an established app, to another requires a significant improvement. Say, your company uses slack and are somewhat satisfied, it requires slack functionality + more to move over. Staying is always easier like that

Lennart Buit21:06:22

its hard to beat a market leader like slack because people get stuck in their way. Slack is comfortable, zulip, teams, … are not yet

andy.fingerhut21:06:54

That is often part of it, and that isn't actually an irrational reason, as I think some people might think.

andy.fingerhut21:06:56

Time is valuable.

sova-soars-the-sora21:06:07

@lennart.buit you're right that it probably takes 3x improvement to get people to move, and something that gets people to shift from slack would have to be 6x better than IRC.

Lennart Buit21:06:56

I agree; I like my developer tools the way they are, and am also slow to adopt change

andy.fingerhut21:06:03

Well, you might be fairly quick if you found a change that was some significant factor better than what you have, and it did not take you much time to switch to it. The more time you guesstimate it takes to switch to it, the higher your estimated value of how much better it is needs to be.

andy.fingerhut21:06:04

Even on Zulip, where history is searchable, and even for the last year or so for most messages that appear on Slack, I find that I don't use that capability terribly often myself. If something is worth recording in a form I want to find later, it is worth writing a blog article, or checking into a README in a public Github repo.

sova-soars-the-sora21:06:27

Google indexes it and when you search google it will come up, that's a plus

seancorfield21:06:16

Oh, you mean Gitter?

sova-soars-the-sora21:06:40

true of here as well, i sometimes find myself in the age-old slack logs...

seancorfield21:06:52

(sorry that was a late response to @borkdude about GitHub)

sova-soars-the-sora21:06:23

If there were some torrent-like program I could run to help host clojure docs and chatrooms I would. Seems like a distant future concept.

mpenet21:06:03

Matrix/riot is quite nice these days too

mpenet21:06:59

Some big orgs migrated from irc to it (like mozilla)

mpenet21:06:15

Zulip has a strange ui, personnaly I am not fond of it.

seancorfield21:06:18

UI is very personal. I really don't like Matrix/Riot. I like that Zulip can be entirely driven from the keyboard, even as a web app.

mpenet21:06:44

Strange as riot is essentially a slack clone

seancorfield21:06:27

Maybe it's gotten more Slack-like over time. It's been a while since I looked at it.

mpenet22:06:06

Yes, they massively improved the web ui and various clients. I was sceptical at first but I am using it for another prog lang chat and it's akmost identical to slack in term of ux

mpenet22:06:54

The irc bridge works very well too in that particular case

mpenet21:06:19

Zulip has a very unusual way of displaying conversations, some love it some hate it.

dominicm21:06:33

Riot can become more like slack, but your hold up with zulip is unlikely to change: that's the whole gimmick.

seancorfield21:06:43

And this subjective divergence on UIs is a big reason why we're all still here on Slack and none of the many alternatives have gained traction. As soon as one alternative is suggested, a dozen people pop up and suggest other alternatives they prefer and then we bikeshed for a bit and then the conversation dies off again... until the next person complains about Slack and proposes an alternative 🙂

mpenet21:06:44

It's mostly because that's were people are for now, slack has a lot of problems

andy.fingerhut21:06:05

That claim of reason is plausible, but unless you actually have survey results of a question like "if every Clojurian Slack user agreed to switch to the result of a majority vote of users to any system that won an election, which one would you vote for?" and the highest vote getter was something other than Slack, it is your best guess, yes?

andy.fingerhut21:06:19

Your opinion of better alternatives isn't necessarily shared by others, is all I am saying. They may have valid reasons to prefer Slack over the alternatives, with which you do not agree.

mpenet21:06:07

As I said it's my opinion

andy.fingerhut21:06:42

Well, keep hoping that Slack messes up their free service significantly, and you'll get your chance to advertise for your favorite alternative and hope people choose it 🙂

mpenet21:06:52

As for migration, once the community was more active on irc, it s now more active here, and I guess it might eventually be more active on other platforms in the future.

andy.fingerhut21:06:15

I would be surprised if it never changed to something other than Slack 🙂

mpenet21:06:17

It was a bit the first semi decent web ui for chat for free. Arguably an improvement over irc (at least for adoption)

mpenet21:06:49

But now there are plenty better alternatives imho