[vacri]

I don't quite understand the huge level of hype around Slack. We use hipchat, which has it's own foibles, and recently tried out Slack at the insistence of one dev who wanted the IRC integration. It was a failure, and the only dev who liked it was the IRC fan, and they were connecting with IRSSI, not the Slack client. I had to set up Slack, and it's true that it's very smooth and easy to set up. Everything around the core feature is beautiful and frictionless.

But the core feature is not good. The chat window is awful, with huge amounts of whitespace between comments and overlarge profile icons. Low information density, one of the lowest I've seen for a chat program. Switching to a compact view improved things, but only a little - but now all the comments start at different points depending on the length of a user's name, making it irritating to follow a conversation as each chat line is not locked to a given position. We found that despite its other shortcomings, we had better quality communication on Hipchat than Slack.

I did notice on their site that they're not marketing to existing chat users. They have video testimonials from people who've never used chat before - what they're lionising in those videos is actually "having chat functionality", not "having Slack in particular". If you're not used to chat, I can see that the above problems wouldn't stand out.

Certainly they above criticisms aren't fundamental flaws, and they can be fixed with some layout design. I did try a couple of user layouts that fixed the craziness, but they had their own problems.