What problem did Slack solve?

>What problem exactly did it solve?

If one answers that with just "workplace chat messaging", Slack looks redundant and unnecessary since the world already had IRC, ICQ, AOL AIM, Yahoo Chat, Skype, etc.

E.g. in the early Facebook years (~2005), Zuckerberg and his team used AOL AIM as their chat system at work because Slack didn't exist. Early Twitter is another example where Jack Dorsey and coworkers used AOL AIM for workplace chat. (Indeed, Jack even said he got inspiration for Twitter from AIM's "away status" feature)

So we have to find the differentiator of Slack that attracted businesses to adopt it instead of just using IRC or Skype:

- Slack lets people subdivide the chat space into "virtual rooms" or "channels" as a 1st-class concept. This is something that the older AOL AIM, Skype, Pidgin client, etc didn't do. This feature is helpful for businesses because you have multiple projects or teams where multiple people collaborate with various subsets of employees. The older chat systems enabled 1-to-1 messaging based on userid but not on "topics" with 1-to-many participants.

- Slack userids are scoped to the company which is more acceptable for private chats within the business. In contrast, the userids in AOL AIM were global ids and therefore not constrained to the particular company's communication. (Slack added ability to chat outside the company recently in 2021: https://www.google.com/search?q=slack+chat+with+other+compan...)

- IRC had topic channels but corporations don't want to hassle with admins setting up internal IRC servers and plain IRC doesn't have desired features such as chat history without additional effort (i.e. IRC bouncer). In contrast, using Slack for workplace chat is just a few clicks in the cloud.

In short, Slack had a combination of some extra useful features and near-zero admin (cloud).

Made it easy to set up real-time chat in a corporate setting, and normalized the idea.

First of all, before Slack real-time chat in a company setting was a novel idea. Your sysadmin may have been born in IRC, but non-tech people probably never used it. "Why would you chat online when you can in real life!?"

Setting up a chat was full of hurdles and questions without clear answers. Do you use XMPP? IRC? Which clients, which servers? Back then it was still common to have on-premise physical servers, so spinning up a server there was suddenly a big deal. Bigger companies did not appreciate "going rogue" with potentially sensitive company information they may had obligation to secure and archive. It was a lot of friction for something that people weren't convinced was a good idea in the first place.

Slack made it accessible, polished, and corporate-friendly, at a time when SaaS and web apps were catching on. You didn't need to get people install an XMPP client, which was designed for 1:1 chats and had awful afterthought UI for group chats, with different capabilities in each client on each platform. You didn't need to explain to anybody how to keep an irssi session alive. File transfers worked with pretty drag'n'drop without having to open ports.

There was a Microsoft Linq back then, but it was awful, and it was an ICQ clone, not a group chat.

Fun fact: Slack was salvaged from a group chat feature of a failed MMORPG "Glitch".

Before Slack, I found it extremely difficult to send all those cat videos and emojis in emails. Worse still even if I tagged specific people in email to get their attention to watch my cat videos, it was always asynchronous and I never caught enough attention. Thanks to Slack, all attention is now on me and I'm well known in my company. So many emojis on my cat videos now.

Great user experience, compared to what IRC was. Especially for non-tech people, so it could span the entire company.

Clean & simple Web UI, Drag'n drop file sharing, rich multi-line text, beautiful colors/branding, session & history handling, search functionality etc. are just some of the thing that come to my mind. IRC had no consistent experience, you just needed to know what the best client is and setup bunch of other things.

Functionally Slack might not have offered much over IRC at least for techies, but UX-wise it was a leap forward. It made chats approachable.

And ofc the timing was right.

It solved usability for group chat, being much better than IRC. Other messengers solved user status, message formatting, attachments but without groups, and for personal use. Slack simply brought these features to companies. It also created consistent clients for multiple platforms, something not yet common.

I was in mIRC for years before, and my company had our own channel on freenode, as did some other tangential companies and OSS projects, but we couldn’t get some less technical people to use those and they didn’t feel confident in privacy on IRC.

Slack solved all that: pretty, private group chat anyone can use.

It looks more corporate than Discord despite being worse in every other way. It's been years and they are adding low quality features at a fraction of the rate of Discord who is still thriving. It also has better GSuite integration, I suppose?

I guess one other thing about Slack is that I can completely ignore it after work. Like having work inside a single app that is for nothing else. For some godawful reason Go and Kotlin decided to use Slack, but that just means we can safely ignore those places.

Slack made it easy and fun to connect with your coworkers, it wasn't unique, but it was a right time sort of thing.

We had chat systems before like IRC, Hipchat, Campfire, Flowdock (We have used them all), but with Slack it was the first time I felt a push from other departments to use it.

I'm still sad about the implementation of threads that Slack went with, Flowdock did this much, much better, every new post into a thread were also posted in the channel view but with a unique colour, the interaction can be seen here: https://youtu.be/BxRE5GUbFes

I also liked that Flowdock had the concept of an "inbox", so every channel had their own inbox for integrations that wouldn't post a message and notify everyone, but you could still chat with your team about a certain item in the inbox.

My company switched because --

Slack had a mobile client that was exactly as good as the desktop client. That client showed image and document previews.

This means executives, who never have computers but always have phones, could be in chats. Before slack they always called or emailed.

It did not much new, but it offered better experience for average user.

Let's be honest IRC is pretty bad experience.

And clearly there was a place for textual instant communication inside teams and between them. Now just provide easy enough and simple enough UI and setup and you have something to offer.

See, thats the issue many people fail to understand. Successful products dont need to be radical new inventions or the only offering available. Slack was simply better than irc, skype or others for work related communication. There isnt just a type of jeans out there. There are hundreds of variations, made of the same material, same properties, but better design (a matter of preference). Same with slack. It nailed the ux. Didnt solve a novel problem. Was just better at it.

It solved IRC? I mean, "Slack" is now other products like Teams or Matrix too. Apparently running your own chat servers and supporting only plain-text chat out of the box was a problem for the common person.

Although to me holding your chats hostage is unique to Slack afaik and I don't think it has e2e which is a major issue personally but not so much in a corporate setting.

Decent analysis of their original pitch deck: https://www.slideteam.net/blog/slacks-original-pitch-deck

The key problem they tried to solve was to keep distributed teams in sync, according to the above link, and for that it really does work, I think because it has the Channels concept and also because it isn't some "crazy open source hacker thing".

Nothing that IRC doesn't have, but they sold it better.

Google Chat is still my favourite just because it integrates nicely with Google office apps. Teams is pretty buggy. Skype is largely dead. But the killer feature of Google Chat is that you know it is private, whereas you always get the feeling that Slack is not.

Irc as a service. You can pay with money instead of losing time maintaining it.

It is more accessible being in the browser so non-technical people can adopt it more easily.

Yes, they added bells and whistles like threading, emojis, and snippets that made the experience even better.

As an aside, I think slack huddles are superior to every other screensharing method out there. Being able to draw on the screen is a killer feature when collaborating.

Slack is icons/point-click for IRC. I guess young people love IRC but find the command driven interface intimidating.

It's a more user friendly IRC with many extra features. While pro users might still prefer their IRC terminal client with text only commands (that's also what I prefer), it's clear that most users prefer a fully featured rich UI with things like video calls in addition to chat.

1) real-time remote communication - email works for most situations, but due to the async nature sometimes you want to resolve something quickly (e.g a customer issue) and a real-time chat is a better medium. Video chat is a bit heavy, because it requires scheduling, coordination etc where chat is "always on", and doesn't require you to prep for a video call.

2) user experience - IRC existed for decades before Slack and does most of the same functionality, but the UX is cumbersome for your average user. What client do I use? What server do I join? What channels do I join? How do I use /commands? How do I get it on mobile? Slack "just works", you sign in with your work account and everything is there, ready to go.

I shall play the cynic here.

The problem resolved by Slack is providing an excuse to waste computer resources (RAM, storage, CPU cycles). Reinventing the wheel on Electron (and charging for it) does that admirably.

If you meant functionality, you already had XMPP or other messaging platforms.

I feel like people are ignoring that hipchat beat Slack by years. I'm not really saying I loved hip chat but besides getting away from Atlassian and marginally prettier UI I don't really prefer slack.

Plenty of group chats existed, but they weren’t easy to setup or use. Sure, if you had a whole team of nothing but software engineers, an IRC server was, and still is, a perfect solution. A completely non-technical company has no chance of setting that up. Slack made IRC that is friendly both for admins and users. They also added lots of modern features like mobile apps, notifications, embeds, etc.

It didn’t solve a problem that hadn’t been solved. It’s just that all the existin solutions were quite stale. They provided an up to date solution to replace the old regime.

I had the idea for slack a few years before slack came around. They've deviated a bit but not much.

My use case was to have all events/messages/etc come under the "same roof". To have services tell me of failures, etc in our chat rooms directly.

I'd argue there are better platforms for this, and IRC still does it better depending on what you're after, but that was the idea.

Slack did that for us. Until their idiotic pricing plans came into play.

Slack is a pretty good app that creates more problems than it solves (and others of its ilk).

Almost no one needs synchronous comms in general. Getting work done inevitably requires you to disable notifications or quit the app.

My current theory of synchronous comms is your company should work like a pod of whales, and surface for air together, sync as necessary, then return to the depths for deep work.

Delivering random amount of cortisol to employees.

IMHO everything mentioned before to get Slack started, and then their integration efforts with APIs. They catered towards developers, had easy integrations for DevOps workflows.

So Slack was the tool for developers, with a lock-in effect, and other departments just followed (-> product -> marketing -> sales).

IRC clients, if that was a problem.

Branded SaaS chat platform with SLAs is also more appealing to business than open standards.

Slack was IRC for it’s time. Most of the standard commands still work as testament to what market they were trying to capture. Devshop which ran dual IRC servers, TLS’d and on the WAN went to Slack.

Slack also had SAML, near feature complete web interface, and an easy to swallow onramp cost in 2017.

Work chat. There have been many iterations of chat products for companies and Slack just did exactly what people needed it to do with a pleasant enough interface.

That said, the Slack vs Microsoft Teams numbers go to show the power of ecosystem integration and a widespread network of existing customers.

Group - async and realtime - comms that scales (i.e., group grows) better than most alternatives.

The integrations also allow Slack to become a dashboard of sorts. Key external events can be logged in Slack. You don't have to find them, they find you.

Not a Slack fan per se. Just trying to answer the question.

I have no idea. Some of my non-technical colleagues seem to love it for gossip, like baby and vacation photos. They also created lots and lots of topic rooms, like 10x our headcount. Inside it's mostly crickets.

I muted email notifications on the first day and then forgot about it :)

I'm surprised more folks in this thread haven't mentioned Campfire. I thought Campfire was excellent for its time. I didn't see a real product-focused reason why Slack should have won out, but it undoubtedly had better marketing/sales.

The problem of Microsoft buying Skype and destroying it. I actually like modern MS relatively much more than other Googles and Apples, but I will never forgive them trashing Skype, which at version 6.21 was damn near perfect.

We use it just because it feels more professional than Whatsapp, Discord or such

Where Slack differentiated itself in practice is in eliminating separation of concerns in a manner which resolves moral hazard to the benefit of the platform provider. Granted, they've continued to pivot since then.

TLDR: Friction around a user having and controlling multiple identities.

In collaboration platforms (email, chat, web sites) the user typically controls and administers the client; crucially and inescapably the user may select a client which conforms to the underlying protocols, and this includes clients which support multiple personas and intermediation of the visibility of those personas to each other.

Utimately, through a variety of self-organizing mechanisms this gives rise to: work and personal email; chat personas; throwaway HN accounts. It also produces its own sorts of frictions / countermeasures: surveillance capitalism / surreptitious device tracking; the tension about work apps installed on personal devices; Uber spying on their competitors' businesses via drivers' phones.

There needed to be a professional communication method that was less formal and "chattier" than email, but still in a written text format that allows sharing files, images, links.

Slack turns your abstract organization) into something of a physical map (albeit one that's alphabetically indexed) with 'places' you can go (channels for various subjects).

It would be cool if more often we asked the following questions about new tech:

- What problem does this tech solve?

- Whose problem is it actually?

- If there is a problem solved by this tech, what other problems are created?

Slack is the best of all the options at creating a culture when working remotely. The trick is to let your employees have the freedom to experiment and socialize.

Last time I user Discord it looked exactly like slack but perhaps more targeted towards gamers. Why are they so similar? Which came first?

Slack is like a virtual office nowadays. While browsing the channels, you can feel as if you are browsing the rooms in the office.

I guess they'd have answered that most team communication happened via email, which didn't work very well.

None. It created, however, the problem of non-qualified amateurs being able to hassle experienced professionals.

a searchable log for all communication and knowledge

In my experience, workplace chat apps were either instant message apps with really bad rich text support and no search/file upload support, or document stores like Lotus Notes that were more like internal file storage that you could add comments to.

An ability to send all forms of information (video, images, text) simply and efficiently in an Enterprise setting. Unfortunately it isn’t so efficient due to being Electron-based and introduces more problems of its own. I can’t recall if it does real-time video and transcription to text.

I think Teams will really win out as it’s IM, collaboration tools, real-time tools, and transcription services are the best IMO.

Definitiv not community building. All the groups I'm in are dead when it comes to interaction.

Mobile and desktop chat, synced. Mobile IRC at the time drained batteries and needed a bouncer.

IRC with better UX, but Integrations was the secret ingredient

In my opinion, emails, not real time chat.

Paul Graham wrote of it in 2012:

"Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. Email is not a messaging protocol. It's a todo list. Or rather, my inbox is a todo list, and email is the way things get onto it. But it is a disastrously bad todo list.

I'm open to different types of solutions to this problem, but I suspect that tweaking the inbox is not enough, and that email has to be replaced with a new protocol. This new protocol should be a todo list protocol, not a messaging protocol, although there is a degenerate case where what someone wants you to do is: read the following text.

As a todo list protocol, the new protocol should give more power to the recipient than email does. I want there to be more restrictions on what someone can put on my todo list. And when someone can put something on my todo list, I want them to tell me more about what they want from me. Do they want me to do something beyond just reading some text? How important is it? (There obviously has to be some mechanism to prevent people from saying everything is important.) When does it have to be done?

This is one of those ideas that's like an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. On one hand, entrenched protocols are impossible to replace. On the other, it seems unlikely that people in 100 years will still be living in the same email hell we do now. And if email is going to get replaced eventually, why not now?

If you do it right, you may be able to avoid the usual chicken and egg problem new protocols face, because some of the most powerful people in the world will be among the first to switch to it. They're all at the mercy of email too.

Whatever you build, make it fast. GMail has become painfully slow. If you made something no better than GMail, but fast, that alone would let you start to pull users away from GMail.

GMail is slow because Google can't afford to spend a lot on it. But people will pay for this. I'd have no problem paying $50 a month. Considering how much time I spend in email, it's kind of scary to think how much I'd be justified in paying. At least $1000 a month. If I spend several hours a day reading and writing email, that would be a cheap way to make my life better."

Source: http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

I think there's a lot of power in the emojis as a callbacks. When you send someone something important, you need all of them to acknowledge the change. But every "Noted" was a waste of attention. Emojis just quickly replace that with almost no overhead.

Unified asynchronous + synchronous communication.

What's the benefit of slack over discord?

definitely custom made emojis in chat

Internal communications simple as