I guess they reach point where they are trying to improve something that was already good enough.For me most annoying is that they removed setting that allowed me to configure to have up arrow to repeat the last command (like on IRC) this is very useful if you do ChatOps.

Glad I&#x27;m not the only one.I never had a problem with formatting code in slack until this release. And the hotkey (Shit+Cmd+C) doesn&#x27;t work for me, although that might be my window manager interfering.

Consider my interests piqued. I shall be giving ripcord a go from tomorrow.

Says works for Discord and WIP for Slack.

Under &quot;Features&quot; it says it&#x27;s a WIP (so yes, probably not working at all):&gt; Voice chat (Discord OK, Slack WIP)It also lists this &#x27;feature&#x27; which I think is hilarious:&gt; Not made from a web browser

How is voice chat on Slack working in Ripcord? I&#x27;m guessing not at all?

The speed difference between Ripcord and Slack is just night and day. I had forgotten applications can respond faster than I can type, yet here we are.

From the official Slack API docs site,<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;api.slack.com&#x2F;community" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;api.slack.com&#x2F;community</a>we find&quot;terminal-slack - Terminal client for Slack&quot;&quot;Slacker - Simple Slack client for the CLI&quot;&quot;scudcloud - Ubuntu client for Slack&quot;I&#x27;m pretty sure there are others in that list which are also standalone thirdparty clients, but clearly they would not be listing those on their own site and providing plenty of API docs if they forbid them.

So Ripcord is making money on illegal thing? Discord &#x2F; Slack ToS forbids third party app afaik.Edit: Why am I being downvoted?
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;discordapp&#x2F;comments&#x2F;8tukek&#x2F;ripcord_unofficial_native_discord_client_no&#x2F;e1toruy&#x2F;?context=8&amp;depth=9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;discordapp&#x2F;comments&#x2F;8tukek&#x2F;ripcord_...</a>

I&#x27;m giving this a whirl now. I can&#x27;t stand forced WYSIWYG and I know this minor annoyance is going to slowly grind on me over time.

It’s heartening to see I’m not the only one with this problem, and also incredibly depressing.

Pah. Next you&#x27;ll tell us that once Ripcord shows you some messages, its &quot;N new messages in this chat&quot; notification actually goes away. Now that would be a killer feature, if Slack managed to implement it.

As a current slack user, could you give a couple examples?

Sadly they aren&#x27;t going to implement some of my most used features from slack in ripcord so I stopped using it. Was ready to pay a ton of money to the dev as well.

My main complaint about Ripcord is that it&#x27;s non-FOSS, which is somewhat concerning to me (the price is a non-issue; I&#x27;d be happy to pay the $20 if that comes with source code access). Sure, Slack itself ain&#x27;t FOSS either, but I&#x27;m more inclined to make it as FOSS as possible (e.g. via Rambox or in an actual browser like Firefox) than to switch clients.It also doesn&#x27;t seem to acknowledge my starred channels; while the bookmarks are better anyway, those don&#x27;t carry over to my phone or my other computers.

There&#x27;s some things you could try listed on this page: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dev.cancel.fm&#x2F;wiki?name=Linux_DPI_Problems" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dev.cancel.fm&#x2F;wiki?name=Linux_DPI_Problems</a>Gnome should probably have the correct DPI values, since it&#x27;s a complete DE, but I&#x27;m guessing something has gone wrong with the way the Qt version that Ripcord uses is reading the DPI values.Try something like:<pre><code> QT_SCALE_FACTOR=2 QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0 .&#x2F;Ripcord.AppImage
</code></pre>
It would be better if this always worked out-of-the-box 100% of the time, but Linux desktop environments are quite varied and it&#x27;s hard to handle every case while also not limiting support to specific desktop environments and versions.

I just tested ripcord and it didn&#x27;t seem to work very well on Gnome. Didn&#x27;t do dpi scaling so it looked tiny on my main monitor and the notifications showed up pretty broken.

I just checked the screenshot. It reminds me of Windows 95.
What I feel like one app can&#x27;t fit all. Some people want a faster response time rather than a modern design and vice-versa.Talking about slack new input box. 
The non-technical person would be more than happy with it. Because they don&#x27;t know markdown and something that works like MS Word is good enough.

I&#x27;ve given up entirely on the Slack desktop app and use Ripcord exclusively. Much faster, more responsive and easier to use for 99% of my time spent on slack.

Not exactly the same thing but GChat used to have a mini drawing UI where you could send a quick doodle and it super useful. No one else seems to have picked up on it.

Yeah, I&#x27;ve always hoped they would change their position on supporting markdown. Their big report on it says they will never support it. Looks like this might be why.

Just a side note: They never have supported markdown. It just markdown-like or a very limited subset of markdown.Especially proper list support is missing (ordered and unordered lists), also markdown links.

I&#x27;m not even sure why we refer to logical pixels (a.k.a. CSS pixels, etc.) anymore, for exactly the reason you mentioned. We should be saying things like &quot;this only needs to be 512px x 512px because it&#x27;s never rendered larger than two degrees of viewing angle&quot; or something to that effect. But I guess that&#x27;s hard to think about... ems could be a good compromise.

Agreed on the code&#x2F;quote block woes.&gt; never rendered larger than 64x64On a high-density display, that 64px x 64px image covers a lot more surface area than 64x64 actual pixels on the physical display. I suspect that this 512x512px requirement is related to scaling factors on devices with high DPI displays.

The worst thing about it is how fucking easy it would be to fix. Just treat the backticks as characters when backspacing or navigating with the arrows, that way you can &#x27;enter&#x27; or &#x27;exit&#x27; a code block reliably, and all previous muscle memory from the markdown editor would carry over.But no, apparently that&#x27;s too hard for a company that&#x27;s worth more dollars than the number of seconds any of us have been alive.

All code sucks now, not just blocks. Inline code screws up at least half the time I use it; it tries to guess what I want, and sometimes doesn&#x27;t end when I close it with another backtick. And, when going back and editing it sometimes carries the formatting outside of where I put the backticks.So frustrating. I hate having to think every time I insert code and re-do it about half the time; I&#x27;d rather have no formatting (just show me the markdown as-is) than this mess.

That&#x27;s likely due to HiDPI displays. A regular display is probably in the 100 DPI range, but we have phones that are in the 400 DPI range, so that icon size suddenly isn&#x27;t so big anymore.

I&#x27;m not seeing this behavior. Are you sure you don&#x27;t have a setting changed? Under Preferences &gt; Advanced,When typing code with ```, Enter should not send the message.
With this checked use ShiftEnter to send.Might be an easy fix :)

The changing behaviour of enter&#x2F;shift+enter in code block drives me absolutely crazy.Normally, shift+enter is newline, enter is send. However, inside a code block, it&#x27;s the opposite. I constantly forget this and press shift+enter for a newline while in the code block and accidentally send a half-finished message.Sad to see the new WYSIWYG editor does exactly the same thing.

There&#x27;s probably a degree of forward-compatibility intended with that requirement. Slack may only display the image at 64x64 (128x128 at 2x dpi) right now, but they want to avoid requiring you to upload a new image if, at some point in the future, they implement a UI with larger action images.

It is infuriatingly terrible. A regression. So many times I&#x27;ve had similar woes with the code block and quote block mechanisms too.Another truly bizarre feature I noted and sent a bug report about was that when adding an image to an &quot;Action&quot; the _minimum_ size requirement is 512px by 512px. For an image that is never rendered larger than 64x64.

Another annoying and broken design decision: because I live in Japan the first link redirects me automatically to the Japanese version of the article. There is no option to choose the language, and manually changing the language-code in the URL still redirects me to the Japanese version. My browser is set to English and French as main languages...

Here is a link for some additional context<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slack.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;articles&#x2F;202288908-format-your-messages" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slack.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;articles&#x2F;202288908-format-your-messag...</a>And<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;api.slack.com&#x2F;changelog&#x2F;2019-09-what-they-see-is-what-you-get-and-more-and-less" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;api.slack.com&#x2F;changelog&#x2F;2019-09-what-they-see-is-wha...</a>

Their stock has been decimated. Tempted to still short it at this price. Very clear it’s not much more than a feature that has quickly been commoditized.

I use Firefox and I&#x27;ve had nothing but trouble from the text box. It&#x27;s just atrocious, I don&#x27;t know why they&#x27;d do this when the previous box worked so well. At least make it an option!

Oddly, I don&#x27;t see those issues with Firefox.If I type an inline `foo()` it converts to WYSIWG as soon as I type the closing back-tic and everything I type after is back in normal text mode. If I left-arrow to have the cursor inside the formatted div but before &quot;f&quot; and type &quot;bar.&quot; I wind up with the expected effect `bar.foo()`.It takes one extra arrow press to move the cursor beyond the invisible back-tic to shift from the inline code to plain text regions before or after the block.I preferred the old input just because I don&#x27;t like having content jump around while typing. I&#x27;d still rather hit the preview tab to see it rearrange itself.

we are all talking about this at work. this is the worst forced update!

&gt; I think the only way to insert text at the beginning of a code span in the WYSIWYG editor is to highlight the first character of the span and type over itThis seems better than what I was doing: put the cursor after the first character, type the new beginning, add the same character and remove the same character from the beginning. Thanks for the tip!

It is pretty astonishing how much Slack was able to grow from their initial 2 years of being ahead of the curve in UX, despite being mediocre&#x2F;bad on every other front since.

So if only 50% of the users have this, we should assume that it&#x27;s only 50% done, and that by the time everyone has this thing, it will be perfect?More seriously, while &quot;this doesn&#x27;t work right&quot; is part of the complaint, the larger complaint is &quot;this is fixing something that wasn&#x27;t really broken.&quot; If Slack wanted to improve their editor, that&#x27;d be great, but they could have done that without losing what people liked about the old system. It&#x27;s not like there&#x27;s a lack of &quot;quasi-WYSIWYG&quot; Markdown editors out there to take cues from.

I get that it&#x27;s bad right now, but it hasn&#x27;t even rolled out fully. It&#x27;s quite clearly not 100% done or it would be 100% rolled out.This seems like literally one bug.

I&#x27;d push back on your last point; there&#x27;s a zero-sum feedback process here that is invisible. You&#x27;re seeing the negative feedback from a vocal set of minority power users; the positive feedback from people isn&#x27;t going to be known or seen in anything other than usage metrics.You say &quot;users&quot;: how many, what percentage, what cohort..you get the idea.

Smells of bad UX&#x2F;design process - some senior &quot;wants&quot; this particular solution, despite their users showing direct feedback that it doesn&#x27;t work for their needs.

This attitude to their rollout reminds me of the recent rollout of Twitter&#x27;s maligned new desktop UI, the new YouTube Studio Beta, and reddit&#x27;s new UI.There is almost a meme of online platform service providers not understanding their users and their workflows, and rolling out new revisions that hamper or outright remove functionality that those users rely on.I guess the canonical example would be that one Digg redesign that nuked the whole platform, or Snapchat&#x27;s redesign a year ago that stunted their growth.Luckily, we haven&#x27;t had to experience this at Hacker News thus far ;)

&quot;The WYSIWYG editor is being gradually rolled out over the coming days – if you don&#x27;t see it in some workspaces, just hang tight, you will soon. &quot;Not to mention, unintentional threats.

I know. I try to give the social media people leeway since they&#x27;re almost always just the messengers. This thread in particular just seemed laser targeted to aggravate me.

It reads more to me like whoever they hire to run their twitter doesn&#x27;t have the authority&#x2F;knowledge to engage with complaints other than being nice and saying &quot;I&#x27;ll pass that on&quot;. This would be fine normally, but not really when they&#x27;ve shipped a feature that everyone hates.

Actually, the cmd&#x2F;ctl-z advice is actually moderately useful. If you type it immediately after the closing formatting character it undoes the wysiwyg formatting. (I&#x27;m not arguing against a way to turn the wysiwyg input window off, however.)

&gt; You can use Cmd&#x2F;Ctrl + Z to undo the format rendering within the text box, if that helps?This is the one that got me. Yeah thanks, I&#x27;ve been using text boxes since the 90s, I know how to undo.Now we&#x27;ll get to find out if _they_ know how to undo.

It needs the PM and the team that championed this gong show to step up and own the reply.

They dishonestly care, because they didn&#x27;t bother to spend any of their billions of dollars to help their existing paying users.

&quot;Not writing it at all&quot; is already miles ahead. Just like this comment, actually

&gt; Is there any way that tweet could have been written that would have satisfied you, without actually agreeing to change course right away?Not passive-aggressively suggesting that the problem is with the user and not the tool. &quot;The goal is for workflows to evolve&quot; effectively means &quot;this is how it&#x27;s going to be, you&#x27;ll have to adapt (even if it&#x27;s worse for you)&quot;.My workflows have thankfully &quot;evolved&quot; to use different tools. Zulip and Discord both still use markdown input, and I no longer use Slack for anything.

Is there any way that tweet could have been written that would have satisfied you, without actually agreeing to change course right away?To me the tweet&#x27;s tone says that they honestly care and don&#x27;t want people to be inconvenienced, but also want to at least see if people will warm to it.There has to be some kind of healthy balance between listening to user feedback and never changing anything. 
 The extreme version of listening to user feedback is: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1172&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1172&#x2F;</a>

That&#x27;s a surefire path to irrelevance. Nobody wants groupware. Nobody uses it unless forced.On the bright side, that would leave a hole in the market for an enterprising chat developer to fill, hopefully with something less annoying and resource intensive.

I don&#x27;t think Slack is building a chat service. Based on the features they are building, they could be aiming to be The Groupware[1] of 2020&#x27;s.On the web site they put it this way &quot;Slack is the collaboration hub that brings the right people, information, and tools together to get work done.&quot;[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Collaborative_software" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Collaborative_software</a>

That style of communication where a corporate entity pretends to be friendly and concerned even as they&#x27;re downright shutting you down is extremely annoying. It comes across as dishonest and condescending. I wish this type of PR would go away.If someone who&#x27;s reading this works in social media, here&#x27;s what would have been less annoying:- Saying &quot;it&#x27;s not possible right now, but you have a point and we&#x27;ll reevaluate this&quot; (even if it&#x27;s a lie)- Saying nothing

This new hive mind of corporations empathising with the poor common man needs to stop. It is outrageously frustrating, condescending and patronising. Every CS rep is trained to say “I understand” more often than they breathe. Corporate blog posts wax poetic about their understanding of the struggle of modern life in the first world. How sorry they are to be doing exactly the opposite of what somebody would do, who actually empathised.I will be the first to admit to a temper, but honestly if I hear one more CS drone tell me how much they understand, I swear to god I will reach through that phone and quiz them on it. Do you really? Explain it to me. In detail. So help you God if you forget anything.Ugh.You know, say what you will about the mob; at least they don’t treat you like you’re three years old.

Look, this was somebody&#x27;s OKR so it had to be shipped. Can&#x27;t you people understand that?

&gt; Only in the software industry would someone tell me that my professional tools should change because change is inherently goodTranslation: &quot;we&#x27;re paying all these engineers and product managers and they need something to do&quot;

Your comment is a punch to the gut for me, I&#x27;ve been developing an internal CRM for two years that embodies many of the philosophies you describe. But while it is somewhat depressing, I&#x27;m left with questions about how bad it really is.First, is it possible to develop software without inconveniencing business users with temporary (let&#x27;s assume the ultimate products are better then the linux&#x2F;vim&#x2F;emacs they are superseding) regressions and inconveniences? And what is the cost in terms of time to route around such pitfalls? Would we still be able to have startups at all if products required thousands of hours of QA or perfect test suites in order to launch?Second, if we were to set a hard rule 20 years ago that all software was to avoid this phenomenon during its development, what valuable tools and services would never have been developed at all? Would we still have Twitter? Reddit? Steam? Whatsapp? I don&#x27;t have to dig far into the history of any of those tools to find near revolutions by their userbases over braindead UI or adversarial practices in the name of &quot;vision&quot;.I don&#x27;t know, these are open questions. I just think avoiding all such frustrations you mentioned is wishful thinking and at some point it is just part of the process of experimentation and iteration. Or perhaps this process is entirely different in a small corp. versus a big corp. environment.

Equipment is critical in pro sports, especially the more technical ones too.

Another thing in Slack that has annoyingly changed (without an option to toggle off) is: its &quot;Drafts&quot; feature - where leaving a channel with an unfinished message means that the channel itself gets moved to the top of the left sidebar. This completely breaks my flow, because 1.) you can no longer use up&#x2F;down hotkeys to reliably go between specific channels, and 2.) I frequently have to do a double take and ask, &quot;where did that channel go?&quot; - especially if you Star specific DM channels, because those go under the drafts section but above the rest of the channels, meaning the Drafts section is out of view most of the time.Long ago I created a Chrome extension that reordered things nicely, but their CSS changes frequently which made it a maintenance hassle, and I read on HN another dev saying doing so is against their terms of service anyway. Not a fan of that anti-tinkering attitude.SLACK: don&#x27;t make dramatic changes to a user&#x27;s workflow without giving a simple toggle to preserve old behavior.I get it, most users probably love this feature. My wife does, for example, and she works at a big organization, which has different needs from my workplace. But even if dramatic changes to product are approved of by 75% of users, every time you do so, you create whiplash for the other 25%, and prevent many from ever loving your product. Rinse and repeat that whiplash too many times and product design rants on HN with 600+ upvotes will be a regular occurrence...

&gt; like Markdown that allowed me to build up decades of muscle memorySpeaking of muscle memory, I still remember these &amp;#133; and &amp;nbsp;&amp;mdash; from the time when most web apps understood HTML. Too bad they stopped…

If we embraced this philosophy none of us would be typing quickly on touch screen phones.  Steve Jobs knew it beat a physical keyboard, and when pressed by people who complained about the new iPhone&#x27;s touchscreen keyboard, he grinned and said &quot;You&#x27;ll get used to it.&quot;  And oh boy, did they ever.

&gt; The goal is for workflows to evolveThis exchange is a pretty good summation of one of the biggest purely practical reasons why I&#x27;m so obsessive about tools, and why I&#x27;m so willing to put up with the initial cost of learning systems like Linux and Vim&#x2F;Emacs.Outside of fundamentally better workflow improvements, most professional fields don&#x27;t randomly change their tools. If you gave a professional artist a new pencil that had to be gripped differently for no reason, they&#x27;d throw it in the trash.But in software, we tolerate buggy tools that change all the time for no discernible reason. We tolerate software that simultaneously targets professionals and casual users, serving both segments poorly. We tolerate software that can&#x27;t be customized or adapted for specific workflows. It&#x27;s tough to put into words, but if you watch a musician or a painter interact with their tools, there&#x27;s a very clear difference that emerges, and over time you start to realize how much better all of their stuff is.In most professional artistic settings, workflow changes only happen because they have a clear benefit -- drawing from your shoulder instead of your wrist, changing your embouchure if you play an instrument. And even in those fields, it&#x27;s generally accepted that over time people will end up with very specialized setups that are very consistent and refined and that remain constant for years and years.Only in the software industry would someone tell me that my professional tools should change because change is inherently good. Only in commercial software would an elegant, consistent interface like Markdown that allowed me to build up decades of muscle memory until my computer was an extension of my fingers and I didn&#x27;t need to think about the way I typed -- only in software would that be considered a bad thing.

Slack&#x27;s voice is great when they&#x27;re saying positive things, but God is it exhausting when they are replying to negative feedback. It&#x27;s like listening to Ned Flanders, only with some extra patronizing emoji to rub it in

Wow, pretty egregious.How do you like this reply to tweet: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;qbixapps&#x2F;status&#x2F;1197332922807865344" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;qbixapps&#x2F;status&#x2F;1197332922807865344</a>

I could honestly say that about most Slack features. The drafts feature in particular drives me crazy.

Did their engineering team not dogfood this change? What Slack engineer or product manager tried to share a `snippet of code` with a peer and thought, &quot;yes, that was a pleasant experience. we should ship that.&quot;

Reading their non-replies on Twitter feels like I&#x27;m reading something specifically designed to piss me off. Smarmy apologies, low empathy, cocksure of how correct their vision of a chat service should be.This one in particular[1]:&gt; The goal is for workflows to evolve, but we realize change can be a bit of a pain.&quot;Stupid peasant, we are only here to help you. Once you see the glorious vision we have you will thank us.&quot;[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;slackhq&#x2F;status&#x2F;1192147475672510474?s=21" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;slackhq&#x2F;status&#x2F;1192147475672510474?s=21</a>

perhaps but its so easy for product managers to not get to the heart of what hackers do

One of the reasons I got into DevOps was because I got tired of dealing with shitty product managers. I&#x27;ve experienced maybe 2 good ones, ever.

The only times I’ve had semi-decent product managers was when I was consulting, and they were paying our company for every hour worked.

This sounds like you&#x27;ve never had a good one.A good product manager can make a world of difference.

Users are to blame. There always has to be something new, even if its no better or even worse. It just has to change regularly or people think its stale and move on. We see this loads in phones where totally useless features like samsungs curved edge or foldable phones and the removal of loads of useful features.

lol product managers are such a bane for tech companies. they have to keep shipping features which no ones wants but they have to show they came up with and are shipping something. i think tech companies should try and avoid product managers and designers for as long as possible.

Know what&#x27;s better than Github issues? A directory in the tree named Issues. Create files there. They all stay with the project. Append comments to them. Code snippets. What have you.git grep finds them.

You know what largely replaced business email AND these crappy chat applications for us? GitHub issue threads. We do a very large part of our collaboration right next to the code now. Email &amp; chat is now mostly to just asynchronously notify regarding one or more issue numbers. Managers, developers, everyone. If you want something discussed or handled, make an issue. It&#x27;s got a single numeric identifier that&#x27;s trivial to pass around, even to clients and end users. Labeling systems applied to issues can quickly turn a messy bucket into a well-oiled software factory. If you use GitHub, this is also a strong argument for a monorepo, as you could have 1 unique identifier for anything across the entire org scope that also links into your code contexts seamlessly.The UX around GitHub must be incredible for non-developers, because I am watching project managers with zero engineering&#x2F;coding background learn markdown syntax almost accidentally. In all of our time using GH issues as a collaboration tool, I have heard exactly ZERO complaints regarding anything being broken or unfriendly to use.We now look back on Teams&#x2F;Slack&#x2F;Skype&#x2F;Email usage as dark days. &quot;How the hell did we ever get anything done?&quot; is the usual take when one of us talks about it.

There is this long-standing bug on mobile versions of slack where large swaths of messages just disappear. The only way to get them back is to sign out and sign back in. This is supposed to replace business email?

The OP said they felt the person should be reassigned. This is hardly a call for termination. It was also accompanied by constructive points about productivity software relevant to the post at hand. I do not believe there was anything unkind in suggesting that maybe the person was in over their head.

It&#x27;s in their ultimate best interest to find a new vocation. You can&#x27;t just hit undo or tab out of this one.

Please don&#x27;t cross into personal attack in HN comments. It breaks the site guidelines ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>). Note this one: Be kind.It&#x27;s hard enough for people to hear criticism or fix mistakes without their head, or a colleague&#x27;s head, being called for.

The product manager for this should be reassigned. To not even have the option to opt-out and use the classic input box is ridiculous.Productivity tools need to be very careful about radical change. Especially when the change won’t make anyone more productive.

Your user experience has been &quot;enhanced&quot;.Share and Enjoy.

I think this may have changed, very recently. Now when I paste any of the example strings in the post, I get an alert that I&#x27;ve pasted markdown, with options to apply formatting, or not ask again[1]. After that, it recommends using a new shortcut, (Cmd&#x2F;Ctrl)+Shift+F[2].Not the best improvement, not the worst.1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;QXHWMpF.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;QXHWMpF.png</a>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;Ksrjvf1.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;Ksrjvf1.png</a>

Because teams is eating their lunch by virtue of being included in Office 365, and they misinterpret it as being due to their WYSIWYG editor?

Teams is way worse than Slack. So&#x27;s Facebook&#x27;s Business Chat offering, which I find less horrible than Teams at least but it tags along with their &quot;business social&quot; application, and those are always useless crap.Though it&#x27;s been a year since I used Slack and from the look of things on here, they&#x27;re trying their best to catch up in the bad-UX department. The drafts thing that moves channels around seems awful, too.

Since moving companies, I have traded slack for microsoft teams.  
Teams is pretty terrible in comparison, one of the most annoying &quot;features&quot; is it&#x27;s WYSIWYG editor, I have no idea why slack would want to copy one of the worst elements about teams.

So true, I was annoyed all day and didn&#x27;t know why. Had no idea they had &quot;upgraded&quot;. I thought I had inadvertently hit a toggle that put it out of adult mode. I was too busy to fuss with it. Every time I went into that box I came out a little more angry, a little older, and farther from the feeling of good flow that Wednesday typically brings.

Thank you for adding the feature of not adding WYSIWYG. I can&#x27;t believe how frustrating Slack&#x27;s new editor is.

Carrier pigeons would be a step up from Lync

Sounds like Atlassians approach with Jira - &quot;it supports markdown, except when it doesn&#x27;t!&quot;

Oh man, Lync. The re-skin of MSN Messenger that nobody wanted.I remember when I couldn&#x27;t change my status from &quot;Away&quot; for some reason. On my computer it would always show me as &quot;Online,&quot; but to everyone else I had been away for 300+ days.

You know what else has a terrible WYSIWYG editor? Microsoft Teams. It&#x27;s kind of sort of like Markdown, except when it isn&#x27;t, or when it breaks. At least it&#x27;s a step up from Lync.

yeah, we realised this too late :SRiot&#x27;s CIDER is pretty much an internal codename though, and it&#x27;s not split out (yet) for anyone else to use. So hopefully it&#x27;s not too bad a namespace clash.

CIDER is also the Clojure Interactive Development Environment that Rocks if it matters<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;clojure-emacs&#x2F;cider" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;clojure-emacs&#x2F;cider</a>It likely doesn&#x27;t as they seem unlikely to be confused.

We used ProseMirror to build our editor at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;able.bio&#x2F;new" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;able.bio&#x2F;new</a>We chose ProseMirror after doing a lot of research (TinyMCE, Slate, Draft, Medium toolbar) and have been very happy with what it’s enabled us to do so far. We’ll probably write a blog post about it at some point.

Curious if you&#x27;ve explored something based on ProseMirror?I&#x27;ve heard good things about it and it seems to have a decent implementation for hybrid WYSIWYG + Markdown.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;prosemirror.net&#x2F;examples&#x2F;markdown&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;prosemirror.net&#x2F;examples&#x2F;markdown&#x2F;</a>

Ugh. No. This really breaks up the flow of the text.I’m sure it’s fine for org-mode’s intended audience, but for people not from a coding background, it’s horrid. And there’s no need to “teach WYSIWYG users Markdown” when WYSIWYG is fine for them.

It&#x27;s even sadder because Org-Mode demonstrated how to do WYSIWYG right.Apply the styling in real time, but then also show the formatting characters around it! That way you lose all of the weird WYSIWYG edge cases (will this character I type at the edge of a bold segment also be bold?), and you also teach WYSIWYG users Markdown in a natural way.

Let&#x27;s put some more blame on people who chose Slack for their companies&#x2F;teams&#x2F;communities. Most Slack users don&#x27;t use it willingly.I for one am showing the middle finger here; when forced to talk on Slack, I use Ripcord as a client.

The reason for Slack&#x27;s success is probably because it&#x27;s a &quot;turn key solution&quot;: you register your company, invite your employees, enter your CC, and you&#x27;re good to go.With a lot of these open solutions things are more complex. I think we should really focus on providing a good UX here if we want more adoption.(also, I don&#x27;t know if Riot is that much better; opening <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;riot.im&#x2F;app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;riot.im&#x2F;app&#x2F;</a> makes Firefox use 100% CPU and my laptops fan spin; I closed it after 10 seconds of just a loading animation)

to be fair, Slack predates Riot (and Riot has only got properly usable as a Slack replacement since hitting 1.0 in Feb this year).But yes, very frustrating to see folks forced by a proprietary product to suck up something like the Slack editor change when there are FOSS options where you can just roll it back, set a config flag to get what you want, or worst case fork it.

There is a chicken-and-egg problem with matrix. It&#x27;s clearly nice, but the more people use it, the easier it will become to install&#x2F;maintain. That&#x27;s how wordpress wins over commercial blogging platforms.One thing i found it hard to do is integrate matrix with an existing database of users. It would be perfect for our community chat.

The fact that this industry turned to a proprietary low-quality solution like Slack when Riot&#x2F;Matrix have already existed tells the full story about what a bunch of incompetent idiots we all are.Everyone frustrated with the new Slack input box deserves what they got. Me included.

Amusingly, for <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;riot.im" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;riot.im</a> we just shelved our WYSIWYG editor efforts after trying two completely separate implementations over the years (one via Draft.js, the other via Slate.js) because: a) it&#x27;s a nightmare to get right, b) nobody used it anyway (it was optional), c) chat isn&#x27;t a wordprocessor, d) markdown (commonmark) + floating formatting toolbar is good enough.Our current editor was written from scratch (codenamed CIDER), and seems to work pretty well for markdown input + some semantic elements like prettified usernames, room names, etc.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;matrix-org&#x2F;matrix-react-sdk&#x2F;blob&#x2F;develop&#x2F;docs&#x2F;ciderEditor.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;matrix-org&#x2F;matrix-react-sdk&#x2F;blob&#x2F;develop&#x2F;...</a> tells all about CIDER, and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.riot.im&#x2F;riot-web-1-5&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.riot.im&#x2F;riot-web-1-5&#x2F;</a> gives the full context if anyone cares :)

I really dislike it as well. It puts designeyness right in my face in a way that interferes with my use of the tool. The old way was just fine.

It&#x27;s logical from a short-sighted perspective as I&#x27;m sure it looks good to investors to have a longer checklist of features. But shipping a broken feature is eroding customer trust.

Don&#x27;t know why you&#x27;re getting down-voted, this is a logical and sensible conclusion, from a business perspective.

That&#x27;s all fine to have it for people who don&#x27;t know markdown, but damn we should be able to turn it off if we don&#x27;t want it.

Exactly, all the cool kids were using backticks, underscores and stars. Naturally the lesser users would figure it out just to fit in. Everyone feels mildly powerful being able to wield a tool like this as trivial as it is. Now we&#x27;re all just back to being bottom feeding piker fish toiling away on word docs.

Everyone that was using slack was clearly aware of backticks, underscores, and stars, which is really the most you need, and probably 99% of everything used.Surrounding some text with these marks to achieve some formatting is hardly rocket science. If someone doesn’t do it it is really because they don’t want to understand.If you however make an editor that fucks up using any of these marks? Well, that’s a big time failure.

&gt;Anyway, the main point, what percentage of people do we think knows markdown to such an extent where it&#x27;s easier for them to use than a WYSIWYG editor would be?Well, Slack supported so little of Markdown that this is a moot point.

Preview could appear above, pushing the conversation slightly up

I work with a bunch of non-tech people. I get what they&#x27;re doing. The techy people are the only ones who bother using ` for anything. I have no idea if non-techies will start now that there&#x27;s a button for it, but typing it is now really annoying for everyone who has been using it.I kinda reminds me when Confluence added their WYSIWYG editor--or using Frontpage. I basically &#x2F;had&#x2F; to go to code view to get the page to look consistent. So far Discourse has been my favorite implementation, with preview being off to the side. I&#x27;m sure that would eat up too much real estate for Slack.

And I&#x27;d add that inclusion is especially important for a tool that&#x27;s supposed to connect everybody in the company. Thinking that one can ignore a chunk of the audience because they have no choice but to keep using your product is at best confused, and at worse displaying enormous arrogance. It&#x27;s the sort of enterprise-grade nonsense that Slack was initially seen as an antidote to.I get that things that want to be popular quite often shiv the early adopters as they become mainstream, as a) that particular orange has been well juiced, and b) satisfying early-adopter needs really can get in the way of that holy grail, maximizing revenue.But here I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s a big conflict. There are a bunch of ways this could have been done to make everybody happy. It could have been opt-in for a while and then opt out. Or as others point out, there are apparently good WYSIWYG experiences already out there. With a market cap of $12 billion, Slack could afford to buy one, or at least the team behind it.The only explanation I see is that it was rushed out the door to meet some executive&#x27;s goals. Which suggests that Slack is becoming the sort of clueless, sales-driven, user-contemptuous company the initially aimed to overthrow.

As someone who runs the product team for a 1000+ person company, the concept of intransigent minorities should be of interest to you. [1]The gist of it is that an intransigent minority can often dictate the choices of a flexible majority. It is unwise to make decisions based solely on majority rule, as stubborn minorities can affect complex systems in ways that you do not expect. The phenomenon can be verified in a variety of situations across history.To put this into context for Slack, I believe technical users have been particularly important for the app. Tech users were early adopters for Slack - I&#x27;m sure a lot of corporate accounts started out with engineering teams. Tech users wrote the chat bots and integrations that Slack is known for. They got people to use Slack, and they can get people to stop using it.Let&#x27;s say you&#x27;re changing the way a certain feature in your application works. The majority of users are happy or indifferent about the change (but weren&#x27;t particularly bothered by the old behaviour). A minority of users not only reject the change, but are vocal in how much they hate it. They will not tolerate the new behaviour, and will try to get other users to abandon your product unless you resolve the situation. What do you do? You can ignore them for now, but can you predict the long term effects of turning your back to the intransigent minority?1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;incerto&#x2F;the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;incerto&#x2F;the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...</a>

Is your 1000+ person company known for a great product with great UX?

If they had all those metrics and that many test users, how could such obvious backtick issues exist?Even simple dog-fooding by their own internal coding team should have revealed that issue.If they had a test group, it was definitely a group that didn&#x27;t use those features to begin with and basically didn&#x27;t use them in the new UI either. Meticulously tracking the wrong sample group simply leads to reams of bad data.

I&#x27;m going to take the opposite of this argument, and for bonafides, I run the product team for a 1000+ person company.
I&#x27;m going to assume that this thing was tested out the wazoo, both qualitatively and behind enough feature-flags and buckets to keep Optimizely in business for a year. So I have no doubt that this wasn&#x27;t just a hunch on their part, but something that they meticulously tracked. If I&#x27;m wrong, definitely let me know.Anyway, the main point, what percentage of people do we think knows markdown to such an extent where it&#x27;s easier for them to use than a WYSIWYG editor would be? I&#x27;d venture on HN alone that number is &lt;10%, and considering Slack is used by a far wider and less-savvy audience than on here, I don&#x27;t have much of a problem with the reasoning behind the change.I think the lack of backwards-compatibility is a legit criticism, and sure, an opt-out would be nice, but I don&#x27;t think for a second that this is as egregious as people are making it out to be.

When you announce that you&#x27;re shilling something, you remove all chance of risk ;) That said, Zulip looks promising. Thanks for sharing.

That&#x27;s exactly how I&#x27;d explain it. It took me about 3 hours to be extremely comfortable using it and feeling productive. But first impressions by all of my coworkers were &quot;It&#x27;s so confusing&quot;, &quot;There&#x27;s no way we can use this, it&#x27;s terrible&quot;, etc. But it&#x27;s amazing. Just absolutely fantastic.

Zulip looks great, but it also looks like the sort of thing I&#x27;d have trouble convincing everyone to switch over to because even though it might be more useful in the long term, in the short term its a bit more complicated (even though we&#x27;re on the free slack, so we&#x27;re looking to move elsewhere)

I&#x27;ll just go ahead and admit to shilling. Zulip is amazing and I tried to get my company to switch to it. The only thing that stopped us from switching is well, the fact that people have to switch. They have to learn another tool, and Zulip sadly is not too friendly when you first start using it, though it&#x27;s amazing for power users.I literally believe it&#x27;s the future of enterprise chat. There&#x27;s no better tool for getting actual work done.edit: I guess I should clarify about the shilling part. I contributed a single feature to zulip, once. So I guess I&#x27;m not really a shill, but I love the product.

I wasn&#x27;t aware of this Slack feature. I used reminders for that. Maybe that&#x27;s supported in Zulip too.

That&#x27;s one thing I&#x27;m currently missing in Ripcord (the Slack client). Or at least I haven&#x27;t figured out how to do it. I use Slack from three devices, and sometimes I read a message I want to reply to later from a different device - marking messages as unread was a handy way for ensuring I don&#x27;t lose them.

Zulip lets you star messages though, and they show up in a separate inbox, so you can effectively bookmark things to come back to later.

What&#x27;s keeping me on Slack instead of Zulip is its inability to mark messages as unread [1] (Alt+Click on Slack).I think that&#x27;s critical for a communication app when you want to ensure that you&#x27;ve answered all things that need answering.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;zulip&#x2F;zulip&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2676" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;zulip&#x2F;zulip&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2676</a>

Keyboard accessibility is second to Weechat. Weechat responds instantly to all keypresses and never leaves janky UI on the screen.When reading Zulip threads I frequently mute those I&#x27;m not interested in. To do so, you have to hit &#x27;i&#x27; to open a menu, then &#x27;M&#x27; (there is no shortcut on &#x27;m&#x27;), then a popup message slowly animates in saying the thread is muted. If you hit &#x27;n&#x27; to go to the next thread, the popup message doesn&#x27;t clear, so it&#x27;s covering the top message of the new thread, and the popup menu is still open covering the top 1-3 messages, still listing the last thread&#x27;s title. So leaving a single thread I know I&#x27;m emphatically not interested in takes five seconds. There&#x27;s a nasty positive feedback loop: catching up on threads is slow and frustrating, so I leave it longer, so there&#x27;s more threads that take even more time and frustration, repeat.I reported this buggy workflow ~2 years ago and it&#x27;s why I&#x27;ve repeatedly given up on a very interesting community&#x27;s Zulip chat. There&#x27;s plenty more flaky stuff, like switching messages with j&#x2F;k sometimes not scrolling the screen, or long messages where you have to take your hand off the home row to scroll up and down because if you hit space the floating nav covers lines you haven&#x27;t seen, long messages being &quot;closed&quot; so you have to navigate to each individually to read, no keys are customizable, death by a thousand cuts. I have my fingers crossed for a bitlbee integration.

Zulip&#x27;s hosted plans for corporate users have a similar model to Slack&#x27;s -- there&#x27;s a free plan with limited access to history, and a paid plan with full access to everything.Since you mentioned nonprofits, we provide free hosting for open source projects and free or highly discounted hosting (e.g. 15% price) for many other nonprofits.See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zulipchat.com&#x2F;for&#x2F;open-source&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zulipchat.com&#x2F;for&#x2F;open-source&#x2F;</a> for more details.

That import chats from Slack feature is compelling, damn.So Zulip doesn&#x27;t hide chats over a certain amount like Slack does eh? This could make it extremely useful for cash strapped non-profits.

What?! What does IRC do that Zulip doesn&#x27;t? I consider the latter far superior.

I also use Zulip at work.  It&#x27;s better than the other fancy chat applications I&#x27;ve tried, but still can&#x27;t hold a candle to IRC.

I&#x27;ve been hosting a personal server, a company server, and servers for every one of clients since we started as a web consulting company.It&#x27;s far superior to Slack for remote work in our experience because it&#x27;s designed to be primarily used asynchronously, as opposed to something like Slack&#x2F;IRC where you have a wall of unread messages all mixed together every time you sign in.The biggest difference is that every conversation must have a topic title and be put into a stream, giving all the benefits of forums or email threads with subjects. Compare that to Slack&#x2F;IRC where the the default mode is putting your messages in big firehose channels that don&#x27;t encourage breaking individual conversions out into separate threads.

At the risk of sounding like a shill, I&#x27;d like to shill Zulip. We started using it instead of Slack, and it has been amazing. It&#x27;s fast, everything is designed to help you get to conversations quickly, keyboard accessibility is second to none and the streams is a much better default than rooms.I can&#x27;t recommend it enough, it&#x27;s well worth the money even though they have a nice free tier and are OSS so you can self-host.

Especially if you have a team of 1500 people. One person trying to make a browser WYSIWYG is bad enough; can you imagine how buggy it would be if 1500 people worked on it?

Recently integrated Quill into our app and it is fantastic — as fantastic as a WYSIWYG editor can be, I suppose. It produces valid, sensical HTML as the output, in case you need to take the result and use it in email templates (which was our use case). Highly recommend.

I&#x27;m obviously biased and would probably recommend what I was working on(CKEditor), but here are some observations regarding the various propositions:CKEditor 4 excels in two things:-Handling selection - especially tables.-Editing for accessibility.I would recommend v5 though, otherwise you&#x27;d be potentially giving my one good friend, who&#x27;s already very busy maintaining v4, even more work. :D<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;textbox.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;textbox.io&#x2F;</a> - these guys gave us a run for our money a few years ago with their paste-from-external-source (e.g. Word) capabilities, but I believe they&#x27;ve been since acquired by Tiny.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tinymce&#x2F;tinymce" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tinymce&#x2F;tinymce</a> - I think this one is slowly being cannibalized by TextBox. I remember them receiving a lot of funding at one point, but getting nowhere with it.Froala - avoid. It&#x27;s not really open-source, and judging how support for paying customers works you&#x27;re not getting your money&#x27;s worth.Quill - we&#x27;ve never seen them as a threat, so maybe they&#x27;re not that good? Especially given that Slack thing that&#x27;s currently unfolding.Edit: Formatting.

what would you say are the top few out there now? looking to adopt an editor for a large website

ProseMirror is not a &quot;batteries included&quot; solution, but rather a framework for creating them, so a lot of the UI stuff is missing and I wouldn&#x27;t advise using it directly.I worked on CKEditor 4 (very different from v5, which is a rewrite).

How do you feel about ProseMirror, and what browser WYSIWYG editor did you work on if you don&#x27;t mind? I&#x27;m using it right now to build a personal notes editor, but there isn&#x27;t much open source components to model my custom nodes to.

Agreed. Part of me wishes you could just embed MS Word in a webpage if you really need WYSIWYG. Similarity to Word is the reason people want it in the first place.

Is this because WYSIWIGs are inherently hard to make, or because of browser-specific challenges? Was this due to compatibility issues between browsers?I&#x27;ve written my own native Windows WYSIWIG editor and a fair amount of web UI, and was thinking of rolling my own web-based editor.

As someone who used to be part of a team developing one of the most popular in-browser WYSIWYG editors:1. Browser WYSIWYGs are really hard to make.2. All browser WYSIWYGs are terrible.Avoid rolling your own WYSIWYG if you can. Even if you have a team of 1500 people at your disposal.

What’s that stand for? I’m guessing something along the lines of:High Importance Person Pushing Own (desires??)?

HiPPO stands for HIghest Paid Person&#x27;s Opinion, a trait of dysfunctional culture, in which power politics trumps data.The concept seems to originate from Netscape&#x27;s CEO and the acronym exists since 2006, according HiPPO FAQ: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitly.com&#x2F;HIPPOExplained" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitly.com&#x2F;HIPPOExplained</a>

And this ladies and gentlemen is the over reaction of the year!

Given that Microsoft Teams is literally an existential threat, they really want to listen to feedback internally!

It&#x27;s a company with non-unique tech run by salespeople, of course they have a management problem.

Bad sign. If the rank and file are afraid to give honest internal feedback, they have a management problem.At least for me, that&#x27;s a time-to-leave signal.

We need to distinguish &quot;is&quot; and &quot;isn&#x27;t&quot;.  Maybe WYTAWYG (What You Type Ain&#x27;t What You Get)?

Can we start calling it the WYTIWYG (What you type isn&#x27;t what you get) editor...

Typing option-return between the two blocks works for me.

If you add a blank line between them, then it won&#x27;t combine them.

The flow of pasting such strings is not great either. Previously you could paste a string with backticks and it would be formatted correctly on send.Now the behaviour is to ask you every time to apply formatting. There is an option for &quot;don&#x27;t ask again&quot; which I tried assuming it would make autoformatting the default, but it turns off the behaviour completely with no way to get it back!

You can exit a code block by hitting Command Option Shift C. I found this out by hovering over the code block icon in the bar below the editor box.The trick seems to be to add a blank final line, otherwise, it will not include the last line you typed in a code block.

I&#x27;m fairly sure you also used to be able to put bullets in blockquotes, right?e.g.<pre><code> &gt; * My quoted bullet point
</code></pre>
I can&#x27;t double-check it now as all my workspaces have converted

For the life of me, I cannot figure out how to create two adjacent but separate code blocks.<pre><code> ```
 one
 ```
 ```
 two
 ```
</code></pre>
I&#x27;ve tried and tried.

Argh! Oh, well, bye bye usable Slack, hello full of individual PM review bullet point features unusable frustrating senseless Slack.Glad my only use is a comms channel for my Ingress group.

Yet again this sounds like the pet project of a VP trying to make his bones while ruining the product, and nobody at the company is powerful enough to overrule him.

This sounds just like how my friends at Google reacted when Gmail and Google Docs were given the &quot;Kennedy&quot; makeover some years ago.  Apparently there were a lot of memes going round to the effect of &quot;still have one tab with the old Gmail open; praying Chrome doesn&#x27;t crash&quot;.

I&#x27;m surprised that hasn&#x27;t been reverted yet. It&#x27;s so fucking stupid. Where did that chat go? oh it&#x27;s up in drafts? WTF?Terrible UI choice. It makes no sense.

Join the hundreds of people complaining in this twitter thread, I put my beef with it in there too. 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;SlackHQ&#x2F;status&#x2F;1135955676545585164" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;SlackHQ&#x2F;status&#x2F;1135955676545585164</a>

I find it very ironic how much slack is moving towards an email UI, given their &quot;goal&quot; to eradicate email a while ago.

Please ask them what they think of the ‘drafts’ section. I’m so fed up of losing chats to that section.

That seems pretty confusing to me, as now you’re left wondering which will actually render, and which text won’t...

Huh, why do you believe user testing is unhelpful to make a good UX design?

It&#x27;s genuinely hard to make a good design for something, but if you put the time and effort required, that&#x27;s the difference between Atom and VS Code.The only way I know how to make a good design, is to have a good Product Owner. Prototyping helps a little bit, User testing absolutely not. You can have five different PO working on the same epic and still get a bad design, but it only takes one to find the perfect solution.That input box story is not different. They could have made the WYSIWYG feature compatible with the &quot;old&quot; input method by changing the visual without altering the character flow (eg: The &lt;star&gt;brown&lt;star&gt; fox). Apparently, no one thought of that...

On another topic, someone recently posted this youtube video of a Norwegian engineer explaining her views on tech worker ethics, how we&#x27;ve got here and maybe a way to fix it or atleast improve on the current situation. I&#x27;d recommend showing it to your commute buddies.It really resonated with my thoughts, how I&#x27;ve viewed the tech world and my (tiny) part in it.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=HfNIiitVFtc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=HfNIiitVFtc</a>

This is funny because I work across the street of Slack’s office in Vancouver, Canada and two Slack engineers who I frequently chat with during our daily commute already told me they —and a handful of other employees— hate the WYSIWYG input box too, but were afraid to express their feelings because their role is irrelevant compared to the people who made the decision to ship it.

my experience with Slack technical folk (on some tricky auth bugs and other issues we&#x27;ve hit over the years) has been excellent. They&#x27;re fast, knowledgeable, never pass the buck, and communicative. If it&#x27;s the PMs doing this, they&#x27;re letting down an otherwise great team.

This is exactly why I hate it.  I think for the average person it&#x27;s probably great, but it should be easy to disable for those who don&#x27;t want it.

I mean, it&#x27;s probably not bad feature for a lot of people.  But for goodness sake, why not make it optional?

Really unsure why I was downvoted for this. I posted a link to someone else in this thread that has actually talked to Slack employees, it&#x27;s directly related to the comment I replied to.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21590153" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21590153</a>

I accidentally clicked a slashdot links yesterday. They show comments by default, sorted by New, despite having invented the best user-enforced moderation system ever seen on the web, and the #2 comment was 10 screenheights of screeenwide ASCII art swastikas. Hooray for UI redesigns to chase the next million dumber users.

Isn’t this how all UI redesign projects happen?The next step that also seems to happen more often than not: Despite user outcry, the company digs in, becomes defensive, and dismisses complaints with platitudes or snark like “you’ll get over it”. See also: Slashdot redesign, Fark redesign, Reddit redesign, Digg redesign, and so on.

you&#x27;re exactly right, but what I want to know is - how many of those enterprise users even know how to do italics in regular email? And is this _really_ the feature that&#x27;s holding them back from Slack!?

TBH, for documentation outside of docstrings and READMEs WYSIWYG editors (usually google docs) are the most popular form of documentation for engineers. I&#x27;ve seen this happen naturally at a bunch of corps unless someone made a coherent documentation policy and enforced it.

And they probably aren&#x27;t wrong either. Even at companies made of mostly programmers, those people aren&#x27;t necessarily the ones making the decision about which communication platform to use.

&gt;I would bet a lot of money I already know the pitch. It&#x27;s the same one that the Confluence PM I&#x27;m sure made. &quot;We have done very well selling to technical programmers and hip startups, but the market is so much bigger. shows Office 365 revenue numbers vs Slack revenue numbers. We have an opportunity to take this to the next level. We need to make this the goto office communication platform. cheers.You&#x27;re probably right. However, Slack will never be _the_ goto office communication platform until it integrates with AD and that will not happen because MS has competing software (Skype for business previously known as Lync).

I would bet a lot of money I already know the pitch. It&#x27;s the same one that the Confluence PM I&#x27;m sure made. &quot;We have done very well selling to technical programmers and hip startups, but the market is so much bigger. shows Office 365 revenue numbers vs Slack revenue numbers. We have an opportunity to take this to the next level. We need to make this the goto office communication platform. cheers. Markdown may seem easy to use to us, but our user research shows that 90% of fortune 500 employees don&#x27;t even know what markdown is. We need a more familiar interface to break into this lucrative new market and continue our growth.&quot;

It&#x27;s really demoralizing to be on a team on which the devs clearly have better design and UX sense than the designer(s) and&#x2F;or product manager. But not the titles—they&#x27;re &quot;just&quot; software developers who couldn&#x27;t possibly understand users or design or common friggin&#x27; sense.

It&#x27;s common for ambitious employees in not-so-ambitious tech companies to lose their jobs over not realizing that the optimal strategy for keeping their job is to just do their work as told, collect a pay cheque, and not innovate.In these companies, the fastest way to get canned is to believe you are there to help the company succeed by trying to innovate, and in the process of doing so, imply there are flaws with how it&#x27;s currently being done.

I bet a large percentage of Slack people _tried super hard_ to stop that cohort of PMs. However, you can only fight upwards so much before you just check out completely, cash the checks, and halfheartedly build whatever nonsense they&#x27;re forcing through.

Ditto... It goes to show that high quality PMs are just as important as high quality engineers. I&#x27;ve been in orgs where either side is imbalanced, and the same predictable results  happen. When you have poor engineers, nothing is shipped, everything is buggy, the product never works and is eventually rewritten from scratch with the same predictable cycle. When you have poor PMs, you spend all your time shipping products no one will ever want to use, which demoralizes everyone and kills the productivity of your engineering organization.

The funny thing is that I am sure most of the people who work at slack know it&#x27;s terrible, but no one asks them. There is a small cohort of product managers who probably have a plausible-sounding reason to do it, and they need to do something to justify their jobs, so they alienate everybody else because no one stops them.I am, to put it lightly, familiar with this in other companies.

This is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slackhq.com&#x2F;new-slack-features-invites-message-formatting" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slackhq.com&#x2F;new-slack-features-invites-message-forma...</a> right? Isn’t there an option to turn this off with the show formatting button?edit: oh nm i only noticed the ui, not that it totally broke typing

That&#x27;s a pretty amusing quote:&gt; &#x27;While we don&#x27;t have any active plans to make this configurable at the moment, we are in the process of collecting user feedback so that we can find a way to make it work for everyone.&#x27;It&#x27;s like the answer to the second half is in the first half of their statement.

God, That reply is a million times better than the pseudo-helpful condescending crap they were spouting on twitter.

Just remember, the people who read and respond to you are probably not the people who either implemented or designed features and bugs you may run across.

I agree. Usually Slack&#x27;s support is wonderful. But with this awful WYSIWYG input debacle, their support has been... subpar.  A whole lot of non-answers and dismissive &quot;we&#x27;re collecting user feedback&quot;.

There are definitely several things that I don&#x27;t like about Slack, but their support has been very responsive. I&#x27;ve reported at least two issues, and they have always taken my input seriously.A while back, I reported a bug with copy&#x2F;paste, and they asked questions, acknowledged it, and had it fixed by the next release.More recently, I had a question about why the UI behaves in a certain way I didn&#x27;t expect, and they took the time to explain that it was intentional, and what their reasoning was for doing it their way instead of how I expected.All of these experiences are way better than average for our industry, which in my experience usually just brushes you off without trying to understand your issue and tries to placate you with a non-answer or answer to something other than what you asked.

You can submit feedback to Slack using &quot;&#x2F;feedback&quot; command. The nice thing it appears they have real people give you real replies. I encourage people to use it.I asked them for the option to turn it off. An excerpt from their response.&gt; ... we understand that this has caused a disruption in workflows for some of our more technical users. While we don&#x27;t have any active plans to make this configurable at the moment, we are in the process of collecting user feedback so that we can find a way to make it work for everyone.I&#x27;ll be sending this as my follow-up.

&gt; I personally have no problem with the hybridization of sync&#x2F;async communication.This is how I use Slack as well. It works nicely for me personally.

&gt; My problem is that all these networks are proprietary and isolated. When someone comes up with a really bad idea in their UI, you&#x27;re SOL until they decide to fix it.Tons of people said this early on, but the people who make decisions for team tooling&#x2F;workflows apparently didn&#x27;t think that was as important. Symptomatic of the disconnect between what most engineers think of as &quot;quality&quot; versus others.

Indeed, I refuse to use closed communication software.Also text = async.
Use the phone when sync is needed.

At my first programming job, the company had an internal NNTP server which we used for public (within the company) discussions.At that time, every decent mail client was also a newsreader, so people could easily flip back and forth between private correspondence and public discussion. News lets you write substantial, email-sized posts and replies, but it also plays perfectly well with quick one-liners. It allows threaded discussion, and newsreaders give you simple but effective tools to navigate it. It&#x27;s fine if threads blow up and die out in a day, or if they live on for weeks. You can cross-post where a discussion touches different areas. You can post-and-mail if you want to attract a specific person&#x27;s attention. It&#x27;s easy to index (although i don&#x27;t think we did that).It was amazing.

I personally have no problem with the hybridization of sync&#x2F;async communication. That&#x27;s where everything is headed. People send emails and sometimes expect them to be delivered and&#x2F;or read immediately. OTOH, people send messages over these &quot;chat&quot; services that aren&#x27;t time sensitive, simply because it&#x27;s easy and available.My problem is that all these networks are proprietary and isolated. When someone comes up with a really bad idea in their UI, you&#x27;re SOL until they decide to fix it. When someone comes up with a really good idea, you have to hope their competitors re-implement it. And all they can do is gently try to guide their network into the place they want to occupy on the sync-async spectrum via features.Looking back at the history of computing, I see that when a protocol is open and has many competing implementations, it lives on far beyond what the original designers ever intended. When a protocol is proprietary and implemented only by a single proprietary UI, it has a fairly short lifespan. What I can&#x27;t tell is if these companies don&#x27;t know their history, or if they think they&#x27;re going to be the first ones ever to beat this trend, or if they don&#x27;t care and just want to grab money while they can.

The solution is to view Slack messages as completely async, too. If you chat with someone in a different location, you don&#x27;t know how long they will have time to converse. Maybe they are using Slack on the phone and just replied once to give you quick feedback; but cannot be pulled into a longer conversation.

Specific bug gripes aside: I see this editor as emblematic of Slack&#x27;s broader shift away from what I think it should be (primarily synchronous chat; irc with a friendlier ui and integrated bouncer features) towards what many people seem to want to use it as (async-heavy pseudo-replacement for email where I get to sit and watch the &quot;...is typing&quot; indicator flicker while somebody writes an essay at me).My rule of thumb generally is: if I need significant rich text formatting in a message I&#x27;m writing, it should probably just be an email.I feel like this increasing hybridization of sync&#x2F;async comms is largely counterproductive and especially harmful to work-life balance, so it&#x27;s unfortunate that companies like Slack are apparently unable to focus on core competencies and instead must shoot for disruptive growth via poorly-executed junk like this editor.

Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible