It uses a dark theme by default, which is very appreciated. Another huge plus is that it's not Electron garbage like the official Slack and Discord clients, so you don't have to effectively run one or two other entire web browsers just to do a bit of chatting. On the other hand, it is Qt garbage instead, so it still doesn't integrate with macOS's look and feel very well, and a long-standing bug is that when disconnecting my laptop from a wired ethernet connection, it doesn't automatically reconnect everything once the system switches over to wifi. Neither of these have stopped me from preferring it over the official clients, though. I recommend anyone not satisfied with the crust and bloat of the official Slack and Discord clients to give it a try.
EDIT: But, yes, IRC is still the better choice when possible.
That said, for what it's worth, I haven't known someone getting banned yet.
Regularly I have DM conversations with people and might have typed out half a message when I need to respond to another channel/DM. But when I go back to the first conversation... it's gone. Because instead of being at the bottom of my list where I expect to see it (like I do the other 99.99999% of the time)... it's up at the top.
Don't. Move. Around. The. UI.
- Add a way to mute notifications from an individual user
- Add a way to organize threads by topic
For the first one, I believe they've said they will never implement it. For the second one, I'm holding out that someone will realize how crappy the threading implementation is, but I don't have much hope.
I'd turn it off for our whole org if I could because I'd rather the conversation happen quickly than...well I'm not sure what their goal is. It's like they're taking a page from Apple's anti-user/anti-choice playbook for iOS Messages by not giving you a painfully obvious option at all, at any level.
Having protanopia myself I'm very grateful for any piece of software that takes these issues seriously.
For those on Visual Studio Code: the slack themes are also available there, including the color blind themes.
But in seriousness, does Slack really have any value proposition over Discord beyond Screen Hero these days?
I switched my organization over to Discord based on the ability to create public channels for testers/customers to communicate with my team on the server without any role-based overhead (also because my target market is largely the Twitch/gamer crowd - most of whom already have Discord set up).
I understand that there are less integrations baked in, but most are easily worked around with webhooks.
It's not just the target market being the gamer crowd, its focus on promoting gaming content is beyond distracting for a work setting.
Take its font-and-center features:
- The primary page with all the game and stream ads has zero value for productivity.
- Its voice chat is great but not nearly as valuable as a video meeting integration.
- I don't need or want to know what application or game you have open right now or what music you're listening to. I just want to know if you're available right now or if not, when you will be.
Integrations, emphasized. Adding a swath of app integrations was a "wow" factor when Slack first came on the scene, and I've had very little trouble introducing Slack at organizations with minimal IT resources because of this. Setting up and maintaining webhooks is "too much" for a lot of people who can otherwise manage a Slack org.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/18/slack-password-breach/
If you care about your data, you have to be able to own it, and neither Slack nor Discord offers that option.
Even ignoring integrations/plugins/bots – of which Discord has almost nothing useful for product development – a huge issue with Discord is that you have no choice over which channels you are in. At Atlassian, we literally have hundreds of different Slack channels for various teams/products/whatever, and everyone has access to everything which isn't private. With Discord, that would get ugly really quickly.
In my eyes, that's the biggest reason I'd choose Slack over Discord. Legitimately, I think it's a better tool overall, but even for what I use Discord for, it's very annoying not to be able to leave a channel that you have no interest in. I can collapse/mute things, but it's still not super helpful when there are tons of them.
Honestly I couldn't care about gifs/emojis/themes/threads/etc, but also the lack of SSO means it's a giant security issue. What if one of your devs loses their password, and you can't mandate 2 factor because Discord sign in is out of your control?
This is likely why there are few integrations developer use in Discord as well.
I had to choose View -> Reload (Command R) form the top menu bar to make this option show up for me.
I find the wee-slack plugin for the WeeChat IRC client to be pretty good (https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack)
In all seriousness though - I don't see why all apps/sites don't develop in a "dark mode" first mindset. With all the studies showing eye strain related health issues correlated to bright screens, you'd think this would be an easy solution to help alleviate the problem.
Imagine writing your name in the sand on a beach by digging out all the area around the text to make it appear.. why project mostly background light with dark content as opposed to projecting the content and letting the dead space remain dark.
I’m anal enough that I’d _love_ to be able to upload dark-mode variants, though. Proper transparency can’t solve everything.
- Its not a forced change. Don't do anything and emojis are fine.
- Even if it was forced, is slack responsible for every possible customization? (Hey I like using black text always! Its hard to see black text in dark mode!)
Its an additional feature. It seems like such a weird thing to be sad/complain about.
One can dream.
Like the font weight is too high or something. I had to change back to Light mode.
I'm all about dark mode but not a fan here. They need to spend some time and make it more readable.
If they allowed customization of the main dark background color this would be remediable, but the only part of the theme that can be changed is the sidebar.
After literally years of promises, this is such a poor implementation that it's shocking. And I say this as someone who actually mostly likes Slack as a product.
That is a much better dark mode for Slack but it's still not good enough. The channel list is still very offensive.
- Many HN users use Slack at this job or have interacted with someone who does.
- Many HN users hate how Slack is an Electron app that consumes too many resources for the simple functions it performs.
- Many HN users follow app trends, including the fact everything is adding a dark mode lately.
These four reasons are why this would make it to the HN front page.
2. The rise of dark-mode popularity seems to coincide with the availability of OLED screens, where black is a very, very dark color (i.e. what your screen looks like when it’s off) compared to what it is on LCD screens (where it’s just “what the backlight looks like when the LCD is trying its best to block it.”) In these cases, not only is #FFF-on-#000 is seemingly higher contrast than #000-on-#FFF, but also uses far less battery besides.
"Dark mode" predates OLEDs by decades. Pretty much up until the first Macs, turning on a computer and getting something other than green, amber, or white text on a black background was an exception. Even then, code editors and terminal emulators on Macs and eventually Windows systems typically allowed for a dark mode, if only as a secondary option, well before anything other than CRT displays were practical.
Anecdotally, dark mode on slack appears more difficult to read than light mode, at least in a well lit room. I couldn't use it for very long.
Maybe it's because I'm getting older, but staring at a blinding white computer monitor inches from my face all day as a software engineer HURTS. Like, literally hurts after a while.
Dark mode is much easier on the eyes.
A couple or groups I am in decided to avoid them entirely
I think threading by default and forcing a topic would be better for channels.
Dark modes are for... the dark.
So many of us are stuck in situations of bad fluorescent light or worse.
The biggest benefits of dark modes are on OLED screens, such as most "flagship" handheld computers these days. On a modern OLED, a black pixel may be entirely unlit, which entirely reduces the amount of light being fired at your retinas during your screen hours. It's also a small power savings when multiplied by lots of unlit pixels across a day.
But at the end of the day, it's also just aesthetic choice. Some people like the Batman approach of paint everything as black and dark as possible. It's okay for people to have a variety of tastes, and nice that "Dark Mode" frenzy has increased options across every platform (whether or not you think you want or need such options).
I find my eyes are quite comfortable in light mode, and it's easier to read... but I do turn my screen brightness down quite a lot. My work monitors are on 40%. Most of my colleagues' screens are a lot brighter, which might explain why they find light mode a little bit uncomfortable sometimes.
Funnily enough, they themselves illustrated the issue with the first image on their post, in how weird the version on the left looks.
Besides - what we need isn’t a full dark mode, it’s an app that is built for the human eye. Dark mode is as extreme as staring into a white lightbulb all day, which is what the light mode is.
An example of this is Aether (disclosure: it’s a project I’m designing for: https://aether.app).
It’s designed for the ‘dark’ mode from scratch, or rather, it’s at 40% mode and it’s the only UI, so it aims to work well for both day and night. So we don’t have to go for the one or the other.
(I’m not sure about posting here since it’s a ‘Slack competitor’ and I don’t want to look like advertising, but hey, I guess it’s relevant)
[1] Contrast Threshold Curve of Human Vision https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Contrast-threshold-curve...
How can this possibly be true? Are you trying to say something else, like "just changing colors is not sufficient to create a high quality dark mode"? That is probably why it's a "mode" and not a "theme".
This tool looks nice though. This type of threading is much more appropriate for work conversations, in my experience.
(And thanks — I agree. It saves quite a bit of productivity in our own remote team every day.)
What uncanny valley? I have been using Youtube's dark mode for a while now, and much prefer it to the default light mode. The light mode appears jarring and "noisy" for some reason.
