But now I am a member of a whole bunch of channels on Discord. It seems to me that this year there was a qualitative shift - and it looks like I'm not one such .
So they don't need developers, do they?
The obvious explanation, of course, is that for both professional reasons and for personal inclinations I am migrating after the developer community, and Slack actually pushed it away from itself. As Harry Hedger put it :
Slack missed out on Reactiflux because it demanded seventy thousand dollars a month in recurring expenses.
Of course, I understand that there were reasons for this decision. Data storage costs money. But not the same ?! In addition, the policy of a loss-making leader, who attracts people and gives growth in the future, is known to any company. While everyone in the world is trying to lure developers with all sorts of free buns, Slack has them divorced themselves like weeds, and the management decided to just brush them off. Stuart Butterfield is just some antipode of Ballmer .
I'm not going to say that Slack missed the developers because they had no interest in them - this is a tautology. I'll put it another way: Slack made a strategic miscalculation and thereby opened the way for some other service that will soon displace it from the role of the favorite of startups (the success of Microsoft Teams is difficult to assess, so I do not take it into account here).
Slack is off course
In terms of user experience, developers are the best signaling for any service: they themselves know how it's done.
Slack originally attracted people by offering a user experience that far surpassed anything that work chat / email / teamwork solutions could provide, including the now defunct HipChat and Campfire. In its pitches, the company flooded like a nightingale about the "employee orientation", which is provided in Slack thanks to the accessible design (MetaLab is always glad to remind us of it ), as well as some bonuses ahead of their time - emoji-reactions, bots. Their theory was that in our professional life, we want to see the same smooth UX that we are used to dealing with after hours.
Now let's fast forward to the present. “I use Discord a lot now. Slack - only for work, and for hobbies - Discord ”, - these are the words of Mark Grabanski, a man who understands a thing or two about trends among developers.
I would like to draw your attention to one more point: back in 2016, for the word Slack, they came up with a transcript retroactively - Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge (Log of all conversations and information with a search option). However, if you go back to the present and look at the recommendations for working from home (of which, interestingly, there are very, very many) that we all receive, you can see two main motives - asynchronous communication and outright rejection of Slack. to store any data on a long-term basis.
Changes in recent years
Meanwhile, over the past five years, the bar for user experience has risen significantly:
- Slack forces you to re-enter your mail and password for each new chat. In Discord, if you are logged in before, clicking on the invitation link immediately opens the desired channel.
- Slack in each new chat gives you a guided tour of the service's capabilities. I'm probably in eighty chats and can no longer see greetings and helpful tips from a local bot, not to mention the step with adding a photo, which draws on a bug - I am invariably asked to add an image for an icon, although Slack has already clearly grasped that I always use the same photo and show it to me myself. There is none of this on Discord.
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Over the past year, the office market has seen a battle of no rules, with other companies attacking Slack from open flanks. Notion has become the leader in information storage with the ability to search. Zoom has almost single-handedly captured video chats, although Slack has this functionality built in natively. Even boost-trapping startups like Tuple are gaining popularity, despite the fact that Slack bought out a pioneer in the corresponding category. And, of course, not only Discord, but Telegram have also firmly established themselves in the messenger market for real-time communication.
Intuition tells me that it is Time to Uncomplete for Slack . Whether her company survives will depend on how she chooses to interprettext messaging - as one aspect of functionality or as a whole product. In any case, the very fact that Slack has to ask itself such questions speaks of its strategically unenviable position. There is no way to get out of this.
It's not over yet
Slack miscalculated, but still has a good lead. The product has two advantages that make it a very useful solution for communication at work: the ability to have a discussion in a separate thread under a specific post (Discord stubbornly refuses to implement something like this), as well as shared channels - I have long said that they brought Slack a solid additional revenue for many years. Both were released in 2017 - perhaps the most fruitful year for innovation in the company, after which the Slack fund appeared in 2018 and the IPO of 2019 took place.
As far as I can tell from my personal observations, Workflow Builderis not yet widely popular, but I would be glad if this changes over time. All good platforms will sooner or later lean toward the low / no-code approach.
Slack also invested heavily in serving corporations - among other things, it introduced the Enterprise Grid system (by the way, also in 2017). Of course, I cannot judge how successfully the company is making its way in the corporate market. But the economic incentives to move from less paying customers to a more elite segment of the market are quite transparent.
Not teams, but communities
The general conclusion can be summed up as follows: now Slack no longer pulls software for teams , as originally stated. But at the same time, the entire user experience is tailored specifically for teams. More specifically: it is assumed that each user has one, basic command, that he communicates with it from one device and he rarely has to start new commands or connect additional ones. Perhaps because of this, we feel some kind of discrepancy between the desired and the actual.
It can be assumed that the team orientation in the Slack variant is no longer keeping up with the realities of the new world, where deep concentration at work and organized knowledge bases are considered a luxury, where the line between work and personal life is blurring, where professional communication spreads across many devices, formats and even communities in which the roles of ordinary members and leaders are not always separated. Discord, with its commitment to the community, can ultimately attract sympathy first and then funds from users.
Here are Kurt Kemple 's words on the community features Discord is worth considering:
In my opinion, Discord is better suited for communities. Moderation, the presence of roles, boosting, group audio and video sessions make the platform more democratic and more scalable.
By prioritizing communities rather than fenced off teams, Discord appeals to large group leaders. In other words, he gathers people around whom other people gather. According to aggregation theory , this is a good strategy.
I can't find a quote, but either Paul Graham or Benedict Evans once said: “What hackers do today for their own pleasure, we will do tomorrow at work” (Addendum: it turned out that this is Chris Dixon : “That what the smartest people do now on weekends, everyone else in ten will do on weekdays "). So, now there is a massive exodus of hackers from Slack. And Slack should be concerned about that.
Recommendations on the topic:
Mule's Dark Horse Discord: How a gaming chat platform is secretly connecting the internet, and defining the future of work
The Arc of Collaboration
Protocol o Discord