I hate endless chats. Not matter if it is work or my personal life. If I need to do focused work, I switch off Slack. At the same time, I love emails with long, detailed, well-thought points.

So, for my team (after trying quite a few options, with Slack being a no-go), I went for Basecamp. To a large extend, it is email-like, with chat and to-do lists as features (so can be used when needed), not - the core.

However - do you know some BC-like tools for community building (edu/gaming)? Discord is considered the go-to solution, but it lacks "posts" for more focused content.

/rj

It seems like Slack is massively overvalued.

At my current organization which has a small team of around ~10 people, we simply could no longer justify the astronomical per-seat price tag, the needlessly convoluted admin UI, among a host of other trivial/annoying things like the syntax restriction on channel naming, and the constant whack-a-mole of maintaining user permissions/roles so that someone wouldn’t install some cheeky chat bot that asks everyone what they want for lunch.

Im not naive enough to think that Slack isn’t aimed squarely at enterprise whale clients, but with the emergence of other workplace chat platforms like the ones built into GSuite and O365, and the ease of which you can spin up something open source like Rocket Chat or Discourse (IIRC Discourse has a self-hosted option), I really have a hard time understanding why this tech is so appealing.

Pepper in Slack’s un-impressive growth during COVID-19, it seems pretty clear that the other shoe might drop—and even a death knell acquisition from Salesforce might start looking appealing.

Someone smarter than me: what am I missing?

I am surprised GitHub project kanbans don’t get more attention. They are easy to setup, great for tracking activities and allow “threaded” discussions inside each issue. Why would you use Slack for your team if you have GitHub with this free option?

The list of company endorsements is a great touch.

> Bring your team together in the sheets. (Wait, no, not like that)

This joke looks unprofessional and inappropriate to me. I’m not sure why it’s on the landing page, especially when the product is about communication in a business context.

Edit: ah, it’s a joke product.

In case people can't decide whether this is a joke or not (the businesses using it didn't tell you? didn't make you giggle?), check the creator/investor: https://badunicorn.vc/ :)

Part of me was hoping this was actually implemented though rather than just a silly concept with a catchy landing page. Maybe a hack in the spirit of DIWhy. Just last year, me and my friends got into a discussion about the power of spreadsheets. There was a time when I'd think "I could write an app for that. A weekend of Python, two for Android...". Now I think first if I could do it in Google Sheets.

Sheets is honestly damn powerful as a dev platform, especially now that it could do SQL-ish queries. It has native access to some nifty Google APIs too. Imagine your database, your backend, and your UI grid powered by the same SDK! My church's shared SchedReservation-2010-NEW.xls that was actually a remake of a file dating back to 2007, accidentally deleted when they upgraded to XP, would be So. Much. Better.

Should have called it Tight

> NHS contract tracing (max 16,384 columns)

I see what you did there.

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Is this a joke?

The critique against the new Google icons is so spot on, I cant believe they made them so hard to distinguish, I bet some internal design department needed to justify their existence and some $200K designers their salary and creating new icons was the best way to do that.

Okay, that was a roller-coaster, from judging them based on their clientele to laughing out loud after reading about their past products. Bad Unicorn Indeed.

Would love to see "unstagram". Or "unmazon".

Got me until I saw the Blockbuster Video testimony

This thread is a great experiment in how seriously HN takes things and how long people think for before they comment.

I had some trouble figuring out what it is - it appears to be a Slack-style UI implemented in Google Sheets.

Teams, teams, teams: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-team...