I Hate Slack

I just wrote about why I hate Medium, so while I’m all in a rage, let me rag on Slack.

I hate Medium on principle: they are a walled garden (like Twitter or Facebook) that hoards our prose.1 But my reasons aren’t quite so righteous when it comes to Slack.

I hate them simply because they do a shit job of making a Mac app. Normally this wouldn’t bother me—I would just look elsewhere. But everyone is using it and the peer pressure is getting harder to ignore.

So why is their Mac app crap? In one word: Electron. I will leave it for another hate-post, but suffice it to say, I think Electron apps are a cancer. They masquerade as desktop-grade, yet deliver none of the deep platform richness that comes from truly native software. Oh, and they piss away your battery. Why not just give me a URL and let me suffer in the browser? At least there I’m not expecting much.2

And, I guess I also hate Slack because I still remember IRC. It is a stupid reason to hate on them—great artists steal after all. But IRC was open, and fun, and no one owned it, and damnit I just miss the good ol’ days.

Sorry for being such a grouch. I should probably get off my soapbox and cut everyone some slack.

  1. Tweets and selfies? Well, you should have known better. But meaningful thoughts… those should be all yours. ↩

  2. To be clear, I have nothing against web browsers. I love the web. But the web I love is not the one of “apps,” it is the one of blogs, about pages, portfolios, wikis. It is the “weird web” (as my good friend would put it). ↩