Slack’s old formatting syntax was Markdown-like but not exactly Markdown, just similar. In case anyone from Slack is paying attention to their technical users here, this is a great opportunity to move to CommonMark formatting for technical users and wysiwyg for non-technical users: just make this optional and switch the format syntax for the non-wysiwyg mode to CommonMark. I can understand that changing the formatting on people previously would have been disruptive, but that is no longer a viable excuse: you have already disrupted the lives of programmers far worse than changing to CommonMark would have done and switching markup formats won’t affect people who stay in wysiwyg mode at all. If you reintroduce Markdown mode now using CommonMark, programmers will just be happy that they can use Slack effectively again and as a bonus, you’ll match GitHub and everywhere else programmers hang out.
Regarding Slack’s attitude about technical users whose life this disrupts, I can see that the calculus may appear to favor the non-technical users: there are probably far more users who have no idea what Markdown is and never need to share code snippets on Slack and who are happy with the new wysiwyg editor since it’s closer to what they get from MS Word and Gmail. However, technical users have massively outsized influence over the choices of technology at most companies. The IT dept is full of technical users who share code fragments all the time. Don’t you think they’ll be keeping an eye out for new chat platforms after this change? Tech startups are (almost by definition) mostly technical users. Do you think any new tech startups will willingly use Slack after this change? Some of those would have been paying customers and a few of them would have become huge paying customers. Now they won’t. I know I’m actively looking for alternatives now and I have controlling influence over what gets used in several paying and non-paying Slack instances.
If you reintroduce Markdown mode now using CommonMark, programmers will just be happy that they can use Slack effectively again and as a bonus, you’ll match GitHub and everywhere else programmers hang out.
Please please do, Slack. I filed a support request already asking how to turn off the new editor.
While we're at it, let's have syntax highlighting of inline non-snippet code blocks.
Slack probably has statistics which indicate that by now their largest user group is non-techies. And i'm assuming that if you look at paying customers, the amount of non-technies is probably even larger. People who are probably not even aware of this thing called markdown. So if you need to increase revenue replacing markdown with wysiwyg will make sense to UX and product management.
Sadly I think this is just another case of product adoption largely being driven by techies in the early stages because they loved it, and later in its growth stages realising their market is now way more mainstream and designing their features as such. And now we're alienated by the same product we helped spread.
Twitter is another obvious example I can think of.
Nothing to do with self respect This is a completely accepted and promoted way of growing your product. See for example the strategies outlined in “crossing the chasm”. Techies are in this case the early adopters, and now that slack has crossed the chasm, they are targeting a completely new user group, the early adopters, with a new set of needs and wants.
Time to move to a new product which still focuses on techies.
As a member of user minorities - the "tech savvy" niche and "knows software can be ergonomic, and expects that" niche - I'm already avoiding using new "innovative" products. The story is always the same - people with needs are used as tools to drive initial adoption, and then the product self-destructs trying to chase the lowest common denominator.
FWIW, I wouldn't even be using Slack if I weren't forced to, like probably most of its users. Regular employees don't have much say in what companies use for chat, nor do most people in communities in what tool was used to start them.
I'd do it for a boatload of cash but not any less. Your core tech users are still selling your product for you, free of charge. Unless it's abuse/fraud/security mitigation there's usually a way to keep your technical customers happy along with your new user base. It obviously has a cost but if you're making dramatic changes that alienate your early adopters I'm sure that those changes are going to do some needle moving in terms of increasing your profits. No one would do something like that on a whim...
That cost does need to stay within reason though. And something crazy like maintaining divergent architectures/infrastructure isn't really reasonable either. But on the bright side the technical folks might be understanding of these sorts of tradeoffs.
Why not try to satisfy both kinds of users? Options and customizability are a thing. One-size-fits-all seems to be the current software trend, but it wasn't always like that. Maintaining a piece of UI that was already there shouldn't be that expensive.
They don't have to. It can default to simple behavior, with the "techy-friendly" options hidden behind a "Settings - Advanced" menu or tab that regular users won't even visit.
Most people I know don’t even know WhatsApp supports Markdown.
That said, none of them are complaining because it’s a chat program. You don’t need heavy formatting in a chat program, it’s meant for short and fast messages, unlike email.
As such, I don’t believe people will spend a lot of time formatting their input in Slack, unless they really are thinking people will replace their email with Slack.
It's by far the most popular messaging platform in Brazil[0][1]. In other places in South and Central America it's also about as popular as in Brazil, so I suspect the majority of internet-connected people in America use it.
That said, WhatsApp is not a tool I use mostly on the computer to talk to my tech friends and co-workers, where I need efficient ways to communicate both using pre-formatted/code lines and in natural language, where things like bold, italic, quotes, etc become important tools to convey the right message.
In English, “America” refers to the USA, 99.9% of the time. (This is not just true in the US but also in the UK and I am pretty sure other English-speaking countries too).
What is called “América” in Spanish and Portuguese, we call “the Americas” and consider to be two continents (North America and South America), not one.
I have no opinion on which usage is “correct”. Just pointing out that the person you’re replying to almost certainly used “America” to mean the USA, not the land mass that includes Brazil.
I’m always a little wary about these claims. For example I worked at a Fortune 500 before and I created a setup on an app like Slack using my corporate email account.
There is a big difference between “used by company Y” and “used by tiny team X inside company Y” (probably without IT approval).
Agreed, just saying x is used at y is meaningless, especially when that company is a multi headed hydra like google or MS. I see it so often with languages these days but I'm pretty sure you could find a team in a huge company like MS programming in TCL all day.
We're getting teams which I'm a bit excited for since it is going to be a company wide replacement for Lync/Skype for business and no developer here has ever used Slack, IRC or anything like this.
Sorry to end your excitement, but it's basically identical to Skype for Business.
As I understand it MS has been covering the two (in both features and design) so that at some point one or other will be deprecated, but that in practice all that means is a name change for those users.
Group chats in Skype don't happen, messages are stowed away in outlook under past conversation history and everything you send on Skype for business is a new conversation @tagging the recipient (singular in almost all cases). And everything to be brought up with multiple people thus ends up being an email chain after the Skype convo.
It's COBOL, but my first software development job. It's a good pay for a novice-dev in Sweden ($44k/yr and our currency has dropped by 1/3 compared to the USD).
I like the language and environments, and it's fine that almost all developers are close to retirement, they are great libraries of knowledge after having worked in the system for 20+ years.
It's mostly the legacy ways of working around here that are an annoyance, communication by email and having to wait for order- and project numbers before starting any development, instead of being allowed to develop improvements that can just be implemented when/if they get the ok.
The wait time does allow me to create some automated tests of which we had absolutely none, that other young developers here also benefit from.
I'm gaining knowledge and the system seems to be getting replaced in not that long, at which point my fiancée wants to move back home to the states, but health insurance woes has kept me from looking into that.
I am in a similar position. It is almost always the technical people in a company that sets this stuff up, thus you are losing the goodwill of the decision-makers, which is unfortunate.
Regarding Slack’s attitude about technical users whose life this disrupts, I can see that the calculus may appear to favor the non-technical users: there are probably far more users who have no idea what Markdown is and never need to share code snippets on Slack and who are happy with the new wysiwyg editor since it’s closer to what they get from MS Word and Gmail. However, technical users have massively outsized influence over the choices of technology at most companies. The IT dept is full of technical users who share code fragments all the time. Don’t you think they’ll be keeping an eye out for new chat platforms after this change? Tech startups are (almost by definition) mostly technical users. Do you think any new tech startups will willingly use Slack after this change? Some of those would have been paying customers and a few of them would have become huge paying customers. Now they won’t. I know I’m actively looking for alternatives now and I have controlling influence over what gets used in several paying and non-paying Slack instances.