Although Flash really sucked as a technology, it did inspire a lot of visual artistry on the web. Half of the cool stuff you saw on StumbleUpon was made with Flash by people who weren't proficient with JS/CSS, which weren’t capable enough to achieve the same results anyway.
Although being stuck at loading something was reminiscent of my early internet experience in a way, the site’s backend seems to be rate-limited and unable to serve. Will check back later!
A few years ago people could not stop talking about how great Slack was. Much better than HipChat, Google Chat, Teams, IRC. I've used all of them, Slack was never better. As much as I dislike Google Chat (or whatever they call it), Slack is worse, only beaten by Teams as the absolute worst.
But Slack was hyped, it was the new shinny. Put all your stuff in Slack it's great. Question that logic and you where told that you just didn't get it. I still don't, it's the single worst piece of software that I'm forced to use.
The business model was always as rocky as everything else coming out of San Francisco/Silicon Valley area in the past 15 years. Why are people surprised?
IRC is fine, for most things. It's free, decentralized, bots are easy to write and you can run your own servers.
I think most people had genuinely different reactions than you, and found Slack to be a better UX. I still do. But yes, it was also a proprietary trap. it can be both. but for many many many people Slack was a much better experience than IRC, they weren't just "tricked" into thinking this.
Well said, it’s a red flag for me if someone both states that they “can’t understand what others like about [thing]” AND then assumes that means they’ve been tricked or they’re stupid or sheep or something else… it’s like, other people having completely reasonable reasons that you just don’t happen to know what they are couldn’t possibly be a possibility.
We use Mattermost at work, and apart from the mobile app being a bit shit, and search being kind of useless, it's easily as good as Slack. In some ways it's better, e.g. you can use proper Markdown in messages instead of Slack's Mrkdwn abomination that doesn't even allow links.
I wish they would improve search though; it's kind of a critical feature in a company.
sounds exactly like slacks search, except slack also doesn't find exactly what you put in sometimes... (think the indexing isn't very fast because sometime a day old message is impossible to search for)
One simple script that automatically connects to your account on the current time frame's server and unifies all into a single timeline will kill the fun.
The messiest launch ever. The renewed UI makes it easy to assume that the LLM-backed Siri is already here but just isn't much better than the old one. A marketing disaster.
AI assistance in IDEs was the final nail in the coffin for Apple's development environment, which had already —and consistently— been lagging behind for over a decade.
