Ask HN: What is the worst communications tool you've ever used?
And what made it so bad?
35 comments
Teams.
Chat is not chat. Office Communicator and Skype for Business were chat apps. Teams is not. Not on desktop and doubly not on mobile.
Collaborative sites. SharePoint was a collaborative workspace. Teams' schizophrenic frankenstein of uninteroperable 'apps' from 'Lists' unaware of members of a Team to 3rd party *ware that has regressed in function, collaboration and interoperability from SharePoint so much a two decade old install of Joomla does a better job, is not.
Chat is not chat. Office Communicator and Skype for Business were chat apps. Teams is not. Not on desktop and doubly not on mobile.
Collaborative sites. SharePoint was a collaborative workspace. Teams' schizophrenic frankenstein of uninteroperable 'apps' from 'Lists' unaware of members of a Team to 3rd party *ware that has regressed in function, collaboration and interoperability from SharePoint so much a two decade old install of Joomla does a better job, is not.
Two additions:
* Teams wanting to be a viewer for all kinds of filetypes. Why the hell would I want to view a Powerpoint presentation in Teams? What if I want to chat about the presentation, while viewing the presentation?
* Clipboard injection attacks. Who in the history of the humanity ever thought prefixing "[2:10 PM] Kimble, Richard:" into the URL/API key/thing-you-want-to-copy a colleague just sent you was a good idea? Yes I know you can manually highlight the text and copy, but you're forcing me to do intricate mouse movements that take time, dozens of times a day. I just want to triple-click, cmd+c, alt+tab, cmd+p
* Teams wanting to be a viewer for all kinds of filetypes. Why the hell would I want to view a Powerpoint presentation in Teams? What if I want to chat about the presentation, while viewing the presentation?
* Clipboard injection attacks. Who in the history of the humanity ever thought prefixing "[2:10 PM] Kimble, Richard:" into the URL/API key/thing-you-want-to-copy a colleague just sent you was a good idea? Yes I know you can manually highlight the text and copy, but you're forcing me to do intricate mouse movements that take time, dozens of times a day. I just want to triple-click, cmd+c, alt+tab, cmd+p
The UI is also just… awful. It gets so confused about what is read and what isn’t. Muting a channel doesn’t really work the way you would expect. Scrolling through messages suddenly just stops and waits 30 seconds to load the next “page”. Even reading through JIRA updates in Teams is hard because the UI is so bland and blank it’s tough to distinguish between the individual updates, but in Slack I have no problem.
Oh, and of course there are three different ways to add a code snippet now, and all three absolutely suck. In Slack there is one, and it just f’ing works.
Teams is free because no one would ever pay for it.
Oh, and of course there are three different ways to add a code snippet now, and all three absolutely suck. In Slack there is one, and it just f’ing works.
Teams is free because no one would ever pay for it.
Also, phone calls in Skype are no longer available (unless you subscribe to a business plan and I guess as well a Phone Plan).
Contacts became People and it’s not straightforward how to add one in iOS at least.
Contacts became People and it’s not straightforward how to add one in iOS at least.
How is chat not chat?
I guess that OP is referring to teams having this builettin-board style posts as a default. You post a post and others can react and comment. Which works like a mashup of old school forum and chat. It breaks chronology as newest updates are not on bottom or top.
It was even called teams. So teams had a special use section called... teams. They recently changed the logic. Chats and teams are in the same place, but the rest is still a thing.
I don't think there is a way to notify a chat. Like on slack or zoom or whatever. You can make a webhook to teams (ekhm, the post board thing), but not a chat. So you basically can't use Teams to make many small notifications because you just can't show them next to each other - it's always a big post.
My favorite "feature" of teams is the missclicks. If you use it folded, when chat list (or teams list...) autohides, some parts of the list takes to the chat you want, but some...click the element that was beneath whatever you clicked.
So you wanted to change a chat to some 1:1 with a friend, but you clicked some OneNote in a group chat.
It was even called teams. So teams had a special use section called... teams. They recently changed the logic. Chats and teams are in the same place, but the rest is still a thing.
I don't think there is a way to notify a chat. Like on slack or zoom or whatever. You can make a webhook to teams (ekhm, the post board thing), but not a chat. So you basically can't use Teams to make many small notifications because you just can't show them next to each other - it's always a big post.
My favorite "feature" of teams is the missclicks. If you use it folded, when chat list (or teams list...) autohides, some parts of the list takes to the chat you want, but some...click the element that was beneath whatever you clicked.
So you wanted to change a chat to some 1:1 with a friend, but you clicked some OneNote in a group chat.
CB radio
Specifically 27MHz CB radio.
People miles away can hear your conversations with your friends.
Sometimes in the daytime the radio signals bounce off the ionosphere, the noise level goes way up and local chatting range is reduced because stations from 600 miles to thousands of miles away are coming in.
In the days when it was popular trolling assholes would jam and disrupt. people up on a hill with an illegal high power amplifier talked over people.
In the 1970s and 1980s high power AM transmissions sometimes blasted out of the neighbors cheaply-made hifi or scrambled their TV picture.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...
The eleven meter wavelength means you need a reasonably large antenna for good performance.
These days it is local CB is almost dead in most places and the noise level is often high in towns due to every house having a dozen switch mode power supplies and other electronics, which really reduces the range.
Decades ago, when it was popular, it was chaotic. Some CB radios did not receive well if someone nearby was talking within a few channels of you. Meet ups at pubs sometimes turned into fist fights.
These days, in most of Europe and the UK you may sometimes hear the last few old men and crazy nitwits that still use CB radio but they are often far away and a legal 4watt radio does not get out far enough for anyone to hear you.
Specifically 27MHz CB radio.
People miles away can hear your conversations with your friends.
Sometimes in the daytime the radio signals bounce off the ionosphere, the noise level goes way up and local chatting range is reduced because stations from 600 miles to thousands of miles away are coming in.
In the days when it was popular trolling assholes would jam and disrupt. people up on a hill with an illegal high power amplifier talked over people.
In the 1970s and 1980s high power AM transmissions sometimes blasted out of the neighbors cheaply-made hifi or scrambled their TV picture.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...
The eleven meter wavelength means you need a reasonably large antenna for good performance.
These days it is local CB is almost dead in most places and the noise level is often high in towns due to every house having a dozen switch mode power supplies and other electronics, which really reduces the range.
Decades ago, when it was popular, it was chaotic. Some CB radios did not receive well if someone nearby was talking within a few channels of you. Meet ups at pubs sometimes turned into fist fights.
These days, in most of Europe and the UK you may sometimes hear the last few old men and crazy nitwits that still use CB radio but they are often far away and a legal 4watt radio does not get out far enough for anyone to hear you.
WhatsApp.
NEVER use whatsapp for work communication. it blurs you personal and work life, there's no boundaries, you are online 24/7, it drains you energy, chats are completely ephemeral (if 30h have passed since a message its gone forever), no pins, no task tracking, no onboarding, no search, no automation, it starts to fall apart with half a dozen people, insecure if they steal your phone, dumb ui, no scheduling, no nothing. Work and personal life must be separated, one app for each. work done? CTRL+W slack and done, offline mode, in whatsapp you cannot close it and its very unprofessional. Your boss hits u up at saturday 9pm and you will have that chat unread lingering there and draining your energy till monday, constant context switch between work and personal. It's horrible.
If you are a startup founder, DO NOT use whatsapp for work comms.
NEVER use whatsapp for work communication. it blurs you personal and work life, there's no boundaries, you are online 24/7, it drains you energy, chats are completely ephemeral (if 30h have passed since a message its gone forever), no pins, no task tracking, no onboarding, no search, no automation, it starts to fall apart with half a dozen people, insecure if they steal your phone, dumb ui, no scheduling, no nothing. Work and personal life must be separated, one app for each. work done? CTRL+W slack and done, offline mode, in whatsapp you cannot close it and its very unprofessional. Your boss hits u up at saturday 9pm and you will have that chat unread lingering there and draining your energy till monday, constant context switch between work and personal. It's horrible.
If you are a startup founder, DO NOT use whatsapp for work comms.
I installed teams for a client. I was surprised how badly it could do something so simple. And the standard operating temperature of my machine went up ten degrees.
Google Allo as a replacement for hangouts. Launched without web access and eventually was added by scanning a QR code on a webpage that was per device, needing a new pairing for new devices. So instead of having access like you normally would on hangouts by signing in to your google account on a laptop and desktop, you had to manually add your device. Sometimes it wouldn't work and I forget the particular details but it was a massive step backwards in functionality and Google still hasn't created anything worthy of replacing hangouts. Not to mention the fact that getting users to switch to another chat app was a pain just to have it shelved after like a year. This among many other reasons are why I ended up getting an Iphone out of necessity.
Lotus Notes. It tried to be everything and was good at nothing.
Email to a German government institution or the management company for my apartment building. The response to your email is always a letter in the post several weeks later with the title "RE: The email you sent on 25.03.2023".
My own mouth. I always say too much. That’s what makes it bad.
Email
You send
I send
You send
I highlight something and then comment below it in red
You reply in green
Can’t read it in order anymore
Edit: oh! Then because it was sent to 2+ other people they reply when they want, out of order, and add Bro from X who also has some pearls of wisdom.
You send
I send
You send
I highlight something and then comment below it in red
You reply in green
Can’t read it in order anymore
Edit: oh! Then because it was sent to 2+ other people they reply when they want, out of order, and add Bro from X who also has some pearls of wisdom.
Google Wave. The UX was so bad that despite all the massive hype it failed very quickly.
I'll bet a lot of people here have a soft spot for Wave, but if you honestly compare its UX to something modern you've been complaining about, you'll see it was pretty convoluted to use.
I'll bet a lot of people here have a soft spot for Wave, but if you honestly compare its UX to something modern you've been complaining about, you'll see it was pretty convoluted to use.
Whatsapp.
Overpromise, underdelivery.
Virtually every major function was broken at least once for me. Poor featerset, annoying and dumb ui. One of those app like skype before - you keep it only because of your grandma and few other important contacts who don’t know any better.
It is much worse than for instance pigeon mail. Because your expectations from pigeon mail more or less align with reality. And you expect from a 21st century software some basic things like cross device synchronization or at least reliable messsge and status drlivery, but it fails you, sonetimes in most important moments of your life.
The only feature they implemented well is video calls. It feels like it was implemented by some other (10x better) team than the rest of the app.
Overpromise, underdelivery.
Virtually every major function was broken at least once for me. Poor featerset, annoying and dumb ui. One of those app like skype before - you keep it only because of your grandma and few other important contacts who don’t know any better.
It is much worse than for instance pigeon mail. Because your expectations from pigeon mail more or less align with reality. And you expect from a 21st century software some basic things like cross device synchronization or at least reliable messsge and status drlivery, but it fails you, sonetimes in most important moments of your life.
The only feature they implemented well is video calls. It feels like it was implemented by some other (10x better) team than the rest of the app.
I think this perhaps sums up my feeling about this whole topic; which is that YMMV.
My world is divided into 2 spheres, personal and work. My personal world runs on WhatsApp. But then in my country everyone has WhatsApp. Nobody uses SMS (other than for spam and OTP), nobody cares about this week's offering from Google or Apple.
Voice calls, group chats, polls (invaluable for group decisions) DMs, etc.
I don't negate uour experience of it. Clearly it failed for you. But the nature of a thread like this is that it's all just personal experience, which is, not surprisingly all over the map.
My world is divided into 2 spheres, personal and work. My personal world runs on WhatsApp. But then in my country everyone has WhatsApp. Nobody uses SMS (other than for spam and OTP), nobody cares about this week's offering from Google or Apple.
Voice calls, group chats, polls (invaluable for group decisions) DMs, etc.
I don't negate uour experience of it. Clearly it failed for you. But the nature of a thread like this is that it's all just personal experience, which is, not surprisingly all over the map.
i noticed about people who like WhatsApp are mostly one of these groups (or combination):
1. They don’t know any better
2. Their expectations low (anything better than sms is already good enough)
3. They see “everyone is using it in my country” as the main feature
4. They are very light users (they don’t need cross device synchronization, they don’t do business or live inside a messenger for work, they don’t care about extra latency, clumsy ui, resiliency, backups etc).
1. They don’t know any better
2. Their expectations low (anything better than sms is already good enough)
3. They see “everyone is using it in my country” as the main feature
4. They are very light users (they don’t need cross device synchronization, they don’t do business or live inside a messenger for work, they don’t care about extra latency, clumsy ui, resiliency, backups etc).
If entire countries runs on Whataspp (including business) (e.g: Brazil) it surely adds a lot of value ?
Of course, and that's a meaningful advantage. My point is that product itself can be terrible while its marketing and distribution is near perfect. Some sort of monopoly dynamics I suppose.
Texting on a modern "smart"-phone sucks. Typing on a featureless flat surface is bad enough, but adding auto-correct to the mix, and random notifications that steal focus (both on the screen, and in real life) are horrible. On top of that they add emojis that have no discernable meaning, and the total loss of all social queues. (On the plus side, I get persistent internet almost everywhere at far, far more than 300 baud, and you can host a VAX 11/780 in it!)
I'm glad that I have this nice mechanical keyboard with a cord, and my recently added wired mouse to make things predictable here on my computer at home.
I'm glad that I have this nice mechanical keyboard with a cord, and my recently added wired mouse to make things predictable here on my computer at home.
Skype, why? Because when they decided to use microsoft email for all accounts I lost access to my account. Like who even decided to do that?
Viber.
Really poor design and message synchronization. And I cannot stop using because landlord and couple of my relatives keep doing that
VHS for maritime communication. It’s necessary for practical purposes, and safety but audio is often indecipherable.
Teams. Everything.
Didn't even have to think about it.
Didn't even have to think about it.