19 february 2020
I really hate Slack. As an accessible chat application, it's fine. It works 99.9% of the time for 99.9% of the use cases in the world. The problem is that for those of us in the 0.1%, the power users, the actual tech people, the people it claims to really market to, it's terrible, and it's getting worse.
Recent updates to the applicatino have added this notifcation that pops up every time I declare bankrupcy and mark all messages read informing me that I've done this and providing a button to undo this if it was in error. OK, great... for the first time, that's fine. Provide me with the option to undo the action and inform me of the appropriate keyboard shortcut to do so again in the future if it happens again. At least, this is how it should be done. Instead, this notificatin pops up EVERY DAMN TIME I mark messages as read. As if to say, "hey, stupid, you probably didn't mean to do the thing you just did, click here to undo that little oopsie doopsie mistakie-poo". No, fuck you. I know EXACTLY what I just fucking did. I'm not a child, get off my lawn. At the very least, they should provide an option to disable this annoying "reminder".
The worst part of all this is I had a perfectly working solution for avoiding the Slack desktop application all together. Wee-Slack is a Python plugin for Weechat, my IRC client of choice, which provided Weechat access to the Slack messaging API.
It. Works. Perfectly.
Or it did until Slack, in their clear infinite wisdom, deprecated their V1 API; the API that supported accessing the API with a user generated token. Now, you have to register any application wishing to use the API as a Slack integration. To do this, you have to be an admin of the Slack "server" for your organization... which I am, thankfully, not. Unfortunately, the administrators of our server are a bit overbearing and consider this a non-essential application providing "little to no benefit" to the organization while creating "unecessary security holes" in our Slack instance. In other words "We're too lazy to really understand what this plugin does for us because you're the 0.1% use case and we don't care about you".
So, now, I'm forced to live with this horrid excuse for a "desktop" (yes, airquotes, I see you Electron... you're just a webpage) application and be treated like a child.