Used differently I'd say, but can't say I have a 100% view of all the users. My feeling is that various software projects moved to Discord instead (particularly FOSS which feels strange), and Slack seen an uptake in enterprise usage which makes sense considering the new(-ish) owner.

It also seems like someone at Slack is tasked with driving up engagement, because I get these "Your team is missing you" messages from Slack (only to be find a dead slack community). That might be a sign that they're losing traction?

Discord is mostly used by devs.

Yes, a 6MB (compressed) bundle is big. But it is not clear that the alternatives are better. The bundle would need to be split increasing complexity of building the application.

It is likely judged that splitting the bundle only has minimal positives compared to the negatives - which also align with my experiecne developing software for roughly the same target segment.

I'm not sure, I've seen plenty of cases where programmers do stop and ask "Should we?" while management says "It's not ideal, but you have 4 hours allocated to shipping this things, so decide the "right" approach for achieving our OKRs" or similar.

This is an effect from no one prioritizing extra complexity that might / might not provide any tangible value.

"I did what my manager asked me to. Asking questions is no in my job description. I've got kids to feed".

Did the product itself not give it away? ;)

There's a discussion to be had as to whether the Slack app should be 48mb, but that's a different discussion. Focusing on the 404 page feels like outrage bait for web devs.

I get perks like not seeing reaction emojis, gifs, and being able to mute the constant flow of @channel notifications by configuring a list of people or channels from which I am not interested in getting these generic notifications.

Also most importantly, since my company recently shifted from treating us like adults to telling us we must only work on the assigned tasks and for no reason go out of task, I configured it to not join general discussions channels where people ask for help and such things. In theory I'm on them, but from the point of view of my IRC client I'm not.

It re-joins automatically if someone mentions me specifically. Unfortunately it won't fetch the history when this happens so I might need to open the real slack to get the context before I can answer.

Anyway, it has worked mostly fine for me… I can have decent battery life and I don't get most of the useless notifications.

Same with how much space the entire thing wastes: it's clearly designed by people with 8K 30" monitors and perfect vision.

I have many more gripes, but that would be too off-topic. I don't understand how it got so popular.

There was a whole thread the other day about a framework for smuggling these huge analytics bundles through content blockers. Funny it was just around the same time another large thread was on the front page full of marketing people spazing out over the low click through rate when people are given AI summaries and aren't forced to "experience" these corporate sites running on their computers.