the three taps of doom

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2021-07-03 16:30:05

A few years ago, I worked as the CTO of an advertising startup. At first, we used Skype for messaging amongst the employees, and then later, we switched to Slack. The main reason for switching to Slack was because they had an IRC gateway — you could connect to a Slack workspace with an IRC client, which allowed for the people who wanted to use IRC to do so, while providing a polished experience for those who were unfamiliar with IRC.

In the beginning, Slack had an IRC gateway. On May 15th, 2018, Slack discontinued the IRC gateway, beginning my descent into Cocytus. Prior to the shutdown of the IRC gateway, I had always interacted with the Slack workspace via IRC. This was replaced with the Slack mobile and desktop apps.

The IRC gateway, however, was quite buggy, so it was probably good that they got rid of it. It did not comply with any reasonable IRC specifications, much less support anything from IRCv3, so the user experience was quite disappointing albeit serviceable.

Switching from IRC to the native Slack clients, I now got to deal with one of Slack’s main features: notifications. If you’ve ever used slack, you’re likely familiar with the unholy notification sound, or as I have come to know it, the triple tap of existential doom. Let me explain.