Ask HN: What is the worst communications tool you've ever used?
8logicallee145/10/2025, 7:47:14 PM
And what made it so bad?
Comments (14)
throwaway519 · 1h ago
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.
chrismeller · 42m ago
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.
joey_spaztard · 2h ago
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.
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.
solardev · 22m ago
Teams. Everything.
Didn't even have to think about it.
mlhpdx · 1h ago
VHS for maritime communication. It’s necessary for practical purposes, and safety but audio is often indecipherable.
romanhn · 5h ago
Lotus Notes. It tried to be everything and was good at nothing.
zoenolan · 1h ago
We had Lotus Notes forced on us at a previous job. Just slow, chunky and a painful to do anything. I was glad to go back to Outlook when I moved on.
mattl · 2h ago
Lot of people are very fond of Notes and Domino. I've barely used Notes.
aristofun · 1h ago
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.
mattl · 6h ago
Microsoft Teams
silisili · 2h ago
Seconded. I had heard the rumors and thought they were overblown. No, it's really that bad. It's actually baffling, and I'm confused how such a thing was ever greenlit much less released.
more_corn · 3h ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
Didn't even have to think about it.
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.