This feels incredibly Silicon Valley centric. Hybrid Command Line only serves to increase friction in the messaging process, particularly for normal users. Press reviews have already noted that there is a learning curve, that the experience is better with a smaller friends list. This sounds like it is set up to fail to get broader adoption.
Agreed. The Slack-esque hybrid command line is a bit of a bait and switch to get the tech community interested. The average user by no means is going to memorize more than 1-2 commands, if any at all. I barely use anything other than Giphy on Slack. At the end of the day content and network effects will determine whether it survives.
^^ this. The commands are great but why not bring up a dialog of the commands represented by an icon that you tap to use the given command? Much better discoverability than having to type "help" and get popped out to a web page with the list.
