This doesn't really sound like a problem with Slack, but rather a personal or cultural problem with a lack of setting or respecting boundaries.
Slack has options to communicate:
- that you're away
- that you're on a call or in a meeting etc.
- to pause notifications for an hour or whatever
- to star the most relevant channels
- to mute less-relevant channels
- to leave irrelevant channels
- to sideline conversations into threads
All of that is just Slack itself, in addition to things like putting meetings and vacations and other appointments on the shared team calendar. Some people where I work book meetings with themselves to guarantee focused distraction-free time. That's completely valid.
Part of being a professional is setting boundaries, communicating them, setting the expectations that the rest of your team will do the same, and of course, respecting those boundaries.
That includes not calling or pestering people that are on vacation. Which also requires that you don't "check in" while you're on vacation, because if you do, then other people will feel like they're expected to as well.
Set and communicate your boundaries, and in a team that respects each other, it shouldn't be a problem.
"You just need discipline" is a common phrase, which usually masks the root problem. Why does something need continuous effort? Is it the best place to put our energies? Are there any other ways of solving the problem?
See "Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength" (https://www.amazon.com/Willpower-Rediscovering-Greatest-Huma...) on willpower as a resource that can be drained, often pointlessly. Having a constant temptation is one of the core cases (e.g. candies on your sight).
Instead of helping us, a flawed tool forces us to work against the current. For the Sauron's ring, this constant test of the hobbit's strength of will was unavoidable. For Slack... it is much easier to throw it into a volcano.
All the options you mention are designed in order to reduce the main problem: that it requires synchronous communication. That is, after you "come back" from a meeting or being away, you can't just work in peace and when you want just send a reply: no, you are expected by design to engage in a conversation.
I'm not interested in engaging in a conversation at all unless there is something really extremely important that requires my undivided attention for a specific period of time. But when companies use Slack, they integrate it as a part of the culture. You are expected to be ready to answer. Sure, you can pause notifications - but you know people are waiting. Are you a good team member if people are asking questions and you are not answering?
For contrast, I found out that many people I worked with are too lazy to write an email and will prefer to solve the problem themselves rather than write to me if I don't answer soon enough. Which shows another interesting aspect of Slack-type culture.
However, Slack doesn't allow you to a) stay alertable to a subset of the company (e.g. people you are working heads down with on a project) while b) ignoring everyone else in the company. Even if you stick those people in a common channel and mute the rest of the channels you are in, people can still jeopardize your focus with a single at-mention or DM. Just anyone can hijack your sidebar.
Slack doesn't respect something as simple and fundamental as the focus of a small team within a larger org. But if they did that, they wouldn't sell as many subscriptions, because it would be less addictive, I guess?
You forgot the most important option of all: closing the window.
Unless your occupation precludes constant communication (like emergency services or such), then the expectation should be that you are generally contactable, not constantly interruptible.
And if you can't close Slack without fear of repercussions then the problem lies with your company, not Slack.
Slack encourages quick, stream-of-consciousness, short responses. Plus, it's hard to find past discussion, and it's hard to jump in after being gone for a few days (or, even a few hours).
Threads are absolutely the answer. But, the defaults matter - Slack isn't encouraging threaded, long-form messages. Instead, it makes all messages feel urgent - and it makes the cost of sending a message way too cheap.
I'm on a mission to bring back forums, where threading is the default. Inspired by YC's Bookface software, I'm working on a project to make forums as slick as Slack or Notion [1]. I think that long-form discussions and slow notifications are the key to bringing sanity back to discussions. And, I think the key is one amazing email summary per day - and few (if any) other notifications.
If you're interested in this problem - please reach out!
My friend works at a company that -- on orders from legal -- has set a 5-day "disappearing messages" policy for all of the corp Slack. Unfortunately nearly all technical discussions happen on Slack. He tells me that it's not unusual for messages to start disappearing before the issue being worked on has even been resolved, and everyone has to re-ask the same questions and re-post the answers at that point, and sometimes things slip through the cracks. Then there's no way for people joining the company to get answers to already-asked-and-answered questions, and they end up spamming everyone on various channels with frequently-asked questions that often go ignored because people are tired of re-posting the same answers over and over again.
The sign up flow is really not great. Pick one and stick with it, but having to do “Phone Number” click “Insert verification code” click “Email” click, “Enter verification code” click. Either defer email verification, or get rid of phones altogether. It’s a forum, I’m not expecting replies in texts hopefully.
I went to try out this service and the sign up process feels pretty invasive: a phone number, a code, my email, a code, and then "pick a username" - with no indication of what sort of visibility it's going to have or how far and wide on the service it's going to go.
I never bother reading slack backlogs. I use slack to get quick answers to questions and then for any kind of design decisions, they go in to a diagram or wiki page which will be discussed in the next meeting.
The name is not great.
The photo on first page is bad.
And I couldn't find a demo at all.
I was curious because forums where my go-place for online discussions growing up.
I’m interested in your idea, bringing what we’ve mastered in chat to the forum, but I don’t want to give my phone number or spin up a forum just to see. Is there an example forum?
> For the next five years I operated in “Slack culture”, the communication paradigm that I suspect is in use by many companies these days. Email inboxes were more or less reserved for broadcasts from exec and HR along with JIRA spam. Everything else happens on Slack.
This is the real problem, IMO.
Slack shouldn't be replacing e-mail or meetings or phone calls. It's great for impromptu discussions with a lot of back-and-forth, but once it becomes a serious conversation with multiple parties you need to escalate to a call or meeting or e-mail. Casual, asynchronous chat is great for low-importance conversations that aren't time sensitive. It's terrible for coordinating and making important decisions in a timely manner, though. Don't be afraid to schedule a synchronous communication session in whatever flavor you prefer.
Once you start making Slack the center of communication, you stop making deliberate decisions about who is included in e-mails/meetings. Now everyone in the channel has to skim everything to make sure they're not missing out on anything important. Busybodies love it because they can be a fly on the wall for everything. Heads-down workers hate it because they have to choose between focusing on their work or checking into Slack all of the time. It optimizes for the wrong kind of engagement.
Trying to enforce a lot of rules around threading is a band-aid, IMO. The real solution should be to create a culture where people aren't trying to force every interaction into Slack or avoid meetings at all costs. Excessive meetings are a problem, but going out of your way to avoid all meetings will waste more time than it frees up.
> Don't be afraid to schedule a synchronous communication session in whatever flavor you prefer.
That is its own separate problem. Constant distraction in Slack, followed closely by Zoom call hell because you didn't respond fast enough in Slack and wouldn't it just be faster if we all got on a call?
If we're going to leverage the power of remote work, part of that is re-learning how to do effective asynchronous communication and not succumbing to interruptions just because it's so easy to inflict them.
This behavior is caused by the presence indicator. People subsconsiously are afraid that closing Slack will signal to their boss (and team) that they're not working. However, the result is that they spend their days slacking - not working.
> Slack shouldn't be replacing e-mail or meetings or phone calls.
Absolutely wrong. We use Slack messaging and huddles to replace these things and are a more efficient workplace because of it. Really this is the point of Slack.
I have no desire to go back to the throat clearing and careful writing that comes with composing emails or wasting time in unfocused real-time meetings and phone calls that could have just been handled through a few async messages on slack. If a co-worker sent me an email (which no one ever really does) I would ignore it until they message me on Slack about it.
On top of that, Slack apps really decrease cognitive load by putting useful information into conversations or providing good prompts to start discussions from webhook notifications.
I'm in the lead-weight-dragging tail (working in a bank using Teams, but dealt with this at the last job in Slack as well). The major hassle seems to be getting people to understand this is asynchronous communication (perpetrators are both developers and executives) and this problem seems to stand before the rest of the more sophisticated complaints evinced here can be even addressed.
A: Hello B.
[... typing/waiting animation]
B: Hi.
A: Good afternoon.
B: All clear for transmission, A. What's going on?
[... now B is derailed, waiting several minutes for A to compose his thoughts and type and edit them]
For all the pseudo UX voodoo we go through, can we not do something to give a hint that this is not a fucking phone conversation or something that requires a Q code? Or am I exiled to some benighted colony? Why is this not the first-order problem to be dealt with?
In the main article Slack communication is assumed to be synchronous.
I find life to be a little happier when it's assumed to be asynchronous.
That means turning off some channel notifications.
When I really want effective synchronous communication I tend to escalate from Slack to audio or video a screen share -- it seems like there's an extra layer of collaboration that you can have with a bit higher bandwidth.
For meetings I like to have audio plus a screen share of a shared document -- usually not a Slack document, because it's valuable to have more than one person be able to make edits.
One of the things I miss working at Facebook is the internal FB (called Workplace). It basically replaced email for the whole company, and worked really well for long form posts where maybe you would write some proposal up or make an announcement and get a bunch of comments. I now work at a slack centric company, and it just doesn't compare - there is no 'newsfeed', so unless you remember to check all the channels, you end up missing stuff. You can send out a group email, but people are reluctant to reply-all, so this doesn't get good discussion either.
At my company we have a “thoughtful communication” guide[1] that addresses Slack and other communication tools. The simple rule for Slack is it’s for ephemeral or urgent communication only. All “conversation” material essentially routes through email and it works great. Takes some getting used to but our Slack instance is very, very relaxed. Most employees silence all Slack notifications and are encouraged to do so to (try our best to) preserve focus.
Microsoft has a solution to that problem: Teams. It is so painful to use and to do anything in it that it encourages people to actually use the bug tracker or other venues to discuss any serious topic.
To me, it is incredible that Slack is used WITHOUT threads. There is no way that information and discussions can be effective without a threaded conversation - it would just be pure cause otherwise.
Also, I find feature-specific channels to be such a pleasure. It's easy to have everyone focused on the same topic in a given channel, without any confusion or missing information between different channels or private messages.
Moreover, I have also considered Slack to be asynchronous - meetings are necessary for sync work, but I find Slack to be working perfectly if no one expects that you reply within minutes, but within a few days (if you are not actively working on a project - in that case a lot of times is just easier to schedule very fast meetings during no-focus times)
My main gripe with so much of the communication moving to Slack is that a lot of highly technical discussion moves into synchronous chat, and that removes the expectation which email often carried that the author spends time organizing their thoughts into clear linear writing.
Of course emails don't always come out coherently either, but my personal experience has been that moving into the streamed sentences model overall reduces the amount of effort put into organizing thoughts before communicating.
Often in my career I find myself on the other side of an opinion after noodling on it for a while. The process of typing out a long-winded email, realizing the hole in your argument, then saying Fuck It, deleting it and instead replying LGTM, is a powerful instrument.
I think the answer here is pretty straightforward: run a Discourse board alongside your Slack, and nudge conversations out of the Slack and onto the board. The board works for long-form stuff, and for stuff you need to reference in the future; Slack works for interactivity when you want the interactivity.
We've been doing this for over a year at Fly.io and it's worked out great; I wish every other place I've worked that did a Slack or Slack-like thing did a dual chat/board strat, instead of pretending that chat/email is a serious alternative.
At a previous company we added an emoji that meant "this needs to be captured somewhere better than Slack", and those would be surfaced in a channel, and then links would be added in response as things were actually moved out.
> and nudge conversations out of the Slack and onto the board
Getting serious conversations out of Slack and into a more thoughtful medium seems to be the key to success.
Every time I've seen Slack used as the central repository of communication and information, it's a disaster. No, I don't want to sift through 30 pinned messages in each of the 5 channels vaguely related to a topic to find some piece of information I need. Treat Slack as casual, interactive chat, but get the information and decision-making into a better medium as soon as it becomes more important.
Question. What is the value of slack at that point? It seems, as someone with no experience with this setup, that it’s just notifications? Couldn’t your threaded system just poll more?
You don't have to talk sync with chat, you don't have to do one line back and forths on chat, you can take hours or days to reply if you so choose on chat like email, you can easily do rich paragraphs. Slack is not synchronous communication, video / voice calls are.
Slack wins over discourse forms, stack overflow and email because it adds too much friction to do essentially the same thing. Slack wins because it's the least friction interface that gives you form and email equivalents, plus it organizes a bit better naturally . If you want to beat slack and change the communication defaults, you need to make a UI that works with less friction than slack.
You can change your chat culture with changing your behaviors and encouraging changes like nohello.net and threading like this post is doing and setting boundaries with how you will communicate.
Also, different people work better with different communication mediums, the slack hate that you see on HN is not universal, there is a quiet majority that works well with slack, otherwise you wouldn't see it naturally adopted so much like the author encountered themselves. There will always be a set that hates whatever the default is. Now WFH is default in the industry, there is a subset that hates it greatly and wish we had offices again. Go back to offices with private rooms or open offices, there will be a set that doesn't like it too.
No, Slack-mania can't be cured with systemized discipline.
Slack is a pox. It's not just about endless notifications that kill your ability to focus, it's an environment that actively encourages organizational anti-patterns. If you have a question, first you ask your manager. If Slack makes it easy to reach out to someone directly, your manager will tell you to Slack them. If you don't have Slack, and you don't have people's phone numbers, instead you get directed to documentation / wiki / support ticketing.
Organizational choice architecture matters. Slack makes bad choices easy and good choices difficult. That's enough reason to ditch it.
If you want to be ahead of other engineers and have a meaningful impact, then you’ll want to maximize the number of uninterrupted deep work sessions. The more you can fit in a week the more you’ll achieve (rfcs, implementations, reviews).
This is one of the biggest contributor for high performing profiles.
To manage this when using Slack you can:
- set your status as “deep work” and decide to pause notifications for x hours
- use “mark as unread”. when you want to peek something but not act on it yet
- use “remind me” on messages you want to deal later on through the week
- avoid DMs has much as possible, so not just one person can help you, but anyone from your team
- avoid Slack on the phone
Then deal with notifications in bulk.
Slack isn’t killing our productivity, HN and twitter are not killing it either.
Our addictions to notifications is, but we can manage this with discipline and training.
For me Slack did not replace email, it replaced Instant Messenger. It replaced standing up from my desk and walking into another office to ask a question that I ether needed the answer to now, or never.
EDIT: I hate how all these code projects have their own Slack though, it's super annoying and has been a horrible way to engage with the community and get answers to questions. (Discord too)
> A practice that was already in place was one of diligent threading – not only was threading encouraged, but by strong convention, every topic goes into one. We thread like our lives depend on it.
This is describing Zulip. And indeed, Zulip is excellent. The only downside is that the mandatory-thread paradigm makes it difficult to find the appropriate place to deliberately fuck around, which is also a valid mode of human socialization. But if you want to get work done, use Zulip, not Slack.
I wish Slack had a feature to "threadify" comments that have already been made. I wouldn't even mind if Slack channels could designate certain users as "thread czars" that had the ability to move other users comments into a thread.
Never mind the thread czars — I wouldn't mind the ability to do this with my own comments. Often I reply to something in the channel, realize after the fact that it should have been in a thread, and then become sad when people start replying to it not in a thread.
This is a brilliant idea.
I work in a slack jungle most of the workday in a very large org across possible 100+ channels.
Multiple instances on top of that.
Sometimes replies bucket up under the thread, sometimes they do not. Sometimes what should be threaded get fragmented into separate threads.
Love this idea.
Some of the old school IRC-channel ops functions could go a long way too (I think discord is more like that).
Our experiences don't match regarding threading, and I don't think the author's are necessarily representative. Slack's threading implementation is an afterthought, a bandaid solution. With it, conversations usually end up as a mix of some replies in a thread and some in the default clutterspace. In this regard even Teams has a better approach, it's really obvious if you're in a topic thread or not.
If you're in the US, be careful with what you write on a company channel/email. Both Slack and email can legally be read by management.
Know someone who works at a well known digital radio company. Prior to joining management they were in a coworkers channel where people vented about management, with the exception being them. Upon joining management they were asked why they didn't report on the gossip/venting earlier even though they never partook and it was explained that management was tracking all channels on the company's Slack. Those that were gossiping/venting all got let go
[+] [-] Falkon1313|4 years ago|reply
Slack has options to communicate:
- that you're away
- that you're on a call or in a meeting etc.
- to pause notifications for an hour or whatever
- to star the most relevant channels
- to mute less-relevant channels
- to leave irrelevant channels
- to sideline conversations into threads
All of that is just Slack itself, in addition to things like putting meetings and vacations and other appointments on the shared team calendar. Some people where I work book meetings with themselves to guarantee focused distraction-free time. That's completely valid.
Part of being a professional is setting boundaries, communicating them, setting the expectations that the rest of your team will do the same, and of course, respecting those boundaries.
That includes not calling or pestering people that are on vacation. Which also requires that you don't "check in" while you're on vacation, because if you do, then other people will feel like they're expected to as well.
Set and communicate your boundaries, and in a team that respects each other, it shouldn't be a problem.
[+] [-] stared|4 years ago|reply
See "Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength" (https://www.amazon.com/Willpower-Rediscovering-Greatest-Huma...) on willpower as a resource that can be drained, often pointlessly. Having a constant temptation is one of the core cases (e.g. candies on your sight).
Instead of helping us, a flawed tool forces us to work against the current. For the Sauron's ring, this constant test of the hobbit's strength of will was unavoidable. For Slack... it is much easier to throw it into a volcano.
[+] [-] hdjjhhvvhga|4 years ago|reply
I'm not interested in engaging in a conversation at all unless there is something really extremely important that requires my undivided attention for a specific period of time. But when companies use Slack, they integrate it as a part of the culture. You are expected to be ready to answer. Sure, you can pause notifications - but you know people are waiting. Are you a good team member if people are asking questions and you are not answering?
For contrast, I found out that many people I worked with are too lazy to write an email and will prefer to solve the problem themselves rather than write to me if I don't answer soon enough. Which shows another interesting aspect of Slack-type culture.
[+] [-] dota_fanatic|4 years ago|reply
Slack doesn't respect something as simple and fundamental as the focus of a small team within a larger org. But if they did that, they wouldn't sell as many subscriptions, because it would be less addictive, I guess?
[+] [-] KnobbleMcKnees|4 years ago|reply
Unless your occupation precludes constant communication (like emergency services or such), then the expectation should be that you are generally contactable, not constantly interruptible.
And if you can't close Slack without fear of repercussions then the problem lies with your company, not Slack.
[+] [-] philip1209|4 years ago|reply
Slack encourages quick, stream-of-consciousness, short responses. Plus, it's hard to find past discussion, and it's hard to jump in after being gone for a few days (or, even a few hours).
Threads are absolutely the answer. But, the defaults matter - Slack isn't encouraging threaded, long-form messages. Instead, it makes all messages feel urgent - and it makes the cost of sending a message way too cheap.
I'm on a mission to bring back forums, where threading is the default. Inspired by YC's Bookface software, I'm working on a project to make forums as slick as Slack or Notion [1]. I think that long-form discussions and slow notifications are the key to bringing sanity back to discussions. And, I think the key is one amazing email summary per day - and few (if any) other notifications.
If you're interested in this problem - please reach out!
[1] https://booklet.group
[+] [-] steelframe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Operyl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] XorNot|4 years ago|reply
I'd prefer to fill out a reCaptcha.
[+] [-] PikachuEXE|4 years ago|reply
https://twist.com/slack-alternative
Supported by Doist which also supports Todoist which I am using
[+] [-] Gigachad|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stavros|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gverrilla|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edgyquant|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] encryptluks2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adenozine|4 years ago|reply
Is that sentimental to you?
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|4 years ago|reply
This is the real problem, IMO.
Slack shouldn't be replacing e-mail or meetings or phone calls. It's great for impromptu discussions with a lot of back-and-forth, but once it becomes a serious conversation with multiple parties you need to escalate to a call or meeting or e-mail. Casual, asynchronous chat is great for low-importance conversations that aren't time sensitive. It's terrible for coordinating and making important decisions in a timely manner, though. Don't be afraid to schedule a synchronous communication session in whatever flavor you prefer.
Once you start making Slack the center of communication, you stop making deliberate decisions about who is included in e-mails/meetings. Now everyone in the channel has to skim everything to make sure they're not missing out on anything important. Busybodies love it because they can be a fly on the wall for everything. Heads-down workers hate it because they have to choose between focusing on their work or checking into Slack all of the time. It optimizes for the wrong kind of engagement.
Trying to enforce a lot of rules around threading is a band-aid, IMO. The real solution should be to create a culture where people aren't trying to force every interaction into Slack or avoid meetings at all costs. Excessive meetings are a problem, but going out of your way to avoid all meetings will waste more time than it frees up.
[+] [-] rootusrootus|4 years ago|reply
That is its own separate problem. Constant distraction in Slack, followed closely by Zoom call hell because you didn't respond fast enough in Slack and wouldn't it just be faster if we all got on a call?
If we're going to leverage the power of remote work, part of that is re-learning how to do effective asynchronous communication and not succumbing to interruptions just because it's so easy to inflict them.
[+] [-] philip1209|4 years ago|reply
Presence indicators are a dark pattern.
[+] [-] xwdv|4 years ago|reply
Absolutely wrong. We use Slack messaging and huddles to replace these things and are a more efficient workplace because of it. Really this is the point of Slack.
I have no desire to go back to the throat clearing and careful writing that comes with composing emails or wasting time in unfocused real-time meetings and phone calls that could have just been handled through a few async messages on slack. If a co-worker sent me an email (which no one ever really does) I would ignore it until they message me on Slack about it.
On top of that, Slack apps really decrease cognitive load by putting useful information into conversations or providing good prompts to start discussions from webhook notifications.
[+] [-] nescioquid|4 years ago|reply
I'm in the lead-weight-dragging tail (working in a bank using Teams, but dealt with this at the last job in Slack as well). The major hassle seems to be getting people to understand this is asynchronous communication (perpetrators are both developers and executives) and this problem seems to stand before the rest of the more sophisticated complaints evinced here can be even addressed.
A: Hello B.
[... typing/waiting animation]
B: Hi.
A: Good afternoon.
B: All clear for transmission, A. What's going on?
[... now B is derailed, waiting several minutes for A to compose his thoughts and type and edit them]
For all the pseudo UX voodoo we go through, can we not do something to give a hint that this is not a fucking phone conversation or something that requires a Q code? Or am I exiled to some benighted colony? Why is this not the first-order problem to be dealt with?
[+] [-] admax88qqq|4 years ago|reply
Why? Having multiple different communication buses seems like a problem as well. Possibly a worse one IMO
[+] [-] dhbradshaw|4 years ago|reply
When I really want effective synchronous communication I tend to escalate from Slack to audio or video a screen share -- it seems like there's an extra layer of collaboration that you can have with a bit higher bandwidth.
For meetings I like to have audio plus a screen share of a shared document -- usually not a Slack document, because it's valuable to have more than one person be able to make edits.
[+] [-] e2021|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wintercarver|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/company/thoughtful-communicatio...
[+] [-] Jiejeing|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackandtrip|4 years ago|reply
Also, I find feature-specific channels to be such a pleasure. It's easy to have everyone focused on the same topic in a given channel, without any confusion or missing information between different channels or private messages.
Moreover, I have also considered Slack to be asynchronous - meetings are necessary for sync work, but I find Slack to be working perfectly if no one expects that you reply within minutes, but within a few days (if you are not actively working on a project - in that case a lot of times is just easier to schedule very fast meetings during no-focus times)
[+] [-] munchbunny|4 years ago|reply
Of course emails don't always come out coherently either, but my personal experience has been that moving into the streamed sentences model overall reduces the amount of effort put into organizing thoughts before communicating.
[+] [-] xyzzy_plugh|4 years ago|reply
Often in my career I find myself on the other side of an opinion after noodling on it for a while. The process of typing out a long-winded email, realizing the hole in your argument, then saying Fuck It, deleting it and instead replying LGTM, is a powerful instrument.
Everyone wins when discourse is more thoughtful.
[+] [-] tptacek|4 years ago|reply
We've been doing this for over a year at Fly.io and it's worked out great; I wish every other place I've worked that did a Slack or Slack-like thing did a dual chat/board strat, instead of pretending that chat/email is a serious alternative.
[+] [-] dllthomas|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|4 years ago|reply
Getting serious conversations out of Slack and into a more thoughtful medium seems to be the key to success.
Every time I've seen Slack used as the central repository of communication and information, it's a disaster. No, I don't want to sift through 30 pinned messages in each of the 5 channels vaguely related to a topic to find some piece of information I need. Treat Slack as casual, interactive chat, but get the information and decision-making into a better medium as soon as it becomes more important.
[+] [-] sneak|4 years ago|reply
Practically there is little difference between an issue tracker that supports comments and Discourse, and most teams already have the former.
[+] [-] kasey_junk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] novok|4 years ago|reply
Slack wins over discourse forms, stack overflow and email because it adds too much friction to do essentially the same thing. Slack wins because it's the least friction interface that gives you form and email equivalents, plus it organizes a bit better naturally . If you want to beat slack and change the communication defaults, you need to make a UI that works with less friction than slack.
You can change your chat culture with changing your behaviors and encouraging changes like nohello.net and threading like this post is doing and setting boundaries with how you will communicate.
Also, different people work better with different communication mediums, the slack hate that you see on HN is not universal, there is a quiet majority that works well with slack, otherwise you wouldn't see it naturally adopted so much like the author encountered themselves. There will always be a set that hates whatever the default is. Now WFH is default in the industry, there is a subset that hates it greatly and wish we had offices again. Go back to offices with private rooms or open offices, there will be a set that doesn't like it too.
[+] [-] solatic|4 years ago|reply
Slack is a pox. It's not just about endless notifications that kill your ability to focus, it's an environment that actively encourages organizational anti-patterns. If you have a question, first you ask your manager. If Slack makes it easy to reach out to someone directly, your manager will tell you to Slack them. If you don't have Slack, and you don't have people's phone numbers, instead you get directed to documentation / wiki / support ticketing.
Organizational choice architecture matters. Slack makes bad choices easy and good choices difficult. That's enough reason to ditch it.
[+] [-] nxpnsv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kanonieer|4 years ago|reply
This matches with my (n=1) experience. The only way to cure "yourself" is to get away from organizations that use Slack in the way that OP describes.
[+] [-] vvoyer|4 years ago|reply
This is one of the biggest contributor for high performing profiles.
To manage this when using Slack you can:
- set your status as “deep work” and decide to pause notifications for x hours
- use “mark as unread”. when you want to peek something but not act on it yet
- use “remind me” on messages you want to deal later on through the week
- avoid DMs has much as possible, so not just one person can help you, but anyone from your team
- avoid Slack on the phone
Then deal with notifications in bulk.
Slack isn’t killing our productivity, HN and twitter are not killing it either.
Our addictions to notifications is, but we can manage this with discipline and training.
[+] [-] dariusj18|4 years ago|reply
EDIT: I hate how all these code projects have their own Slack though, it's super annoying and has been a horrible way to engage with the community and get answers to questions. (Discord too)
[+] [-] kibwen|4 years ago|reply
This is describing Zulip. And indeed, Zulip is excellent. The only downside is that the mandatory-thread paradigm makes it difficult to find the appropriate place to deliberately fuck around, which is also a valid mode of human socialization. But if you want to get work done, use Zulip, not Slack.
[+] [-] 22c|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cellentel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boopmaster|4 years ago|reply
Sometimes replies bucket up under the thread, sometimes they do not. Sometimes what should be threaded get fragmented into separate threads.
Love this idea.
Some of the old school IRC-channel ops functions could go a long way too (I think discord is more like that).
[+] [-] politelemon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dijit|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vegai_|4 years ago|reply
Slack. Almost nothing to do with work.
Discord. Almost nothing to do with communication.
[+] [-] skadamat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway743|4 years ago|reply
Know someone who works at a well known digital radio company. Prior to joining management they were in a coworkers channel where people vented about management, with the exception being them. Upon joining management they were asked why they didn't report on the gossip/venting earlier even though they never partook and it was explained that management was tracking all channels on the company's Slack. Those that were gossiping/venting all got let go