We adopted Slack and I hate it but use daily. What I find so frustrating with Slack is that it's
1. Super terrible at threading. Threads are clearly discouraged and don't nest. This appears to be by design, but even Usenet handled threading better.
2. Slack is an information wastebasket - at least in my experience it's really hard to find information once there's a significant traffic in a deployment.
3. Too Much Notification! I have to mute channels that has a high rate of addressing the channel.
However there's no denying that it's popular. Seems like every place I go is using Slack. At least slack allows me to edit my typos.
Slack is a tool, and like all tools it can be used badly. You work at a company that uses it badly.
- No one should be using Slack for deep, branching conversations that require nested threads. Those would be lost and hard to refer back to in any system. Learn to separate and focus on things better.
- Slack is not a documentation system or a knowledge base, and shouldn't be treated like one. Pull salient points out of Slack chats and into a better place for holding information you'll go back to. I genuinely believe that Slack's crappy search tool is a feature. It discourages using Slack history as documentation.
- No one should be using channel wide messaging to the point where people are annoyed enough to mute notifications. Those people should be regulating what they broadcast, and use email instead when things need to be seen by lots of people.
Slack is a great tool for short form conversations, checkins, and automated notifications. But that's all. Using it for something that it's not fit for won't work, but that's not Slack's fault.
Totally agree with this, not to mention that chat apps are some of the most boring, uninteresting, and braindead "problems" to solve and they have been basically completely "solved" over and over again since bulletin boards.
I remember at a previous company there were discussions on what to go with (HipChat/Stride had just been killed by Atlassian) and Zulip seemed to be the best free solution. But ultimately we went with Slack.
The word "enterprise" is notable in its absence in the article. Framing your problem as "enterprise xxx" would evoke Teams and HipChat, not improved Slack.
>Slack is based on IRC and is a messaging client. It was built for synchronous communication and not for collaboration. As a result, the way to scale Slack for a large company is to create more and more channels. This increases the amount of information generated in a company. Whilst this can be a good thing, Slack users don’t have the ability to filter high-quality information from low-quality. [emphasis mine]
This is the crux of the issue for me personally. The way Slack handles notifications and badges creates basically only three levels of importance: read this immediately, read this relatively quickly, or never read this. That works for small teams in which the gap between the second and third option is rather small. However as companies grow they generate more data and a huge gulf starts to form between the second and third option. There is now a wealth of information that necessitates a "you might want to read this eventually" category. Yet Slack provides no native way to handle this and the end result is that either you subject yourself to frequent interruptions for messages that aren't relevant to you or you ignore messages that are.
One thing I think Teams does well in this space, and where I feel Slack falls short, is the organisation of channels.
With Teams you can put people in... well teams, and each team has channels and other data associated with it. This hierarchy makes it easy for people to keep a multitude of channels and data organised without actually having to do it themselves.
Another thing I have to (begrudgingly) concede to Teams is that it's essentially "free" and from the perspective of an exec it does the same thing as Slack + has better video conferencing. Even simple things like meeting with 3rd parties is very easy to do on Teams - just send an invite. Whether or not the A/V actually works during the call or peoples PC's don't run out of memory mid-meeting is another matter, but on paper it looks good.
Teams also has the BEST accessibility (at least for live captioning).
I have not used Google Meet or anything, but I'm constantly surprised by the level of sophistication from Teams live captioning and transcripts. You can be watching it "type" in real time. It'll write the wrong word, but several seconds later (as the person has added more context) you see the word, or even sentence completely change to be more on point! It's wonderful.
Teams makes it hard to form opinions about its potential good ideas because the totality of the user experience is so abysmal, a bit like it's hard to appreciate a details of craftmanship of a torture device from the victim POV.
We use Slack at work, and I hate it. The ratio of Signal to Noise is brutal, and there's no accountability.
But the issue is not Slack per se, Slack does what Slack does: synchronous, instant, INFORMAL communication.
If we want better processes we don't need a better Slack, we need better processes and enforcing better habits.
If we want traceability of information, we need data-rich communications and structured communications, and we have other tools to do that, from emails to databases to actual systems that reside outside Slack.
So now the problem is enforceability and not the tool per se.
My favorite solution is an Agile organization with Agile team. Vertically integrated where each lead has 4-5 reports, each responsible for projects, processes and documentation.
The problem to adoption is that the C-suite doesn't understand processes, and leads don't want to be bothered.
So the broken information system enterprise continue its crippled path, akin to walking in the dark.
The enterprise needs process innovation, not technical innovation.
I think Twist is the right answer. It's basically a forum, which is nice because:
- people have to write "real messages", with a beginning, middle, and end. Subject line.
- Doesn't suffer from e-mail's "I wasn't on the original to/cc" problem where information is completely silo'd by default
- Messages by default need to be categorized and a bit organized. Less of a firehose
E-mail gets a lot of shit, but from my experience the biggest issue is just the transmission issue. Forums/stuff like Twist solve this nicely, in my opinion.
I think Twist is totally undersold as the future. If only they would put custom emoji (this is, I swear, a blocker for moving to it at $JOB. In a full/mostly remote world, we want ways of expressing at least a bit of company culture!)
Really you want a mix of tools, of course. You want stuff for synchronous discussions, you want recorded minutes/"serious discussions", you want a place where you write up big documentation (Confluence/xWiki etc).... there's not gonna be a single tool that solves it all. And if you have shitty communication culture, all tools are going to be miserable. But there are interesting tools that go beyond "messaging" out there!
I use Twist daily and it seems abandoned. There are few UI/UX problems that hurt me constantly and I don't remember when was the last time the app was updated.
I think Zulip has the potential to become a dominant solution in this space if they find way to make the UI as appealing as Slack. Zulip offers a new approach on how to structure discussions by threads while still being a chat application with a “linear” flow.
I switched companies which meant moving from Zulip to Slack. I don’t understand why people like Slack or what they like about the UI.
Threading is terrible, async catchup is difficult, gif links don’t convert cleanly, group DMs are limited to 8 users then Slack suggests creating a new channel…?!
I'm actually really interesting in this. What are the top 3 things you could change in slack / teams that would make you switch. I'll go first:
* Notifications settings are annoying I'm either swamped with notifications or miss them. I want to be able to switch of notifications for short periods
* I want to group discussions about certain things. I.e. if we are discussing a JIRA issue I can select the message and group them into something that I can attach to the issue we are discussing
* Too many private chats - I'd like to ban private chats as I find there's some great info in these which are often not shared to the group
Notifications need to be more intelligent — if Mary rarely posts in a channel (or joined the channel just to post) it might be worth more attention than John who keeps pressing enter mid stream of consciousness.
If you've a long running channel like a "developers channel" it probably has some bot integrations — "the last PR failed linting". It should be possible to mute these without muting the whole channel.
A lot of problems come down to company culture though. I think the hard work of fostering good practices is something outside of a tool's remit.
Maybe it should be a point on people's annual review if you want to get people to use it as less of a rubbish bin. "Sorry Peter, you won't get a pay rise this year as you sent an at-channel message to the team every day in Feb even when we told you that was really disruptive"(!) Most places don't care about these efficiencies enough though (yet). E.g. if people were as wasteful with company expense accounts as they are with other people's attention it would definitely get sorted out.
I'd add security to the list of things to address.
Aggregating all of the institutional knowledge of the company to one perpetually searchable global workspace hosted in a US company's shared cloud vulnerable to being downloaded and abused by a global breakin or any compromised employee account is bad.
I thought much the same. Controlling the custody and flow of information is impossible with tens of thousands of users and pretty much no policies or significant monitoring in place.
It’s wild that Google, despite being the leader in startup email/business software and literally giving their Slack competitor to everyone for free as part of their Google Business subscription, STILL has such low mindshare in this space that it didn’t even merit a mention in the blog post.
(Full disclosure: my company used Google Chat, and I find the integration ecosystem so pitiful that I’m constantly thinking about paying up for Slack. I don’t know how Google is screwing this market up so badly.)
I think the issue (read on HN a lot of comments about the subject) is that there is no unified vision/goal inside Google, there are a lot of teams with different goals and visions, but it seems that the most common goal for their employees is to get enough merits to get promoted, forget about the old project and jump into a new one (because new things give you merits to continue climbing).
I could be wrong, with no insight information this was my conclusion after reading comments and also seen too many products killed by Google, even releasing new worst products to replace old ones that were better.
Especially because they came so close so early with Google Wave! That was it, I think, but Google didn't have the confidence at the time to stick with it, and it was just too unpolished to keep out in the public at a time when everyone thought that whatever Google did was gold.
Seriously, I think the Wave ideas were the ones that hit the perfect feature-set for informal electronic business communication.
For personal use, GChat has really been hurt ever since they merged it into Mail. It's much harder to share files and access now. Also they took away video for some reason
I have used Slack, Teams and Discord. If I should choose one I would go for Discord. Discord is much better in the collaboration department for distributed teams, and I love their open audio channels. It just works. Teams is good when it comes to integration with office and onedrive (of course). Slack is, in my opinion, just another chat service. A hugely successful one with a big user base and a strong brand, but not superior when it comes to collaboration.
> 2. Slack clone but with Feature X. Feature X is usually something like task management, project management, notes etc. Examples of these apps are Chanty, Rock.so, Flock, Ryver, Twist (there are many more).
> The problem with the apps in the second category is that they end up competing with two existing tools.
I use 4 written communication tools:
1. Slack for (a) async & sync team chat (b) async company/other-teams channels
2. Email for formal company communication (I don't send email, other than auto calendar invites)
3. git/GitHub for project work
4. Google Docs for RFCs
In addition there are sync meets and pairing sessions.
The only thing that I find missing is a good shared whiteboard and hallway/watercooler chats.
The problem with Slack exists between chair and keyboard--it's about finding a way to use it that works. If the culture is for anyone to post arbitrary volume in a large channel, then that's on you. Similarly if your company/teams create too many channels that many people should be in, you're doing it wrong. My policy is that if there's more than X people in a channel I don't need to pay attention (except for the 1 official company announcements channel).
In 2016, I was hoping slack or a competitor would take a native desktop application, but ultimately found slack's problem's managable.
It's a shame that instead of literally any progress or competition at all, the industry is regressing rapidly into the slower, buggier, and in every way I can think of, just all around inferior product called "teams".
I'm always curious about how different teams have "solved" whiteboarding with distributed teams, as they are normally then not whiteboarding but using a collaborative diagramming tool which is much too restrictive.
The closest I've found is making sure everyone has a decent sized tablet and using Google Jam.
Slack _is_ missing some basic functionality for keeping yourself organized when receiving a bunch of info, it's not just about the people. Especially when it's the replacement for corporate e-mail.
Dumb example: you are in N threads. You want to remove yourself from those threads. You can turn off being notified from them one-by-one (refreshing the page to actually have them disappear). Compare with e-mail, where you can quickly select a bunch of threads and just hit "archive".
>I spent nearly 4 years working on Workplace from Meta, so I’m familiar with building in this space.
Some VC guy said this is one of the biggest red flags he looks for in a startup. It almost always leads to failure. I dont remember the exact reasons but something like it means the startup doesnt understand fundamental market segment issues and grit required to overcome them.
I have a similar 'rule' (advising to small businesses) - as a company scales from 1 to 12 to 35 to 120 to 1000 people [1], they move through different phases.
So I see a lot of my clients in the 12-35 person 'Process' phase being excited when they hire someone from a 120+ person company, because of all the expertise they can bring. But that 'Strategy' phase expertise, often when they have a full team and budget to execute their ideas, rarely translates to a smaller business where they also have to roll up their sleeves and GSD.
Sitting in a team building stuff for Meta is definitely a whole other ballpark to convincing Dave's Accounting LLC to give your Slack-competitor a chance.
I've long held the opinion the best chat app is no chat app, i.e. delegate everything to your favorite issue tracker and other forms of knowledge keeping (e.g. Git commits, design documents).
Let everything be either fully 'literate' (for lack of a better term: abundant context, complete paragraphs and argumentation, hyperlinking), or fully sync and human (meetings), with no in between other than email, used thinly.
I'd wager that this approach will be increasingly obvious as more people burn out from messy remote settings - many of which were improvised due to the pandemic, yet are here to stay.
It's a model that has worked well for OSS - many projects do just fine with Github alone, sustainably, for years.
I work for a company distributed across the world with ~200 users in our 'watercooler' channel. I can't think of a better alternative to Slack that would enable everyone to stay in touch and feel part of a community. Email, forums, or — god forbid — enormous video chats would be overkill.
It feels to me that the type of communication slack is used for can't scale to a huge company, rather than it being a tooling issue. It's useful to be able to pull disparate people into a channel when working on a project, or to be able to find someone from another team to ask a question. But, expecting people to be able to discuss things with everyone from a large organisation all of the time just seems destined for failure.
At a certain size it probably makes sense to have actual humans in each department working out what communication needs to flow to the rest of the organisation and moving it in a different tool. Maybe links to those "publications" are posted in an all hands channel that most people have muted until they're ready to sit down and catch up with what everybody else is doing, but I can't imagine a situation where they should be getting notifications in real time about it.
Not to get off topic but the problem I find (consistently) with online comms (i.e., email, Slack, Teams, FB Groups, LinkedIn, etc.) is subpar human to human communication skills.
Typically, adding (unnecessary) friction is: vagueness or ambiguity. We can't read each others' minds. We're not sitting in each other's seats / moments. My current context (i.e., what I'm focused on) has influence on where my thought process can go next. Dropping your without-warning thought bomb in the middle of that without a hint of context is too assuming. Assumption-based Comms creates unnecessary noise and friction.
And yes, these missteps at scale certainly don't help.
I think the author should invest in learning the keyboard shortcuts and search more often. They’re great and allow me to move around slack with ease. Also reminders for things you don’t want to think about at the moment work well too
The noise issue seems tool agnostic to me, if you converse with noisy people who are sporadic with posting and put important messages in threads/channels with less visibility then you’d have issues no matter what tool you use. Does anyone ever read a company wide email longer than 1 paragraph anyway? At least with slack you can search it
Matrix is even more overwhelming than slack in the same sense that email is more overwhelming than lotus notes. Maybe overwhelming is fine if the use for the tech isn't siloed to solving communication in only one part of their life.
I cant believe I read Slack and fast in one sentence.
We use mattermost and its mostly OK to the point i'm willing to use it which cannot be said about Slack. Forcing me to have Slack open all the time was reason I left a job. It was unbearable.
It's surprising to read that. No one at work hates it so much, afaik. I wonder what's different about our channel lineup, usage habits, or anything else that is such a contrast to your experience.
I think is fast if you compare with the other products mentioned, I hope they get their shit together (Slack and Teams) and build a real native app that is fast and use a lot less ram.
Some have described it as a structured Notion, but it combines lots of functionality from project management, to org charts, to threads and discussion, as well as knowledge management.
FullyFunctional|3 years ago
1. Super terrible at threading. Threads are clearly discouraged and don't nest. This appears to be by design, but even Usenet handled threading better.
2. Slack is an information wastebasket - at least in my experience it's really hard to find information once there's a significant traffic in a deployment.
3. Too Much Notification! I have to mute channels that has a high rate of addressing the channel.
However there's no denying that it's popular. Seems like every place I go is using Slack. At least slack allows me to edit my typos.
onion2k|3 years ago
- No one should be using Slack for deep, branching conversations that require nested threads. Those would be lost and hard to refer back to in any system. Learn to separate and focus on things better.
- Slack is not a documentation system or a knowledge base, and shouldn't be treated like one. Pull salient points out of Slack chats and into a better place for holding information you'll go back to. I genuinely believe that Slack's crappy search tool is a feature. It discourages using Slack history as documentation.
- No one should be using channel wide messaging to the point where people are annoyed enough to mute notifications. Those people should be regulating what they broadcast, and use email instead when things need to be seen by lots of people.
Slack is a great tool for short form conversations, checkins, and automated notifications. But that's all. Using it for something that it's not fit for won't work, but that's not Slack's fault.
pjmlp|3 years ago
mattwad|3 years ago
icelancer|3 years ago
cyberpunk|3 years ago
Getting into enterprise IM in 2022 is complete idiocy, but… Good luck.
We already have the solution, it’s zulip, yet no one uses it or cares.
> Slack is based on IRC
Not true any more, maybe in ancient history.
> It was built for synchronous communication.
Also wrong.
dvt|3 years ago
jamesfinlayson|3 years ago
FateOfNations|3 years ago
> Not true any more, maybe in ancient history.
I see that comparison more in the conceptual sense, rather than using the actual IRC protocol.
fulafel|3 years ago
slg|3 years ago
This is the crux of the issue for me personally. The way Slack handles notifications and badges creates basically only three levels of importance: read this immediately, read this relatively quickly, or never read this. That works for small teams in which the gap between the second and third option is rather small. However as companies grow they generate more data and a huge gulf starts to form between the second and third option. There is now a wealth of information that necessitates a "you might want to read this eventually" category. Yet Slack provides no native way to handle this and the end result is that either you subject yourself to frequent interruptions for messages that aren't relevant to you or you ignore messages that are.
1123581321|3 years ago
epivosism|3 years ago
synicalx|3 years ago
With Teams you can put people in... well teams, and each team has channels and other data associated with it. This hierarchy makes it easy for people to keep a multitude of channels and data organised without actually having to do it themselves.
Another thing I have to (begrudgingly) concede to Teams is that it's essentially "free" and from the perspective of an exec it does the same thing as Slack + has better video conferencing. Even simple things like meeting with 3rd parties is very easy to do on Teams - just send an invite. Whether or not the A/V actually works during the call or peoples PC's don't run out of memory mid-meeting is another matter, but on paper it looks good.
veb|3 years ago
I have not used Google Meet or anything, but I'm constantly surprised by the level of sophistication from Teams live captioning and transcripts. You can be watching it "type" in real time. It'll write the wrong word, but several seconds later (as the person has added more context) you see the word, or even sentence completely change to be more on point! It's wonderful.
I hope they continue to improve that. '
fulafel|3 years ago
happymellon|3 years ago
Not sure why, but I find it to be the worst way of communicating anything.
SMAAART|3 years ago
But the issue is not Slack per se, Slack does what Slack does: synchronous, instant, INFORMAL communication.
If we want better processes we don't need a better Slack, we need better processes and enforcing better habits.
If we want traceability of information, we need data-rich communications and structured communications, and we have other tools to do that, from emails to databases to actual systems that reside outside Slack.
So now the problem is enforceability and not the tool per se.
My favorite solution is an Agile organization with Agile team. Vertically integrated where each lead has 4-5 reports, each responsible for projects, processes and documentation.
The problem to adoption is that the C-suite doesn't understand processes, and leads don't want to be bothered.
So the broken information system enterprise continue its crippled path, akin to walking in the dark.
The enterprise needs process innovation, not technical innovation.
rtpg|3 years ago
- people have to write "real messages", with a beginning, middle, and end. Subject line.
- Doesn't suffer from e-mail's "I wasn't on the original to/cc" problem where information is completely silo'd by default
- Messages by default need to be categorized and a bit organized. Less of a firehose
E-mail gets a lot of shit, but from my experience the biggest issue is just the transmission issue. Forums/stuff like Twist solve this nicely, in my opinion.
I think Twist is totally undersold as the future. If only they would put custom emoji (this is, I swear, a blocker for moving to it at $JOB. In a full/mostly remote world, we want ways of expressing at least a bit of company culture!)
Really you want a mix of tools, of course. You want stuff for synchronous discussions, you want recorded minutes/"serious discussions", you want a place where you write up big documentation (Confluence/xWiki etc).... there's not gonna be a single tool that solves it all. And if you have shitty communication culture, all tools are going to be miserable. But there are interesting tools that go beyond "messaging" out there!
maarf|3 years ago
ngrilly|3 years ago
molsongolden|3 years ago
Threading is terrible, async catchup is difficult, gif links don’t convert cleanly, group DMs are limited to 8 users then Slack suggests creating a new channel…?!
jimkleiber|3 years ago
Are there any specific UI recommendations you'd give?
Dave3of5|3 years ago
* Notifications settings are annoying I'm either swamped with notifications or miss them. I want to be able to switch of notifications for short periods
* I want to group discussions about certain things. I.e. if we are discussing a JIRA issue I can select the message and group them into something that I can attach to the issue we are discussing
* Too many private chats - I'd like to ban private chats as I find there's some great info in these which are often not shared to the group
another-dave|3 years ago
If you've a long running channel like a "developers channel" it probably has some bot integrations — "the last PR failed linting". It should be possible to mute these without muting the whole channel.
A lot of problems come down to company culture though. I think the hard work of fostering good practices is something outside of a tool's remit.
Maybe it should be a point on people's annual review if you want to get people to use it as less of a rubbish bin. "Sorry Peter, you won't get a pay rise this year as you sent an at-channel message to the team every day in Feb even when we told you that was really disruptive"(!) Most places don't care about these efficiencies enough though (yet). E.g. if people were as wasteful with company expense accounts as they are with other people's attention it would definitely get sorted out.
fulafel|3 years ago
Aggregating all of the institutional knowledge of the company to one perpetually searchable global workspace hosted in a US company's shared cloud vulnerable to being downloaded and abused by a global breakin or any compromised employee account is bad.
calvano915|3 years ago
peterbonney|3 years ago
(Full disclosure: my company used Google Chat, and I find the integration ecosystem so pitiful that I’m constantly thinking about paying up for Slack. I don’t know how Google is screwing this market up so badly.)
norman784|3 years ago
I could be wrong, with no insight information this was my conclusion after reading comments and also seen too many products killed by Google, even releasing new worst products to replace old ones that were better.
schimmy_changa|3 years ago
Seriously, I think the Wave ideas were the ones that hit the perfect feature-set for informal electronic business communication.
mattwad|3 years ago
renewiltord|3 years ago
grandinj|3 years ago
And then, of course they killed it and made it a web UI thing and made it majorly worse at the same time
Manheim|3 years ago
robertlagrant|3 years ago
Erm. Not sure someone who's used it would say that :-)
LilBytes|3 years ago
karmakaze|3 years ago
> 2. Slack clone but with Feature X. Feature X is usually something like task management, project management, notes etc. Examples of these apps are Chanty, Rock.so, Flock, Ryver, Twist (there are many more).
> The problem with the apps in the second category is that they end up competing with two existing tools.
I use 4 written communication tools:
1. Slack for (a) async & sync team chat (b) async company/other-teams channels
2. Email for formal company communication (I don't send email, other than auto calendar invites)
3. git/GitHub for project work
4. Google Docs for RFCs
In addition there are sync meets and pairing sessions.
The only thing that I find missing is a good shared whiteboard and hallway/watercooler chats.
The problem with Slack exists between chair and keyboard--it's about finding a way to use it that works. If the culture is for anyone to post arbitrary volume in a large channel, then that's on you. Similarly if your company/teams create too many channels that many people should be in, you're doing it wrong. My policy is that if there's more than X people in a channel I don't need to pay attention (except for the 1 official company announcements channel).
antifa|3 years ago
It's a shame that instead of literally any progress or competition at all, the industry is regressing rapidly into the slower, buggier, and in every way I can think of, just all around inferior product called "teams".
happymellon|3 years ago
The closest I've found is making sure everyone has a decent sized tablet and using Google Jam.
rtpg|3 years ago
Dumb example: you are in N threads. You want to remove yourself from those threads. You can turn off being notified from them one-by-one (refreshing the page to actually have them disappear). Compare with e-mail, where you can quickly select a bunch of threads and just hit "archive".
Lapz|3 years ago
citizenpaul|3 years ago
Some VC guy said this is one of the biggest red flags he looks for in a startup. It almost always leads to failure. I dont remember the exact reasons but something like it means the startup doesnt understand fundamental market segment issues and grit required to overcome them.
JacobAldridge|3 years ago
So I see a lot of my clients in the 12-35 person 'Process' phase being excited when they hire someone from a 120+ person company, because of all the expertise they can bring. But that 'Strategy' phase expertise, often when they have a full team and budget to execute their ideas, rarely translates to a smaller business where they also have to roll up their sleeves and GSD.
Sitting in a team building stuff for Meta is definitely a whole other ballpark to convincing Dave's Accounting LLC to give your Slack-competitor a chance.
[1] https://jacobaldridge.com/business/the-growth-transitions-th...
mikebenfield|3 years ago
meitros|3 years ago
vemv|3 years ago
Let everything be either fully 'literate' (for lack of a better term: abundant context, complete paragraphs and argumentation, hyperlinking), or fully sync and human (meetings), with no in between other than email, used thinly.
I'd wager that this approach will be increasingly obvious as more people burn out from messy remote settings - many of which were improvised due to the pandemic, yet are here to stay.
It's a model that has worked well for OSS - many projects do just fine with Github alone, sustainably, for years.
oneeyedpigeon|3 years ago
PikachuEXE|3 years ago
You can take a look at https://blog.doist.com/async-first/
fnord123|3 years ago
What's the biggest OSS project you know of with no IRC, Discord, Slack or other chat presence?
bengale|3 years ago
At a certain size it probably makes sense to have actual humans in each department working out what communication needs to flow to the rest of the organisation and moving it in a different tool. Maybe links to those "publications" are posted in an all hands channel that most people have muted until they're ready to sit down and catch up with what everybody else is doing, but I can't imagine a situation where they should be getting notifications in real time about it.
chiefalchemist|3 years ago
Typically, adding (unnecessary) friction is: vagueness or ambiguity. We can't read each others' minds. We're not sitting in each other's seats / moments. My current context (i.e., what I'm focused on) has influence on where my thought process can go next. Dropping your without-warning thought bomb in the middle of that without a hint of context is too assuming. Assumption-based Comms creates unnecessary noise and friction.
And yes, these missteps at scale certainly don't help.
chupchap|3 years ago
1. Costing
2. Who will manage it and how integrated is it with everything that exists
3. How much manual effort and time is needed to set it up and maintain it?
4. Who will provide long-term support? Will the company be around in five years for sure?
5. Who else is using it?
6. Does it work on all platforms?
Quality is not a quantified criteria and it is because of these questions raised that a lot of bigger enterprises end of with Teams.
From what I have seen, the decision to use Slack is made bottom-up, which is not how most orgs work.
Lastly, most companies in the world are not massive to have scaling issues. Even in those that are massive, most of the teams work in silos.
lamplovin|3 years ago
The noise issue seems tool agnostic to me, if you converse with noisy people who are sporadic with posting and put important messages in threads/channels with less visibility then you’d have issues no matter what tool you use. Does anyone ever read a company wide email longer than 1 paragraph anyway? At least with slack you can search it
httpz|3 years ago
Slack is good for realtime discussions but it's really hard to find a conversation from last week or a popular discussion that I should read.
For any topic that doesn't have to be discussed realtime, I just want a front page sorted Hacker News style based on upvotes and recency.
This will also make it easier to find the context of a decision years down the road.
disgruntledphd2|3 years ago
kevincox|3 years ago
1. Everyone subscribes everyone to tons of notifications and people send email to everyone.
2. Everyone gets too much email and starts ignoring it.
3. Everyone hates email, no one responds.
4. They switch to Slack. It is great, high signal-to-noise, channels to organize.
5. People start adding notifications, subscriptions, blasting messages to many channels.
6. You are back to all of the problems of email.
smorgusofborg|3 years ago
Matrix is even more overwhelming than slack in the same sense that email is more overwhelming than lotus notes. Maybe overwhelming is fine if the use for the tech isn't siloed to solving communication in only one part of their life.
hexo|3 years ago
We use mattermost and its mostly OK to the point i'm willing to use it which cannot be said about Slack. Forcing me to have Slack open all the time was reason I left a job. It was unbearable.
Jailbird|3 years ago
norman784|3 years ago
brixtonbrew|3 years ago
That's the central thesis behind Qatalog - which is really cool. It says it's a 'Work Hub that helps teams collaborate at scale'. Read more here if interested - https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-founder-ceo-tariq-rauf...
Some have described it as a structured Notion, but it combines lots of functionality from project management, to org charts, to threads and discussion, as well as knowledge management.