[puzzledobserver]

I think this is the real question to ask.

Does the complicated flowchart point to deficiencies in the Slack user interface? If the user cannot intuit the flowchart, then how can they (as several sibling comments rightly point out) reliably turn notifications on or off?

Algorithmic transparency should be a thing, no?

[swatcoder]

"Feature flag" development culture is in direct conflict with user's having intuitive, consistent experiences that they can model in their head.

If the vendor needs a database report to see what features the user may encounter in any given session, because it's an n-dimensional matrix that changes based on uncountably many factors, there is no mental modeling to be done. The user just experiences some idiosyncratic amalgam of code in each session, and the vendor watches aggregate metrics to make sure the number of users in immediate crisis remains below some threshold -- bringing in a $XXXX/hr on-call team to identify and apply some adequately impactful change if it breaks over. Meanwhile, the users-in-crisis cross their fingers that the next time they open the app, they get a better roll on the feature matrix and encounter a more tolerable subset of issues.

If you want to be able to understand your software and know how to turn things on and off, you need to demand a whole new (old) approach to building and publishing things. We're way off track right now.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Feature flag development culture is the only practical way to do continuous delivery. The old approach is still used in markets where it makes sense - database systems, for example, often have only a handful of releases per year. But there's a lot of markets where it's just not feasible to make customers wait 3-6 months between when you finish developing a feature and when it's available for use.

[mattmanser]

I think it more points to how different people behave, and so how channels end up needing different settings to deal with different sets of people.

Sometimes @channel is important, because everyone in the channel knows to use it sparingly.

Sometimes one person just constantly spams @channel in every message.

So you do need different settings.

So you need the nuance to deal with the nuance of people.

[kccqzy]

I disagree. Having read the original diagram, I believe it does a very good job of making precise what user intuition says the software should behave.