Curing Our Slack Addiction • Hacker News Board

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#31

Post by odonnellryan » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 3:08 AM UTC

cik2e wrote: post #28

Reading this article was honestly sickening. As I went on I got a growing sense of something horribly wrong with the author/culture of the company. And then these paragraphs all out confirmed my suspicions: > Slack forced me to evaluate things very fast and respond quickly, otherwise I would miss my opportunity to join a conversation before it moved onto something else. > Then there was the fact that we had so many c…

I dunno. The tool didn't work for the author.

Are they really to blame for this? It's an alternate view. One I don't agree with either: but that's fine. I don't have to agree with everything.

If it doesn't work for their team, they're saying "it didn't work for us: don't force it for you, too." I see nothing wrong with that.

You have a positive experience with Slack. I use Slack too.

One thing I an certain of, and this goes beyond Slack: people often spend a lot of time giving valuable input into a situation. That input should most definitely, absolutely, be read. If they didn't think it was important, they would not have spent the time on it.

Using chat applications like Slack, it's extremely easy to feel like others are skimming over that important information. Sometimes I get the feeling that I did not give an adequate response: it's only because I didn't have time.

I don't like coming across this way. Seems the author doesn't, either.

The author cares about their culture, and the business, in a very deep and obvious way. Maybe too much. Who's to judge?

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#32

Post by vitno » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 3:12 AM UTC

op00to wrote: post #19

subpixel wrote: post #9

> We all knew how great it would be to have a repository of knowledge for people to find their answers, but Slack was simply too good at providing the quick fix we all needed. I'm seeing this across numerous open source project communities, and it's really infuriating. B/c these communities are not paying Slack, they don't have access to archives, and of course it's all invisible to Google. So a valuable Q&A that mig…

Information dropping into a black hole happens in IRC on Freenode all day, every day. The issue isn't just Slack.

actually, most channels have logging. I've frequently stumbled across solutions on public (and indexed!) IRC logs.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#33

Post by prakashk » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 3:13 AM UTC

op00to wrote: post #19

subpixel wrote: post #9

> We all knew how great it would be to have a repository of knowledge for people to find their answers, but Slack was simply too good at providing the quick fix we all needed. I'm seeing this across numerous open source project communities, and it's really infuriating. B/c these communities are not paying Slack, they don't have access to archives, and of course it's all invisible to Google. So a valuable Q&A that mig…

Information dropping into a black hole happens in IRC on Freenode all day, every day. The issue isn't just Slack.

Many IRC channels are archived and the archives are searchable, so the information is not necessarily lost.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#34

Post by EGreg » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 3:21 AM UTC

I think the key takeaway is this:

And even if we had been successful in changing people’s behaviour, the lack of threading made it very difficult to have meaningful, deep conversations about complex subjects anyway. Before you could even fully understand the problem being discussed (let alone find a solution), someone would invariably start a new conversation or reply to a previous discussion that happened earlier in the channel.

Threaded, asynchronous discussions with notifications when someone actually replied to your message are much more useful.

And they can also be freaking decentralized and end-to-end encrypted! Woot!

I am building something like this. Anything like that exist?

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#35

Post by paulcole » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 3:26 AM UTC

> And the notifications are to die for. They are simply amazing and fun to receive.

This is where the article lost me. How are Slack notifications different from those in other services? I'm just not getting it.

To me, this is an example of somebody wanting to love something.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#36

Post by T2_t2 » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 3:27 AM UTC

llamataboot wrote: post #18

I have no idea why the answer to this problem is "using Basecamp!" - That doesn't make sense to me at all. For me the answer has been to turn off notifications and shut Slack when I need to go heads down, but review it multiple times a day and chime in where needed. It's still such a vast improvement over an email or email+issues based workflow.

The CEO of a flat company probably has a need to see everything, JIC. Not all use cases are equal.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#37

Post by vacri » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 3:31 AM UTC

educar wrote: post #29

Here's my best practices list: 1. The best use of slack is the free edition which has limited history. Once this lack of history is made clear, people use it simply for online pings. Since notes, files and everything will disappear, people will automatically put the effort to put those things in the right tools (wiki, bug tracker etc). 2. Don't expect people to be online. It's the same as irc. If people are there, th…

The integrations are indeed a gimmick. They consume so much space that they end up being shoved into their own channel, where nobody ever looks... so what was the point of them again?

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#38

Post by ramoq » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 3:32 AM UTC

cik2e wrote: post #28

Reading this article was honestly sickening. As I went on I got a growing sense of something horribly wrong with the author/culture of the company. And then these paragraphs all out confirmed my suspicions: > Slack forced me to evaluate things very fast and respond quickly, otherwise I would miss my opportunity to join a conversation before it moved onto something else. > Then there was the fact that we had so many c…

I think I'll stick with email from now on.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#39

Post by lttlrck » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 3:32 AM UTC

andrewfromx wrote: post #21

one day in our office slack was down from like 11:50am to 1:10 pm and it was perfect. It was like a big sign lit up in the office that said "TALK TO PEOPLE". Everyone took a much needed slack break and got lunch. Maybe the admin of a slack network should be able to enable that timeframe to be off everyday.

Slack admin can set a team wide do not disturb period. Users can override if they wish.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#40

Post by scrollaway » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 3:32 AM UTC

prakashk wrote: post #33

op00to wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Information dropping into a black hole happens in IRC on Freenode all day, every day. The issue isn't just Slack.

Many IRC channels are archived and the archives are searchable, so the information is not necessarily lost.

Archives are a start, but the problem is most channels are not indexed. There is no "google for irc" of sorts.

Even if the archives are searchable (the searches generally suck in the first place), who's going to know to go into this specific archive, for this specific channel, and search for this particular query?

As someone who was interested in this a few years ago: This is still an open problem for someone to solve. The solution isn't particularly hard, it's just nobody has really gotten to it yet.

(And yes, you may come across the odd irc conversation in your google searches once in a while - but it is not to scale with the immense amount of information that comes out of irc).