61–70 of 187 posts
My understanding: free CI runners for everybody, 10 USD promo code to new users. Considering that DigitalOcean has always been giving away 10 USD coupons to non-users, the promo code is quite irrelevant. But the free CI runners are great!
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.
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…
What you're describing is called email. Seriously - it is exactly this, right?
I guess if you use mailing lists for topics you can subscribe to, and cc'ing people for @mentions inviting them to reply, then yeah! Email can do it all. So why is email considered such a time sink? Because people don't filter conversations coming from the outside. But if they just set up a filter, then literally email is a Slack killer, no?
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.
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?
Sure it can be gimmick or it can be an extremely valuable tool and usually they are somewhere in-between.
In my own experience I've found they are a great replacement for many different types of email notifications such are exceptions from an application. Things you want to glance at and maybe take action on. When these are an email I have to "manage" them, choose where to put them or to delete them or whatever. And I eventually end up just filtering them into an inbox I rarely look at.
As a channel though it's just the right amount of attention and time to them. Took some time adjusting settings to get the right level of exceptions to show up and we still have them all in the exception tracker itself.
The other thing is I only check my email a couple times a day. because most of what goes into my inbox is not time sensitive. Whereas Slack is always on if I'm working so I will instantly see if there's a major issue on the site.
Of course every company is different and has different needs. But writing off all integrations as a gimmick is narrow minded.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For what it's worth, last week I asked for help with user testing a couple new features on a startup in three different Slack groups I'm a member of, and also via around 150 cold emails. Response rates were 21x better to the same ask in a cold email versus a Slack message. And this isn't just a one-off either, I've seen other people report the same thing consistently, where 'conversion' rates in response to even the…
Like IRC vs email. #shocker
Because of that it's not immediately obvious that Slack should be no different than just asking a Linux question in some random FreeNode channel or whatever. That's actually a pretty big issue that doesn't bode well for the longterm viability of Slack, if (for example) it turns out that it leads to significantly worse organizational decision-making than email due to lower participation rates.
Chat is toxic to productivity. Teams need to get questions answered 'eventually' (exactly when depends on the team) without interrupting each other.
I'm wondering if Slack will ever implement something like Sococo or teamspeak's always-on voice chat. If you have not seen these it's quite a weird idea. If you are in the channel your speakers are always-on. Someone can speak to you without dialing and without you answering. They can simply say "Hey Fred..." and start talking. I have not worked with these, but did try Sococo briefly. The way this would work in slack…
Like every voice-chat enabled computer game since the 90s; IRC style open channels, but audio.
Mumble is one free, encrypted (I think), cross platform one.
Chat is toxic to productivity. Teams need to get questions answered 'eventually' (exactly when depends on the team) without interrupting each other.
My understanding: free CI runners for everybody, 10 USD promo code to new users. Considering that DigitalOcean has always been giving away 10 USD coupons to non-users, the promo code is quite irrelevant. But the free CI runners are great!
Wrong article.