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Curing Our Slack Addiction

blog.agilebits.com

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Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#71

Post by educar »

cracell wrote: post #65
vacri wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Completely disagree. There's a tons and tons of ways to use them. 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"…

It's a gimmick based on why you came to use the tool. My understanding is that it's goal is for team communication and all these alerts are simply distracting.

But maybe slack should position itself as an advanced alert management tool (which is what many seem to use it for).

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#72

Post by awinter-py »

cyphar wrote: post #67
awinter-py wrote: post #25

Chat is toxic to productivity. Teams need to get questions answered 'eventually' (exactly when depends on the team) without interrupting each other.

Except sometimes you're blocked on something and need to know the answer now to finish a task. If you switch to something else while waiting for a 2 minute answer, you end up wasting a lot of your time.

Interruptions are sometimes time-savers for the interruptor but they're costly to the interuptee.

Some problems are important and merit an interruption, yes. But if you build a culture around instant communication, your worst people will drag down your best people.

The default should be digest mode (and god help me because my 50 year-old desk-neighbor said that to me 2 years ago and at the time I thought 'man this is an old human being').

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#73

Post by greenspot »

I really do not get this hype around Slack.

Chat, group chat, video conferencing are nothing special. These applications are commodities and included with so many other apps. Eg. if you use Google Apps/Mail you get the fantastic Hangout for free, working on all devices.

Moreover, every time I login Slack it feels so crowded. If you want to change something you have to navigate through a forest of settings here and there.

Finally, chatting and being messaged is the best thing to get out of flow and to get ADD. Messaging is great, group messaging too but use it rather for important stuff.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#74

Post by rekoros »

mmaunder wrote: post #46
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…

I disagree. Twitter integration is great because it gives us a way to have tweets about our brand appear and we can discuss each one if needed. Munin integration via our bot just alerted us to the Linode DDoS today. We've created our own bot which recognizes bug ID's and expands the bug with title, description and status and a link. Same with support tickets. Also our bot can draw cows on demand. Very important that.

Twitter-wise, even better is to respond from Slack to tweets in real time with this integration — https://sameroom.io/integrations/respond-to-twitter-from-sla... [0]

[0] shameless

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#75

Post by bhuga »

Slack does a good job overall, but I'm glad to see articles like this one challenging the enthusiasm that they've seen of late. I'm starting to share the article's opinion that Slack encourages unthoughtful communication. I do wish the author had spent a little time pointing out some specific product decisions that lead to the kinds of problematic communication they were seeing.

For example, basic product choices like "every message highlights a room for attention" creates, for me, a feeling of "farmville for corporate communications." There's always another channel to click, another few sentences to read. This makes Slack very engaging at first, and makes it highly successful at lodging itself into organizations. And that's great, because Slack's a far sight better than email. But this rapid-fire feel encourages synchronous communications, and everyone quickly learns that @-mentions and DMs get quicker responses. That in turn leads to communicating with individuals instead of teams (or instead of searching issues, or Jira, or a wiki, or whatever). I don't think chat has to be this way; product decisions can encourage a more thoughtful question and answer flow.

I think that Chat may be like product management: the product opinions matter quite a bit, and teams have varying styles, so there's room in the market for several different products. Slack does a great job for a certain communication style, but it's not the only style out there. I hope some competing products with different opinions gain enough traction to keep them honest.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#76

Post by subsection1h »

dingo_bat wrote: post #53
tootie wrote: post #12

I love electronic communication and Slack in particular. For a distributed team, it's an absolute must that every important chat happen on Slack. Stuff spoken in person is imprecise, secretive and easily forgotten. Slack is clear, persistent, and public. Everyone is on the same page. I too feel the need to read every conversation, but compare that to having those conversations just happening without my knowledge. The…

>Stuff spoken in person is imprecise, secretive and easily forgotten. Slack is clear, persistent, and public. I don't get how verbal stuff is imprecise but slack is clear. I find it to be the opposite. It's much better to have a face-to-face chat or a voice chat than converse in writing. It's more clear and you can get more feedback from the other person. Also, if you need to be more precise, you can just write stuff…

When you talk to people, they're more likely to support their assertions by citing sources with precision than when they write? Really? When I talk to people, I get a lot of "I read somewhere that X is true" and "I heard from someone that Y is true". And when I request sources, they say they'll get back to me, but they rarely do.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#77

Post by Strom »

dingo_bat wrote: post #55
mgpc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're describing is called email. Seriously - it is exactly this, right?

I've always wondered about the viability of an email client that behaves like a chat client. Instant send with the enter key, messages in bubbles, etc. You get all the fun of IM without additional infrastructure or services, and in a standard way too. No walled gardens of different apps.

Could be a pretty cool UI solution to have a chat client that uses PGP encrypted e-mail in the background, but Gmail SMTP has a send limit of 100 e-mails per day. You would run into that rather quickly with a chat UI.

I guess the chat client could do all the e-mail sending from some of their maintainer e-mail servers and not from under the chat participant e-mail. Then we would start losing comaptibility with other e-mail clients though. Although not completely, as we could set Reply-To headers and when another e-mail client replies to user1234@chat-client.com, we could just forward it to the correct e-mail.

An interesting concept indeed.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#78

Post by paulcole »

dceddia wrote: post #48
paulcole wrote: post #35

> 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.

In my experience comparing Slack vs HipChat (limited experience, but still), Slack's notifications were more reliable. As in, Slack was smarter about figuring out when I'd locked my laptop, or the screensaver had activated, and then it would re-route notifications to my phone. It does this pretty flawlessly, compared to HipChat that would mess it up sometimes (and so we were never quite sure whether to trust it).

OK, that clears things up a bit. I don't use Slack on mobile, only the desktop app on Mac.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#79

Post by zvrba »

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…

Sharing files is another convenience which is also in the free edition.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#80

Post by alanh »

Off-topic, but: AgileBits is one of my favorite companies ever.

- Fantastic product

- … which genuinely helps people

- … which has evolved and matured in an impeccable manner

- … which has, as far as I’m aware, never failed critically (no data loss or security breaches – hell, they are so proactive that 1Password saves multiple DB backups for you just in case they eventually mess up)

- … which sports good and native apps for all major platforms, including icky ones I’m sure the founders don’t prefer. (They have this in common with WhatsApp!)

- Helpful, knowledgeable, and quick support

- Didn’t shut the company down after 2, 3, 4, or 10 years just because they weren’t on track to be a billion dollar company in the next few quarters

Whatever culture these guys have? Copy that.

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