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Curing Our Slack Addiction

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Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#81

Post by makeitsuckless »

T2_t2 wrote: post #36
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.

> The CEO of a flat company probably has a need to see everything

And Slack does an excellent job at demonstrating why that is idealistic nonsense and simply bad management that doesn't work, simply by making it possible to actually see almost _everything_.

It's one of the great things about Slack, it's much like Scrum in that respect: it may not be the answer, but it sure as hell will confront you with what the actual questions are.

Unfortunately, people who don't want to face their problems will immediately turn around and blame the tool/method. So very typical.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#83

Post by stephengillie »

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…

> 2. Don't expect people to be online. It's the same as irc. If people are there, they are expecting to be interrupted / they are feeling helpful at that moment.

One of the reasons I don't like Slack is that people contact me when I'm off shift. I support APAC and so work different hours from most of my company. If I have a problem, I have to either email someone, or DM someone who isn't online. Either way, my voice goes into the black hole. Likewise, they return my DM in the morning, and their reply goes into the void if Slack doesn't wake me.

But with our corporate culture buying into the "always online" concept of Slack, I can't easily communicate how email-like it can be.

Slack isn't necessarily the problem in many situations. The problem is often how the tool highlights personal and culture problems instead of helping to smooth them over, by making them less evident. Email and other asynchronous communication can hide gaps in an organization by removing the pressure to respond immediately.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#84

Post by teen »

My last 2 companies used slack. I thought it was amazing. After being at a company that doesn't use slack, I realized how terrible it was for productivity and also gossip.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#85

Post by mmaunder »

rekoros wrote: post #74
mmaunder wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks for sharing. A channel for every tweet would create a lot of channels for us. We've had a few hundred tweets today. https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=wordf...

In general our workflow is to have 2 people in the org able to reply to tweets. And the rest of us are the peanut gallery just expressing what we think in the channel. So it works better to have it read-only in a single channel - at least for our purposes.

Right now we just see name, username, link and tweet. So it might be useful to unfurl that a little and show number of followers/following and give permissions to specific usernames to reply in-channel. Also create @channel or @username alerts when a twitter user has more than X followers - although I really hate that idea because I've seen people who (I'm pretty sure) buy followers bullying companies on twitter to get VIP treatment - but I guess that could be useful too.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#86

Post by HappyTypist »

bhuga wrote: post #75

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 lik…

I agree. What I'd like to see is to batch room highlights when you're not mentioned. For example, allow me to batch highlights every 30 mins, and then the temptation to read everything goes away.

Better copy/paste (like most IM apps) would also make it easier to copy/paste some discussion into your bug tracker of choice.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#87

Post by HappyTypist »

scrollaway wrote: post #40
prakashk wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 solv…

Every single open source project's IRC channel I've seen is logged and searchable, with a link in the topic.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#89

Post by rekoros »

mmaunder wrote: post #85
rekoros wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks for sharing. A channel for every tweet would create a lot of channels for us. We've had a few hundred tweets today. https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=wordf... In general our workflow is to have 2 people in the org able to reply to tweets. And the rest of us are the peanut gallery just expressing what we think in the channel. So it works better to have it read-only in a single channel - at…

It's a channel for every "conversation", not tweet. The benefit here is that you can keep talking to someone without asking them to email support@company.com.

There is usually a window of open channels -- 15 or 40, say, that remain active in parallel. Oldest channels outside the window get auto-archived. You can also favorite directly from Slack with "-sameroom Only those people who are "on call" will actually see the channels (for details, see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Cg7LQOVZbkm8tmUyc_yJsp8e...)

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#90

Post by scrollaway »

HappyTypist wrote: post #87
scrollaway wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 solv…

Every single open source project's IRC channel I've seen is logged and searchable, with a link in the topic.

Please re-read my post. Searchable doesn't mean indexed and mass-searchable.

Are you going to know that the problem you are encountering with your bluetooth connection was solved in freenode's #pulseaudio 3 years ago?

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