Curing Our Slack Addiction

The lack of threading is what really kills the usefulness of Slack. This is why we settled on Flowdock in our company.

If you don't have threading, you lose the one best feature of those new chat solutions, the single advantage they have over decades-old IRC: conversations at least slightly detached from time. On Slack, you have to be there all the time in order not to miss things or to participate in just about any conversation. If you aren't, soon it will be too late and no one will know what you're replying to.

As for other advantages, I noticed that one of the biggest uses is file exchange. If there was another simple way to just drag&drop a file somewhere and have people access it, those chat apps would see less use. But there isn't.

I haven't seen the bad effects in our company. Perhaps they occur at larger company sizes.

Here's a solution, e.g. for the #rust channel: https://botbot.me/mozilla/rust/

On the other hand they've been moving to a subscription model, starting a slow deprecation of the standalone product. Towards this end they've introduced the $5 / month family plan and killed the Mac-only option, while raising the price of the Mac+Windows option. At this point it's worth noting that the Windows client is old and buggy. They did this, as I said, to raise attractiveness of the $5 / month family plan, being the oldest trick in the book: setting an anchor for comparisons.

First of all I find $5 / month to be expensive. Yes, that may be the price of 2 coffees, but if you pay that kind of money for any service/app used, pretty soon you're talking about real money. I also like to own things and I hate renting things, being a terrible tenant. I cannot justify a rent of $60 per year for services/apps unless they are investments producing money. Something like 1Password keeps me safe, but it doesn't make me more productive when programming and it's not helping me with sales either. I can justify subscriptions for Dropbox or IntelliJ IDEA or for keeping my domain active, but not for password storage.

I guess what really bothers me is that 1Password is moving away from the things that made me pick it in the first place: standalone app, Dropbox/Wifi sync, Everywhere interface. I expected them to build the Everywhere interface for opvault, to introduce GDrive/OneDrive sync as an option, to fix their Windows client and maybe to introduce a Linux client. Their new Windows client that's the successor to the old one is a "modern Windows" app distributed through the Windows store, which means I won't even be able to keep running 1Password through Wine.

But there's another reason I prefer standalone apps. With the family/business plans they promise a web interface and they promise that after you are dead your wife or children will be able to access your vault. Of course, if I'm dead, the subscription would end because nobody would realize that they need to renew it in time, so that's an odd point to make. But skipping over that, this means that the vault is now stored on their servers and they have access to it and to your one password whenever you login. If you thought the Dropbox sync was insecure, think again.

So unfortunately they took the bait and decided to spend resources on a subscription model, which is exactly what makes me run away. In the grand scheme of things I guess it makes sense and I hope it works out for them. But along with DRM, trusted computing and the overall trend of bait and switch, I find it to be quite treacherous.

I recently disabled threading in my email as I have an unfortunate number of people who regularly : send mail using identical subject lines, reply to whatever my previous email to them was rather than come up with a new subject line or send multiple versions of important documents under the same subject/RE the same message over the course of months. This results in a hideous nightmare of thread spaghetti where I can't find stuff, or worse, I'm looking at the wrong iteration of something. Oh, and did I mention all the people who have MIME attachment email footers so that figuring out which email contains the document they sent means looking through every single mail? [0]

So I flattened it back down to chronological order and it feels like that restored a lot of sanity.

[0] Obviously a lot of this chaos can be tamed with a more aggressive process for inbox management, but that kind of plays into my point, that's all out of process manual work that a better communication tool should help me with.

I agree with many of the problems, but quite a few are actually advantages! The biggest misconception I see here is that you try to change other's behaviour instead of your own.

E.g. if there are decisions made without you, let them. Offline there are also many conversations and decisions you are not a part of just because you were so unlucky that you haven't been there at the time. But in an offline or private-chat conversation you can't look up afterwards what each person said exactly, you have to rely on hear-say. So in fact if you accept that decisions are made without your participation (it's called "trust in your team") then using a good chat tool is an advantage.

E.g. 2: People don't use your QnA software or wiki and instead use chat. Maybe instead of convincing them to use the other tools you can learn and teach others how to use the search function of the chat efficiently. You may find that you don't need a QnA software when all the questions and answers are searchable in the chat software. Here you can safe the cost (money, admin, learning time for new guys) of one software.

E.g.3: You want tickets and tickets are really important to link activity like commits. I'm not sure but I would assume that it's possible to find a chatbot which creates tickets for you from your chattool, writes comments to them and gives you back the ticket-id to use it in your commits. Then you also have a kind of log for how a discussion and the creation of a ticket where interlinked with each other, because you see the 'hubot create ticket "debug problem"' in the middle of a conversation happening. More context for free.

To change others the first thing we need to do is change us, and that is admittedly even harder.