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Curing Our Slack Addiction

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Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#171

Post by pavel_lishin »

dvanduzer wrote: post #160
pavel_lishin wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Giphy, though a pleasure to have on the team I couldn't disagree more. I hate giphy integrations, and I disable them in any room I have any control in. It becomes abused far too easily, and the results are so rarely relevant. "/giphy high five" will return a gif of someone high-fiving 30% of the time, and will return nonsense garbage the rest of the time, prompting people to try, try again, flooding the room with a…

> control This is the heart of the issue. If you are in a room that you don't like being in, then leave the room . Communicating with other humans is difficult. If your team can't come to an understanding about how you have fun together, then you have much bigger problems .

> If you are in a room that you don't like being in, then leave the room.

... unless it's actually a work room that just happens to have lax rules about what is and isn't appropriate.

... unless you're a remote employee, and it's one of the only ways to build team cohesion outside of 100%-work conversations.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#172

Post by imtringued »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #6

"Slack as the new email" is spot on. And the article identifies it too. The problem isn't the tool. The problem is people. Giving people more and better ways to communicate creates more noise, not necessarily more signal. Constraining communication to channels that only allow signal feels bureaucratic (complete form 31/b to request new business cards and send to purchasing no later than the second week of the month).…

Slack is the new telephone but it's treated like email. Conversations are ephemeral, synchronous and the worst of all they can easily interrupt you.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#173

Post by Alex3917 »

aaron695 wrote: post #155
randomsearch wrote: post #97

Recently I've seen a lot of anti-Slack articles. Not once have I heard a colleague criticising Slack. Every startup I know is using it and praising it. When I work with some people who still use email to coordinate in situations where I usually use Slack, I find it to be maddeningly time-wasting. Email is terrible for group conversation. It strikes me that there must be some more general for the Slack criticism. Perh…

I think you don't get the article at all. Slack is heroin (is the point), it is great to start, and seems great for a while, but for many people it gets worse and worse as time goes by. You have not answered the point at all. Obviously many people spend their lives enjoying heroin (with no bad affects) But for many it's toxic, why are you not just an addict selling something you yet don't understand?

The ironic thing is that email fixes pretty much all of the problems that Slack creates.

Slack is still better for sending out random links and messages about lost car keys or whatever, rather than having those clog everyone's inboxes, but beyond that it quickly becomes an anti-pattern that enables a huge array of self-destructive behaviors.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#174

Post by specialist »

gumby wrote: post #93
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 have a hard time agreeing that "Slack's a far sight better than email." The lack of threading and context (mentioned in AB's writeup) means you have to maintain a lot of state (and keep up to date) in order to get any value. That defeats the point of having automation! For good or ill, the 40+ year history of mail means there are various tools and conventions that allow your computer to do part of the work for you.

Slack's pinning UX baffles me.

My previous team used Slack to coordinate releases (deploys). (Automation? What's that?)

The devops lead would post the release notes, whatifs and whatnots, then pin them, hoping for easy recall when the chat activity scrolls them offscreen. Great idea. I never got the hang of Slack's implementation.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#175

Post by scrollaway »

heinrich5991 wrote: post #94
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…

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

Botbot is nice but does not solve the issue of mass-searchability.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#176

Post by 1123581321 »

jesseg17 wrote: post #13

While I understand the motivation to move away from Slack, Basecamp, to me, seems like a worse alternative. Most of my Basecamp interactions come from the emails that are sent on every thread change. It almost seems to be a proxy between conversation and email, which is counterproductive to its goal. The key issue in this article is about the lacking of separation of concerns in Slack. I may be missing something, but…

The new version of Basecamp is pretty smart about notifications. If you have the site open, it doesn't send you a ton of email. It also has something to disable notifications during certain times of the day and catch you up later (probably in one longer email.)

Sadly, some people need those emails to keep using the tool everyone else is using directly. I wish it wasn't like that.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#177

Post by falcolas »

Touche wrote: post #141
moron4hire wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, email is an open standard, with plenty of choices in both client and server software. Slack is a proprietary system. Why are we actively axing solid, widely distributed, open ecosystems for proprietary ones? It'd be like if everyone woke up one day and decide "eh, Linux is just not animated-giphy enough, let's all switch to this startup OS with a crippled free version."

Because Slack doesn't have to write up an RFC and wait months/years for feedback before getting features implemented. People care about features, not interoperability (until they want out, at which point they feel the lock-in burn).

I disagree with this. Other than the place-keeping, search, and notifications, I (and my team) don't want other features from Slack. In fact, the constant additions of features is aggravating as hell. The addition of an enabled-by-default DND feature was a real PITA for our team to try and work around.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#178

Post by mmaunder »

mmaunder wrote: post #44

This is incredibly timely for me. We have grown from a team of 2 to a team of 18 in the past year, we're all remote and we literally huddle around Slack and warm ourselves to it's glow from morning till night. It's the core of our company culture and our comms. I think Dave (the author and founder of 1password) is feeling the same thing I'm feeling as a CEO. It's a kind of weird anxiety that creeps up on you as the c…

Posting an update on this for anyone else in a growing org using Slack: Our team chatted today and decided to keep using Slack because it's awesome for remote teams and our needs. It works well for us. What we are doing now though is to us the 'Snooze' function which lets you set it on a timer. Then when someone msgs you they are told that you're in snooze mode and given the option to 'break through' the snooze and alert you anyway. We've agreed we'll only do that if it's urgent.

I think this will work well and probably scale well too.

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#179

Post by janekm »

jqgatsby wrote: post #151
phillc73 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hadn't heard of Fleep before, but thought immediately that it might solve one use case for me. After checking the pricing (good), if there was a self-hosted version (no, but maybe not a deal breaker) I looked for the Android app installer. Only available from Google Play Store. Unfortunately, that kills Fleep for me. Please consider making your app directly downloadable and not reliant on Google Play Services.

Why is this a requirement?

The Google Play store is also not accessible in China, an no doubt a few other countries, so it's just sensible to provide an alternative download anyway...

Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction

#180

Post by mdaniel »

bad_user wrote: post #96
alanh wrote: post #80

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…

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, b…

> I expected them to build the Everywhere interface for opvault

I realize this may only partially help you, but onepasswordpy (https://github.com/Roguelazer/onepasswordpy) has support for both Agilekeychain and the OpVault, if you find yourself on a system that isn't Mac or Windows, or otherwise is a PitA to get to your keychain/vault.

In fairness(?) to Agilebits, the 1Password Anywhere really was just the most bare-bones possible, as it didn't support any of the encrypted items except Login; so no Passwords, Secure Notes, no attachments on anything. Maybe they just figured it wasn't worth the hassle to flesh it out, and then with opvault it became a lower priority than it was before.

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