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Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

blog.doist.com

11–20 of 220 posts

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#11
A small, but impactful design choice we made in creating Twist was to leave out the online presence indicator.

I imagine you could address this in Slack by just having everyone set themselves to 'Away' by default.

One of the things that I've found useful in Slack is turning off the "Someone is typing" message (the option is in the Display Options). I used to wait for someone to post if I knew a message was coming. Now I can drop in and out of a channel more easily. Similarly, I've muted almost all the channels I'm in so now I only need to check if someone notifies me.

The point I'm making is that Slack doesn't necessarily work the way you want right away, and that you might need address a few cultural problems with the way your team uses it. You need to think about how your team communicates, consider why people do annoying things in it, and come up with solutions that work. At the most extreme that might be writing a competitor product but for most companies there just needs to be a little more tolerance of people not answering immediately and a little consideration that gifs can be unhelpful.

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#12

I worked at a Slack shop for several years, and share the author's opinion. I can't think of any five minute period during my entire tenure where the Slack tab didn't have a little red circle telling me that I absolutely needed to check it right this second. There was no way to filter notifications beyond "Everything", so that little bubble would go up every time anybody in the company pressed a key. And heaven forbi…

Half of my team has audio notifications on and nobody seems to n read the @channel warning.

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#13
post #7

I like it. I've been thinking for a while that old-school forums are actually fundamentally superior to chatrooms for sharing important information and having in depth discussions. In my opinion the chat model is simply bad for effectively distributing useful information because it disappears in the noise. Perhaps what's needed is a combination of the forum-style threaded conversation model for information sharing an…

I used to think that too and even began to write something like that. But what happens if something important accidentally is discussed on the chat? Right, someone has to move it to the sticky "forum" part of the app. That is complicated.

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#14

I worked at a Slack shop for several years, and share the author's opinion. I can't think of any five minute period during my entire tenure where the Slack tab didn't have a little red circle telling me that I absolutely needed to check it right this second. There was no way to filter notifications beyond "Everything", so that little bubble would go up every time anybody in the company pressed a key. And heaven forbi…

More granular controls really would fix this problem. For instance, per-channel settings to have the channel highlighted in the sidebar when it has new messages, but without badging the tab/dock. That way you could reserve the badges for the channels you really need to monitor closely, but not have to check every single other channel explicitly to see if there are new messages.

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#15

I worked at a Slack shop for several years, and share the author's opinion. I can't think of any five minute period during my entire tenure where the Slack tab didn't have a little red circle telling me that I absolutely needed to check it right this second. There was no way to filter notifications beyond "Everything", so that little bubble would go up every time anybody in the company pressed a key. And heaven forbi…

And heaven forbid somebody typed "Good morning, @channel" (which happened 20 times per morning per timezone), because then you'd get the dreaded Red Exclamation Mark in the tab.

That isn't a problem with Slack. That's a problem with the way people are using Slack. If the only workable fix is to use a different tool you have a far bigger problem at your company.

I can't fathom how anybody would have been able to work if they had gone as far as allowing notifications to be turned on and make noises at them every time Slack thought something Important Enough To Interrupt You had happened.

All the notifications and noises can be switched off, and the @channel and @here notifications can be ignored on a per channel basis.

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#16
> But in reality, even I couldn’t keep track of all the conversations that were happening at the company.

Nor should you, really. Imagine trying to do that in an office-based organization! Slack, to me, is a bit like our digital office space.

You can also use highlight words to ensure you don't miss any discussion on topics you're particularly interested in. We have a guy who worked a lot with our billing, and he is magically always present whenever anyone says "refund".

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#17
post #11

A small, but impactful design choice we made in creating Twist was to leave out the online presence indicator. I imagine you could address this in Slack by just having everyone set themselves to 'Away' by default. One of the things that I've found useful in Slack is turning off the "Someone is typing" message (the option is in the Display Options). I used to wait for someone to post if I knew a message was coming. No…

It sounds like you kind of ended up with e-mail :)

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#18
Just went through Startup School that uses Mattermost, which seems to be a Slack clone (not sure since I never used Slack).

It didn't seem to work well. Since all members of all groups were from all over the world and rarely shared a timezone, no conversation could really take place in real time.

And since there are no threads or topics or anything, it's almost impossible to go back to something that was said a while ago.

I think a subreddit would have worked much better.

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#19
post #7

I like it. I've been thinking for a while that old-school forums are actually fundamentally superior to chatrooms for sharing important information and having in depth discussions. In my opinion the chat model is simply bad for effectively distributing useful information because it disappears in the noise. Perhaps what's needed is a combination of the forum-style threaded conversation model for information sharing an…

It's called Facebook Workplace. Balance of Messenger for immediate communication, groups for threaded conversations, and feed for discovery.

I don't think I've really heard much about that product since the announcement. Is it good? And are accounts tied to Facebook proper? That would turn me off completely.

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#20
post #15

I worked at a Slack shop for several years, and share the author's opinion. I can't think of any five minute period during my entire tenure where the Slack tab didn't have a little red circle telling me that I absolutely needed to check it right this second. There was no way to filter notifications beyond "Everything", so that little bubble would go up every time anybody in the company pressed a key. And heaven forbi…

And heaven forbid somebody typed "Good morning, @channel" (which happened 20 times per morning per timezone), because then you'd get the dreaded Red Exclamation Mark in the tab. That isn't a problem with Slack. That's a problem with the way people are using Slack. If the only workable fix is to use a different tool you have a far bigger problem at your company. I can't fathom how anybody would have been able to work…

All the notifications and noises can be switched off, and the @channel and @here notifications can be ignored on a per channel basis.

Sounds like a feature that was added in the last 18 months since I last used it. At the time, your options were "every notification about everything, ever" or "no 'notifications' ever, but we'll still helpfully flash the favicon at you all day".

Glad to see there is at least a tiny drip of sanity making its way into the product.

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