How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#61

Post by getrendevu » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 6:17 PM UTC

dewey wrote: post #56

matchbok wrote: post #45

It amazes me how popular Slack is. Terrible performance, constant interruptions, horrible threads. Here's an exercise. You and your coworker discussed plans for a project in a large channel 3 weeks ago. You need to get all that information and give it to someone else. How do you do it? You can't. It will be interspersed with a bunch of other nonsense from other people and isn't grouped or organized in any sane manner…

What's the alternative though? I really don't like Slack but I don't see another great way of doing it. - Face to Face: No record, even harder to give to someone - Wiki: Goes stale pretty quickly - E-Mail: Same problem, slower, as distracting as Slack

I think the alternative is posting important information to a feed that intelligently updates itself, rather than into channels where it gets pushed above the fold.

We're building this at Rendevu (https://rendevu.co) and running an alpha right now, feel free to check it out.

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#62

Post by city41 » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 6:17 PM UTC

matchbok wrote: post #45

It amazes me how popular Slack is. Terrible performance, constant interruptions, horrible threads. Here's an exercise. You and your coworker discussed plans for a project in a large channel 3 weeks ago. You need to get all that information and give it to someone else. How do you do it? You can't. It will be interspersed with a bunch of other nonsense from other people and isn't grouped or organized in any sane manner…

Why not use a thread in the channel? To be fair Slacks' thread implementation is rather poor, but it's better than nothing.

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#63

Post by lghh » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 6:18 PM UTC

gsich wrote: post #58

dewey wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the alternative though? I really don't like Slack but I don't see another great way of doing it. - Face to Face: No record, even harder to give to someone - Wiki: Goes stale pretty quickly - E-Mail: Same problem, slower, as distracting as Slack

IRC gateway from Slack. But they closed it down because .

How does that solve the problem the poster is describing? IRC still has that issue.

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#64

Post by inertiatic » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 6:18 PM UTC

My team recently started using slack again and I'm finding it extremely lacking.

Whoever made the decision to use it cheaped out and didn't pay for it, so our history on channels is just getting lost, while I can still search for useful info or tips from 2 years ago on Gchat.

You can argue that this is the business model, but that is a shitty business model then. Sell features that further empower a team, don't intentionally remove one of the largest benefits of communicating in writing.

But what really pissed me for the past few months is the fact that you are unable to mute specific people. I recently had to coach a junior person, who despite being bright, fun etc. just failed to take to heart that they shouldn't interrupt someone to ask for something they could figure out themselves by looking around some, or that smiling emojis a minute after they got their answer was an additional interruption. This lack of a basic feature caused me weeks if not months of agony, making me more angry than I should be towards a person that didn't really deserve it, making me worried about my performance etc.

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#65

Post by giancarlostoro » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 6:19 PM UTC

dewiz wrote: post #32

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #2

The most useful thing about Slack is you can press Shift+ESC (sometimes you have to press it twice) to mark all conversations as read. Inbox zero with two keystrokes. Whoever implemented that, I'd like to buy a coffee someday. (Also, I discovered this because I use Ctrl+Shift+ESC instead of Ctrl+Alt+Del to bring up the Windows Task Manager immediately without going through the intermediary screen that pops up, and on…

Wasn’t the Windows Start menu shortcut Ctrl+ESC?

Had no idea there was another shortcut other than the Windows key, confirmed it works on Windows 10.

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#66

Post by mrpoptart » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 6:19 PM UTC

Better workflow:

Star every individual you talk to

Star channels you talk to often

Mute channels you only read occasionally

Occasionally close messages to people to clear the list.

Important things stay on the top, everything else moves to the bottom.

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#67

Post by whorleater » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 6:21 PM UTC

inertiatic wrote: post #64

My team recently started using slack again and I'm finding it extremely lacking. Whoever made the decision to use it cheaped out and didn't pay for it, so our history on channels is just getting lost, while I can still search for useful info or tips from 2 years ago on Gchat. You can argue that this is the business model, but that is a shitty business model then. Sell features that further empower a team, don't inten…

>our history on channels is just getting lost

my company actually pays for slack but had to enable limited history, since developers kept on writing stuff that should be in wiki's or documentation in slack and relying on the search.

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#68

Post by MisterTea » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 6:26 PM UTC

I've used slack. Worked at a small web shop of 10 people (one remote) which used slack. Wanna know what it was used for, and still to this day? Posting memes, cat and cute animal pictures, political news articles, funny articles, food related stuff, youtube, gifs, ad nauseum.

The project dev channels were all dead as the shop was small enough where people didn't need a bloated chat app for the few projects they managed. The one remote worker was paired with a local dev and they did all their communication via direct chat. Plus they still left access to the main random channel to ex employees so everyone could keep in touch. So there was an additional dozen people posting crap all day.

Slack was used for entertainment and distraction. I think the "modern" web chat idea is more of a distraction than help. IRC might be primitive but it does what it was made for without the distraction of gifs, memes, videos and other nonsense.

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#69

Post by getrendevu » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 6:28 PM UTC

The author addresses how to reduce the amount of notification spam in slack, but doesn't really get to the root of why there are so many notifications in the first place.

At Rendevu (https://rendevu.co), we think that's because people are attempting to use slack for more than it is -- mainly, using it to broadcast team information (documents / decisions / faqs), that then get pushed above the fold in channels by memes / gifs / other chatter, and then have to be reposted again and again.

We're building an intelligent feed that aggregates information from the tools you already use (Gsuite / Trello / Slack), and gives your team one place to stay on top of things. It's in alpha right now, but feel free to sign in and try it at https://rendevu.co. Any feedback is much appreciated :)

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#70

Post by newnewpdro » Fri, Jun 22, 2018, 6:30 PM UTC

Slack eliminating the irc gateway has made it completely useless via low bandwidth internet connections. It's awful, and seriously alienating when I'm off grid for extended periods with a weak cell signal capable of ~14KiB/s. I hate that nearly everyone has adopted this proprietary hosted garbage that gives zero fucks for users outside the meat of their target market.