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How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

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Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#71

Post by [deleted] »

getrendevu wrote: post #61
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

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.

[deleted]

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#72

Post by dewey »

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 .

I also prefer IRC but in this case it doesn't really improve anything. The opposite really, no build-in search, no easy onboarding, no central logs,...

(Yes, I know I can build all this with ZNC, ELK or by using IRC cloud but that doesn't solve the issue about chat vs. some other system)

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#73

Post by dewey »

getrendevu wrote: post #61
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

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.

> where it gets pushed above the fold

Isn't this where the Slack search comes in? I never had the problem that I couldn't find something that I was looking for. Usually I just need one distinct word that I know was used in the conversation and a from:person filter. A feed has the same problem that it'll get too big and things will get pushed above the fold.

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#74

Post by TooBrokeToBeg »

s3r3nity wrote: post #6
consumethreads wrote: post #3

dont use it ... if a production is actually not making your life better why tie yourself down to it. just use what works, force slack to innovate

Not sure why you're getting downvotes - it's a reasonable question to ask: "why use something that makes you crazy / stressed out? Not to set up a straw-man, but I'd imagine a similar reaction if someone wrote a post titled "How to use Facebook and not get depressed," the gut-reaction is "why use it if it's making you feel bad?"

> Not sure why you're getting downvotes

I am. Not contributing to the discussion by dismissing the topic.

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#75

Post by bachmeier »

gnu8 wrote: post #48

No one should be using slack at all. I understand that it fills use cases that email and irc don’t, but that is no excuse for letting all of your communications be owned by some other company. What if slack accidentally or deliberately denies access to your data? What if they choose to use it for their own purposes or disclose it to some third party? What if they get hacked by Russia?

At this very moment, there is a story on the front page about Twitter shutting down Smyte. One commenter writes:

"We had 20 minutes notice, and then everyone was kicked out of the Slack support channel and API responses simply died."

If someone says "they would never do that" you can discard it as wishful thinking.

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#76

Post by getrendevu »

dewey wrote: post #73
getrendevu wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> where it gets pushed above the fold Isn't this where the Slack search comes in? I never had the problem that I couldn't find something that I was looking for. Usually I just need one distinct word that I know was used in the conversation and a from:person filter. A feed has the same problem that it'll get too big and things will get pushed above the fold.

That's definitely true.

We try to solve that in two ways: 1. We'll intelligently bubble up stuff that has a lot of discussion or activity, along with the context, even if that activity is happening in other apps. (Lots of comments on a google doc).

2. I personally think the asynchronous nature of a feed stops people from spamming irrelevant garbage. In my experience, project channels always devolve at points to jokes/references/and stuff that people may think twice about posting to a wiki or feed.

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#77

Post by saltcured »

ravenstine wrote: post #37
jrootabega wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really sufficient, unfortunately. People will always abuse this and mention you whenever they feel like it, without thinking if it really needs immediate attention. The only solution is disabling notifications entirely.

If it were email, those same people would abuse email. I don't think what you're saying is really a problem with Slack. Those people you're referring to are disrespectful morons.

I think the issue is that people already learned how to avoid going crazy with email. A large part of that is reading it in batches and not getting any notification when messages arrive. Some other people are bothered by this and seem to forever seek a way to worm their way back into your foreground attention.

Slack conflates mentioning someone with notifying someone. Some of my coworkers use mentions like metadata. They think they are creating a better informatics resource by mentioning people by their Slack id instead of their name. They had no intention of it actually sending an immediate notification to interrupt anybody.

They see Slack more like some kind of wiki and not like a chat system. I see Slack as a chat system and an even more worthless wiki than all the other wikis everyone creates and then abandons due to editorial debt. Unfortunately, we don't get to join different Slack systems with entrance exams to filter out the wrong sort of user...

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#78

Post by imglorp »

MisterTea wrote: post #68

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 manag…

Large shop, checking in. We pay for it and have around 1500 technical people on ours, all spread out in a dozen locations. It lets us work as if we're all in the same office.

One misconception is that slack is not "chat", it's not like IRC. It's more like groupware when used as intended. It handles things like files or code samples, extensibility like webhooks and bots, fine grained notification preferences, decent search across channels or by other criteria. Screen sharing and conference calling is decent if immature. We have a channel for each team, a channel for any big issues that pop up (they get archived), a channel for each product, etc. and yes channels for screwing around. Corporate version has search and archive for Sarbox/HR reqs.

There are other products. IRC can only do a few of these things, with many requiring expert scripting to accomplish.

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#79

Post by saltcured »

gnu8 wrote: post #48

No one should be using slack at all. I understand that it fills use cases that email and irc don’t, but that is no excuse for letting all of your communications be owned by some other company. What if slack accidentally or deliberately denies access to your data? What if they choose to use it for their own purposes or disclose it to some third party? What if they get hacked by Russia?

For me, Slack already did that when they reneged on their XMPP gateway sales pitch. It was an instrumental feature for getting consensus in my group, precisely because it promised we could use our existing chat clients and ignore the Slack-only features we don't care about.

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#80

Post by matchbok »

getrendevu wrote: post #60
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…

At Rendevu ( https://rendevu.co ), we think the problem you're describing is due to Slack's (or any messaging app's) inherent synchronous nature. We're building an intelligent asynchronous feed that aggregates discussions from all the other apps you already use (google / jira / trello / invision), and gives your team a one stop place to find info that doesn't go stale like a wiki. We're running an alpha right now at…

oof, that looks nice! Gonna poke around. Your note about the synchronicity is spot on.
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