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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

#91
I cannot wait for the day where slack will just die.

Or better, the day where people realize that Slack-style communication is most of the time completely useless and actually hurst productivity.

I now see that people start to realize this more and more. Slack was so much hyped a couple years ago that everyone had to use it to be cool. Now, people reflect on it and they realize that it mainly brings constant buzz and unneeded notifications. There is a use case for it, but for 99% of any serious discussion, email is usually way better.

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#92
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?

The risk you're talking about definitely exists. It's interesting how people treat that risk, though. You could make a similar argument to say you should never rent office space. Your stuff is stored in a building you don't own, and the landlord could deny you access either accidentally or deliberately. (This actually does happen sometimes with incompetence or landlord/tenant disputes.) But few people really feel lik…

> the landlord could deny you access

..or grant themselves access. That's the other risk that the parent comment pointed out.

> In practice, most companies will rent office space without batting an eye.

Presumably, though, they also put in security cameras and don't leave the "crown jewels" (source repo?) exclusively accessible from that office space and needing nothing more than the landlord's key to do so.

> it still feels like a similar calculated risk thing

It certainly feels like it, but is it actually? Is anyone actually even pausing to think about it, let alone calculate the risk?

> the alternative of doing it yourself takes away too much from focusing on your business

I can't help but wonder if the effort required isn't routinely over-estimated. Some of these things aren't that hard, and, when they're critical to the business, there's an argument to be made that doing it oneself is focusing on the business.

I can personally attest to repeatedly running into labor/effort over-estimation in the cloud-vs-hardware decision. This, like (at least rudimentary) chat is a well-enough understood problem that an accurate estimate is actually possible.

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#93
post #49
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?

> What if they choose to use it for their own purposes or disclose it to some third party? I appreciate the sentiment, but Slack has a privacy policy and a known system for how they make money (they charge customers). Companies don’t just, on a whim, decide to start giving away data, especially when they know that it’s valuable and they have a business model of trust. Slack has this. So does basically every other cor…

> But companies don’t just “decide” how to use data on a whim

Their acquirers do, however.

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#95
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, ctrl-esc was the original shortcut since 3.x, and when there was no Win key yet

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#96

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…

And I'd like to buy you a coffee someday for teaching me about the Ctrl+Shift+ESC shortcut.

I remember running into a few viruses floating around that (among other wonderful behaviors) disabled the ctrl+alt+del shortcut to try to prevent you from getting to the task manager. Often ctrl+shift+esc still worked, though.

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#97
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?

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. But it could be. It's actually worse than what you described. By default, users can install integrations and applications that extend legal contract of your company to fly-by-night third parties that can obtain access to all public channels that any user of their integration is a member of. We locked this down, but most companies don't realize the legal, privacy and sec…

I’m not sure how is this different from an employee copy/pasting confidential data in an email and sending it off to a third-party. Will you also blame email clients for making it “too easy” to leak data to third parties?

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#98

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.

This kind of shows that people just want to write stuff and search for it later, rather than spend time organizing it. Gmail and Google Drive encourage this behavior too.

Of course for somebody who just comes in, this is pretty suboptimal.

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#99

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…

We have used Slack and now switched to Google Chat. I think your problems stem from the fact that using slack for off-topic discussion was allowed in the first place. Could it be that the bosses were not present?

Re: How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

#100
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. But it could be. It's actually worse than what you described. By default, users can install integrations and applications that extend legal contract of your company to fly-by-night third parties that can obtain access to all public channels that any user of their integration is a member of. We locked this down, but most companies don't realize the legal, privacy and sec…

I’m not sure how is this different from an employee copy/pasting confidential data in an email and sending it off to a third-party. Will you also blame email clients for making it “too easy” to leak data to third parties?

This is not about me blaming anyone. This is about educating folks that the shiny new "app" they installed is relaying data to a 3rd party and it may not be clear to people the legal and privacy ramifications of doing so. They must also be made aware that the 3rd party has no legal agreement with them so they are dealing with 3rd party data processors. I can assure you that most legal and HR departments have no idea that Slack does this.
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