Slack channels are a waste of time
zulipchat.com
Slack channels are a waste of time
1–10 of 51 posts
Re: Slack channels are a waste of time
#2> Remote workers can’t participate
Maybe not the correct headline at least, they mean folks in other time zones. But a little sleep hacking fixes this, for me.
> Channels rapidly devolve into GIF posts
Sometimes I wish they would. I've found recent Slack orgs I'm in to be dead. And you try start a topic and no one replies for hours or days, and I sometimes delete posts out of embarrassment that I said something wrong or just boring.
Last I looked at Zulip they were using the web-app in a "native" wrapper approach to desktop clients. I wish them the best, but wish just _one_ enterprise chat competitor would take a different approach. I know the appeal and I'm a JS developer myself, but even if you have to make a Mac-only solution, there is a market for that cause nearly every small-to-medium office seems to be all Mac.
Re: Slack channels are a waste of time
#3Actually Slack (and chat in general) has been a benefit for me. I'll slowly losing my hearing as I age and this habit of communicating by text messages throughout the day with my work team makes it easier for me to understand things clearly.
Re: Slack channels are a waste of time
#4You do not need to read your entire slack channel history.
Personally, I simply scan for messages addressed to me with an @mention or @channel.
If there's no @mention, I load the channel, press the escape key and go on with my day.
Re: Slack channels are a waste of time
#5Headline is a little click-baity, but I get their point. “Streams” seems like just adding another layer of abstraction to your existing channels. For the Slacks I’m on having multiple topic-specific channels is extremely useful, and the easy way to get rid of the .gif wars is to just silo them in #random. People generally only need a small nudge to change behavior like that.
Re: Slack channels are a waste of time
#6Half my time in Slack is just banter and gifs, the other half is skimming discussions that would've been a meeting otherwise. I think the time I waste chit chatting about cancels out the time I've saved from emails, meetings, briefings, and forced context switching from shoulder tapping. From a productively standpoint, it's neither a gain or loss. But the real win for Slack (but also shared with email and tickets) is the journaling aspect of chat, which is typically leaps and bounds ahead of meetings without minutes or hallway discussions.
I've also noticed that any channel that has more than ~10 active participants quickly turns off topic or impossible to follow. That I can blame on Slack's awful implementation of threading which Zulip seems to do better at.
Re: Slack channels are a waste of time
#7Ok. So their approach to solving this problem is to break down the concept of single channels into a system of parent channels with sub-channels... Pardon my cynicism, but that's not going to solve the problem.
If this were an information architecture problem, it would have been solved already by Slack itself.
Slack's problem is noise and that's not something you can solve easily. Trying to create new abstractions is only going to increase the cognitive load for your users. Who wants to have a hundred notification bubbles begging for attention? No one would ever catch up on anything relevant with this approach.
If you have a noise problem is because you have a system that pushes information to its users faster than they can consume it. No amount of information re-decoration or re-abstraction will solve this problem. This is also the reason why all the social media platforms eventually move away from chronological feeds and start using algorithmic feeds.
The solution is to narrow the scope of information that is useful or relevant to the users, but the paradox here is that Slack success comes from creating a product that is a solution for FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and not a solution for keeping people informed about what matters.
Re: Slack channels are a waste of time
#8You do not need to read your entire slack channel history. Personally, I simply scan for messages addressed to me with an @mention or @channel. If there's no @mention, I load the channel, press the escape key and go on with my day.
Indeed, the only thing I actively watch are direct messages, everything else I check periodically through the "unread messages" area at the top with a quick "mark all as read".
Re: Slack channels are a waste of time
#9You do not need to read your entire slack channel history. Personally, I simply scan for messages addressed to me with an @mention or @channel. If there's no @mention, I load the channel, press the escape key and go on with my day.
yeah the way to use slack (for distributed teams) is the same as the way you use the water cooler (for office-based teams). you only hear what you're there to hear. if someone put an audio recorder at your office cooler you'd never listen to the recording.
however, i think that's their entire point. it's actually not very useful for actual topical discussions
Re: Slack channels are a waste of time
#10You do not need to read your entire slack channel history. Personally, I simply scan for messages addressed to me with an @mention or @channel. If there's no @mention, I load the channel, press the escape key and go on with my day.
yeah the way to use slack (for distributed teams) is the same as the way you use the water cooler (for office-based teams). you only hear what you're there to hear. if someone put an audio recorder at your office cooler you'd never listen to the recording. however, i think that's their entire point. it's actually not very useful for actual topical discussions
It depends on the work place, but for the agency I used to work at you would be working on a particular client's project on any given day and therefore you only needed to tune into one channel. But more than that, any decisions or discussions particular to a task happened in the ticket for that task, not in slack. Slack was used for short periods of quick deliberation and problem solving environments or configuration, or general state of the project type conversations. In other words if it didn't fit in a ticket it went into slack.
That worked really well for isolating slack communication to silos of attention and it solved the problem of information important to a task living in slack.
Ultimately it's not the tools fault for any of this though. It's just a bunch of chat channels. It's up to you and your company to form good policies and practices.