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Slack channels are a waste of time

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Re: Slack channels are a waste of time

#21

Post by TranquilMarmot »

We solve this with Slack where I work by just making one-off channels that are for specific topics.

These are usually project-focused channels where we only talk about the project that we're currently working on. The channels can last anywhere from a few days to a few months, and once the project is done we close the channel.

We find this works really well to keep noise to a minimum since we still have team-specific channels where the usual noise happens, but if we're just trying to do work we only focus on the project channel.

Re: Slack channels are a waste of time

#22

Post by spookthesunset »

mabynogy wrote: post #19

Switch to IRC, you won't regret it. Two points concerning the post. IRC is "senior-friendly" and you won't have that GIF problem as it's text-only.

What planet are you living on where you can say with a straight face that IRC is a senior-friendly thing to use?

Do people who advocate for IRC even understand what made Slack successful? Seriously. Stay relevant or you are gonna get left in the dust when the world moves on.

> GIF problem

GIFs are a feature, not a bug.

Re: Slack channels are a waste of time

#23

Post by hluska »

sekasi wrote: post #18

Honestly, this read so much like desperate marketing. You're making baseless claims. "Senior people rarely use Slack channels". Care to back that up with some facts please? It takes away from everything the product is trying to do by focusing so intently on misguided flaws of the competitor product. It's like those Galaxy vs iPhone ads. Make the product better.

I don't understand why you're being downvoted as this is an excellent comment.

This article read like an advertisement. There's nothing wrong with advertising, but this isn't even a particularly good ad.

I'd be more likely to try whatever the heck this service is called if they talked about what they do, and focused less on calling out Slack.

The problem with ads that shoot down your competitors is that your readers are busy thinking up counterpoints when they should be learning your points.

Re: Slack channels are a waste of time

#24

Post by KaiserPro »

Sorry, but most of that is simply not true.

I worked for a large news company that moved from virtually nothing to slack. There is now something like 800 channels.

Each channel has a purpose that is distinct from each other (for example system-outage-44, or graphics-team, or aws-help)

Each team normally has a public and private channel, one to provide support, the other brisk frank discourse. Seniors are expected to contribute(in fact the members of the board are on there), and its the only way that remote workers can get real time collaberation. In fact it allowed people to work at home and feel included.

So to say its a waste of time sounds like either a marketing ploy, or an organisational problem.

Re: Slack channels are a waste of time

#25

Post by yellowapple »

whoisjuan wrote: post #7

Ok. 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…

The reason why Slack ends up being prone to "noise" is because there's no sense of what each "sound" is about or its origin. Given the same number of messages, a Zulip-like model of putting messages in topics in channels makes it (hopefully) at least somewhat eaiser to differentiate between the sound for which you're listening and the other sounds about which you couldn't really care less.

If you have one of those voice-driven personal assistant gadgets (Echo, Google Home, etc.), try putting it between you and some other sound source (say, a TV) and give it a command. It'll probably hear you correctly, since it knows to listen in a particular direction and can differentiate between you and the TV. Now put yourself between the Echo and the TV and give the exact same command. The Echo probably won't even hear you, and if by some miracle it does, it'll get overwhelmed by all the noise coming at it. Same amount of data, but how that data is arranged matters significantly.

Same thing here. You're the Echo, the information you want is the user, and the information you don't want is the TV. Slack puts the user between the Echo and the TV, while Zulip claims to put the Echo between the user and the TV.

Re: Slack channels are a waste of time

#26

Post by smelendez »

nineteen999 wrote: post #12

Maybe Slack already has this feature (I haven't used it in a couple of years), but it would be great if we could personally "downvote" users that have an unsatisfactory signal:noise ratio, and their comments would fade into the background colour of the page (like HN does with downvoted comments). Or use a decreasing font size or something to show me that I consider their input less important in general. This would on…

I would definitely like more granular filtering by user. I'm a purely remote freelancer, so I'm in a number of client Slacks, and I sign into Slack on my phone in case anything comes up I should respond to quickly when I'm AFK.

I would love to get notifications for "DMs on this Slack from the following people" (who only Slack me to joke around or with nonurgent questions I don't need to know about in the supermarket or the gym) or "@all messages in these channels except from these users" (who I don't directly work with at all but sometimes post "@all who wants lunch from the sushi place").

Re: Slack channels are a waste of time

#27

Post by yellowapple »

KaiserPro wrote: post #24

Sorry, but most of that is simply not true. I worked for a large news company that moved from virtually nothing to slack. There is now something like 800 channels. Each channel has a purpose that is distinct from each other (for example system-outage-44, or graphics-team, or aws-help) Each team normally has a public and private channel, one to provide support, the other brisk frank discourse. Seniors are expected to…

Having to sift through 800 channels to find the relevant topic sounds like a nightmare.

Re: Slack channels are a waste of time

#28

Post by yellowapple »

squiggleblaz wrote: post #9
gouggoug wrote: post #4

You 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

Maybe that would be a compelling idea: have a channel-level chat for those ephemeral conversations, where the messages disappear after a certain number of minutes/hours/days/messages (maybe configured per-channel), and then have named topics within the channels for more persistent/ongoing conversations.

Maybe Zulip already does that. Haven't tried it yet.

Re: Slack channels are a waste of time

#29

Post by yellowapple »

krispbyte wrote: post #16
nineteen999 wrote: post #12

Maybe Slack already has this feature (I haven't used it in a couple of years), but it would be great if we could personally "downvote" users that have an unsatisfactory signal:noise ratio, and their comments would fade into the background colour of the page (like HN does with downvoted comments). Or use a decreasing font size or something to show me that I consider their input less important in general. This would on…

Well Slack is typically used for work so it's probably not a widespread problem but one thing you could do is open a #random channel so people can post all the noise there.

Ain't #random already a default channel? At the very least, I recall it in every Slack org of which I've ever been a member.

Re: Slack channels are a waste of time

#30

Post by Proven »

> Teams that love Slack are often mostly using DMs and small channels

That's just not true.

I extremely rarely use DM, it's an anti pattern.

As for the large/busy channels, why are they buys? Because of the idiotic notion of inclusiveness - aka lazy bastards and idiots are most welcome to ask stupid questions. Dozens of times I'd see questions asked just below the answer provided two comments earlier.

Having said that, people who love to help others or are. Paid to do it, do hang in busy channels.

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