81–90 of 131 posts
I guess we are in the minority. Slack has been awesome for boosting communication and collaboration in our department. It's effectively killed awful e-mail communication on issues. Instead, we carry on live, highly-interactive communications. Everyone pretty much understands if you are busy, however, and don't respond immediately. Work without Slack would be awful.
You are definitely the non-vocal majority.
I wonder how many more productivity and sanity points society would have gained in the past few years if Slack had built in an @@ or @! symbol for a "SuperPing" that's differentiated from a normal ping (five knocks after the brush, perhaps?). Or even provide a structured way to set a priority on a mention, letting you reference that someone was involved in a thing you're writing about or that they should see it as an FYI, but make it clear that they don't need to worry about it immediately. You can make the UI have sane defaults so it's not overwhelming, then you either let culture sort itself out if people are misusing the system, or otherwise ensure there are speed-bumps to misuse.
It's ironic that even YouTube streamers benefit from being able to triage Superchats, with color coding based on the monetary value the sender ascribes to getting the streamer's immediate attention. Why is donation-based entertainment more sane than the business environment?
At the end of the day, humans don't work well when they're "always on." There's a balance between UI simplicity and the fundamental UX principal that not everything can be important. I do wonder if there's research on how many classes of things people can handle on a screen - rather than a binary classification between mentions and non-mentions, is there anything preventing us from handling a third priority level?
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Look up their terms of service before considering it for work use. At the end of the day Discord is not enterprise software, and so will never be considered seriously for it.
This is a good point, one of the points that my friend made is that without a comparable revenue model you always run the risk of Discord shutting down whereas Slack wouldn't. With that said, I would happily pay for an enhanced nitro subscription to discord that allowed for enterprise use
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At my employer we have Slack channels for engineering teams but anyone in the company can (and does) come in to ask what amount to low-level support questions. I've dealt with it on my team by rotating the job of responding so that whoever is on-call for the week deals with it. It means there's a lot of interruptions, unfortunately, for whoever is on call, but at least the rest of the team is explicitly given permiss…
We deal with the same. Here's an easy solution – set up a #support- channel for the team. If anyone asks a question in the regular channel, redirect them. Have a fixed rotation and SLA for the support channel. In fact everyone now prefers this over the pre-Slack way where you had to randomly email or IM people one by one to try and get some help.
Slack is fine and works fine. As a user, you can very easily turn it off and on at will, mute it, even set status messages like "I will check my messages twice a day". There are plenty of 'product X is bad' write-ups, but all of them try to blame something while the blame is for something intangible which is much harder to write a clever title for. Same goes for the open office; that can work just fine if you make su…
> Slack is fine and works fine. As a user, you can very easily turn it off and on at will, mute it, even set status messages like "I will check my messages twice a day". From a workflow standpoint, this is optimal. The catch is that many people view Slack as e-mail but with an expectation of instant response. The farther your Slack communications stray from engineers, the more likely you are to encounter this mindset…
I don't get this, because email is instant response. It arrives more or less instantly. Almost all digital non-verbal communications can invite an instant response.
Why is Slack so different than email?
The excuses are the same... "Well, I didn't have Slack open..." "Well, I didn't have Outlook open..." Hell, you could go back in time and say, "Well, I didn't have ICQ open..."
I don't see any difference.
Here's what this conversation always boils down to: Slack is a tool, just like one of probably dozens you use in your day-to-day work. It doesn't set or enforce any guidelines for how it should be used. If left unchecked it has a tendency to amplify the worst parts of your company's culture. If you make an effort to moderate it, it can be a huge asset to productivity. Speaking of the example in the article, there is…
A 128oz tub of pork rinds with an easy-open cap is just a tool to alleviate hunger when you're looking for a salty snack. Placed next to an incredibly disciplined person like an Olympic athlete, the tub will probably last six months and not damage their health. But placed next to an ordinary person it will definitely encourage overeating. Tools placed in the hands of imperfect people will be used imperfectly, and in…
I get that some environments might be fine without group chat, but for others it's indispensable.
Here's what this conversation always boils down to: Slack is a tool, just like one of probably dozens you use in your day-to-day work. It doesn't set or enforce any guidelines for how it should be used. If left unchecked it has a tendency to amplify the worst parts of your company's culture. If you make an effort to moderate it, it can be a huge asset to productivity. Speaking of the example in the article, there is…
This ignores the fact that defaults matter, and defaults shape the usage of the tool. I want to reply in threats, but often don't, because it requires me to let go of my keyboard and fumble around with the mouse to do it. That's why I vastly prefer Zulip (which additionally isn't slow as molasses).
Here's what this conversation always boils down to: Slack is a tool, just like one of probably dozens you use in your day-to-day work. It doesn't set or enforce any guidelines for how it should be used. If left unchecked it has a tendency to amplify the worst parts of your company's culture. If you make an effort to moderate it, it can be a huge asset to productivity. Speaking of the example in the article, there is…
> If you make an effort to moderate it, it can be a huge asset to productivity. Sounds good in theory, rarely works well in practice. The only times I've seen Slack work well is when everyone involved starts with similar expectations about how it should be used and what's appropriate. In my experience, this is easiest to achieve when Slack channels are closely aligned with teams who are working together. The model te…
And that's bad because?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This ignores the fact that defaults matter, and defaults shape the usage of the tool. I want to reply in threats, but often don't, because it requires me to let go of my keyboard and fumble around with the mouse to do it. That's why I vastly prefer Zulip (which additionally isn't slow as molasses).
Threads are an extremely important asset in large channels to maintain organization. Less important in ad-hoc quick conversations in small DM groups for sure. I've never experienced any issues with people not using threads and the UX around it has always seemed fairly smooth to me.
a) posts and comments logically group discussion better than multiple interleaved discussions in a channel
b) the newsfeed does a decent job of surfacing interesting content (posts from groups/people you interact most with)
c) notifications in one place (with per-group options like “notify for every post” or “only when tagged” or whatever) beats clicking through each channel to scan everything that happened since you last looked. It puts the power to choose what to consume back in the hands of the recipient.
Sure, it’s not a real-time discussion platform but, IMO, most things at work don’t need this anyway. For the times this is useful (incident response, etc) small messenger groups work well.
YMMV, opinions mine, contents may settle in transit, etc