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Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?

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Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?

#91

Post by underwater »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #34
lmarcos wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack would become the best chat app for every company out there with just one simple feature (or the lack of it): - remove the "user is online" green dot. Really, it's not needed. Once it's removed then everything becomes async by default (and so everything slows down a little bit =>everyone is happier)

E-mail is inherently async. Async to the core. Why not just send your async requests as an e-mail so the other person can handle it as they process their inbox? Slack excels at real-time, interactive communication. It's chat, designed for back-and-forth. Your messages will get scrolled into the backlog if there's a lot of chat while you're away. The green dot (or the "busy" setting) is great for understanding whether…

I don't understand the love of email. It's little pieces of conversations that get sent around in an ad hoc way.

Email doesn't have an easy way to add someone to a thread, or to manage a forked conversation. It's closed and non-discoverable by default.

Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?

#92

Post by mr_tristan »

skadamat wrote: post #77

Highly recommend World Without Email by Cal Newport on this exact topic: https://www.calnewport.com/books/a-world-without-email/

Was about to recommend this, too. Newport's description of the "hyperactive hive mind" is almost dead on what this author is calling "Slack-mania". And Newport shows this is much bigger in scope than just the introduction of Slack or MS Teams. New technologies have repeatedly created way too many points of communication now that it's so easy to, well, communicate with anyone.

I found his observations about needing to separate specialist time from support-style time to be very intriguing.

Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?

#94

Post by mayop100 »

My team just launched a product on Tuesday designed to solve this exact problem.

Email has a better threading model than Slack, but email clients lack the realtime features needed for synchronous collaboration. So we're trying to fix. The idea is to let you do long-form, async and short-form, synchronous communications using the same tool, and to do it over email so you can still talk to anyone.

Our product is Shortwave (https://www.shortwave.com/) -- we had a Show HN on Tuesday. We have a video here that walks through our team collaboration features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex_o2d1GXf4&t=5s

Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?

#95

Post by ungamed »

philip1209 wrote: post #84
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #12

> For the next five years I operated in “Slack culture”, the communication paradigm that I suspect is in use by many companies these days. Email inboxes were more or less reserved for broadcasts from exec and HR along with JIRA spam. Everything else happens on Slack. This is the real problem, IMO. Slack shouldn't be replacing e-mail or meetings or phone calls. It's great for impromptu discussions with a lot of back-a…

This behavior is caused by the presence indicator. People subsconsiously are afraid that closing Slack will signal to their boss (and team) that they're not working. However, the result is that they spend their days slacking - not working. Presence indicators are a dark pattern.

I think the name indicates its intentions quite clearly. Make employees slack.

Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?

#96

Post by ungamed »

Spoom wrote: post #78
nescioquid wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Casual, asynchronous chat is great ... I'm in the lead-weight-dragging tail (working in a bank using Teams, but dealt with this at the last job in Slack as well). The major hassle seems to be getting people to understand this is asynchronous communication (perpetrators are both developers and executives) and this problem seems to stand before the rest of the more sophisticated complaints evinced here can be even ad…

We have an unofficial policy in my company that all pertinent information should be in the first message specifically to avoid the scenario you mention. Highly recommended.

The business I work for has the same, it is branded "Naked pings suck".

Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?

#97

Post by spoils19 »

xeromal wrote: post #28
thebean11 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does email not have the exact same issues? I agree that a meeting might be better though.

Because email is a snapshot in time. Slack on the other hand can get overwhelmed by noise and most people, myself included, don't go back very far when opening a channel. Emails, on the other, I make sure to read each thread.

Right, because people definitely read each thread in emails and definitely don't read each message in a thread. It's incredibly easy to link to a specific point in time in Slack, where you can contextually read the discussion from there. Quoting email replies is not the same.

> most people

Based on what number of people in what context?

To put it another way, I don't go back very far when opening an email. Slack, on the other hand, I make sure to read each message.

Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?

#98

Post by ungamed »

underwater wrote: post #91
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

E-mail is inherently async. Async to the core. Why not just send your async requests as an e-mail so the other person can handle it as they process their inbox? Slack excels at real-time, interactive communication. It's chat, designed for back-and-forth. Your messages will get scrolled into the backlog if there's a lot of chat while you're away. The green dot (or the "busy" setting) is great for understanding whether…

I don't understand the love of email. It's little pieces of conversations that get sent around in an ad hoc way. Email doesn't have an easy way to add someone to a thread, or to manage a forked conversation. It's closed and non-discoverable by default.

> Email doesn't have an easy way to add someone to a thread

You add them to the cc list.

> or to manage a forked conversation.

Your email client is at fault there, any decent email manages forked conversations.

> It's closed and non-discoverable by default.

Thats why you have mailing lists which are indexed and searchable. You may see 'closed and non discoverable' as a downside, I do not. Anything that should be discoverable should be on a wiki.

Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?

#99

Post by novok »

You don't have to talk sync with chat, you don't have to do one line back and forths on chat, you can take hours or days to reply if you so choose on chat like email, you can easily do rich paragraphs. Slack is not synchronous communication, video / voice calls are.

Slack wins over discourse forms, stack overflow and email because it adds too much friction to do essentially the same thing. Slack wins because it's the least friction interface that gives you form and email equivalents, plus it organizes a bit better naturally . If you want to beat slack and change the communication defaults, you need to make a UI that works with less friction than slack.

You can change your chat culture with changing your behaviors and encouraging changes like nohello.net and threading like this post is doing and setting boundaries with how you will communicate.

Also, different people work better with different communication mediums, the slack hate that you see on HN is not universal, there is a quiet majority that works well with slack, otherwise you wouldn't see it naturally adopted so much like the author encountered themselves. There will always be a set that hates whatever the default is. Now WFH is default in the industry, there is a subset that hates it greatly and wish we had offices again. Go back to offices with private rooms or open offices, there will be a set that doesn't like it too.

Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?

#100

Post by novok »

nescioquid wrote: post #64
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #12

> For the next five years I operated in “Slack culture”, the communication paradigm that I suspect is in use by many companies these days. Email inboxes were more or less reserved for broadcasts from exec and HR along with JIRA spam. Everything else happens on Slack. This is the real problem, IMO. Slack shouldn't be replacing e-mail or meetings or phone calls. It's great for impromptu discussions with a lot of back-a…

> Casual, asynchronous chat is great ... I'm in the lead-weight-dragging tail (working in a bank using Teams, but dealt with this at the last job in Slack as well). The major hassle seems to be getting people to understand this is asynchronous communication (perpetrators are both developers and executives) and this problem seems to stand before the rest of the more sophisticated complaints evinced here can be even ad…

I put my status as nohello.net , and if people don't follow, I politely say that nohello.net is the better way to do things in the future, and everyone can answer you questions faster if you do it that way.
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