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Everyone is wrong about that Slack flowchart

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Re: Everyone is wrong about that Slack flowchart

#2
Lol I rarely received notifications that I expect to. (I've checked my settings and done nothing else to fix it, not tried reproducing behavior nor reporting it to Slack.)

Paid server.

Android client.

Lightly used, in part due to the absence of notifications.

It's been over a year that I've missed notifications. More than 50% missed, comments to my threads especially, and also new messages on watched channels.

Re: Everyone is wrong about that Slack flowchart

#4
post #2

Lol I rarely received notifications that I expect to. (I've checked my settings and done nothing else to fix it, not tried reproducing behavior nor reporting it to Slack.) Paid server. Android client. Lightly used, in part due to the absence of notifications. It's been over a year that I've missed notifications. More than 50% missed, comments to my threads especially, and also new messages on watched channels.

Do you have a bot or script somewhere that’s using your token and appearing to “read” messages before you see them yourself?

Re: Everyone is wrong about that Slack flowchart

#5
That complexity in the flow chart is probably just straight bugs, like TFA gets into. For example, I'm sure the flow chart — if you made one — for message "parsing" would be similarly complex. And it shows, on the client, since it feels less like there's a parser, and more like someone has cobbled a bunch of regexes together. There's a number of rather trivial to discover bugs¹, particularly around code block formatting and hyperlinks. That Slack will actively mutates entered text is doubly infuriating.

Similarly, complex flowcharts aren't necessarily something to be proud of, rather, something to be eyed with suspicion. Is that complexity essential complexity, or accidental complexity?

(Though sometimes it can be infuriatingly difficult to simplify. I've attacked a few such codepaths in my career only to come out going "nope, it's just that terrible/complex.")

On notifications, one of the best things I ever set up was making my name a notification trigger. Lets me know when people are talking about me (or even to me), but aren't using a @- tag. Some people just … don't seem to know how to do it?

¹trivial enough that it leaves me wondering: does Slack's own eng use Slack, with cognitive awareness of the things that they run into?

Re: Everyone is wrong about that Slack flowchart

#6
post #2

Lol I rarely received notifications that I expect to. (I've checked my settings and done nothing else to fix it, not tried reproducing behavior nor reporting it to Slack.) Paid server. Android client. Lightly used, in part due to the absence of notifications. It's been over a year that I've missed notifications. More than 50% missed, comments to my threads especially, and also new messages on watched channels.

A notification in this context isn’t a push notification, it’s a Slack notification (a red bubble counter).

Sounds like an issue with your android phone.

Re: Everyone is wrong about that Slack flowchart

#7

That complexity in the flow chart is probably just straight bugs, like TFA gets into. For example, I'm sure the flow chart — if you made one — for message "parsing" would be similarly complex. And it shows, on the client, since it feels less like there's a parser, and more like someone has cobbled a bunch of regexes together. There's a number of rather trivial to discover bugs¹, particularly around code block formatt…

> That Slack will actively mutates entered text is doubly infuriating.

Slack is not good with that but man what are the people smoking that designed MS Teams? What the actual fuck happens when you try to type, copy, paste or send a message?!

Slack is an oasis of sanity, compared.

Re: Everyone is wrong about that Slack flowchart

#8
I just turn off notifications completely. Horribly implemented notification systems have completely turned me away.

DnD on? Nope still get notified. Government sends Amber alert? Yea let’s full send it across the entire state for a crack head vs police incident that occurred 500 miles away at 4AM.

Severe weather alerts have now been moved to voice calls and that number whitelisted in my contacts

Re: Everyone is wrong about that Slack flowchart

#9
I don't know if I'd classify the cleaner diagram as "cheating" per se, but it does trade one kind of complexity for another kind. Removing nodes by adding a concept of implicit branches via "unless" clauses within a node doesn't necessarily make the system any easier to understand at a glance. Sometimes systems have good reason to be complex, and sometimes we have good reasons to hide much of that complexity, but let's not conflate hidden complexity with the lack of complexity.

If I were to suggest a way to make the original chart cleaner without changing the quantity of explicit nodes and branches, I would start by reducing it into parts that are cyclic and parts that are acyclic, then drawing clear divisions between those parts. Then you could give these encapsulated bits names and thereby make it easier for them to refer to each other (such as in the duplicated flows between local and global preferences) without having to draw a mess of crisscrossing lines.

Re: Everyone is wrong about that Slack flowchart

#10
Maybe the real source of complexity in that flowchart is there are just too many ways to suppress notifications. You have muting, do not disturb, do not disturb overrides, @message preferences per channel and global, DM preferences, and so on.

I love dials and knobs and sliders in my software, but at some point when they are all for the same feature, there is no longer any way for the user to intuit how they interact.

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