Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Everyone is wrong about that Slack flowchart

sophiebits.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 87 posts

Re: Everyone is wrong about that Slack flowchart

#11

Post by puzzledobserver »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #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…

I think this is the real question to ask.

Does the complicated flowchart point to deficiencies in the Slack user interface? If the user cannot intuit the flowchart, then how can they (as several sibling comments rightly point out) reliably turn notifications on or off?

Algorithmic transparency should be a thing, no?

Re: Everyone is wrong about that Slack flowchart

#12

Post by sethops1 »

xyst wrote: post #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

I see that you also live in Texas

Re: Everyone is wrong about that Slack flowchart

#13

Post by theSuda »

rpicard wrote: post #3

Content aside (it’s good too), I love this blog and post visually.

I had to turn off my Dark Reader to light mode to see it. Yes, this is a very elegant, easy on the eyes and fun to read website/blog. I would like to use this theme unless it is a fully custom site.

Re: Everyone is wrong about that Slack flowchart

#14

Post by NBJack »

kibwen wrote: post #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…

I agree with you; it is hand-wavey and strays into "spherical cows in a vacuum" territory. Practical for discussions, not so great for implementations, where details matter greatly. I would presume the original diagram was meant to align on the specifics; the revised version from the author leaves much to interpretation.

Re: Everyone is wrong about that Slack flowchart

#15

Post by claudex »

isoprophlex wrote: post #7
deathanatos wrote: post #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 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.

That's because Teams purpose was to replace Skype. You can't replace Skype with a working tool, it will disturb the users.

Re: Everyone is wrong about that Slack flowchart

#16

Post by theideaofcoffee »

xyst wrote: post #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

Same, my phone was gradually turning into another point of control over me, rather than the other way around and it being a tool to help me. Only a handful of people are default allowed through DnD, all of the nonsense government alerts are off, almost all app notifications are off save for absolutely the most important ones. If an app somehow breaks through after all of that, it's an instant uninstall, I just don't want to waste any more of my life than I alerady have being subservient to this shit. It's a daily annoyance to have to dismiss popups in apps when they notice they can no longer send notifications. Almost as annoying as the notifications themselves.

Most work apps have a permanent 'Away' status and a message on and the expectation set that I sparingly check throughout the day. It works really well, my mind has never been quieter and more at ease.

Re: Everyone is wrong about that Slack flowchart

#17

Post by swatcoder »

puzzledobserver wrote: post #11
VyseofArcadia wrote: post #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…

I think this is the real question to ask. Does the complicated flowchart point to deficiencies in the Slack user interface? If the user cannot intuit the flowchart, then how can they (as several sibling comments rightly point out) reliably turn notifications on or off? Algorithmic transparency should be a thing, no?

"Feature flag" development culture is in direct conflict with user's having intuitive, consistent experiences that they can model in their head.

If the vendor needs a database report to see what features the user may encounter in any given session, because it's an n-dimensional matrix that changes based on uncountably many factors, there is no mental modeling to be done. The user just experiences some idiosyncratic amalgam of code in each session, and the vendor watches aggregate metrics to make sure the number of users in immediate crisis remains below some threshold -- bringing in a $XXXX/hr on-call team to identify and apply some adequately impactful change if it breaks over. Meanwhile, the users-in-crisis cross their fingers that the next time they open the app, they get a better roll on the feature matrix and encounter a more tolerable subset of issues.

If you want to be able to understand your software and know how to turn things on and off, you need to demand a whole new (old) approach to building and publishing things. We're way off track right now.

Re: Everyone is wrong about that Slack flowchart

#18

Post by mattmanser »

puzzledobserver wrote: post #11
VyseofArcadia wrote: post #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…

I think this is the real question to ask. Does the complicated flowchart point to deficiencies in the Slack user interface? If the user cannot intuit the flowchart, then how can they (as several sibling comments rightly point out) reliably turn notifications on or off? Algorithmic transparency should be a thing, no?

I think it more points to how different people behave, and so how channels end up needing different settings to deal with different sets of people.

Sometimes @channel is important, because everyone in the channel knows to use it sparingly.

Sometimes one person just constantly spams @channel in every message.

So you do need different settings.

So you need the nuance to deal with the nuance of people.

Re: Everyone is wrong about that Slack flowchart

#19

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

swatcoder wrote: post #17
puzzledobserver wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the real question to ask. Does the complicated flowchart point to deficiencies in the Slack user interface? If the user cannot intuit the flowchart, then how can they (as several sibling comments rightly point out) reliably turn notifications on or off? Algorithmic transparency should be a thing, no?

"Feature flag" development culture is in direct conflict with user's having intuitive, consistent experiences that they can model in their head. If the vendor needs a database report to see what features the user may encounter in any given session, because it's an n-dimensional matrix that changes based on uncountably many factors, there is no mental modeling to be done. The user just experiences some idiosyncratic a…

Feature flag development culture is the only practical way to do continuous delivery. The old approach is still used in markets where it makes sense - database systems, for example, often have only a handful of releases per year. But there's a lot of markets where it's just not feasible to make customers wait 3-6 months between when you finish developing a feature and when it's available for use.

Re: Everyone is wrong about that Slack flowchart

#20

Post by ryandrake »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #19
swatcoder wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Feature flag" development culture is in direct conflict with user's having intuitive, consistent experiences that they can model in their head. If the vendor needs a database report to see what features the user may encounter in any given session, because it's an n-dimensional matrix that changes based on uncountably many factors, there is no mental modeling to be done. The user just experiences some idiosyncratic a…

Feature flag development culture is the only practical way to do continuous delivery. The old approach is still used in markets where it makes sense - database systems, for example, often have only a handful of releases per year. But there's a lot of markets where it's just not feasible to make customers wait 3-6 months between when you finish developing a feature and when it's available for use.

Maybe Continuous Delivery is the problem. What are these markets where customers want such frequent changes? As a user, I don't really want my software changing daily, weekly or even monthly. I don't want features to come and go depending on which arm of an A/B test I am in. I don't want to be part of the developer's "experiment" and metrics-gathering.
Post reply on HN