How Slack hooks users through artificial urgency

Slack for work mostly sucks. It's OK for communities where urgency is obviously not there -- basically as an alternative IRC. I have worked at a couple companies that used IRC. They beauty of IRC is no offline notifications (unless you're using a cloud service, I guess) -- so it was only used during the workday.

I'm not sure if this is the case with other teams, but I've been noticing my team has been using public channels less and less lately, and I guess most slack-based communication must happen in private messages. We could probably change to a traditional IM client and not have to deal with Slack anymore.

> "What lures people to Slack in the first place is its ability to manufacture an artificial sense of urgency..."

I think it would be far more accurate to say that it's due to a lack of other products that as easy to use for so many.

I've considered putting my internet savvy parents on Slack, and they are well into their retirement years.

I don't think Slack is addicting as much as most humans enjoy contact with other humans. We are wired to be social. It helped us survive and thrive. Slack et al is simply a symptom of that wiring.

The killer feature of slack is that alerts are highly configurable and work properly across devices - it lets you eliminate unnecessary and duplicated alerts

> It’s a bit like the way everyone gravitates towards the kitchen at a house party.

I've solved this problem by dimming or turning off the lights in all the rooms I don't want people to hang out in and having brighter lighting in the room I want people to stay in. It works wonders.

i agree but even a nice thing and a more innovative application of slack is making the anti social become social.

If you dont like seeing people face to face and you still need to communicate with team members slack has the ability to be flexible enough to communicate many different ideas very accurately. With bots and file sharing slack is the one stop collaboration board (along with google docs for co file editing)

and for people that are social or non technical slack has that friendly feeling ... its has taken exactly what we have been hoping from the internet , efficient communication and sharing and made it be homey instead of cold.

Slack is just another message board for tech guys but to the rest of the people tech guys have to communicate with (and would want to make this communication as fast and accurate as possible) slack is a world of difference from other chat services.

They took good tech and added the human touch.