11–20 of 107 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally agree with this, not to mention that chat apps are some of the most boring, uninteresting, and braindead "problems" to solve and they have been basically completely "solved" over and over again since bulletin boards.
And yet Atlassian managed to not solve it with HipChat and not solve it again with Stride.
I'd add security to the list of things to address. Aggregating all of the institutional knowledge of the company to one perpetually searchable global workspace hosted in a US company's shared cloud vulnerable to being downloaded and abused by a global breakin or any compromised employee account is bad.
I thought much the same. Controlling the custody and flow of information is impossible with tens of thousands of users and pretty much no policies or significant monitoring in place.
>Slack is based on IRC and is a messaging client. It was built for synchronous communication and not for collaboration. As a result, the way to scale Slack for a large company is to create more and more channels. This increases the amount of information generated in a company. Whilst this can be a good thing, Slack users don’t have the ability to filter high-quality information from low-quality. [emphasis mine] This…
> 2. Slack clone but with Feature X. Feature X is usually something like task management, project management, notes etc. Examples of these apps are Chanty, Rock.so, Flock, Ryver, Twist (there are many more).
> The problem with the apps in the second category is that they end up competing with two existing tools.
I use 4 written communication tools:
1. Slack for (a) async & sync team chat (b) async company/other-teams channels
2. Email for formal company communication (I don't send email, other than auto calendar invites)
3. git/GitHub for project work
4. Google Docs for RFCs
In addition there are sync meets and pairing sessions.
The only thing that I find missing is a good shared whiteboard and hallway/watercooler chats.
The problem with Slack exists between chair and keyboard--it's about finding a way to use it that works. If the culture is for anyone to post arbitrary volume in a large channel, then that's on you. Similarly if your company/teams create too many channels that many people should be in, you're doing it wrong. My policy is that if there's more than X people in a channel I don't need to pay attention (except for the 1 official company announcements channel).
Some VC guy said this is one of the biggest red flags he looks for in a startup. It almost always leads to failure. I dont remember the exact reasons but something like it means the startup doesnt understand fundamental market segment issues and grit required to overcome them.
>Slack is based on IRC and is a messaging client. It was built for synchronous communication and not for collaboration. As a result, the way to scale Slack for a large company is to create more and more channels. This increases the amount of information generated in a company. Whilst this can be a good thing, Slack users don’t have the ability to filter high-quality information from low-quality. [emphasis mine] This…
Reminders are the 2.5 option. Scan and postpone until a better time to read.
> Slack Alternatives > 2. Slack clone but with Feature X. Feature X is usually something like task management, project management, notes etc. Examples of these apps are Chanty, Rock.so, Flock, Ryver, Twist (there are many more). > The problem with the apps in the second category is that they end up competing with two existing tools. I use 4 written communication tools: 1. Slack for (a) async & sync team chat (b) asyn…
The closest I've found is making sure everyone has a decent sized tablet and using Google Jam.
One thing I think Teams does well in this space, and where I feel Slack falls short, is the organisation of channels. With Teams you can put people in... well teams, and each team has channels and other data associated with it. This hierarchy makes it easy for people to keep a multitude of channels and data organised without actually having to do it themselves. Another thing I have to (begrudgingly) concede to Teams…
Not sure why, but I find it to be the worst way of communicating anything.
1. Super terrible at threading. Threads are clearly discouraged and don't nest. This appears to be by design, but even Usenet handled threading better.
2. Slack is an information wastebasket - at least in my experience it's really hard to find information once there's a significant traffic in a deployment.
3. Too Much Notification! I have to mute channels that has a high rate of addressing the channel.
However there's no denying that it's popular. Seems like every place I go is using Slack. At least slack allows me to edit my typos.