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The Problem with Slack at Scale

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101–107 of 107 posts

Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#101

It’s wild that Google, despite being the leader in startup email/business software and literally giving their Slack competitor to everyone for free as part of their Google Business subscription, STILL has such low mindshare in this space that it didn’t even merit a mention in the blog post. (Full disclosure: my company used Google Chat, and I find the integration ecosystem so pitiful that I’m constantly thinking abou…

I literally have no idea which of Google’s numerous chat apps you’re talking about

Eh, but you remember the first one that around when AIM was around, and pretty much nothing used today performs as good as it or AIM did on the average computer 20 years ago.

Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#102

> 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…

In 2016, I was hoping slack or a competitor would take a native desktop application, but ultimately found slack's problem's managable.

It's a shame that instead of literally any progress or competition at all, the industry is regressing rapidly into the slower, buggier, and in every way I can think of, just all around inferior product called "teams".

Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#104
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there might be a term for it - Async-First Communication You can take a look at https://blog.doist.com/async-first/

Good resource, thanks! I'm familiar with the term (as popularized by http://asyncmanifesto.org/ ) but perhaps 'async' is not enough of a self-sufficient term. Something can be async but also happen to be poor.

I agree and there are benefits on some sync activities too.

Being better is another thing after we understand and adopt necessary concepts/strategies like 'async'. But without those the ability to improve would be more limited.

Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#105
I think the author should invest in learning the keyboard shortcuts and search more often. They’re great and allow me to move around slack with ease. Also reminders for things you don’t want to think about at the moment work well too

The noise issue seems tool agnostic to me, if you converse with noisy people who are sporadic with posting and put important messages in threads/channels with less visibility then you’d have issues no matter what tool you use. Does anyone ever read a company wide email longer than 1 paragraph anyway? At least with slack you can search it

Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#106
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack-the-company’s mission was for Slack to be a searchable knowledge base.

Company mission statements are marketing, not actual missions. If you want to see the mission of the company look at what it actually does rather than what it says it aims to do.

Did you notice we are saying the same thing?: Slack’s mission was to be a knowledge base but, to date, they have failed to execute.

It’s not because mission statements are marketing bullshit that distract outsiders from an alternate nefarious goal. It’s simpler than that: your mission is where you want to go, but in many cases a business just can’t complete that mission.

Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#107
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams also has the BEST accessibility (at least for live captioning). I have not used Google Meet or anything, but I'm constantly surprised by the level of sophistication from Teams live captioning and transcripts. You can be watching it "type" in real time. It'll write the wrong word, but several seconds later (as the person has added more context) you see the word, or even sentence completely change to be more on p…

Google meet has a very similar feature. The missing piece is it seems to only work during the meeting when obviously it'd be great to get a downloadable and searchable transcript afterwards.

They announced this is coming later this year, today.
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