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Slack channels are a waste of time

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Re: Slack channels are a waste of time

#31

Post by yellowapple »

spookthesunset wrote: post #22
mabynogy wrote: post #19

Switch to IRC, you won't regret it. Two points concerning the post. IRC is "senior-friendly" and you won't have that GIF problem as it's text-only.

What planet are you living on where you can say with a straight face that IRC is a senior-friendly thing to use? Do people who advocate for IRC even understand what made Slack successful? Seriously. Stay relevant or you are gonna get left in the dust when the world moves on. > GIF problem GIFs are a feature, not a bug.

GIFs are a useless feature at best, and a distraction at worst.

Don't get me wrong, I love using them, but they ain't exactly a productivity boost.

Re: Slack channels are a waste of time

#32

Post by unpythonic »

yellowapple wrote: post #27
KaiserPro wrote: post #24

Sorry, but most of that is simply not true. I worked for a large news company that moved from virtually nothing to slack. There is now something like 800 channels. Each channel has a purpose that is distinct from each other (for example system-outage-44, or graphics-team, or aws-help) Each team normally has a public and private channel, one to provide support, the other brisk frank discourse. Seniors are expected to…

Having to sift through 800 channels to find the relevant topic sounds like a nightmare.

Our company has a similar number of channels, if not more, and you don't scan all of the channels for input. People typically subscribe to their team and related team channels as well as any topics of interest. Slack makes it easy to bring someone in just by mentioning them, so people get added to the places they didn't know about as needed.

Once you start seeing that you're subscribed to too many channels, you just leave them as they lose relevance to you. There's even a middle ground where you can mute notifications from a channel, but can still watch what's going on.

The main problem with slack is the poor search capability, and that's very relevant to your comment.

Re: Slack channels are a waste of time

#33

Post by joselreyes »

At work we started doing private project-specific channels for whatever initiative we're working on that's cross functional. As soon as that project is complete, we archive the channel and move on the next thing. It's worked out really well surprisingly. Our public channels rarely get activity now because their subject matter is so vague but the private channels are incredibly active and productive.

Re: Slack channels are a waste of time

#34

Post by shlant »

yellowapple wrote: post #31
spookthesunset wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What planet are you living on where you can say with a straight face that IRC is a senior-friendly thing to use? Do people who advocate for IRC even understand what made Slack successful? Seriously. Stay relevant or you are gonna get left in the dust when the world moves on. > GIF problem GIFs are a feature, not a bug.

GIFs are a useless feature at best, and a distraction at worst. Don't get me wrong, I love using them, but they ain't exactly a productivity boost.

well lucky for you, Slack has a solution for that:

https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/565314985405206529?lang=e...

Re: Slack channels are a waste of time

#35

Post by derefr »

hluska wrote: post #23
sekasi wrote: post #18

Honestly, this read so much like desperate marketing. You're making baseless claims. "Senior people rarely use Slack channels". Care to back that up with some facts please? It takes away from everything the product is trying to do by focusing so intently on misguided flaws of the competitor product. It's like those Galaxy vs iPhone ads. Make the product better.

I don't understand why you're being downvoted as this is an excellent comment. This article read like an advertisement. There's nothing wrong with advertising, but this isn't even a particularly good ad. I'd be more likely to try whatever the heck this service is called if they talked about what they do, and focused less on calling out Slack. The problem with ads that shoot down your competitors is that your readers…

Some services are solutions to a problem people don’t realize they have. To tell them about the solution, you first have to convince them that they have the problem. And the problem, in this case, is something created by the UX choices made by the ecosystem of their competitors.

The first car with seat-belts had to explain in its advertising just how existing cars are dangerous, before it could explain how seatbelts fix that problem. People would start off thinking that existing cars are just fine; the ad needed first-and-foremost to make them believe that they weren’t; to foment a state of irritation or even disgust at “the way things are.”

——

Not to say it’s always a real problem, necessarily. You can convince people they have a problem whether or not they would have agreed they have a problem if they were just provided with some additional straight facts.

See: the invention of deodorant. First take something society doesn’t actually care about, even if it’s pointed out—the fact that you smell sour after a hard day’s labor—and make it into an etiquette faux pas for people to be able to notice that about you in the public sphere. Then you can sell the solution.

Admittedly, even this manipulative version of the technique can still have unintentional positive knock-on effects: public transit probably never would have been bothered with as a concept without you and the sardines around you on the train being deodorized first.

Re: Slack channels are a waste of time

#36

Post by ryrobes »

At the risk of sounding petty and nit-picky...

I hate it when companies start their marketing about how shitty their main competitor is. Really? You couldn't muster an elegant elevator pitch without throwing some shade first?

Granted this seems to be a 'alternative marketing' page ("Why Zulip?") that calls out Slack directly... but, then again, so does the main page of the site.

If you can't define what your product does without namedropping a popular alternative first... C'mon man.

Re: Slack channels are a waste of time

#37

Post by jstandard »

joselreyes wrote: post #33

At work we started doing private project-specific channels for whatever initiative we're working on that's cross functional. As soon as that project is complete, we archive the channel and move on the next thing. It's worked out really well surprisingly. Our public channels rarely get activity now because their subject matter is so vague but the private channels are incredibly active and productive.

We also do this coupled with project specific Trello boards. Solved many of the signal v noise issues we had.

Re: Slack channels are a waste of time

#38

Post by flafla2 »

whoisjuan wrote: post #7

Ok. So their approach to solving this problem is to break down the concept of single channels into a system of parent channels with sub-channels... Pardon my cynicism, but that's not going to solve the problem. If this were an information architecture problem, it would have been solved already by Slack itself. Slack's problem is noise and that's not something you can solve easily. Trying to create new abstractions is…

Slack channels are largely defined by _membership_, not necessarily by _topic_. At least in my organization (we use Slack), there is generally a channel (or channels) for each team and larger channels for the whole company.

As these channels get bigger, they inevitably split into sub channels (#myteam becomes #myteam-status, #myteam-oncall, #myteam-eng, ...). But this is clunky and can lead to a lot of confusion as to what chats should go where. Furthermore information retrieval can be cumbersome as I’ve found myself flipping through 5 chats and searching them all for a conversation.

I don’t have any experience with zulip, but it’s strategy of partitioning conversations largely aligns with how I think when I look for things on Slack: First I recall who I was talking to (channel), then I drill down and look for the thread I’m thinking of.

Re: Slack channels are a waste of time

#39

Post by tabbott »

whoisjuan wrote: post #7

Ok. So their approach to solving this problem is to break down the concept of single channels into a system of parent channels with sub-channels... Pardon my cynicism, but that's not going to solve the problem. If this were an information architecture problem, it would have been solved already by Slack itself. Slack's problem is noise and that's not something you can solve easily. Trying to create new abstractions is…

(I lead the Zulip project.)

If you talk to people who use Zulip, they will tell you that a better information architecture actually does make a big difference for communicating effectively. See, for example:

* https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/986444234365521920

* https://www.recurse.com/blog/112-how-rc-uses-zulip

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17622987 (on the HN frontpage right now)

Re: Slack channels are a waste of time

#40

Post by yellowapple »

unpythonic wrote: post #32
yellowapple wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having to sift through 800 channels to find the relevant topic sounds like a nightmare.

Our company has a similar number of channels, if not more, and you don't scan all of the channels for input. People typically subscribe to their team and related team channels as well as any topics of interest. Slack makes it easy to bring someone in just by mentioning them, so people get added to the places they didn't know about as needed. Once you start seeing that you're subscribed to too many channels, you just…

I get that you can selectively subscribe to only certain channels. The problem is that now you have 800+ channel names to read in order to determine the ones to which you might want to subscribe. Sure, someone else could invite you to some new topic-oriented channel if one remembers to actually do so. More often than not, in my observation, that doesn't really happen in a timely manner (if at all).
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