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Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

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Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#431

Post by nothrabannosir »

warp_factor wrote: post #351

Congratulation to them. I think what they did is absolutely amazing and will be seen retrospectively as one of the biggest fads of history. - They managed to disturb millions of worker to an attention-driven work culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate. - They managed to change chat from a set of open protocols to a single closed app terribly written in JS. - They managed to make a lo…

I see this complaint a lot, and I'm very sensitive to dopamine addiction myself so perhaps a few of my tips can help someone else make Slack less frustrating:

1. use /mute judiciously. especially on the main chats. only unmute important "#500" style channels. People immediately learn to @you when relevant.

2. disable notifications for everything on mobile: DMs, @here, @channel, @yourname, anything. No notifications whatsoever.

3. Put "Notifications disabled -- in case of emergency, please call me: " in your status. I've had one person call me ever and it was completely justified. He saw the status, called me and said, "sorry I'm calling but it's an emergency and your status said to call." Great.

4. Disable all notifications on your desktop app, as well. On Mac OS X, don't even have the red app button show up for unread messages. Just check Slack once an hour (or what you want) and deal with any DMs / @mentions / outstanding chat. In reality, you'll automatically check whenever you have mental downtime, or during a conversation. This just allows you to stay in the zone when you are.

This has significantly reduced my Slack-stress. I enjoy it far better now, on my terms.

Most importantly: if someone is frustrated by your poor response time, explain! "I'm very bad with distractions, I need this to cope. If it's an emergency, please call :)". People are good people, they understand.

I hope this helps anyone :)

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#433

Post by raldi »

drawnwren wrote: post #427
raldi wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm going to go out on a limb here and venture a guess that Slack is going to do very well for itself, though it may dip and swoon over the next couple years before it reaches that point. An even more applicable comparison is the HN thread about the Dropbox announcement. "What? This is just [IRC|rsync] with gimmicky bells and whistles."

I think it's telling that I've seen that Dropbox comment mentioned (and here distorted to the whole thread) probably >100 times yet can't remember the threads it was mentioned in.

I don't understand what you mean about "distorted"

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#434

Post by lostjohnny »

askafriend wrote: post #361

Slack is great. The valuation makes sense and I wish them continued success. All the integrations, and workflows that Slack has enabled for our company make us more productive. I would hate to go back to what came before it. IRC is complete trash and I don't know why anyone would use it in the same sentence as Slack. UX matters. It matters A LOT.

> IRC is complete trash

We'll talk about it 10 years from now when Slack is gonna be "old cruft" while IRC still gonna be there rocking.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#435

Post by piva00 »

lostjohnny wrote: post #421
piva00 wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, on Slack (or any other similar chat) I can jump in and answer a co-worker that had a question when I'm available, if they are also available they reply and we have a short convo that takes much less time than e-mailing back and forth which usually ends with a "let's talk this in person". Having realtime chat has saved me countless hours of participating in e-mail threads that end nowhere, at the same time as help…

> I can jump in and answer a co-worker that had a question when I'm available Isn't what you are describing the de-facto use case of a mailing list?

Not when I have to keep sorting my mailing lists into its own "label/category/folder/whatever your e-mail client calls it" on a sidebar so I can keep track of activity happening in which mailing list.

In Slack or any IRC-like chat I can keep track of the channels that interest me, I keep track of live operations, my team's public channel to see if there are stakeholders having issues with our systems, our private channel for internal team discussions (even more when I'm working from home). The engineering announcement channel to keep track in realtime of changes being performed to other systems or our infrastructure and getting quick status updates.

Yes, e-mail could be used for all of that, it would also make my inbox completely useless.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#436

Post by mulmen »

vhab wrote: post #372
warp_factor wrote: post #351

Congratulation to them. I think what they did is absolutely amazing and will be seen retrospectively as one of the biggest fads of history. - They managed to disturb millions of worker to an attention-driven work culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate. - They managed to change chat from a set of open protocols to a single closed app terribly written in JS. - They managed to make a lo…

> They managed to disturb millions of worker to an "attention driven" work culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate. I see where you're coming from. But anecdote time. The immediate communication fixed something for us which would previously be a more disruptive tap on the shoulder, or alternatively an only once a day processed e-mail. Slack gave our devs time to finish their thought,…

None of this is unique to Slack, it's just a consequence of using a chat app, or email.

The only thing that allows you to have a liberal work from home policy is a healthy company/team/corporate culture.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#437

Post by anilakar »

vhab wrote: post #372
warp_factor wrote: post #351

Congratulation to them. I think what they did is absolutely amazing and will be seen retrospectively as one of the biggest fads of history. - They managed to disturb millions of worker to an attention-driven work culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate. - They managed to change chat from a set of open protocols to a single closed app terribly written in JS. - They managed to make a lo…

> They managed to disturb millions of worker to an "attention driven" work culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate. I see where you're coming from. But anecdote time. The immediate communication fixed something for us which would previously be a more disruptive tap on the shoulder, or alternatively an only once a day processed e-mail. Slack gave our devs time to finish their thought,…

What previously was a tap on the shoulder is now a message and a tap on the shoulder after three minutes if there is no reply.

Slack has become the worst possible amalgamation of email and telephone. When previously minor things were discussed asynchronously over mail, only major and immediate issues warranted a phone call. Now all kinds of noncritical correspondence gets pushed to an instant messenger application, where every issue has to be paid attention to immediately.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#438

Post by coldtea »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #423
coldtea wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Communication tools don't create this issue, they only bring it closer to the surface. You have to learn to manage your emotions. If you don't then it's always going to something which holds you back. That's close to saying "bullets don't kill people, the hole in their vital organs does". The thing is, text-based communication tools are problematic compared to face-to-face communication, even in people who know how…

Unlike being poked in a vital organ, communication is a repeatable exercise, so reasonable people can keep communicating over the lower-fidelity medium until problem is resolved. Face-to-face communication may be ideal, but it has huge overhead and limits. Compared to the scale of communication text (especially one over the wire) enabled, I think the world is much better off with the tech than it would be without it.…

>so reasonable people can keep communicating over the lower-fidelity medium until problem is resolved.

And has empirical evidence, of people communicating in text mediums, from USENET to modern social forums, proven the above?

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#439

Post by kjaftaedi »

cush wrote: post #374
neumann wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is currently abhorrent. They do appear to be updating regularly, but so much of the UX should have been fixed at the beginning. - Messages don't get delivered for hours on mobile. - UX is so bad I don't think they are even dog fooding. eg, copy and paste a code block and it will capture a bunch of meta information - teams aren't followed by default, so half the team had no idea the data was there - this means nobo…

You're describing 12 months ago Teams. It's come a long way.

Some of my co-workers switched to Teams. They show up as offline on Skype for Business.

I haven't moved to it yet because I require a chat application that works and allows people to contact me.

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