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The Problem with Slack at Scale

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Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#91

Post by droopyEyelids »

michaelt wrote: post #78
onion2k wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack is a tool, and like all tools it can be used badly. You work at a company that uses it badly. - No one should be using Slack for deep, branching conversations that require nested threads. Those would be lost and hard to refer back to in any system. Learn to separate and focus on things better. - Slack is not a documentation system or a knowledge base, and shouldn't be treated like one. Pull salient points out o…

> You work at a company that uses it badly [...] Learn to separate and focus on things better. Maybe, but it's not within my power to change the behaviour of dozens or hundreds of other people, none of whom report to me. So if I join a company where Slack is a shitty experience, I'm going to have a shitty experience with it - even if the company is "holding it wrong"

Is part of your thesis that if the company didn't have slack, they'd use their other tools properly?

Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#92

Post by mdaniel »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #90
onion2k wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack is a tool, and like all tools it can be used badly. You work at a company that uses it badly. - No one should be using Slack for deep, branching conversations that require nested threads. Those would be lost and hard to refer back to in any system. Learn to separate and focus on things better. - Slack is not a documentation system or a knowledge base, and shouldn't be treated like one. Pull salient points out o…

Your argument is just another “you’re holding it wrong” People are using these chat systems for such things so maybe Slack as a company should build in the smarts extract the data into a more permanent format.

I get the _strong_ impression that Slack considers information that leaves Slack as a threat to the business. Thus, I don't think it's a lack of smarts, it's a lack of will

Contrast that to https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option which is one of the major "what the hell" for me when any big open source community picks Slack for their "chat" solution: unless the community has deep pockets, messages both age out and are not indexed by search engines

Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#93

Post by slg »

1123581321 wrote: post #44
slg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you identify if a message is of the 2.5 variety without first reading it to confirm it is not a 2? You still need to be interrupted to read the message. In my experience reminders have always been a way to manage work and not a way to manage notifications.

I misunderstood and thought you were talking about making sure you didn’t forget to fully deal with the message. I think it’s worth being notified about important messages, even if you have to deal with them later. If you’re truly too busy to triage Slack, the unread status keeps the message for you while you do non-chat work, or work out of an urgent channels synchronously and ignore the others. The other suggestion…

>I think it’s worth being notified about important messages, even if you have to deal with them later

You are still misunderstanding. This isn't the problem. The issue is how to keep yourself from being interrupted from non-important messages. Slack provides support for messages that are not time sensitive. It encourages us to treat every channel as either worthy of some urgency to read or completely irrelevant and worthy of muting.

Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#94

Post by kevincox »

I feel like the cycle of Slack is:

1. Everyone subscribes everyone to tons of notifications and people send email to everyone.

2. Everyone gets too much email and starts ignoring it.

3. Everyone hates email, no one responds.

4. They switch to Slack. It is great, high signal-to-noise, channels to organize.

5. People start adding notifications, subscriptions, blasting messages to many channels.

6. You are back to all of the problems of email.

Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#95

Post by dijonman2 »

mdaniel wrote: post #92
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is just another “you’re holding it wrong” People are using these chat systems for such things so maybe Slack as a company should build in the smarts extract the data into a more permanent format.

I get the _strong_ impression that Slack considers information that leaves Slack as a threat to the business. Thus, I don't think it's a lack of smarts, it's a lack of will Contrast that to https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option which is one of the major "what the hell" for me when any big open source community picks Slack for their "chat" solution: unless the community has deep pockets, messages both age out an…

> I get the _strong_ impression that Slack considers information that leaves Slack as a threat to the business.

Double that since Salesforce bought them.

Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#96

Post by janejeon »

maarf wrote: post #77
rtpg wrote: post #50

I think Twist is the right answer. It's basically a forum, which is nice because: - people have to write "real messages", with a beginning, middle, and end. Subject line. - Doesn't suffer from e-mail's "I wasn't on the original to/cc" problem where information is completely silo'd by default - Messages by default need to be categorized and a bit organized. Less of a firehose E-mail gets a lot of shit, but from my exp…

I use Twist daily and it seems abandoned. There are few UI/UX problems that hurt me constantly and I don't remember when was the last time the app was updated.

> I don't remember when was the last time the app was updated

checks app store

Uhhhhhh... 17 hours ago?

Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#97

Post by karmakaze »

Lapz wrote: post #63
karmakaze wrote: post #14

> 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…

For the whiteboarding solution at work we use Miro. Extremely happy with it

I've also used Miro. It's good for gathering information, but not so good for synthesizing/creating/collaborating on a design diagram that you can do with a whiteboard and marker. Maybe it can work better with a large tablet device--I haven't tried.

Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#98

Post by 1123581321 »

slg wrote: post #93
1123581321 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I misunderstood and thought you were talking about making sure you didn’t forget to fully deal with the message. I think it’s worth being notified about important messages, even if you have to deal with them later. If you’re truly too busy to triage Slack, the unread status keeps the message for you while you do non-chat work, or work out of an urgent channels synchronously and ignore the others. The other suggestion…

>I think it’s worth being notified about important messages, even if you have to deal with them later You are still misunderstanding. This isn't the problem. The issue is how to keep yourself from being interrupted from non-important messages. Slack provides support for messages that are not time sensitive. It encourages us to treat every channel as either worthy of some urgency to read or completely irrelevant and w…

I guess I don’t see the problem if a channel notifies you and you either read/action immediately, or triage for later. Why is it a problem if your sender expects you to decide if you have time to deal with an important message now? If the message is long but unimportant, I’d file it in the “read quickly and move on” category. I think I’m disagreeing and not misunderstanding.

Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#99

Post by antifa »

glotzerhotze wrote: post #11
jamesfinlayson wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet Atlassian managed to not solve it with HipChat and not solve it again with Stride.

What does that tell about Atlassian?

Atlassian is weird in that they seem to have vacuumed up the entire market but all of their products are (AFAIK and experienced) objectively shitty and have negative demand.

Re: The Problem with Slack at Scale

#100

Post by antifa »

dvt wrote: post #5
cyberpunk wrote: post #2

I mean, good luck… Getting into enterprise IM in 2022 is complete idiocy, but… Good luck. We already have the solution, it’s zulip, yet no one uses it or cares. > Slack is based on IRC Not true any more, maybe in ancient history. > It was built for synchronous communication. Also wrong.

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.

A zulip clone written in end to end rust sounds interesting, with reasonable allowances for non-rust code on android/iOS. So maybe just end to end swift would also be fine.

But instead, probably instead we're going to get something like kernels written in electron forced onto us by our IT departments out of nowhere just because it's included in our Microsoft or Atlassian plan at no additional cost.

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