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Slack does a good job overall, but I'm glad to see articles like this one challenging the enthusiasm that they've seen of late. I'm starting to share the articl
by bhuga 10y ago
Slack does a good job overall, but I'm glad to see articles like this one challenging the enthusiasm that they've seen of late. I'm starting to share the article's opinion that Slack encourages unthoughtful communication. I do wish the author had spent a little time pointing out some specific product decisions that lead to the kinds of problematic communication they were seeing.
For example, basic product choices like "every message highlights a room for attention" creates, for me, a feeling of "farmville for corporate communications." There's always another channel to click, another few sentences to read. This makes Slack very engaging at first, and makes it highly successful at lodging itself into organizations. And that's great, because Slack's a far sight better than email. But this rapid-fire feel encourages synchronous communications, and everyone quickly learns that @-mentions and DMs get quicker responses. That in turn leads to communicating with individuals instead of teams (or instead of searching issues, or Jira, or a wiki, or whatever). I don't think chat has to be this way; product decisions can encourage a more thoughtful question and answer flow.
I think that Chat may be like product management: the product opinions matter quite a bit, and teams have varying styles, so there's room in the market for several different products. Slack does a great job for a certain communication style, but it's not the only style out there. I hope some competing products with different opinions gain enough traction to keep them honest.
- HappyTypist 10y agoI agree. What I'd like to see is to batch room highlights when you're not mentioned. For example, allow me to batch highlights every 30 mins, and then the temptation to read everything goes away. Better copy/paste (like most IM apps) would also make it easier to copy/paste some discussion into your bug tracker of choice.
- gumby 10y agoI have a hard time agreeing that "Slack's a far sight better than email." The lack of threading and context (mentioned in AB's writeup) means you have to maintain a lot of state (and keep up to date) in order to get any value. That defeats the point of having automation! For good or ill, the 40+ year history of mail means there are various tools and conventions that allow your computer to do part of the work for you.
- stevetrewick 10y agoI recently disabled threading in my email as I have an unfortunate number of people who regularly : send mail using identical subject lines, reply to whatever my previous email to them was rather than come up with a new subject line or send multiple versions of important documents under the same subject/RE the same message over the course of months. This results in a hideous nightmare of thread spaghetti where I can't find stuff, or worse, I'm looking at the wrong iteration of something. Oh, and did I mention all the people who have MIME attachment email footers so that figuring out which email contains the document they sent means looking through every single mail? [0] So I flattened it back down to chronological order and it feels like that restored a lot of sanity. [0] Obviously a lot of this chaos can be tamed with a more aggressive process for inbox management, but that kind of plays into my point, that's all out of process manual work that a better communication tool should help me with.
- pjmlp 10y agoI have seen this among all my friends that aren't that computer knowledgeable. They just search for an email with the same set of people that they want to sent an email to, choose reply all and change the content.
- Already__Taken 10y agoThis is a symptom of bad address books in the email software.
- Already__Taken 10y agoThis is a symptom of bad address books in the email software.
- kevincox 10y agoIf you use a quality mail client (such as Thunderbird) it doesn't rely on subject for threading and fixes these problems. As well as displaying the replies in a proper tree rather then as a giant list.
- moron4hire 10y ago