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The NYC Ruby users group just replaced their email list with Slack, it's great, it's cut down participation by about 80%, messages that are not seen immediately

The NYC Ruby users group just replaced their email list with Slack, it's great, it's cut down participation by about 80%, messages that are not seen immediately go forever unread, and what was once a valuable community for me to reach out to as a freelancer is now worthless. But at least we're on the coolest new billion dollar valuation closed source tech. And we have some great new channels like #general that no one ever posts to. I can't imagine anything better.

nihonde 10y ago
This made me laugh because it's also exactly my experience with free community Slack. I suppose there is an argument for a more transient means of communication, and Slack's interface is certainly an improvement over IRC or awful, awful Google Groups, but... Of course, if you want a better Slack experience, you can shell out an unknown multiplier of thousands of dollars per month for a paid version (which is never going to happen). The pricing gap for free/paid community Slack is just nuts.
- stephengillie 10y ago
  Slack amplifies "fishbowl" workplace environments. Imagine if you're only allowed to discuss certain topics in certain channels, but what you can say in each channel changes often. And your boss can't cut you any...slack...about these changes, because his boss is watching all of these channels too, telling him who should say what where. We've been coping by hanging out in private channels. And so the tribal knowledge remains hidden among a small cabal because management doesn't want it discussed. They prefer the illusion that we are...all-knowing or psychic or something.
  - fsloth 10y ago
    What? Managament controlling information dispersal within a company?! How can any place work that way? NDA and GAAP rules limiting discussions to third parties but within companies...?! (shudders). Either the process would need to be trivially linear or the management need to be psychics to know what information is actually needed where.
    - annnnd 10y ago
      Happens more than you would think... Key phrase is usually "on a need-to-know basis". It is difficult to argue with such phrase as it seems completely reasonable on the surface, but what happens is that someone has to decide which information someone needs to know. Such decisions are not without mistakes, and to top it off, there is even incentive to keep people out of the loop because information gives the holder some power. So it often happens that people do not get the whole picture and operate on limited knowledge, leading to bad decisions.
      - fsloth 10y ago
        Crazy. I've worked in companies ranging from 10 to thousands of employees and never heard before of such a self immolating idea gaining wide acceptance. I must be lucky.
noobiemcfoob 10y ago
With my group, we started to use slack for email, but the transient nature of the chat did exactly what you describe. We ended up finding Discourse, a forum system, and have been using that. Now, slack is more about simulating in person discussion (i.e. we rarely use it), and Discourse is more like emails pre-sorted by category. I have to say, it's working pretty well.
tedmiston 10y ago
I think there's a chance of Slack winning this use case when they add one feature: threaded conversations / topics. Zulip (https://zulip.org https://zulip.org), Dropbox's Slack clone, supports threaded convos out of the box quite nicely.

nihonde 10y ago

This made me laugh because it's also exactly my experience with free community Slack. I suppose there is an argument for a more transient means of communication, and Slack's interface is certainly an improvement over IRC or awful, awful Google Groups, but... Of course, if you want a better Slack experience, you can shell out an unknown multiplier of thousands of dollars per month for a paid version (which is never going to happen). The pricing gap for free/paid community Slack is just nuts.

stephengillie 10y ago
Slack amplifies "fishbowl" workplace environments. Imagine if you're only allowed to discuss certain topics in certain channels, but what you can say in each channel changes often. And your boss can't cut you any...slack...about these changes, because his boss is watching all of these channels too, telling him who should say what where. We've been coping by hanging out in private channels. And so the tribal knowledge remains hidden among a small cabal because management doesn't want it discussed. They prefer the illusion that we are...all-knowing or psychic or something.
- fsloth 10y ago
  What? Managament controlling information dispersal within a company?! How can any place work that way? NDA and GAAP rules limiting discussions to third parties but within companies...?! (shudders). Either the process would need to be trivially linear or the management need to be psychics to know what information is actually needed where.
  - annnnd 10y ago
    Happens more than you would think... Key phrase is usually "on a need-to-know basis". It is difficult to argue with such phrase as it seems completely reasonable on the surface, but what happens is that someone has to decide which information someone needs to know. Such decisions are not without mistakes, and to top it off, there is even incentive to keep people out of the loop because information gives the holder some power. So it often happens that people do not get the whole picture and operate on limited knowledge, leading to bad decisions.
    - fsloth 10y ago
      Crazy. I've worked in companies ranging from 10 to thousands of employees and never heard before of such a self immolating idea gaining wide acceptance. I must be lucky.

noobiemcfoob 10y ago

With my group, we started to use slack for email, but the transient nature of the chat did exactly what you describe. We ended up finding Discourse, a forum system, and have been using that. Now, slack is more about simulating in person discussion (i.e. we rarely use it), and Discourse is more like emails pre-sorted by category. I have to say, it's working pretty well.

tedmiston 10y ago

I think there's a chance of Slack winning this use case when they add one feature: threaded conversations / topics. Zulip (https://zulip.org https://zulip.org), Dropbox's Slack clone, supports threaded convos out of the box quite nicely.