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> I felt a little bit like I was a freelancer again, which I think was kind of the point ... a lot of us are writers who ended up weighing in on every single li

> I felt a little bit like I was a freelancer again, which I think was kind of the point ... a lot of us are writers who ended up weighing in on every single little thing in Slack because it felt like that was our job when really it probably isn't. Over analysis leads to paralyzation, which isn't necessarily a Slack problem. Sounds more like they are blaming the messenger rather than themselves, which is exceedingly easy to do in this day and age. There's a similar argument made for gun legislation, where the restriction in distribution of guns leads to less violence. People are still responsible for their actions, but other people's actions (such as turning off Slack) lead to greater awareness that those actions will not be tolerated in a social group.

AznHisoka 10y ago
They're just saying Slack creates an environment that makes it easy to be unproductive. So they made the right decision to not use it rather than force themselves to use up their "discipline energy" and use it properly. It's like going on a diet and deciding not to have any junk food in the house rather than have it around and force yourself to be disciplined. An entirely valid (and correct) approach.
- kordless 10y ago
  And what of those that don't need to expend "discipline energy" whatever the fuck that is? Slack is not the problem, nor the removal of it the solution. This is corporate bullshit in action.
  - AznHisoka 10y ago
    Then go ahead and use Slack. To each his own. For Vice it obviously didn't cultivate a productive environment.
- jkoebler 10y ago
  Yeah, I think this is right (I'm on the Motherboard team), I'm the one who made the "silo" comment. I think Derek's point in the article about Slack making it easy to disguise structural / workflow problems is very true. We don't hate slack and I'm sure we'll go back to using it, but by stripping down to nothing, it made the flaws in our workflow / approach more obvious. Now when we go back to it, hopefully we'll use it in a much different way. Frankly, I hope we don't ever go back or go back in a much scaled down way, but I'm not expecting that long term.

AznHisoka 10y ago

They're just saying Slack creates an environment that makes it easy to be unproductive. So they made the right decision to not use it rather than force themselves to use up their "discipline energy" and use it properly. It's like going on a diet and deciding not to have any junk food in the house rather than have it around and force yourself to be disciplined. An entirely valid (and correct) approach.

kordless 10y ago
And what of those that don't need to expend "discipline energy" whatever the fuck that is? Slack is not the problem, nor the removal of it the solution. This is corporate bullshit in action.
- AznHisoka 10y ago
  Then go ahead and use Slack. To each his own. For Vice it obviously didn't cultivate a productive environment.
jkoebler 10y ago
Yeah, I think this is right (I'm on the Motherboard team), I'm the one who made the "silo" comment. I think Derek's point in the article about Slack making it easy to disguise structural / workflow problems is very true. We don't hate slack and I'm sure we'll go back to using it, but by stripping down to nothing, it made the flaws in our workflow / approach more obvious. Now when we go back to it, hopefully we'll use it in a much different way. Frankly, I hope we don't ever go back or go back in a much scaled down way, but I'm not expecting that long term.