15 ms·

How to make Slack less bad for you

171 points by hardmath123 10y ago

notJim 10y ago
Honestly I find the gripey-ness of this pretty off-putting. We get it, you hate Slack, congratulations.
untog 10y ago
While the tone of the article is maybe a little hyperbolic, I agree with a lot of it. The default setting to be alerted when absolutely anything happens is crazy. And whenever I see someone talking about Slack replacing e-mail as if it's a good thing, I recoil in horror. You can answer e-mails at your own pace, while Slack prioritises instant replies.
- edgan 10y ago
  I have to disagree. The problem with email is the signal to noise ratio is too high, because it is globally accessible. Where as Slack is company only. Some things need to be addressed now. With email that would be turning on notifications, but then you get notifications for spam. Slack doesn't have the spam problem. The closest it gets is messages from computers. Those can be controlled or segregated to certain channels.
  - ryukafalz 10y ago
    I think this really just speaks to a need for better email clients - or just better email client configurations. A good email client for a business might filter all messages from other members of your company into a given folder, and then only notify for messages in that folder. Notifications for any other messages would just be blocked. Heck, don't even show them in the unread count until the user looks for them in particular.
  - jomamaxx 10y ago
    " Where as Slack is company only. " This problem is easily solved with a filter, no?
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > Slack doesn't have the spam problem. The closest it gets is messages from computers. Those can be controlled or segregated to certain channels. And that's why Slack will not be a replacement for e-mail. Your life doesn't turn around the company you're currently employed in. Or, at least mine doesn't. Company messages are only a small fraction of important messages I get daily. (Not to mention that Slack killing e-mail would be a pretty dystopian future, with some single profit-seeking company controlling your primary means of communication.)
  - untog 10y ago
    > The problem with email is the signal to noise ratio is too high, because it is globally accessible. If your inbox is deluged with spam from outside the company, you need to filter your e-mail by domain.
- matwood 10y ago
  Turn off alerts unless you are specifically mentioned or something happens in a channel you deem important.
- r00fus 10y ago
  I dunno. What I do is simply mute the chatty channels, and go in when I need answers or get invited/DM'd. Mute is pretty powerful.
  - traviscj 10y ago
    You can't mute "@here" notifications though, which is really annoying. We have a slack bot that proxies "@team" to relevant "channel owners" , but the @here is more discoverable/more uniformly usable, so people still use that.
mmjjss 10y ago
Less can certainly be more. However I feel like Slack's usefulness:distraction ratio change greatly depending on the type of team or company using it. These suggestions are good ones but every situation is different. Is your team disciplined, focused, and/or collaborative and to what degree? The answer will tell you how Slack may get used or abused.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  Agreed. My Slack experiences have been fine: just a few channels, notifications off, mostly relevant work chats, etc.
- a300600st 10y ago
  Yeah before Slack I was constantly getting interrupted with questions that could have been answered any time and random co-workers just wanting to chat. However, I agree with the analysis that Slack is good for immediate communication and communication that doesn't really matter too much. Before Slack we didn't really have a tool that fit that and so every communication was a co-worker walking over and interrupting whatever you were doing.
  - AlexandrB 10y ago
    > Before Slack we didn't really have a tool that fit that and so every communication was a co-worker walking over and interrupting whatever you were doing. I don't get it. Doesn't any popular chat client fit the bill? The thing Slack adds is big persistent chat groups which doesn't help with the problem you're describing.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      I think big persistent groups sometimes do help with that. If you want to know which client requested X, then messaging one person is slow, and walking up to ask one person is disruptive. With Slack, you can ask 30 people and get an answer from whoever looks first (and so presumably isn't disrupted). Everyone else who's busy ignores things and skims things when they're not occupied. That's all contingent on a culture of async Slack usage, but I've found it valuable.
firewalkwithme 10y ago
I am probably getting old. Having used irc as main communication channel for 8 years in a previous company, we now added slack on top of the mail and direct messenger methods at my new workplace. I can not get used to it, at all. It is nothing but a distraction of half wit and delayed misunderstandings. I even dislike the ui. May be the staff is not ready, maybe just give it a little time. Maybe I just got too used to email
- tormeh 10y ago
  If you dislike Slack, have you seen Skype for Business? Its text chat function disproves the existence of Cthulhu, since something so mind-bendingly horrible would surely have awoken Him, if He existed. Imagine sending your colleagues single-line Word documents and you're basically there.
  - fiveoak 10y ago
    Using Slack is like a dream compared to Skype for Business. Sure Slack may have some dumb default settings but Skype for Business finds a way to somehow sabotage 5-10 mins of most meetings with some sort of technology issue.
    - erentz 10y ago
      Out of curiosity is this on a Mac? I've recently joined a new company where everybody loves to complain about Skype/Lync stating similar things to this. But I have zero issues, and had near zero issues at my prior company where it was widely used and improved remote working considerably. The only difference I can see is in this new company everybody is using MacOS (and admittedly when I tried it on Mac it was terrible).
  - fumplethumb 10y ago
    Couldn't agree more. We use Skype for Business and its lack of obvious features is amazing. To give people an example, you cannot even send a link!
taytus 10y ago
I can't be the only one who think Slack is another super hyped company...
- nilved 10y ago
  Nope, that's what everything thinks. Some people even think it's over-hyped.
- lojack 10y ago
  You would be correct. You can't mention slack anywhere on the Internet without someone saying how over hyped it is.
Stratoscope 10y ago
He didn't mention one of my pet peeves: the "stratoscope, robertheaton, and dang are typing" messages below the input window. They draw you in to watching... nothing! I sit there slack-jawed (pun unintended, but I'll take credit for it anyway) waiting to see what - if anything - will eventually show up. Even on #random. It seemed like such a good idea at the time - keep "water cooler" chat out of the main channels. But what really happens is that all the fun stuff goes on in #random, so you pay as much or more attention to it as anything else. Who wants to be late for the party? And there's the uncapitalized, unpunctuated, line-by-line stream of consciousness writing style I ranted about some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11239614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11239614
- dang 10y ago
  Another is that they just started putting light-grey text "Message @channel" by default in the text area. I am surprisingly stressed out by this. It feels like a command or a nudge that insinuates itself into my thinking space, like a half-finished message which a corporate entity 'helpfully' began for me, and now it's my job to finish it, and as soon as I finish that one another will begin. There's a bad dream in there somewhere... I think the OP is right that a UI needs to be sensitive to the user's psyche and not push them all the time toward using the product.
  - Stratoscope 10y ago
    Oh my, I was doing my best to not see that new message. I thought it was just a glitch that would go away soon enough. But now you've done it, I can't unsee it any more! Update: I'm curious why you're getting downvoted for your comment. Maybe people didn't like the creative way you put it? For me that made it all the better. Instead of some dry analysis, I like hearing what's going on in someone's head. Drama aside, for me the problem with that message is that it's just distracting.
  - JasonSage 10y ago
    I'm actually more at ease with this change than if there was no default text. There's that flicker of recognition when I look at the input area before I start typing—"I'm messaging @channel." Call me paranoid, but I often flick over to the sidebar to see which channel I'm in before I dive into some conversations, just to make sure I'm not saying something in a public channel I shouldn't—like scanning over the recipients before you send an email. This proactively reassures me so I don't have to flit about making sure I'm doing the right thing.
swagv 10y ago
And yet it says nothing of the evils of ad hoc private group chat and the miracle required to remember what secret combination of usernames -- like remembering the nuclear codes -- gets you to an earlier conversation you had to set aside.
ihuman 10y ago
I don't understand the part about "permanent do not disturb". Can't you just turn off all notifications, or quit the app?
- daenney 10y ago
  You can set Do Not Disturb for a team too from the same start to end time.
feistyGrub 10y ago
Slack is of utmost importance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius#Conspiracy_and_.22Slack.22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius#Conspi... Get it while you can. Hail Eris
- adzm 10y ago
  Eris be praised.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- mtraven 10y ago
  Somebody awhile back pointed out that Slack the app is about the most anti-Slack thing ever produced.
welder 10y ago
If you have more than a few teams, Slack becomes unusable. This alternative client doesn't freeze up like Slack: http://meetfranz.com/ http://meetfranz.com/
- esseti 10y ago
  This isn't very fair. If i've many team in slack, and slack app becomes unstable, you don't solve the problem, don't you?
raesene9 10y ago
One thing that's not mentioned in the article that I see as one of the main drawbacks of slack is lack of threading, which makes it much harder to have an async. conversation (especially across timezones). The very very weird part to me about this is that slack say they've been working on threading for at least 18 months now (https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/535121236452732928 https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/535121236452732928) and still can't provide a timeline for when it'll go live, which seems really odd for such a well funded development team, given it's such an oft-requested piece of functionality (there's even a twitter account dedicated to it https://twitter.com/slackThreadsYet https://twitter.com/slackThreadsYet )
ktamura 10y ago
I cannot recommend using Slack via a browser enough. It achieves several goals: 1. It sandboxes resource usage, preventing Slack from being a permanent resource hog. Is your Slack tab running hot on Chrome? Just kill it for now. There are many browser extensions for managing resource usage per tab. 2. Closing the Slack browser tab means no disruptive notifications. Sure, you can snooze Slack @-mentions, etc., but that's too much of "working hard to make the tool work." 3. Better workflow (seriously) Perhaps this is just me (or my function as a marketing person at a startup), but I work almost entirely inside the browser (GMail, Google Docs, various sites for research, SaaS apps). Using Slack as a standalone desktop app means I have to focus away from the browser. Using Slack as a browser tab means I can treat it just one of several web apps I use regularly. 4. Bonus point: No need to update your Slack client =)
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  Besides, isn't the desktop app mostly just the browser app itself running inside the Electron framework? I haven't noticed any critical features it offers on top of the web app.
  - JasonSage 10y ago
    I think as of at least half a year ago, they were still using MacGap on OS X. Browser notification support is still evolving. The native apps also have more awareness of when a user is active since they can read into activity outside the window frame.
    - dom0 10y ago
      > The native apps also have more awareness of when a user is active since they can read into activity outside the window frame. Maybe I'd rather not have that...
- maw 10y ago
  There are many browser extensions for managing resource usage per tab. Any clues on what to google for? I've tried the Great Suspender and wasn't very impressed.
esseti 10y ago
Since slack people will pass by here. Please, if i set not disturb then don't disturb me: no notification, no badge icon (!!), nothing! (maybe just when the people, after been warned that they may disturb still send the notification). then when i remove the not disturb your nice slackbot can tell me what i missed. Why am I asking so? beacuse I use pomodoro and i've a script that sets slack to "do not disturb" when i'm in the pomodoro and switch it off (to the pls bother me mood) when i'm done.
- GrinningFool 10y ago
  If you send it via /feedback you'll at least get a friendly, appreciative reply. The feature may never get implemented but the response is always nice... :slightly_smiling_face:
  - esseti 10y ago
    i did, i got a friendly reminde but that's it. The not-disturb feature is still disturbing :)
iza 10y ago
Surprised this doesn't mention the mute feature. I just mute the noisy channels (#random, etc). https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204411433-Muting-a-channel https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204411433-Muting-a-...
- ilyanep 10y ago
  Muting a channel doesn't prevent it from showing unread message indicators when your coworkers use @here and @channel indiscriminately. This is probably my current biggest pet peeve with Slack, an app that I otherwise love (at least more than some other alternatives we've tried).
ozten 10y ago
It sounds like the cultural norm for how their team is using Slack is synchronous. I'd strongly suggest building a culture that Email and Slack are Asynchronous. If something is time sensitive, take it to a synchronous channel which has cultural expectations that it is okay to interrupt the other person.
- RBerenguel 10y ago
  Our unwritten but seems to be more or less the rule at work is that unless you get an @ (either in a general channel or in a 1-1 chat) anything that goes into slack is as async as email. Maybe a little bit less, but the expectation is that you will get to it at some point and that's it. I don't find it specially disruptive this way. Way less than shouting from one side of the office "hey, check the deploy!"
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    This is exactly how we've handled Slack. It's sync (to within a minute or two) for @ messages, which are used sparingly. It's async for everything else, and it's faster than email only in that it's a bit more conversational. Within that norm, all of the "Slack is an evil attention vampire" complaints feel deeply unfamiliar to me. I find it less distracting than email because @ makes message priority clear at a glance.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  Using Slack asynchronously (or rather, using only private messages synchronously), these complaints are totally alien to me. Seeing Slack called "Facebook for work" doesn't feel inflammatory, it feels bizarre. I suspect synchronous culture would change things quite a bit. I've certainly never had the sense that "hey, do this when you can, no rush" meant anything but what it says. Of course, some of this seems to be about configuration approaches. I had forgotten that Slack's dock icon embeds notifications, because my dock minimizes when not in use.
oxguy3 10y ago
Honestly, this is not my experience using Slack at all. Maybe it's because I'm on such a small team, but I find that the amount of chatter on Slack isn't overwhelming at all -- #random is pretty dead most of the time. And if someone sends me a message and I'm busy, then I'll maybe glance at the notification but probably just ignore it until I'm free. My team uses Slack very asynchronously -- whenever you have something that needs feedback or whatever, you just post it in the appropriate channel, and expect responses to trickle in over maybe the next 24 hours. If someone sends "hey no rush but", then I legitimately do not rush to answer it -- just a different company culture I guess.
perseusprime11 10y ago
Is everyone forgetting the biggest benefit of Slack? It's the transparency part. Important details are no longer privy to 1 or 2 individuals on the team in their inboxes instead the whole team can see what's going on and can chime in if they disagree
- GrinningFool 10y ago
  If you're in the right channel. If someone didn't make a new channel to discuss the idea more , and you missed the single line of text that mentioned it two hours ago. If you happen to be looking at the right channel at the right time. If the pertinent bits aren't lost in back scroll. I think your statement is true for a sufficiently small company with a limited number of channels. Less so for larger companies, or even small ones with dozens or hundreds of them.
  - ec109685 10y ago
    Slack search is really good and can let you recover missed bits of information.
    - GrinningFool 10y ago
      But it's only helpful if you know what you need to search for. In the case of a conversation that happened in the past that you wanted to have input into - and either never learned about it, or only learned after a decision was reached - it doesn't help so much.
- dingaling 10y ago
  > Important details are no longer privy to 1 or 2 individuals on the team Sure they are, they just split-off into direct messages between themselves and return to the main channel to present the result of their discussion. Or don't even do that. Information-hoarding needs a cultural fix, not a technical solution. In my experience it usually occurs in companies with a blame-culture, so people confide between themselves and keep some information undisclosed as 'insurance'.
Hexigonz 10y ago
I'm on a small team (14-15) and honestly I love Slack. Have never had any issues with it and I think it's an awesome team messaging system. We use growbot to give props and get a kick out of it. We just switched from skype to slack calls and it was a gamechanger. I have been on teams that used GroupMe in the past and it was terrible. I don't read group me messages because they're off topic and annoying. Slack's channel system changed that for me.
jomamaxx 10y ago
Folks, I suggest that while Slack may have some mechanical advantages over e-mail, the 'problem of too many emails' will absolutely not be solved by Slack, or almost anything else. 'Communication discipline' is the key issue, and it's a social issue regarding how organizations work. Some people, in some jobs, are simply rewarded for broadcasting BS. It's their job to do that. Sadly. It's funny how much time we waste communication, and how, most often, there is very little guidance on how we should do that. Very few 'rules'. Like typing, or 'interviewing' - there should be some effort to control this. If you think about it - isn't it absurd that someone from some group can do something that possibly interrupts dozens of other people? Would you allow them to shout loudly in a room? In the Army they call it 'radio discipline'. There are specific ways to communicate. Entirely inappropriate for corporate life, at the same time, we also don't want to quash the serendipitous opportunity that sometimes arises from great chats ... But still. Perversely ... because Email clients usually offer finer control ... maybe email with tight discipline is the way. I feel dirty for saying that :)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
apatters 10y ago
Slack is good, notifications are bad, and this is a rant. This post reads to me as another snowflake in the very justified avalanche of "Internet is drowning me in pointless chatter" complaints that define our time. I use Slack this way with my team and it works wonderfully for me: - I disable all notifications - I tell people to PM me if they need me to act - I tell people to carry on discussion in the relevant project/topic channel if they need to chat about said project/topic These points are ordered by importance. The first is vastly more important than the others and extends beyond Slack. I aggressively disable notifications of all kinds from all things. If I can't disable them I at least disable their ability to make sound or vibrate. I have one way to be immediately "notified" and that is to call my mobile. I can count the people who know and use that number on one hand. They're so close to me that they know if I truly need to be informed of something now - in their respective sphere of family, friends, or work - and they call me and I pick up. The PMs I read and act on when it's my Slacking time. I open up Slack and crank through them. Slacking time happens one or more times a day depending on my bandwidth. The other channels I read if and only if I have a justified need to know what's going on with that project/topic. Or if I have downtime and am curious about something. Grazing on info about what my team is up to in project X is a nicer distraction than watching TV. I am also that crazy guy who actually uninstalled Facebook from his phone and just goes to the website when he feels like catching up with friends. So I'm not subject to that megacorp's constant interruptions either. I don't feel like my life has lost anything at all by doing this. The problem isn't Slack, it isn't Facebook, it's notifications, turn them off and tell the world that if they want your attention they have to call you and they can't have your number unless you love them.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  Couldn't have said it better myself. Disabling notifications (sometimes I go as far as disabling the red "1" bubble on messaging services) has been the best productivity boost.
- greggman 10y ago
  Turnig off notificwtions wouldn't solve it for me. With email I read through what others thought was important enough to include me. Even on mailing lists I can mute threads I'm not interested in With slack I have to read everything. It's like having to read through not just my inbox but also everyone else's inbox and on top of that no way to mute threads period. Sure I can not follow a channel. That equivalent to a unsubscribing from a mailing list. But, like I said above, a mailing list has threads so I can mute or ignore any threads I'm not interested in. With slack I have to read it all
bhuga 10y ago
I wrote an electron app to inject javascript and CSS into slack in an attempt to turn off a lot of distraction and, more importantly, easily differentiate between bots and people. I feel the author's pain, but the great part about being a programmer is that if it's bad enough to write about, it's bad enough to fix. It allows per-team customizations, and if anyone cares to mess with it, there's a link at https://github.com/bhuga/hackable-slack-client https://github.com/bhuga/hackable-slack-client. OSX only, but it's electron, so porting it would probably be easy. Changing other people's applications' behavior is challenging but rewarding. The hacks required make great stories for certain kinds of parties. I always point people to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11805380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11805380 for a better introduction than I could give.
chubs 10y ago
I see a common theme here is resource usage by Slack on the desktop. I also share this concern, and proposed a Kickstarter to build a native app: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2137936555/taut-the-fast-beautiful-macos-native-slack-app https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2137936555/taut-the-fas... Unfortunately it didn't get the traction that I wanted. This is OK, the main purpose of the kickstarter was 'market/idea validation' to see if enough people were dissatisfied with Slack's resource usage/performance to justify building it. If enough people here are interested though, i'd be willing to resurrect the project - please let me know.
nkantar 10y ago
My main issue with Slack is that with sane-ish notification defaults (only for my name), group direct messages default to that as well. They're fundamentally perceived by everyone (in my experience) as an extension of individual direct messages, which do trigger notifications, and yet I find myself missing these for minutes/hours at a time, sometimes when it's important, all because I've finally trained myself to ignore the non-numeric notification badge. I've contacted the support about this and was basically told to go away. :/
z6 10y ago
I'm not a fan of Slack. I think it's way more distracting than useful. The biggest problem I think is that it doesn't really allow for async communication. If I have a question that I want to ask someone, but it's not urgent, there isn't really a way to do it. With the typical gmail setup, I have 2 options. Send an email for non-urgent. Or send a hangout message for urgent. Slack really needs something like this, a sort of silent direct message that doesn't disrupt the recipient. Also, I hate the <person> joined / left messages. There are team-related channels that are so disruptive and useless that I'd like to silently leave without being judged, but I can't. Lastly, I've yet to be in a channel that isn't overrun by giphy spam. I know this isn't directly Slack's fault and more a company culture issue, but Slack sure makes it easy to use distracting features, whether that's integrations like giphy, or reactions to messages, etc. I think the focus needs to be less on making Slack 'fun' to use, and more on improving communication.
Falkon1313 10y ago
Slack has a powerful Do Not Disturb feature - that little X in the upper corner of the window. Same as any other program, close it when you don't want it running, open it when you do. Why go to such great lengths to complicate that?
ycombinatorMan 10y ago
Honestly, this is not a problem at all.
bitL 10y ago
Is there any way to turn off those "motivational" start up messages such as "we like you"? It always irritates me; I want to use Slack for work not for getting the feel I am in a kindergarten and "special".
- jordanrobinson 10y ago
  You can replace them, so assumedly you could replace the "motivational" messages with things such as "Work harder" or "You are not special" or "You are an easily replaceable cog".
  - bitL 10y ago
    "" would work perfectly, by default.
mverwijs 10y ago
To reduce noise, I always get the admins to turn on XMPP and IRC support. That way I can pick my client of choice, and limit notifications that way.

171 points by hardmath123 10y ago

Honestly I find the gripey-ness of this pretty off-putting. We get it, you hate Slack, congratulations.

untog 10y ago

While the tone of the article is maybe a little hyperbolic, I agree with a lot of it. The default setting to be alerted when absolutely anything happens is crazy. And whenever I see someone talking about Slack replacing e-mail as if it's a good thing, I recoil in horror. You can answer e-mails at your own pace, while Slack prioritises instant replies.

edgan 10y ago
I have to disagree. The problem with email is the signal to noise ratio is too high, because it is globally accessible. Where as Slack is company only. Some things need to be addressed now. With email that would be turning on notifications, but then you get notifications for spam. Slack doesn't have the spam problem. The closest it gets is messages from computers. Those can be controlled or segregated to certain channels.
- ryukafalz 10y ago
  I think this really just speaks to a need for better email clients - or just better email client configurations. A good email client for a business might filter all messages from other members of your company into a given folder, and then only notify for messages in that folder. Notifications for any other messages would just be blocked. Heck, don't even show them in the unread count until the user looks for them in particular.
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  " Where as Slack is company only. " This problem is easily solved with a filter, no?
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > Slack doesn't have the spam problem. The closest it gets is messages from computers. Those can be controlled or segregated to certain channels. And that's why Slack will not be a replacement for e-mail. Your life doesn't turn around the company you're currently employed in. Or, at least mine doesn't. Company messages are only a small fraction of important messages I get daily. (Not to mention that Slack killing e-mail would be a pretty dystopian future, with some single profit-seeking company controlling your primary means of communication.)
- untog 10y ago
  > The problem with email is the signal to noise ratio is too high, because it is globally accessible. If your inbox is deluged with spam from outside the company, you need to filter your e-mail by domain.
matwood 10y ago
Turn off alerts unless you are specifically mentioned or something happens in a channel you deem important.
r00fus 10y ago
I dunno. What I do is simply mute the chatty channels, and go in when I need answers or get invited/DM'd. Mute is pretty powerful.
- traviscj 10y ago
  You can't mute "@here" notifications though, which is really annoying. We have a slack bot that proxies "@team" to relevant "channel owners" , but the @here is more discoverable/more uniformly usable, so people still use that.

mmjjss 10y ago

Less can certainly be more. However I feel like Slack's usefulness:distraction ratio change greatly depending on the type of team or company using it. These suggestions are good ones but every situation is different. Is your team disciplined, focused, and/or collaborative and to what degree? The answer will tell you how Slack may get used or abused.

sotojuan 10y ago
Agreed. My Slack experiences have been fine: just a few channels, notifications off, mostly relevant work chats, etc.
a300600st 10y ago
Yeah before Slack I was constantly getting interrupted with questions that could have been answered any time and random co-workers just wanting to chat. However, I agree with the analysis that Slack is good for immediate communication and communication that doesn't really matter too much. Before Slack we didn't really have a tool that fit that and so every communication was a co-worker walking over and interrupting whatever you were doing.
- AlexandrB 10y ago
  > Before Slack we didn't really have a tool that fit that and so every communication was a co-worker walking over and interrupting whatever you were doing. I don't get it. Doesn't any popular chat client fit the bill? The thing Slack adds is big persistent chat groups which doesn't help with the problem you're describing.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    I think big persistent groups sometimes do help with that. If you want to know which client requested X, then messaging one person is slow, and walking up to ask one person is disruptive. With Slack, you can ask 30 people and get an answer from whoever looks first (and so presumably isn't disrupted). Everyone else who's busy ignores things and skims things when they're not occupied. That's all contingent on a culture of async Slack usage, but I've found it valuable.

firewalkwithme 10y ago

I am probably getting old. Having used irc as main communication channel for 8 years in a previous company, we now added slack on top of the mail and direct messenger methods at my new workplace. I can not get used to it, at all. It is nothing but a distraction of half wit and delayed misunderstandings. I even dislike the ui. May be the staff is not ready, maybe just give it a little time. Maybe I just got too used to email

tormeh 10y ago
If you dislike Slack, have you seen Skype for Business? Its text chat function disproves the existence of Cthulhu, since something so mind-bendingly horrible would surely have awoken Him, if He existed. Imagine sending your colleagues single-line Word documents and you're basically there.
- fiveoak 10y ago
  Using Slack is like a dream compared to Skype for Business. Sure Slack may have some dumb default settings but Skype for Business finds a way to somehow sabotage 5-10 mins of most meetings with some sort of technology issue.
  - erentz 10y ago
    Out of curiosity is this on a Mac? I've recently joined a new company where everybody loves to complain about Skype/Lync stating similar things to this. But I have zero issues, and had near zero issues at my prior company where it was widely used and improved remote working considerably. The only difference I can see is in this new company everybody is using MacOS (and admittedly when I tried it on Mac it was terrible).
- fumplethumb 10y ago
  Couldn't agree more. We use Skype for Business and its lack of obvious features is amazing. To give people an example, you cannot even send a link!

taytus 10y ago

I can't be the only one who think Slack is another super hyped company...

nilved 10y ago
Nope, that's what everything thinks. Some people even think it's over-hyped.
lojack 10y ago
You would be correct. You can't mention slack anywhere on the Internet without someone saying how over hyped it is.

Stratoscope 10y ago

He didn't mention one of my pet peeves: the "stratoscope, robertheaton, and dang are typing" messages below the input window. They draw you in to watching... nothing! I sit there slack-jawed (pun unintended, but I'll take credit for it anyway) waiting to see what - if anything - will eventually show up. Even on #random. It seemed like such a good idea at the time - keep "water cooler" chat out of the main channels. But what really happens is that all the fun stuff goes on in #random, so you pay as much or more attention to it as anything else. Who wants to be late for the party? And there's the uncapitalized, unpunctuated, line-by-line stream of consciousness writing style I ranted about some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11239614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11239614

dang 10y ago
Another is that they just started putting light-grey text "Message @channel" by default in the text area. I am surprisingly stressed out by this. It feels like a command or a nudge that insinuates itself into my thinking space, like a half-finished message which a corporate entity 'helpfully' began for me, and now it's my job to finish it, and as soon as I finish that one another will begin. There's a bad dream in there somewhere... I think the OP is right that a UI needs to be sensitive to the user's psyche and not push them all the time toward using the product.
- Stratoscope 10y ago
  Oh my, I was doing my best to not see that new message. I thought it was just a glitch that would go away soon enough. But now you've done it, I can't unsee it any more! Update: I'm curious why you're getting downvoted for your comment. Maybe people didn't like the creative way you put it? For me that made it all the better. Instead of some dry analysis, I like hearing what's going on in someone's head. Drama aside, for me the problem with that message is that it's just distracting.
- JasonSage 10y ago
  I'm actually more at ease with this change than if there was no default text. There's that flicker of recognition when I look at the input area before I start typing—"I'm messaging @channel." Call me paranoid, but I often flick over to the sidebar to see which channel I'm in before I dive into some conversations, just to make sure I'm not saying something in a public channel I shouldn't—like scanning over the recipients before you send an email. This proactively reassures me so I don't have to flit about making sure I'm doing the right thing.

swagv 10y ago

And yet it says nothing of the evils of ad hoc private group chat and the miracle required to remember what secret combination of usernames -- like remembering the nuclear codes -- gets you to an earlier conversation you had to set aside.

ihuman 10y ago

I don't understand the part about "permanent do not disturb". Can't you just turn off all notifications, or quit the app?

daenney 10y ago
You can set Do Not Disturb for a team too from the same start to end time.

feistyGrub 10y ago

Slack is of utmost importance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius#Conspiracy_and_.22Slack.22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius#Conspi... Get it while you can. Hail Eris

adzm 10y ago
Eris be praised.
deleted 10y ago
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mtraven 10y ago
Somebody awhile back pointed out that Slack the app is about the most anti-Slack thing ever produced.

welder 10y ago

If you have more than a few teams, Slack becomes unusable. This alternative client doesn't freeze up like Slack: http://meetfranz.com/ http://meetfranz.com/

esseti 10y ago
This isn't very fair. If i've many team in slack, and slack app becomes unstable, you don't solve the problem, don't you?

raesene9 10y ago

One thing that's not mentioned in the article that I see as one of the main drawbacks of slack is lack of threading, which makes it much harder to have an async. conversation (especially across timezones). The very very weird part to me about this is that slack say they've been working on threading for at least 18 months now (https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/535121236452732928 https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/535121236452732928) and still can't provide a timeline for when it'll go live, which seems really odd for such a well funded development team, given it's such an oft-requested piece of functionality (there's even a twitter account dedicated to it https://twitter.com/slackThreadsYet https://twitter.com/slackThreadsYet )

ktamura 10y ago

I cannot recommend using Slack via a browser enough. It achieves several goals: 1. It sandboxes resource usage, preventing Slack from being a permanent resource hog. Is your Slack tab running hot on Chrome? Just kill it for now. There are many browser extensions for managing resource usage per tab. 2. Closing the Slack browser tab means no disruptive notifications. Sure, you can snooze Slack @-mentions, etc., but that's too much of "working hard to make the tool work." 3. Better workflow (seriously) Perhaps this is just me (or my function as a marketing person at a startup), but I work almost entirely inside the browser (GMail, Google Docs, various sites for research, SaaS apps). Using Slack as a standalone desktop app means I have to focus away from the browser. Using Slack as a browser tab means I can treat it just one of several web apps I use regularly. 4. Bonus point: No need to update your Slack client =)

enraged_camel 10y ago
Besides, isn't the desktop app mostly just the browser app itself running inside the Electron framework? I haven't noticed any critical features it offers on top of the web app.
- JasonSage 10y ago
  I think as of at least half a year ago, they were still using MacGap on OS X. Browser notification support is still evolving. The native apps also have more awareness of when a user is active since they can read into activity outside the window frame.
  - dom0 10y ago
    > The native apps also have more awareness of when a user is active since they can read into activity outside the window frame. Maybe I'd rather not have that...
maw 10y ago
There are many browser extensions for managing resource usage per tab. Any clues on what to google for? I've tried the Great Suspender and wasn't very impressed.

esseti 10y ago

Since slack people will pass by here. Please, if i set not disturb then don't disturb me: no notification, no badge icon (!!), nothing! (maybe just when the people, after been warned that they may disturb still send the notification). then when i remove the not disturb your nice slackbot can tell me what i missed. Why am I asking so? beacuse I use pomodoro and i've a script that sets slack to "do not disturb" when i'm in the pomodoro and switch it off (to the pls bother me mood) when i'm done.

GrinningFool 10y ago
If you send it via /feedback you'll at least get a friendly, appreciative reply. The feature may never get implemented but the response is always nice... :slightly_smiling_face:
- esseti 10y ago
  i did, i got a friendly reminde but that's it. The not-disturb feature is still disturbing :)

iza 10y ago

Surprised this doesn't mention the mute feature. I just mute the noisy channels (#random, etc). https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204411433-Muting-a-channel https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204411433-Muting-a-...

ilyanep 10y ago
Muting a channel doesn't prevent it from showing unread message indicators when your coworkers use @here and @channel indiscriminately. This is probably my current biggest pet peeve with Slack, an app that I otherwise love (at least more than some other alternatives we've tried).

ozten 10y ago

It sounds like the cultural norm for how their team is using Slack is synchronous. I'd strongly suggest building a culture that Email and Slack are Asynchronous. If something is time sensitive, take it to a synchronous channel which has cultural expectations that it is okay to interrupt the other person.

RBerenguel 10y ago
Our unwritten but seems to be more or less the rule at work is that unless you get an @ (either in a general channel or in a 1-1 chat) anything that goes into slack is as async as email. Maybe a little bit less, but the expectation is that you will get to it at some point and that's it. I don't find it specially disruptive this way. Way less than shouting from one side of the office "hey, check the deploy!"
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  This is exactly how we've handled Slack. It's sync (to within a minute or two) for @ messages, which are used sparingly. It's async for everything else, and it's faster than email only in that it's a bit more conversational. Within that norm, all of the "Slack is an evil attention vampire" complaints feel deeply unfamiliar to me. I find it less distracting than email because @ makes message priority clear at a glance.
Bartweiss 10y ago
Using Slack asynchronously (or rather, using only private messages synchronously), these complaints are totally alien to me. Seeing Slack called "Facebook for work" doesn't feel inflammatory, it feels bizarre. I suspect synchronous culture would change things quite a bit. I've certainly never had the sense that "hey, do this when you can, no rush" meant anything but what it says. Of course, some of this seems to be about configuration approaches. I had forgotten that Slack's dock icon embeds notifications, because my dock minimizes when not in use.

oxguy3 10y ago

Honestly, this is not my experience using Slack at all. Maybe it's because I'm on such a small team, but I find that the amount of chatter on Slack isn't overwhelming at all -- #random is pretty dead most of the time. And if someone sends me a message and I'm busy, then I'll maybe glance at the notification but probably just ignore it until I'm free. My team uses Slack very asynchronously -- whenever you have something that needs feedback or whatever, you just post it in the appropriate channel, and expect responses to trickle in over maybe the next 24 hours. If someone sends "hey no rush but", then I legitimately do not rush to answer it -- just a different company culture I guess.

perseusprime11 10y ago

Is everyone forgetting the biggest benefit of Slack? It's the transparency part. Important details are no longer privy to 1 or 2 individuals on the team in their inboxes instead the whole team can see what's going on and can chime in if they disagree

GrinningFool 10y ago
If you're in the right channel. If someone didn't make a new channel to discuss the idea more , and you missed the single line of text that mentioned it two hours ago. If you happen to be looking at the right channel at the right time. If the pertinent bits aren't lost in back scroll. I think your statement is true for a sufficiently small company with a limited number of channels. Less so for larger companies, or even small ones with dozens or hundreds of them.
- ec109685 10y ago
  Slack search is really good and can let you recover missed bits of information.
  - GrinningFool 10y ago
    But it's only helpful if you know what you need to search for. In the case of a conversation that happened in the past that you wanted to have input into - and either never learned about it, or only learned after a decision was reached - it doesn't help so much.
dingaling 10y ago
> Important details are no longer privy to 1 or 2 individuals on the team Sure they are, they just split-off into direct messages between themselves and return to the main channel to present the result of their discussion. Or don't even do that. Information-hoarding needs a cultural fix, not a technical solution. In my experience it usually occurs in companies with a blame-culture, so people confide between themselves and keep some information undisclosed as 'insurance'.

Hexigonz 10y ago

I'm on a small team (14-15) and honestly I love Slack. Have never had any issues with it and I think it's an awesome team messaging system. We use growbot to give props and get a kick out of it. We just switched from skype to slack calls and it was a gamechanger. I have been on teams that used GroupMe in the past and it was terrible. I don't read group me messages because they're off topic and annoying. Slack's channel system changed that for me.

jomamaxx 10y ago

Folks, I suggest that while Slack may have some mechanical advantages over e-mail, the 'problem of too many emails' will absolutely not be solved by Slack, or almost anything else. 'Communication discipline' is the key issue, and it's a social issue regarding how organizations work. Some people, in some jobs, are simply rewarded for broadcasting BS. It's their job to do that. Sadly. It's funny how much time we waste communication, and how, most often, there is very little guidance on how we should do that. Very few 'rules'. Like typing, or 'interviewing' - there should be some effort to control this. If you think about it - isn't it absurd that someone from some group can do something that possibly interrupts dozens of other people? Would you allow them to shout loudly in a room? In the Army they call it 'radio discipline'. There are specific ways to communicate. Entirely inappropriate for corporate life, at the same time, we also don't want to quash the serendipitous opportunity that sometimes arises from great chats ... But still. Perversely ... because Email clients usually offer finer control ... maybe email with tight discipline is the way. I feel dirty for saying that :)

deleted 10y ago

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apatters 10y ago

Slack is good, notifications are bad, and this is a rant. This post reads to me as another snowflake in the very justified avalanche of "Internet is drowning me in pointless chatter" complaints that define our time. I use Slack this way with my team and it works wonderfully for me: - I disable all notifications - I tell people to PM me if they need me to act - I tell people to carry on discussion in the relevant project/topic channel if they need to chat about said project/topic These points are ordered by importance. The first is vastly more important than the others and extends beyond Slack. I aggressively disable notifications of all kinds from all things. If I can't disable them I at least disable their ability to make sound or vibrate. I have one way to be immediately "notified" and that is to call my mobile. I can count the people who know and use that number on one hand. They're so close to me that they know if I truly need to be informed of something now - in their respective sphere of family, friends, or work - and they call me and I pick up. The PMs I read and act on when it's my Slacking time. I open up Slack and crank through them. Slacking time happens one or more times a day depending on my bandwidth. The other channels I read if and only if I have a justified need to know what's going on with that project/topic. Or if I have downtime and am curious about something. Grazing on info about what my team is up to in project X is a nicer distraction than watching TV. I am also that crazy guy who actually uninstalled Facebook from his phone and just goes to the website when he feels like catching up with friends. So I'm not subject to that megacorp's constant interruptions either. I don't feel like my life has lost anything at all by doing this. The problem isn't Slack, it isn't Facebook, it's notifications, turn them off and tell the world that if they want your attention they have to call you and they can't have your number unless you love them.

sotojuan 10y ago
Couldn't have said it better myself. Disabling notifications (sometimes I go as far as disabling the red "1" bubble on messaging services) has been the best productivity boost.
greggman 10y ago
Turnig off notificwtions wouldn't solve it for me. With email I read through what others thought was important enough to include me. Even on mailing lists I can mute threads I'm not interested in With slack I have to read everything. It's like having to read through not just my inbox but also everyone else's inbox and on top of that no way to mute threads period. Sure I can not follow a channel. That equivalent to a unsubscribing from a mailing list. But, like I said above, a mailing list has threads so I can mute or ignore any threads I'm not interested in. With slack I have to read it all

bhuga 10y ago

I wrote an electron app to inject javascript and CSS into slack in an attempt to turn off a lot of distraction and, more importantly, easily differentiate between bots and people. I feel the author's pain, but the great part about being a programmer is that if it's bad enough to write about, it's bad enough to fix. It allows per-team customizations, and if anyone cares to mess with it, there's a link at https://github.com/bhuga/hackable-slack-client https://github.com/bhuga/hackable-slack-client. OSX only, but it's electron, so porting it would probably be easy. Changing other people's applications' behavior is challenging but rewarding. The hacks required make great stories for certain kinds of parties. I always point people to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11805380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11805380 for a better introduction than I could give.

chubs 10y ago

I see a common theme here is resource usage by Slack on the desktop. I also share this concern, and proposed a Kickstarter to build a native app: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2137936555/taut-the-fast-beautiful-macos-native-slack-app https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2137936555/taut-the-fas... Unfortunately it didn't get the traction that I wanted. This is OK, the main purpose of the kickstarter was 'market/idea validation' to see if enough people were dissatisfied with Slack's resource usage/performance to justify building it. If enough people here are interested though, i'd be willing to resurrect the project - please let me know.

nkantar 10y ago

My main issue with Slack is that with sane-ish notification defaults (only for my name), group direct messages default to that as well. They're fundamentally perceived by everyone (in my experience) as an extension of individual direct messages, which do trigger notifications, and yet I find myself missing these for minutes/hours at a time, sometimes when it's important, all because I've finally trained myself to ignore the non-numeric notification badge. I've contacted the support about this and was basically told to go away. :/

z6 10y ago

I'm not a fan of Slack. I think it's way more distracting than useful. The biggest problem I think is that it doesn't really allow for async communication. If I have a question that I want to ask someone, but it's not urgent, there isn't really a way to do it. With the typical gmail setup, I have 2 options. Send an email for non-urgent. Or send a hangout message for urgent. Slack really needs something like this, a sort of silent direct message that doesn't disrupt the recipient. Also, I hate the <person> joined / left messages. There are team-related channels that are so disruptive and useless that I'd like to silently leave without being judged, but I can't. Lastly, I've yet to be in a channel that isn't overrun by giphy spam. I know this isn't directly Slack's fault and more a company culture issue, but Slack sure makes it easy to use distracting features, whether that's integrations like giphy, or reactions to messages, etc. I think the focus needs to be less on making Slack 'fun' to use, and more on improving communication.

Falkon1313 10y ago

Slack has a powerful Do Not Disturb feature - that little X in the upper corner of the window. Same as any other program, close it when you don't want it running, open it when you do. Why go to such great lengths to complicate that?

ycombinatorMan 10y ago

Honestly, this is not a problem at all.

bitL 10y ago

Is there any way to turn off those "motivational" start up messages such as "we like you"? It always irritates me; I want to use Slack for work not for getting the feel I am in a kindergarten and "special".

jordanrobinson 10y ago
You can replace them, so assumedly you could replace the "motivational" messages with things such as "Work harder" or "You are not special" or "You are an easily replaceable cog".
- bitL 10y ago
  "" would work perfectly, by default.

mverwijs 10y ago

To reduce noise, I always get the admins to turn on XMPP and IRC support. That way I can pick my client of choice, and limit notifications that way.