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I've actually come to regard Slack Archives as a negative feature. I work with a lot of different companies. They almost universally have Slack instances that
by davidbanham 9y ago
I've actually come to regard Slack Archives as a negative feature.
I work with a lot of different companies. They almost universally have Slack instances that get used for discussion. One time I was working with a client who was too tight to actually pay for their Slack instance so it had amnesia.
For a while I was really grouchy about it. Then one day I was thinking along the lines of "Ah this is such a PITA. I've just had this good discussion about these requirements in Slack but because it's not a paid instance it'll vanish in a few days. Grr I'll have to take this information and put it somewhere else. I guess I'll stick it in a design document in the project's wiki. This is such an inconven... wait. Huh. That's vastly better than leaving it floating somewhere in Slack. Oh."
And in that moment, I was enlightened. Paying for Slack actually makes it a worse tool.
- rorygibson 9y agoI kind of agree with this, but I took a slightly different path and built my own 'enterprise search' tool for my Slack, Trello and GDrive, and now I'm productizing it - https://getctx.io https://getctx.io - so I'll always be thankful to Slack for giving me my idea :-)
- jacobwal 9y agowould you use something that made it easy for you to save stuff from Slack in another place where it wasn't floating around? Like how you can star something for yourself, but instead you could star something so that your entire team could see that this was an important message?
- davidbanham 9y agoI might. I think the value for me would hinge on how easy it was to contextualise the information. Like if it was just a big list of "Stuff people have starred in Slack" I would not use it. If it was a repository of information categorised by project and subject, maybe with a little blurb of info to give me a summary of it, then under all that a link to the source material if I still needed it, that might be compelling.
- gulperxcx 9y agoSounds like you're describing a mailing-list
- jacobwal 9y agoThanks for sharing that. A few friends and I are trying to explore a product in this space, and what you said is pretty much what we've arrived at as well. If you have any other feedback you think we should keep in mind I'm all ears
- Will_Parker 9y agoI'm wondering, as well, if no archival leads to freer discussion with less fear of saying something stupid that will live forever. And if that's worth anything. Maybe it depends too on whether Slack is used strictly as an impartial way to coordinate professional communication, or if it is also social and informal, which the parent article has some interesting points in favor of.