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I've used slack. Worked at a small web shop of 10 people (one remote) which used slack. Wanna know what it was used for, and still to this day? Posting memes, c

I've used slack. Worked at a small web shop of 10 people (one remote) which used slack. Wanna know what it was used for, and still to this day? Posting memes, cat and cute animal pictures, political news articles, funny articles, food related stuff, youtube, gifs, ad nauseum. The project dev channels were all dead as the shop was small enough where people didn't need a bloated chat app for the few projects they managed. The one remote worker was paired with a local dev and they did all their communication via direct chat. Plus they still left access to the main random channel to ex employees so everyone could keep in touch. So there was an additional dozen people posting crap all day. Slack was used for entertainment and distraction. I think the "modern" web chat idea is more of a distraction than help. IRC might be primitive but it does what it was made for without the distraction of gifs, memes, videos and other nonsense.

imglorp 8y ago
Large shop, checking in. We pay for it and have around 1500 technical people on ours, all spread out in a dozen locations. It lets us work as if we're all in the same office. One misconception is that slack is not "chat", it's not like IRC. It's more like groupware when used as intended. It handles things like files or code samples, extensibility like webhooks and bots, fine grained notification preferences, decent search across channels or by other criteria. Screen sharing and conference calling is decent if immature. We have a channel for each team, a channel for any big issues that pop up (they get archived), a channel for each product, etc. and yes channels for screwing around. Corporate version has search and archive for Sarbox/HR reqs. There are other products. IRC can only do a few of these things, with many requiring expert scripting to accomplish.
yoz-y 8y ago
We have used Slack and now switched to Google Chat. I think your problems stem from the fact that using slack for off-topic discussion was allowed in the first place. Could it be that the bosses were not present?

imglorp 8y ago

Large shop, checking in. We pay for it and have around 1500 technical people on ours, all spread out in a dozen locations. It lets us work as if we're all in the same office. One misconception is that slack is not "chat", it's not like IRC. It's more like groupware when used as intended. It handles things like files or code samples, extensibility like webhooks and bots, fine grained notification preferences, decent search across channels or by other criteria. Screen sharing and conference calling is decent if immature. We have a channel for each team, a channel for any big issues that pop up (they get archived), a channel for each product, etc. and yes channels for screwing around. Corporate version has search and archive for Sarbox/HR reqs. There are other products. IRC can only do a few of these things, with many requiring expert scripting to accomplish.

yoz-y 8y ago

We have used Slack and now switched to Google Chat. I think your problems stem from the fact that using slack for off-topic discussion was allowed in the first place. Could it be that the bosses were not present?