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>Noone is forcing you to look at it immediately Ugh this is such a common strawman for why most people criticize Slack. I've never heard someone say "Slack has

>Noone is forcing you to look at it immediately Ugh this is such a common strawman for why most people criticize Slack. I've never heard someone say "Slack has a weird magical power over me where I'm physically incapable of _not_ checking the notifications." What people are saying is that Slack _encourages_ synchronous communication through it's explicit design choices. Why do people want to use a tool where you have to exert conscious effort to deviate from the designer's intentions in order to get value from the product?

marktangotango 8y ago
IMO it’s the fear of missing a direct message from my boss is why I feel the need to check every notification immediately. I don’t know that he expects instant responses from the team, but he hasn’t said otherwise, either. Ideally there’s a culture where high priority is @here and non urgent is email. I have not seen this in practice.
- quickthrower2 8y ago
  I've been taken to task in the past by a boss who sits behind me because I ignored a chat message. So yeah that threat is real but maybe us pions are to blame and we need to "grow some" not put up with it and be prepared to instaquit if necessary. I get the feeling in most countries the demand for developers (etc...) is fierce.
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    More to the point, if your boss is an asshole they can be an asshole without slack/chat
- Benjammer 8y ago
  See, you're still missing my point. You are still jumping to the level of how _you_ emotionally feel about Slack and how _you_ choose to interact with it. I'm saying that, given a generic human Slack user, Slack's design team is optimizing for engagement. They are making explicit choices about how/where/why to show notifications and how the @ commands work, and their goals are to _increase engagement on Slack_. Their motivations are antithetical to the motivations of Slack's users, who would explicitly like to see _less_, but _more efficient_ engagement ("email is full of crap I never check it, with Slack I can mute certain channels," etc).
  - p1necone 8y ago
    > I'm saying that, given a generic human Slack user, Slack's design team is optimizing for engagement. They are making explicit choices about how/where/why to show notifications and how the @ commands work, and their goals are to _increase engagement on Slack_. I don't see this, Slack seems to have a pretty simple feature set to me. There's a different kind of notification for direct messages, and situations where someone consciously decides to flag a specific person in a channel message. (All features that aren't unique to Slack, and that I would expect any chat application to have). What would you expect it to do differently? It seems like the Slack devs are just making the notifications behave the way that I would intuitively expect them to behave, and how most people use IRC or other group chat apps.
    - Benjammer 8y ago
      What do you mean, you "don't see this"? What else would their goals be?
      - p1necone 8y ago
        I don't see it as in I don't see anything in Slacks design that seems to be because of what you said. What incentive does Slack have to focus on metrics like "engagement" rather than building a genuinely useful product. They just charge the customer for it, they aren't an ad driven social network like Facebook where "engagement" actually directly translates to revenue.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  How is that different from sitting at your inbox all day waiting for an email from boss, while sitting by phone waiting for a call, and staying parked at your desk in case they walk by? That's a problem in your relationship, not in your tools.
thrower123 8y ago
It's uncomfortable any time that you are in an organization that mixes asynchronous and synchronous communications in the same channel. This is more a people problem than a technical one... different platforms can skew towards being more natural for one or the other, but nothing will save you from the Peter Potamuses of the world that use them incorrectly and stomp into your office or blow up your phone three minutes after they send an email, bellowing "Did you get that thing I sent you?"
p1necone 8y ago
It wasn't meant to be a strawman - this is genuinely how I'm interpreting most of the really negative comments about slack. Some people really don't seem to consider that they aren't being forced to use it synchronously by anything other than their own company culture.
- wpietri 8y ago
  Their own company culture and the design of Slack. Many people report a quickening of work tempo when Slack is adopted. As a contrast, look at email. Both of them allow the sending of text messages between individuals and groups. But the tool designs encourage different cadences. Note also the difference between this: > if your team is using it in a way that impedes productivity that's on you and this: > anything other than their own company culture The first clearly blames the individual. The second broadens from "team" to "company", so that's a bit better. But individuals aren't able to change company culture on their own. Especially given that a company's culture isn't isolated; it picks a lot up from the broader corporate work culture.

marktangotango 8y ago

IMO it’s the fear of missing a direct message from my boss is why I feel the need to check every notification immediately. I don’t know that he expects instant responses from the team, but he hasn’t said otherwise, either. Ideally there’s a culture where high priority is @here and non urgent is email. I have not seen this in practice.

quickthrower2 8y ago
I've been taken to task in the past by a boss who sits behind me because I ignored a chat message. So yeah that threat is real but maybe us pions are to blame and we need to "grow some" not put up with it and be prepared to instaquit if necessary. I get the feeling in most countries the demand for developers (etc...) is fierce.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  More to the point, if your boss is an asshole they can be an asshole without slack/chat
Benjammer 8y ago
See, you're still missing my point. You are still jumping to the level of how _you_ emotionally feel about Slack and how _you_ choose to interact with it. I'm saying that, given a generic human Slack user, Slack's design team is optimizing for engagement. They are making explicit choices about how/where/why to show notifications and how the @ commands work, and their goals are to _increase engagement on Slack_. Their motivations are antithetical to the motivations of Slack's users, who would explicitly like to see _less_, but _more efficient_ engagement ("email is full of crap I never check it, with Slack I can mute certain channels," etc).
- p1necone 8y ago
  > I'm saying that, given a generic human Slack user, Slack's design team is optimizing for engagement. They are making explicit choices about how/where/why to show notifications and how the @ commands work, and their goals are to _increase engagement on Slack_. I don't see this, Slack seems to have a pretty simple feature set to me. There's a different kind of notification for direct messages, and situations where someone consciously decides to flag a specific person in a channel message. (All features that aren't unique to Slack, and that I would expect any chat application to have). What would you expect it to do differently? It seems like the Slack devs are just making the notifications behave the way that I would intuitively expect them to behave, and how most people use IRC or other group chat apps.
  - Benjammer 8y ago
    What do you mean, you "don't see this"? What else would their goals be?
    - p1necone 8y ago
      I don't see it as in I don't see anything in Slacks design that seems to be because of what you said. What incentive does Slack have to focus on metrics like "engagement" rather than building a genuinely useful product. They just charge the customer for it, they aren't an ad driven social network like Facebook where "engagement" actually directly translates to revenue.
fjsolwmv 8y ago
How is that different from sitting at your inbox all day waiting for an email from boss, while sitting by phone waiting for a call, and staying parked at your desk in case they walk by? That's a problem in your relationship, not in your tools.

thrower123 8y ago

It's uncomfortable any time that you are in an organization that mixes asynchronous and synchronous communications in the same channel. This is more a people problem than a technical one... different platforms can skew towards being more natural for one or the other, but nothing will save you from the Peter Potamuses of the world that use them incorrectly and stomp into your office or blow up your phone three minutes after they send an email, bellowing "Did you get that thing I sent you?"

p1necone 8y ago

It wasn't meant to be a strawman - this is genuinely how I'm interpreting most of the really negative comments about slack. Some people really don't seem to consider that they aren't being forced to use it synchronously by anything other than their own company culture.

wpietri 8y ago
Their own company culture and the design of Slack. Many people report a quickening of work tempo when Slack is adopted. As a contrast, look at email. Both of them allow the sending of text messages between individuals and groups. But the tool designs encourage different cadences. Note also the difference between this: > if your team is using it in a way that impedes productivity that's on you and this: > anything other than their own company culture The first clearly blames the individual. The second broadens from "team" to "company", so that's a bit better. But individuals aren't able to change company culture on their own. Especially given that a company's culture isn't isolated; it picks a lot up from the broader corporate work culture.