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My personal experience is that the vast majority of slack complaints are solved by: - Allowing all users to freely create channels as needed - Raising user aw

My personal experience is that the vast majority of slack complaints are solved by: - Allowing all users to freely create channels as needed - Raising user awareness of how to use the very flexible channel notification settings (and muting channels that aren't relevant but still things you want to keep an eye on) - Threading conversations whenever it makes sense - Encouraging limited usage of @channel and @here (only use when very important) Humans are remarkably capable at self-organization when given the opportunity. At the end of the day, Slack is about enabling natural conversations between people. It is not email. It's chat. If you try to enforce rules on how people naturally converse with each other, you are going to encounter a lot of resistance and friction.

bertil 7y ago
I would agree if I worked at company where a majority of the users saw all of the above as a problem. In my experience (three tech companies with a 4 to 10 times larger non-tech crowd) people who care about asynchronous written communication just leave or ignore the noisy groups and their concern are ignored. Once CEO stormed our open space and yelled at the entire tech team for having muted the main channel. We’ve had to make a presentation to the whole company about why. That was kind of an eye-opening moment. > Encouraging limited usage of @channel and @here (only use when very important) I’ve through about it slightly differently: * use those only if everyone or a majority of people in the channel will need to change their day-to-day habits because of what you are saying (say, the channel is about an internal tool and that tool is undergoing maintenance); * do not use those if you are asking for help and want the attention of one person in the group (specific or not); people who have the time will answer. If you use those too often, people who can help you will ignore the channel. We’ve had to implement a bot in a key internal chanel that, unless you were an admin/support team, would remind people of those rules. We also displayed a ratio of who among the support group had chosen to ignore those signals to convey the point.

bertil 7y ago

I would agree if I worked at company where a majority of the users saw all of the above as a problem. In my experience (three tech companies with a 4 to 10 times larger non-tech crowd) people who care about asynchronous written communication just leave or ignore the noisy groups and their concern are ignored. Once CEO stormed our open space and yelled at the entire tech team for having muted the main channel. We’ve had to make a presentation to the whole company about why. That was kind of an eye-opening moment. > Encouraging limited usage of @channel and @here (only use when very important) I’ve through about it slightly differently: * use those only if everyone or a majority of people in the channel will need to change their day-to-day habits because of what you are saying (say, the channel is about an internal tool and that tool is undergoing maintenance); * do not use those if you are asking for help and want the attention of one person in the group (specific or not); people who have the time will answer. If you use those too often, people who can help you will ignore the channel. We’ve had to implement a bot in a key internal chanel that, unless you were an admin/support team, would remind people of those rules. We also displayed a ratio of who among the support group had chosen to ignore those signals to convey the point.