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>I eventually turned off Slack notifications entirely, after experimenting with many different variations. @here is an abomination; notifications in each "other

>I eventually turned off Slack notifications entirely, after experimenting with many different variations. @here is an abomination; notifications in each "other Slack instance" need to be set separately; it spams your @#$!! phone with every single message anyone types, even while you're on your PC. Forget it, notification privileges revoked, and I've been much happier since. Eh, I've found Slack to be highly competent at presence management, when it's working correctly, which is most of the time. It's usually smart enough to know I've walked away from my computer, and to start pushing the notifications to my phone instead, and then stop again. And I'm pretty sure it dismisses its own mobile notifications once I've cleared them on desktop, too. > Third, it's highly integrated, not to say bundled, with Calendar, to the point where it obnoxiously auto-schedules a Hangouts meeting id even for your team lunch. This is a setting in your GSuite Admin panel. Also, I feel like Hangouts Meet (the evolution of Hangouts itself) is a much better product in general, and the Hangouts Meet Hardware is surprisingly decent, if expensive. Hangouts even has auto-captioning, which is kind of cool! Surprised the author didn't call out Slack video calls. They're... also decent! And baked right into Slack! (So no incremental cost!) But they only work for meetings with people in your Slack workspace, so that's a bit auto-limiting.

DerDangDerDang 7y ago
fwiw I’ve never had working audio in slack video calls on mac
- t-writescode 7y ago
  Go check your security permissions for your microphone. This happened a lot at my work. People probably told Slack ‘no’ the first time, long ago, that it wanted mic permissions.
regularfry 7y ago
We tried out slack calls as a potential SfB replacement. They worked well unless we had a participant on a low-bandwidth connection, in which case it fell apart for everyone. Or possibly high-latency, we never did track down the precise trigger. Unfortunately the person most likely to be on the slow connection was the boss.
- Normal_gaussian 7y ago
  surely that is fortunate? Too many businesses end up making random employees suffer greatly because senior management are blind to the reality of their struggle.
  - regularfry 7y ago
    Unfortunate in that we couldn't then recommend it as a Skype replacement. The boss in this case was middle management, not senior. It left us with no other options which had already gone through our internal compliance team, and their stance is fairly firmly "we've already got a tool which does X, another one increases the attack surface".
t-writescode 7y ago
I've used Slack at 3-ish different companies. Each company has different practices when it comes to Slack; and, as someone who has used Slack so much that it's mentioned about him at those companies (not always in a positive light?), I have a few thoughts and rules about the best Slack usage that I think help, in general. 1) At any not-small company, you're going to want to almost immediately change your Sidebar from "Everything" to "Unread and starred conversations". 2) Star all channels that you personally need to keep track of (or want to keep track of for a certain amount of time) and all people that you want to talk to or are currently in an important conversation with. 3) Unstar channels and people where #2 is no longer the case. 4) Create private channels for any conversation / project or issue that will ever require more than the people that are currently in a 'multi-person private message'. Archive them when the issue is over. 5) Use @here sparingly and @channel way more sparingly. If you're at a company that doesn't use @here / @channel sparingly, mute them for the channels that use them in excess. My current company has a meeting room shortage, so every single time a meeting room is freed up unexpectedly, there's an @here in one of our channels. That channel has @here notifications disabled. 6) If you can, in your broader "all the devs hang out here and can chat about work stuff" or "talk with ops here" channels, consider adding group aliases, so you can say, in those channels @ops, or @team-ops to notify just that group when things are important. 7) Use @here sparingly, yourself. Use it only for extreme situations. 8) Give chatty bots their own channel. Having the pull request bot for your dev team in the same channel as active development is going on, or in the same channel as other teams are supposed to come in to talk to you about a project your team is working on is just not the best. 9) Current, unproven experiment: at my current job, my team is experimenting with a heavy use of threads. Previously, we had multiple projects occurring concurrently and historical knowledge on features is spread across the team with a lot of new members, so we can't use the tricks of private channels per project to as much effect. Threads have a lot of weaknesses when it comes to readability and following; but, they do reduce the chances that someone's important message will get lost in a swarm of other messages on more pressing issues. edit: Whoops, thought of more. 10) Use snippets for any bit of code even slightly long. I'm thinking like 7 lines or more. There's syntax highlighting, and they're collapsible, saving precious screen real-estate 11) Use Posts for large format messages you want to post to a channel or multiple channels. They have formatting, headers, and so on. They're also collapsible, again to save on screen real-estate. 12) Personal preference: try to not send multiple, short messages, unless that's your company's culture. It breaks up the conversation and makes it a bit hard to follow where a thread is, if you're using threads. For example, which message do you put the response on? The part where the situation got confusing? A random message in the middle? The last one? The first one? edit 2, 3: more adding (I'll just add more after this and not say I'm adding more, if it happens again), and some removing some unnecessary information 13) Mute channels that you want to remain in, but don't want to be bothered by (maybe unmute @here and @mentions on this channel). This could include your company's random chatting channel, or the operations channel, or even your personal team's channel if you're currently heads down in a major project, but you might need to be pinged for something serious.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
imglorp 7y ago
> spams your @#$!! phone [...], even while you're on your PC I feel like "attention", "presence", and "what device am I `on`" is a poorly exploited concept in tech in general. The right answer probably entails a device using a combination of gaze and most recent input to assert "I'm the attention leader now", then gossiping out to all your devices. Any device hearing that gossip should mute off until it was leader again. This idea is almost app independent, as an overlay. Phones, at least, seem to have do-not-disturb modes.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  It's not a trivial problem. For various reasons "last looked at" is as likely to be wrong as right if you have more than a couple of devices. "Last moved" might work better for mobile devices, but there are still going to be many misses.
  - codetrotter 7y ago
    > For various reasons "last looked at" is as likely to be wrong as right if you have more than a couple of devices. Agreed. Even with just a computer and a phone it would not work in my case. I am sitting in front of my computer and that is my main focus, but I pick up my phone all of the time to do things like check on some messages or add the currently playing song to my favorites. If my phone decided that every time I interacted with it that was somehow an indicator that the phone was now my main focus... I think I would probably grow frustrated with that within a very short amount of time.
- bo1024 7y ago
  Of course our currently attention model is poorly developed, because the companies developing it are literally competing for your attention. Capturing attention translates directly into money or power for them. To realize your vision, we need FOSS-based models where the software serves the user, rather than exploits her.
igetspam 7y ago
Slack calls... Ibuse Firefox (because privacy) and Linux (because I do). Guess what doesn't work but people keep trying anyway? Slack calls. No thank, I don't want to install your desktop client and no I won't be taking "calls" on my five year old mobile. Why can't it Just Work like everything else does? Probably for the same reason they can't fix their text input bugs that they were able to confirm a year ago. Slack is mediocre software.

DerDangDerDang 7y ago

fwiw I’ve never had working audio in slack video calls on mac

t-writescode 7y ago
Go check your security permissions for your microphone. This happened a lot at my work. People probably told Slack ‘no’ the first time, long ago, that it wanted mic permissions.

regularfry 7y ago

We tried out slack calls as a potential SfB replacement. They worked well unless we had a participant on a low-bandwidth connection, in which case it fell apart for everyone. Or possibly high-latency, we never did track down the precise trigger. Unfortunately the person most likely to be on the slow connection was the boss.

Normal_gaussian 7y ago
surely that is fortunate? Too many businesses end up making random employees suffer greatly because senior management are blind to the reality of their struggle.
- regularfry 7y ago
  Unfortunate in that we couldn't then recommend it as a Skype replacement. The boss in this case was middle management, not senior. It left us with no other options which had already gone through our internal compliance team, and their stance is fairly firmly "we've already got a tool which does X, another one increases the attack surface".

t-writescode 7y ago

I've used Slack at 3-ish different companies. Each company has different practices when it comes to Slack; and, as someone who has used Slack so much that it's mentioned about him at those companies (not always in a positive light?), I have a few thoughts and rules about the best Slack usage that I think help, in general. 1) At any not-small company, you're going to want to almost immediately change your Sidebar from "Everything" to "Unread and starred conversations". 2) Star all channels that you personally need to keep track of (or want to keep track of for a certain amount of time) and all people that you want to talk to or are currently in an important conversation with. 3) Unstar channels and people where #2 is no longer the case. 4) Create private channels for any conversation / project or issue that will ever require more than the people that are currently in a 'multi-person private message'. Archive them when the issue is over. 5) Use @here sparingly and @channel way more sparingly. If you're at a company that doesn't use @here / @channel sparingly, mute them for the channels that use them in excess. My current company has a meeting room shortage, so every single time a meeting room is freed up unexpectedly, there's an @here in one of our channels. That channel has @here notifications disabled. 6) If you can, in your broader "all the devs hang out here and can chat about work stuff" or "talk with ops here" channels, consider adding group aliases, so you can say, in those channels @ops, or @team-ops to notify just that group when things are important. 7) Use @here sparingly, yourself. Use it only for extreme situations. 8) Give chatty bots their own channel. Having the pull request bot for your dev team in the same channel as active development is going on, or in the same channel as other teams are supposed to come in to talk to you about a project your team is working on is just not the best. 9) Current, unproven experiment: at my current job, my team is experimenting with a heavy use of threads. Previously, we had multiple projects occurring concurrently and historical knowledge on features is spread across the team with a lot of new members, so we can't use the tricks of private channels per project to as much effect. Threads have a lot of weaknesses when it comes to readability and following; but, they do reduce the chances that someone's important message will get lost in a swarm of other messages on more pressing issues. edit: Whoops, thought of more. 10) Use snippets for any bit of code even slightly long. I'm thinking like 7 lines or more. There's syntax highlighting, and they're collapsible, saving precious screen real-estate 11) Use Posts for large format messages you want to post to a channel or multiple channels. They have formatting, headers, and so on. They're also collapsible, again to save on screen real-estate. 12) Personal preference: try to not send multiple, short messages, unless that's your company's culture. It breaks up the conversation and makes it a bit hard to follow where a thread is, if you're using threads. For example, which message do you put the response on? The part where the situation got confusing? A random message in the middle? The last one? The first one? edit 2, 3: more adding (I'll just add more after this and not say I'm adding more, if it happens again), and some removing some unnecessary information 13) Mute channels that you want to remain in, but don't want to be bothered by (maybe unmute @here and @mentions on this channel). This could include your company's random chatting channel, or the operations channel, or even your personal team's channel if you're currently heads down in a major project, but you might need to be pinged for something serious.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

imglorp 7y ago

> spams your @#$!! phone [...], even while you're on your PC I feel like "attention", "presence", and "what device am I `on`" is a poorly exploited concept in tech in general. The right answer probably entails a device using a combination of gaze and most recent input to assert "I'm the attention leader now", then gossiping out to all your devices. Any device hearing that gossip should mute off until it was leader again. This idea is almost app independent, as an overlay. Phones, at least, seem to have do-not-disturb modes.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
It's not a trivial problem. For various reasons "last looked at" is as likely to be wrong as right if you have more than a couple of devices. "Last moved" might work better for mobile devices, but there are still going to be many misses.
- codetrotter 7y ago
  > For various reasons "last looked at" is as likely to be wrong as right if you have more than a couple of devices. Agreed. Even with just a computer and a phone it would not work in my case. I am sitting in front of my computer and that is my main focus, but I pick up my phone all of the time to do things like check on some messages or add the currently playing song to my favorites. If my phone decided that every time I interacted with it that was somehow an indicator that the phone was now my main focus... I think I would probably grow frustrated with that within a very short amount of time.
bo1024 7y ago
Of course our currently attention model is poorly developed, because the companies developing it are literally competing for your attention. Capturing attention translates directly into money or power for them. To realize your vision, we need FOSS-based models where the software serves the user, rather than exploits her.

igetspam 7y ago

Slack calls... Ibuse Firefox (because privacy) and Linux (because I do). Guess what doesn't work but people keep trying anyway? Slack calls. No thank, I don't want to install your desktop client and no I won't be taking "calls" on my five year old mobile. Why can't it Just Work like everything else does? Probably for the same reason they can't fix their text input bugs that they were able to confirm a year ago. Slack is mediocre software.