19 ms·

Slack's core flaws require topic modeling to fix

133 points by awinter-py 7y ago

bobbiechen 7y ago
Since "topic model" is not explained in the post: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_model
Der_Einzige 7y ago
My experience is that basically all types of topic modeling tools just kinda blow. You might as well use traditional clustering techniques instead since topic models are basically a type of clustering
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
...aren't these all problems that emails have too, in more-or-less equal measure? Of course, Slack needs to be better than email, or there's no point—but I'd posit that it already is, despite being unable to address these problems. The overall interface of a "chatroom" just works better for quick conversations compared to long email chains. Maybe not much better, but better. As I see it, the problems pointed out in this article are the eternal problems of all communication within a large group—including face-to-face. It's why small companies can be more nimble despite less resources, and why managing the size of a team is so important. And while the author's suggestions are great in theory, I can't imagine how you'd even go about implementing them. At least, not until AI gets much, much better than it is today.
- jasonv 7y ago
  I think I'm officially bored of the "Slack is a problem" threads. Just spent time in a dev org where 500+ members of a technical team used email, Teams & Slack. However you want to slice it, there are organizational habits of a department that large, and nothing deep in a licensed product stack is likely to fix/influence how a big dept runs itself. They superficially used all the enterprise tools at their disposal, because relying on implementations complicated enough to need documentation wouldn't live long in a big org that had lots of turnover (how's your Sharepoint doing?). Said team had people at all levels who were unreachable in any way, except when you slacked them. You disrupted them, told them they'd ignored an email that you really needed a response to, and they gave you what you needed. Slack fixed the "I'm ignoring my inbox and I have 40K unread emails in there" problem that feels typical in enterprises. Teams worked to connect tech and non-tech business units. It helped to keep business teams off Slack. Slack was noisy for the ops team. How Slack is supposed to "fix" disorganized, i-don't-care-about-management principles of big departments is beyond me. The flip side: the business thrived, everyone worked pretty sane house, and the paychecks arrived every other week without fail. There was a lot to complain about, but no one ever complained about Slack (or even Teams).
  - SahAssar 7y ago
    You're saying that email was overloaded so people turned to slack instead? People can change how notifications are handled for email too, so that is not at all new and I think that changing communications to a proprietary protocol instead of configuring an email client is stupid.
    - jasonv 7y ago
      Yeah, sure. And I usually build up a set of filters and rules so that my inbox is manageable, but I think the compassionate point of view is that email is loaded with more disposable and management heavy communications than slack tends to be. Slack was where work got done. Email, less so.
      - SahAssar 7y ago
        > email is loaded with more disposable and management heavy communications That's a cultural problem, not a technical one. Slack gets work done just because the bad practices haven't migrated to it yet, not because it's a better communication medium. In some spaces the email bad practices have migrated to slack too and personally I have to ignore slack just as much as email because of that.
        kristianc 7y ago
        > Slack gets work done just because the bad practices haven't migrated to it yet, not because it's a better communication medium. Well no solution can possibly compete with all the bad things that _might_ happen on it in 10 years time.
        andrewprock 7y ago
        I have seen plenty of bad practices in slack. In particular, there is more and more of a tendency to treat slack as "publication of record" as opposed to "ephemeral missives".
    - visarga 7y ago
- marmaduke 7y ago
  > At least, not until AI gets much, much better than it is today. One could extend LDA (a common topic model) to include people, by modeling topics as mixtures of people (which they kinda are), and any given comment is generated by a mixture of topics. If anyone is missing, pull them in; if it's the wrong topic channel, move the thread over etc. I'm not saying it'd be compelling but it's possible
csb6 7y ago
> The ‘stuck at home’ economy is gangbusters. VR headsets are selling out, video chat esp Zoom is under heavy use (though security / privacy news is hurting them), Peloton’s stock is up presumably on sales numbers, and remember Blue Apron? They’re back baby. People are gonna die, and this is what people think about? How can I profit off of this? What stocks should I buy and sell? Hundreds of thousands of people are gonna be dead in the next few months. Global capitalism is the reason why we are so vulnerable to outbreaks like this. But you know, it’s great that Microsoft’s stocks have gone up; best of luck to the 10% of households that control 84% of the value of the stock market. They’re the ones who are going to come out of this crisis ahead and more rich than they started, unlike the millions of working-class people who have and will lose their jobs.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  > Hundreds of thousands of people are gonna be dead in the next few months. How many people will die as a result of economic and supply chain disruption? How many will kill themselves after losing their life’s work? How much human suffering will all this economic disruption cause? Getting the economy back online is obviously a very serious concern. > Global capitalism is the reason why we are so vulnerable to outbreaks like this. Capitalism has nothing to do with it. There is no economic model that responds well to being temporarily turned off.
- duxup 7y ago
  I think people can regnozinze the business going on... and be sensitive / sympathetic to the situation. I'm writing code / getting paid to do a thing(s) because of COVID, is just part of keep calm and carry on.
  - csb6 7y ago
    I understand this perspective, but I think it fails to take into account the bigger issues here. While programmers and other knowledge economy workers can work remotely and keep getting paid in relative comfort and safety, millions of people have jobs that cannot be remote and have no savings or stocks to fall back on. My point is that the article is out of touch with the meaning of the crisis for 90% of the population, and the issue with the wealthy being the only ones able to come out ahead in times of crisis is troubling.
zippergz 7y ago
When all you have is a hammer…
SahAssar 7y ago
> Having AI in your DNA isn’t just a buzzword anymore I haven't read or seen anything that suggests this, including in this article. If this article is suggesting that all companies have to use AI/ML to survive then that's wrong IMO. AI/ML is great for a certain subset of problems but I don't think textual inter-human communication is one of them and there are a lot others where AI/ML will not be a silver bullet.
jfjrjri9nn 7y ago
I’m short on real time chat mattering as much in 5 years. My company is sick of the nuisance, and is working towards real time communication via git & CI/CD, PD alerts, and self guided copy paste of boilerplate framework manifests, without the constant forced check ins to sooth attitudes seeking conformity and compliance in behavior of people who are generally non-hostile. Traditional office life is falling down just as much because the people that built it are dying off as it is tech. The masses commuting to offices on the far edges of our towns is a generational thing that the future isn’t obligated to give a shit about.
Jasper_ 7y ago
I don't want an algorithm helpfully randomly deciding that someone trying to ping me is "noise". AI is not robust enough for this yet, and never will be. Even Facebook has enough restraint to not include AI in their messaging app.
- ethbro 7y ago
  The killer feature is not a Slack client deciding that something intentionally directed at you can be ignored. It's the Slack server generating a realtime stream of things you probably should be involved in. I.e. Enterprise Twitter for people in the organization who need your help How does Slack get there? Compile an interaction graph and feature mine previous interactions. Slack should be Facebook... except for productivity.
  - visarga 7y ago
    > It's the Slack server generating a realtime stream of things you probably should be involved in. I think Slack should copy an idea from email - show a simple timeline of messages related to the user in a single place. Sometimes I see a message came in and can't tell who sent it if I already have multiple unanswered messages waiting.
    - ethbro 7y ago
      I think Slack's lack of emphasis on feed-style interfaces is because the company thinks it's a communication tool, but its core value source is as an unstructured store and feed of business communication data. Being a highly used communication tool is table stakes for getting the latter. Email never evolved because legacy. IRC never cared about enterprise. Everything Microsoft ever put out (Lync, SharePoint, Lync-Skype, Teams) has been corrupted by their spineless kowtowing to HR's assinine audit and control requirements, above usability. Slack's progression should be the same as Facebook's: (1) build a tool people like and use (success!), (2) store everything, (3) continuously reverse engineer structure (organizational, expertise, and process) from everything, & (4) build and sell products that require (2) & (3) (and therefore that they have no competition for). Unfortunately, it remains to be seen if they really understand the difference in value between (2) and (3).
swiley 7y ago
I don’t mind real time chat honestly, but I wish it were done right, at least on par with email: No erasing edit history Open source Self hostable The iPhone means the last two won’t happen and people who set their clients to auto load remote images means the first one won’t.
- machello13 7y ago
  What does the iPhone have to do with it?
  - aenario 7y ago
    As an OpenSource developer, I am fine with paying the one time $25 fee for Android, but not the $1500 computer and $100/year to make my app available on the app store
    - Geeflow 7y ago
      You can develop for iOS without actually owning Apple hardware. I develop an app and use MacinCloud[1] to build the iOS version. Costs $1/hour on demand. The hardest part was getting a two-factor enabled apple id. I actually had to borrow a physical iPhone just to activate the two-factor authentication. Once it is activated, you can get away without an iPhone again. Just saying that it is possible without the $1500 hardware. It still sucks that Apple makes one jump through all these hoops... [1] https://www.macincloud.com/ https://www.macincloud.com/
      - swiley 7y ago
        1) that’s ridiculous. 2) you still have to pay $100 a year to do push notifications and the effect is almost no one maintains the push severs for open source apps because the people running the actual servers aren’t allowed to.
- molsongolden 7y ago
  Zulip hits all of these if the "view edit history" feature fulfills #1 for you. There's also an iOS app. https://github.com/zulip https://github.com/zulip
Roritharr 7y ago
Slack needs to buy hopin.to or a competitor. now.
topkai22 7y ago
I feel like a lot of the authors recommendations for Slack are talking points in Office 365 keynotes.
nikisweeting 7y ago
I much prefer Zulip to Slack because it forces you to split your convos into topics, making it more like a forum than a realtime chat system. It also intentionally eschews push notifications in favor of keeping everything asynchronous (unless you're specifically @mentioned). I haven't seen any chat system other than Zulip quite nail this yet, but I'm optimistic that others will eventually catch on. I'm not convinced that human-provided topic labels could ever be replaced by an AI deciding which things should be clustered, but maybe I'm wrong...
- maelito 7y ago
  What I miss in Zulip is Slack-like threads. In Slack, when you don't care about a thread, you just don't open it, it doesn't clutter your view. But Slack also misses Zulip's model.
  - molsongolden 7y ago
    These are topics in Zulip. Async usage for me looks like: 1) Skim list of Streams in the org, streams show the number of new messages in a bubble next to the name 2) Click on the Streams relevant to me to expand the list of Topics with new messages 3) Skim the active Topics to see which are relevant to me and click into each of those to skim new messages and reply if necessary 4) Feel good knowing I've caught up on everything relevant to me without needing to see the thousands of other messages in the org 5) Click the dropdown for each Stream and select "mark all messages as read" so I'm back to the equivalent of inbox zero and can repeat the process later.
  - maccam94 7y ago
    You can mute topics in Zulip, which should keep it out of the way unless you decide to open it specifically. You can't really have topics if no one sees when they get created. Streams (similar to slack Channels) are not automatically joined. If you find there is too much noise, you may need to split the stream to have multiple more focused streams.
- molsongolden 7y ago
simonhamp 7y ago
The solution isn’t AI. The solution does however require some intelligence to skim over the content and re-label it. Humans are the engine here. And Slack is already starting to show some promise with things like threads, reminders and actions. However to be truly beneficial, this has to be baked into the core of Slack’s being; it must support labelling of historical activity, it must treat threads differently, and reminders and actions need to be customisable based on your intended level of interaction with the underlying conversations. Until Slack gets on top of that, shifting the UI around won’t help.
- zeroimpl 7y ago
  Yeah, they need to make it possible for users to clean up/label things after the fact (including changing things posted by others - like stack overflow’s edits), and perhaps they can have some AI reminders to encourage this behavior (“hey, looks like this conversation is over, would you like to summarize and archive it?”) Recently, in the middle of an important team discussion where we had a brief lull waiting for senior people to respond, one coworker decided to ask me some off-topic questions. It would have made 10x more sense to send them as DM, or at least start a single thread. But converting messages to a thread or moving to another channel is hard so there was nothing I could do (aside from asking them to delete all the messages)
dividedbyzero 7y ago
The thing I like most about Slack is the ability to add custom emoji – absolutely ingenious. We got a couple of different checkbox ones for status updates, with a question mark inside the box, an exclamation mark, crossed out, checked, which makes it really easy to convey different nuances of "done" and "not done". We have lots of product icons (AWS, GCP etc.) as emoji, so alerts can have the appropriate service logo in them, so people can scan and filter them much easier, plus consistent emoji for different urgency levels. And a lot of fun ones, too, which add some lightheartedness to overly serious conversations. There's a kind of meta-level communication and inside jokes going on in our team via Emoji reactions that otherwise would only work in person. Might not be for everyone, but it works tremendously well for us. Custom emoji give us a really neat way of making such a clean virtual space ours, of making it a bit more human; something that feels sorely needed in a world of cleanly UXed platforms and tools and walled gardens where people get data-driven into funnels. Human-ness is also something that I feel state-of-the-art AI routinely takes away from things and spaces where it is a dominant feature. What AI we have is quite useful to blur the background of a video call; after all, that requires an understanding of what a human form looks like on video and not much more. After herculean efforts and gazillions of metric tons of training data, that works quite well nowadays. But getting human communication to a degree that would allow for any meaningful assistance in a chat app? Color me very sceptic. If my social ads are any measure for this, there's still a long way to go, and that should be orders of magnitude easier – I interact with a lot of content that isn't that hard to categorize, just show me photography equipment ads already! You don't even necessarily need to deep-mine my natural language content for that. And yet I get shown all those smart toilet ads, no idea why. That's not just unhelpful – it ensures the whole social media experience won't ever feel human and welcoming in the way random threads on low-tech PHP forums did back in the day, or the way a Slack convo can feel nowadays. Not while that stupid robot ant-brain is constantly breathing down my neck and interjecting smart toilet content; it's weird and uncanny, please stop. I really don't understand why AI would be required to make people convert to premium in an app like Slack, or stay beyond the lockdown. Whatever happened to just making a great tool that's helpful and useful and a joy to use? If anything, it might be the opposite: Annoying, unhelpful, obnoxious AI assistance would drive people off quickly – think Clippy, but in a product that isn't remotely as entrenched and without alternative as MS Office back in the day. The way modern software tends to replace user choice with data-driven fits-for-most defaults, there might not even be a proper "off" setting for such a thing. Please don't, thank you very much.
jedbrown 7y ago
Everyone I work with is part of at least a dozen Slack workspaces with disparate notification settings. I get loads of notifications at times when I can't reply immediately, but there is no system comparable to _not archiving an email_ so I remember to come back to it. I get the convenience of semi-synchronous conversations and being able to engage and catch people up better than forwarding an email chain, but Slack and its ilk are very, very far from replacing email.
- lemoncucumber 7y ago
  I've always wished that Gmail (or some other email client) would add support for creating arbitrary "folders" each with an "inbox" and an "archive" section. The Gmail inbox -> archive flow works really well, but I'd like to have multiple such inboxes for different mailing lists. A prime example is pull request notification emails: I want them to skip my inbox and go into a "folder", but I want to keep track of which ones I still need to review so the archiving model would be great. I could hack such a workflow together using multiple labels, but it wouldn't have the convenience of a universal "archive" keyboard shortcut / button.
  - shiftb 7y ago
    Superhuman has something like this.
  - anoncake 7y ago
    Something like Thunderbird's "Keep existing folder structure of archived messages"?
- ec109685 7y ago
  Slack workspaces aren’t good. I hate switching between them. I can get to “inbox” zero in my email and one slack workspace. Switching between them is too much friction.
- IneffablePigeon 7y ago
  I agree, I'd love a quick "add to to-do list" button or something as a quick and dirty fix to that. Or even just a mark as unread button. Right now I resort to setting a slackbot reminder for an hour for any message I think I might forget to deal with.
ThomPete 7y ago
Slack, like Dropbox and almost any tool in this category are great for a few people, and horrible the more you become. Dropbox for +100 people isn't fundamentally better than a windows network drive.
matchbok 7y ago
People like slack because using it feels like "working". It's not. Everyone who has described to me how their "productivity" went up because of slack I am able to explain away. It's not work, it's keeping up with slow chats and a mess of interlaced conversations. That's not work. Test: In a popular channel wait until someone asks a question. Immediately then post another question. This should be ok behavior (it is with email). See what happens. The previous one quickly goes away as other people type. What a mess. Chat isn't how work gets done, it's how people trick themselves into thinking they are "working".
- cuchoi 7y ago
  A big part of most jobs is communication. Any tool that improves that is a win. For me Slack has replaced email in a good way (can set up reminders, bots, have sub-threads, among others). This doesn't mean that it will work for everybody... > The previous one quickly goes away as other people type Not if we use threads.
- jlarocco 7y ago
  I don't even like Slack, but that complaint seems petty and easy to avoid using threads... It's easy to nitpick anything if you put your mind to it, but at the end of the day most people find chat pretty intuitive and useful for communicating, which is actually part of "working" for most people.
lettergram 7y ago
A lot of those issues are actually handled by our product: https://insideropinion.com/ https://insideropinion.com/ Which indeed, does use topic modeling :)
JoeOfTexas 7y ago
On Slack, I just mute all the channels, unless I'm active on a project related channel. But having to jump through each workspace to clear out messages is a pain. One view to see all or every workspace unreads would be great... I'm jumping through hoops just to find the damn unread messages sometimes.
nurettin 7y ago
slack requires some priorities (better platform support for drawing on screen, less lag on connections like 50mbit down/ 5 mbit up) and for that, they need more programmers who know what they are doing and less product managers who want to "renovate the UI".
DonHopkins 7y ago
>Slack actively hinders all non-communication forms of work by distracting the shit out of people and frying their brains worse than Broxholm. >(Broxholm’s brain fryer was in fact beneficial, if parasitic. Slack is probably neither). TIL the story and moral philosophy behind Broxholm’s brain fryer (which helps me understand Slack better). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Teacher_Is_an_Alien#My_Teacher_Fried_My_Brains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Teacher_Is_an_Alien#My_Teac... Here's a great review that questions its dubious assumptions about human nature and plot inconsistencies (click the "more" button at the end of "User reviews: LibraryThing member StormRaven"): https://www.librarycat.org/lib/cctesttc1/item/139177749# https://www.librarycat.org/lib/cctesttc1/item/139177749# >[...] Eventually, the alien is revealed as is the alien's plot concerning Duncan and the machine used to make him smarter. This is more or less merely a vehicle for Coville to work into the book his argument that humanity is fundamentally inhumane. Duncan's previous behavior, bullying and crude, is contrasted with his nicer, more thoughtful behavior after he has been made smarter. Duncan is also alerted to the fact that the Interplanetary Council (an organization all the alien races of the galaxy belong to) is concerned by the violence and nastiness of humans and is considering what steps to take to neutralize the threat humans pose. >Coville's thesis may be true, but I have some serious problems with some of the elements of the book. The most glaring is the idea that when Duncan becomes smarter, he also becomes nicer and more humane. One only has to think back on human history to realize that being more intelligent does not seem to correlate in any significant way with being nice. I also think that the way the alien treats Duncan - performing experiments on him without his knowledge, kidnapping and then imprisoning him to use his brain as a communications device - seems to pretty much destroy any claim the Interplanetary Council may have to the moral high ground. Coville's theme, that humans are bad and the aliens are more moral and kind, seems to depend on the idea that whatever bad things the aliens do is justified by circumstance (this is not the first time in the series that an ostensibly non-evil alien has kidnapped and imprisoned an innocent human to further their goals). This sort of moral inconsistency simply saps away some of the message that the books are trying to convey. >In the end, some dubious assumptions about human nature and some plot inconsistencies regarding the moral nature of the aliens mar an otherwise fun little book about kids dealing with alien teachers. While My Teacher Fried My Brains has flaws that undermine the message of the story, it remains at the very least a decent book for younger readers.
myspy 7y ago
Yeah, Slack is a chat tool no work organization tool. We use Basecamp for that. Organizing work in an ordered and calm way.
tomduncalf 7y ago
Slack just need to fix threads. The UI right now is crazy if you are in more than one thread, I don’t understand why you have to click “x more replies” to see new messages - I don’t think they fixed this in the new update either. Right now it makes me (and others) avoid threads which clutters up channels for everyone.
- rmdashrfstar 7y ago
  Everyone has complained for years about this — nothing from the Slack team!
  - tomduncalf 7y ago
    I asked them about this on Twitter, they did have a rationale that "We do want to be careful that folks don't miss threaded replies if they're looking at All Threads and then replies come through and they click into another channel, which is why that exists now." They did say they were looking to tackle it but this was around a year ago :/ https://twitter.com/tomduncalf/status/1134141543626018816 https://twitter.com/tomduncalf/status/1134141543626018816 It mainly frustrates me because I think the rest of Slack is great!
    - thebean11 7y ago
      Yet I still constantly miss threaded replies. If I have click "threads" when I have multiple new replies, I often only see the top one, the ones below it are still marked as read if I don't scroll down.
      - tomduncalf 7y ago
        Exactly this :(
- tvaughan 7y ago
  Flowdock did threads really well. It also did crashing several times a day really well too. Today, Twist https://twist.com https://twist.com seems to do everything right.
JackPoach 7y ago
I think that Slack has economic problem as well. They are just chat, no matter what they say. And Slack is pricey, too. Once the coronavirus pandemic is over, but the recession/depression hits hard, many IT heads will look for ways to cut costs. Many organizations will dump Slack in favor of other solutions.

133 points by awinter-py 7y ago

Since "topic model" is not explained in the post: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_model

Der_Einzige 7y ago

My experience is that basically all types of topic modeling tools just kinda blow. You might as well use traditional clustering techniques instead since topic models are basically a type of clustering

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

...aren't these all problems that emails have too, in more-or-less equal measure? Of course, Slack needs to be better than email, or there's no point—but I'd posit that it already is, despite being unable to address these problems. The overall interface of a "chatroom" just works better for quick conversations compared to long email chains. Maybe not much better, but better. As I see it, the problems pointed out in this article are the eternal problems of all communication within a large group—including face-to-face. It's why small companies can be more nimble despite less resources, and why managing the size of a team is so important. And while the author's suggestions are great in theory, I can't imagine how you'd even go about implementing them. At least, not until AI gets much, much better than it is today.

jasonv 7y ago
I think I'm officially bored of the "Slack is a problem" threads. Just spent time in a dev org where 500+ members of a technical team used email, Teams & Slack. However you want to slice it, there are organizational habits of a department that large, and nothing deep in a licensed product stack is likely to fix/influence how a big dept runs itself. They superficially used all the enterprise tools at their disposal, because relying on implementations complicated enough to need documentation wouldn't live long in a big org that had lots of turnover (how's your Sharepoint doing?). Said team had people at all levels who were unreachable in any way, except when you slacked them. You disrupted them, told them they'd ignored an email that you really needed a response to, and they gave you what you needed. Slack fixed the "I'm ignoring my inbox and I have 40K unread emails in there" problem that feels typical in enterprises. Teams worked to connect tech and non-tech business units. It helped to keep business teams off Slack. Slack was noisy for the ops team. How Slack is supposed to "fix" disorganized, i-don't-care-about-management principles of big departments is beyond me. The flip side: the business thrived, everyone worked pretty sane house, and the paychecks arrived every other week without fail. There was a lot to complain about, but no one ever complained about Slack (or even Teams).
- SahAssar 7y ago
  You're saying that email was overloaded so people turned to slack instead? People can change how notifications are handled for email too, so that is not at all new and I think that changing communications to a proprietary protocol instead of configuring an email client is stupid.
  - jasonv 7y ago
    Yeah, sure. And I usually build up a set of filters and rules so that my inbox is manageable, but I think the compassionate point of view is that email is loaded with more disposable and management heavy communications than slack tends to be. Slack was where work got done. Email, less so.
    - SahAssar 7y ago
      > email is loaded with more disposable and management heavy communications That's a cultural problem, not a technical one. Slack gets work done just because the bad practices haven't migrated to it yet, not because it's a better communication medium. In some spaces the email bad practices have migrated to slack too and personally I have to ignore slack just as much as email because of that.
      - kristianc 7y ago
        > Slack gets work done just because the bad practices haven't migrated to it yet, not because it's a better communication medium. Well no solution can possibly compete with all the bad things that _might_ happen on it in 10 years time.
      - andrewprock 7y ago
        I have seen plenty of bad practices in slack. In particular, there is more and more of a tendency to treat slack as "publication of record" as opposed to "ephemeral missives".
  - visarga 7y ago
marmaduke 7y ago
> At least, not until AI gets much, much better than it is today. One could extend LDA (a common topic model) to include people, by modeling topics as mixtures of people (which they kinda are), and any given comment is generated by a mixture of topics. If anyone is missing, pull them in; if it's the wrong topic channel, move the thread over etc. I'm not saying it'd be compelling but it's possible

csb6 7y ago

> The ‘stuck at home’ economy is gangbusters. VR headsets are selling out, video chat esp Zoom is under heavy use (though security / privacy news is hurting them), Peloton’s stock is up presumably on sales numbers, and remember Blue Apron? They’re back baby. People are gonna die, and this is what people think about? How can I profit off of this? What stocks should I buy and sell? Hundreds of thousands of people are gonna be dead in the next few months. Global capitalism is the reason why we are so vulnerable to outbreaks like this. But you know, it’s great that Microsoft’s stocks have gone up; best of luck to the 10% of households that control 84% of the value of the stock market. They’re the ones who are going to come out of this crisis ahead and more rich than they started, unlike the millions of working-class people who have and will lose their jobs.

AmericanChopper 7y ago
> Hundreds of thousands of people are gonna be dead in the next few months. How many people will die as a result of economic and supply chain disruption? How many will kill themselves after losing their life’s work? How much human suffering will all this economic disruption cause? Getting the economy back online is obviously a very serious concern. > Global capitalism is the reason why we are so vulnerable to outbreaks like this. Capitalism has nothing to do with it. There is no economic model that responds well to being temporarily turned off.
duxup 7y ago
I think people can regnozinze the business going on... and be sensitive / sympathetic to the situation. I'm writing code / getting paid to do a thing(s) because of COVID, is just part of keep calm and carry on.
- csb6 7y ago
  I understand this perspective, but I think it fails to take into account the bigger issues here. While programmers and other knowledge economy workers can work remotely and keep getting paid in relative comfort and safety, millions of people have jobs that cannot be remote and have no savings or stocks to fall back on. My point is that the article is out of touch with the meaning of the crisis for 90% of the population, and the issue with the wealthy being the only ones able to come out ahead in times of crisis is troubling.

zippergz 7y ago

When all you have is a hammer…

SahAssar 7y ago

> Having AI in your DNA isn’t just a buzzword anymore I haven't read or seen anything that suggests this, including in this article. If this article is suggesting that all companies have to use AI/ML to survive then that's wrong IMO. AI/ML is great for a certain subset of problems but I don't think textual inter-human communication is one of them and there are a lot others where AI/ML will not be a silver bullet.

jfjrjri9nn 7y ago

I’m short on real time chat mattering as much in 5 years. My company is sick of the nuisance, and is working towards real time communication via git & CI/CD, PD alerts, and self guided copy paste of boilerplate framework manifests, without the constant forced check ins to sooth attitudes seeking conformity and compliance in behavior of people who are generally non-hostile. Traditional office life is falling down just as much because the people that built it are dying off as it is tech. The masses commuting to offices on the far edges of our towns is a generational thing that the future isn’t obligated to give a shit about.

Jasper_ 7y ago

I don't want an algorithm helpfully randomly deciding that someone trying to ping me is "noise". AI is not robust enough for this yet, and never will be. Even Facebook has enough restraint to not include AI in their messaging app.

ethbro 7y ago
The killer feature is not a Slack client deciding that something intentionally directed at you can be ignored. It's the Slack server generating a realtime stream of things you probably should be involved in. I.e. Enterprise Twitter for people in the organization who need your help How does Slack get there? Compile an interaction graph and feature mine previous interactions. Slack should be Facebook... except for productivity.
- visarga 7y ago
  > It's the Slack server generating a realtime stream of things you probably should be involved in. I think Slack should copy an idea from email - show a simple timeline of messages related to the user in a single place. Sometimes I see a message came in and can't tell who sent it if I already have multiple unanswered messages waiting.
  - ethbro 7y ago
    I think Slack's lack of emphasis on feed-style interfaces is because the company thinks it's a communication tool, but its core value source is as an unstructured store and feed of business communication data. Being a highly used communication tool is table stakes for getting the latter. Email never evolved because legacy. IRC never cared about enterprise. Everything Microsoft ever put out (Lync, SharePoint, Lync-Skype, Teams) has been corrupted by their spineless kowtowing to HR's assinine audit and control requirements, above usability. Slack's progression should be the same as Facebook's: (1) build a tool people like and use (success!), (2) store everything, (3) continuously reverse engineer structure (organizational, expertise, and process) from everything, & (4) build and sell products that require (2) & (3) (and therefore that they have no competition for). Unfortunately, it remains to be seen if they really understand the difference in value between (2) and (3).

swiley 7y ago

I don’t mind real time chat honestly, but I wish it were done right, at least on par with email: No erasing edit history Open source Self hostable The iPhone means the last two won’t happen and people who set their clients to auto load remote images means the first one won’t.

machello13 7y ago
What does the iPhone have to do with it?
- aenario 7y ago
  As an OpenSource developer, I am fine with paying the one time $25 fee for Android, but not the $1500 computer and $100/year to make my app available on the app store
  - Geeflow 7y ago
    You can develop for iOS without actually owning Apple hardware. I develop an app and use MacinCloud[1] to build the iOS version. Costs $1/hour on demand. The hardest part was getting a two-factor enabled apple id. I actually had to borrow a physical iPhone just to activate the two-factor authentication. Once it is activated, you can get away without an iPhone again. Just saying that it is possible without the $1500 hardware. It still sucks that Apple makes one jump through all these hoops... [1] https://www.macincloud.com/ https://www.macincloud.com/
    - swiley 7y ago
      1) that’s ridiculous. 2) you still have to pay $100 a year to do push notifications and the effect is almost no one maintains the push severs for open source apps because the people running the actual servers aren’t allowed to.
molsongolden 7y ago
Zulip hits all of these if the "view edit history" feature fulfills #1 for you. There's also an iOS app. https://github.com/zulip https://github.com/zulip

Roritharr 7y ago

Slack needs to buy hopin.to or a competitor. now.

topkai22 7y ago

I feel like a lot of the authors recommendations for Slack are talking points in Office 365 keynotes.

nikisweeting 7y ago

I much prefer Zulip to Slack because it forces you to split your convos into topics, making it more like a forum than a realtime chat system. It also intentionally eschews push notifications in favor of keeping everything asynchronous (unless you're specifically @mentioned). I haven't seen any chat system other than Zulip quite nail this yet, but I'm optimistic that others will eventually catch on. I'm not convinced that human-provided topic labels could ever be replaced by an AI deciding which things should be clustered, but maybe I'm wrong...

maelito 7y ago
What I miss in Zulip is Slack-like threads. In Slack, when you don't care about a thread, you just don't open it, it doesn't clutter your view. But Slack also misses Zulip's model.
- molsongolden 7y ago
  These are topics in Zulip. Async usage for me looks like: 1) Skim list of Streams in the org, streams show the number of new messages in a bubble next to the name 2) Click on the Streams relevant to me to expand the list of Topics with new messages 3) Skim the active Topics to see which are relevant to me and click into each of those to skim new messages and reply if necessary 4) Feel good knowing I've caught up on everything relevant to me without needing to see the thousands of other messages in the org 5) Click the dropdown for each Stream and select "mark all messages as read" so I'm back to the equivalent of inbox zero and can repeat the process later.
- maccam94 7y ago
  You can mute topics in Zulip, which should keep it out of the way unless you decide to open it specifically. You can't really have topics if no one sees when they get created. Streams (similar to slack Channels) are not automatically joined. If you find there is too much noise, you may need to split the stream to have multiple more focused streams.
molsongolden 7y ago

simonhamp 7y ago

The solution isn’t AI. The solution does however require some intelligence to skim over the content and re-label it. Humans are the engine here. And Slack is already starting to show some promise with things like threads, reminders and actions. However to be truly beneficial, this has to be baked into the core of Slack’s being; it must support labelling of historical activity, it must treat threads differently, and reminders and actions need to be customisable based on your intended level of interaction with the underlying conversations. Until Slack gets on top of that, shifting the UI around won’t help.

zeroimpl 7y ago
Yeah, they need to make it possible for users to clean up/label things after the fact (including changing things posted by others - like stack overflow’s edits), and perhaps they can have some AI reminders to encourage this behavior (“hey, looks like this conversation is over, would you like to summarize and archive it?”) Recently, in the middle of an important team discussion where we had a brief lull waiting for senior people to respond, one coworker decided to ask me some off-topic questions. It would have made 10x more sense to send them as DM, or at least start a single thread. But converting messages to a thread or moving to another channel is hard so there was nothing I could do (aside from asking them to delete all the messages)

dividedbyzero 7y ago

The thing I like most about Slack is the ability to add custom emoji – absolutely ingenious. We got a couple of different checkbox ones for status updates, with a question mark inside the box, an exclamation mark, crossed out, checked, which makes it really easy to convey different nuances of "done" and "not done". We have lots of product icons (AWS, GCP etc.) as emoji, so alerts can have the appropriate service logo in them, so people can scan and filter them much easier, plus consistent emoji for different urgency levels. And a lot of fun ones, too, which add some lightheartedness to overly serious conversations. There's a kind of meta-level communication and inside jokes going on in our team via Emoji reactions that otherwise would only work in person. Might not be for everyone, but it works tremendously well for us. Custom emoji give us a really neat way of making such a clean virtual space ours, of making it a bit more human; something that feels sorely needed in a world of cleanly UXed platforms and tools and walled gardens where people get data-driven into funnels. Human-ness is also something that I feel state-of-the-art AI routinely takes away from things and spaces where it is a dominant feature. What AI we have is quite useful to blur the background of a video call; after all, that requires an understanding of what a human form looks like on video and not much more. After herculean efforts and gazillions of metric tons of training data, that works quite well nowadays. But getting human communication to a degree that would allow for any meaningful assistance in a chat app? Color me very sceptic. If my social ads are any measure for this, there's still a long way to go, and that should be orders of magnitude easier – I interact with a lot of content that isn't that hard to categorize, just show me photography equipment ads already! You don't even necessarily need to deep-mine my natural language content for that. And yet I get shown all those smart toilet ads, no idea why. That's not just unhelpful – it ensures the whole social media experience won't ever feel human and welcoming in the way random threads on low-tech PHP forums did back in the day, or the way a Slack convo can feel nowadays. Not while that stupid robot ant-brain is constantly breathing down my neck and interjecting smart toilet content; it's weird and uncanny, please stop. I really don't understand why AI would be required to make people convert to premium in an app like Slack, or stay beyond the lockdown. Whatever happened to just making a great tool that's helpful and useful and a joy to use? If anything, it might be the opposite: Annoying, unhelpful, obnoxious AI assistance would drive people off quickly – think Clippy, but in a product that isn't remotely as entrenched and without alternative as MS Office back in the day. The way modern software tends to replace user choice with data-driven fits-for-most defaults, there might not even be a proper "off" setting for such a thing. Please don't, thank you very much.

jedbrown 7y ago

Everyone I work with is part of at least a dozen Slack workspaces with disparate notification settings. I get loads of notifications at times when I can't reply immediately, but there is no system comparable to _not archiving an email_ so I remember to come back to it. I get the convenience of semi-synchronous conversations and being able to engage and catch people up better than forwarding an email chain, but Slack and its ilk are very, very far from replacing email.

lemoncucumber 7y ago
I've always wished that Gmail (or some other email client) would add support for creating arbitrary "folders" each with an "inbox" and an "archive" section. The Gmail inbox -> archive flow works really well, but I'd like to have multiple such inboxes for different mailing lists. A prime example is pull request notification emails: I want them to skip my inbox and go into a "folder", but I want to keep track of which ones I still need to review so the archiving model would be great. I could hack such a workflow together using multiple labels, but it wouldn't have the convenience of a universal "archive" keyboard shortcut / button.
- shiftb 7y ago
  Superhuman has something like this.
- anoncake 7y ago
  Something like Thunderbird's "Keep existing folder structure of archived messages"?
ec109685 7y ago
Slack workspaces aren’t good. I hate switching between them. I can get to “inbox” zero in my email and one slack workspace. Switching between them is too much friction.
IneffablePigeon 7y ago
I agree, I'd love a quick "add to to-do list" button or something as a quick and dirty fix to that. Or even just a mark as unread button. Right now I resort to setting a slackbot reminder for an hour for any message I think I might forget to deal with.

ThomPete 7y ago

Slack, like Dropbox and almost any tool in this category are great for a few people, and horrible the more you become. Dropbox for +100 people isn't fundamentally better than a windows network drive.

matchbok 7y ago

People like slack because using it feels like "working". It's not. Everyone who has described to me how their "productivity" went up because of slack I am able to explain away. It's not work, it's keeping up with slow chats and a mess of interlaced conversations. That's not work. Test: In a popular channel wait until someone asks a question. Immediately then post another question. This should be ok behavior (it is with email). See what happens. The previous one quickly goes away as other people type. What a mess. Chat isn't how work gets done, it's how people trick themselves into thinking they are "working".

cuchoi 7y ago
A big part of most jobs is communication. Any tool that improves that is a win. For me Slack has replaced email in a good way (can set up reminders, bots, have sub-threads, among others). This doesn't mean that it will work for everybody... > The previous one quickly goes away as other people type Not if we use threads.
jlarocco 7y ago
I don't even like Slack, but that complaint seems petty and easy to avoid using threads... It's easy to nitpick anything if you put your mind to it, but at the end of the day most people find chat pretty intuitive and useful for communicating, which is actually part of "working" for most people.

lettergram 7y ago

A lot of those issues are actually handled by our product: https://insideropinion.com/ https://insideropinion.com/ Which indeed, does use topic modeling :)

JoeOfTexas 7y ago

On Slack, I just mute all the channels, unless I'm active on a project related channel. But having to jump through each workspace to clear out messages is a pain. One view to see all or every workspace unreads would be great... I'm jumping through hoops just to find the damn unread messages sometimes.

nurettin 7y ago

slack requires some priorities (better platform support for drawing on screen, less lag on connections like 50mbit down/ 5 mbit up) and for that, they need more programmers who know what they are doing and less product managers who want to "renovate the UI".

DonHopkins 7y ago

>Slack actively hinders all non-communication forms of work by distracting the shit out of people and frying their brains worse than Broxholm. >(Broxholm’s brain fryer was in fact beneficial, if parasitic. Slack is probably neither). TIL the story and moral philosophy behind Broxholm’s brain fryer (which helps me understand Slack better). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Teacher_Is_an_Alien#My_Teacher_Fried_My_Brains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Teacher_Is_an_Alien#My_Teac... Here's a great review that questions its dubious assumptions about human nature and plot inconsistencies (click the "more" button at the end of "User reviews: LibraryThing member StormRaven"): https://www.librarycat.org/lib/cctesttc1/item/139177749# https://www.librarycat.org/lib/cctesttc1/item/139177749# >[...] Eventually, the alien is revealed as is the alien's plot concerning Duncan and the machine used to make him smarter. This is more or less merely a vehicle for Coville to work into the book his argument that humanity is fundamentally inhumane. Duncan's previous behavior, bullying and crude, is contrasted with his nicer, more thoughtful behavior after he has been made smarter. Duncan is also alerted to the fact that the Interplanetary Council (an organization all the alien races of the galaxy belong to) is concerned by the violence and nastiness of humans and is considering what steps to take to neutralize the threat humans pose. >Coville's thesis may be true, but I have some serious problems with some of the elements of the book. The most glaring is the idea that when Duncan becomes smarter, he also becomes nicer and more humane. One only has to think back on human history to realize that being more intelligent does not seem to correlate in any significant way with being nice. I also think that the way the alien treats Duncan - performing experiments on him without his knowledge, kidnapping and then imprisoning him to use his brain as a communications device - seems to pretty much destroy any claim the Interplanetary Council may have to the moral high ground. Coville's theme, that humans are bad and the aliens are more moral and kind, seems to depend on the idea that whatever bad things the aliens do is justified by circumstance (this is not the first time in the series that an ostensibly non-evil alien has kidnapped and imprisoned an innocent human to further their goals). This sort of moral inconsistency simply saps away some of the message that the books are trying to convey. >In the end, some dubious assumptions about human nature and some plot inconsistencies regarding the moral nature of the aliens mar an otherwise fun little book about kids dealing with alien teachers. While My Teacher Fried My Brains has flaws that undermine the message of the story, it remains at the very least a decent book for younger readers.

myspy 7y ago

Yeah, Slack is a chat tool no work organization tool. We use Basecamp for that. Organizing work in an ordered and calm way.

tomduncalf 7y ago

Slack just need to fix threads. The UI right now is crazy if you are in more than one thread, I don’t understand why you have to click “x more replies” to see new messages - I don’t think they fixed this in the new update either. Right now it makes me (and others) avoid threads which clutters up channels for everyone.

rmdashrfstar 7y ago
Everyone has complained for years about this — nothing from the Slack team!
- tomduncalf 7y ago
  I asked them about this on Twitter, they did have a rationale that "We do want to be careful that folks don't miss threaded replies if they're looking at All Threads and then replies come through and they click into another channel, which is why that exists now." They did say they were looking to tackle it but this was around a year ago :/ https://twitter.com/tomduncalf/status/1134141543626018816 https://twitter.com/tomduncalf/status/1134141543626018816 It mainly frustrates me because I think the rest of Slack is great!
  - thebean11 7y ago
    Yet I still constantly miss threaded replies. If I have click "threads" when I have multiple new replies, I often only see the top one, the ones below it are still marked as read if I don't scroll down.
    - tomduncalf 7y ago
      Exactly this :(
tvaughan 7y ago
Flowdock did threads really well. It also did crashing several times a day really well too. Today, Twist https://twist.com https://twist.com seems to do everything right.

JackPoach 7y ago

I think that Slack has economic problem as well. They are just chat, no matter what they say. And Slack is pricey, too. Once the coronavirus pandemic is over, but the recession/depression hits hard, many IT heads will look for ways to cut costs. Many organizations will dump Slack in favor of other solutions.