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I've never really "got" it when it comes to tools like Slack or Teams. To me they've always felt like a forum with a handful of mega topics that go on forever

I've never really "got" it when it comes to tools like Slack or Teams. To me they've always felt like a forum with a handful of mega topics that go on forever with worse (or no) pagination. I also don't get why some devs of successful open source projects hang out in Slack. Do they feel like they need to or do they want to? The specific thing I don't get is that a lot of projects have both an issue tracker and a forum so they can filter low level questions into the forum, but then you can get direct access to the devs by visiting the Slack channel. I mean it's cool, but WTF? I guess maybe my thinking is old-fashioned at this point, but I think people seeking out help should RTFM and be held to a certain standard when it comes to the effort they make. I self solve more than 50% of my problems while I'm trying to build a test case or write a good quality forum / SO question. Maybe Slack, etc. are popular because the informal nature lets people skip the part of the process where they're expected to make an effort.

mxcrossb 6y ago
I mean, if we’re talking old fashion, before all these fancy issue trackers a lot of times you could find devs on their irc channel.
- c0l0 6y ago
  For many projects, you still can - if you know where to look. It's what makes FOSS "support" (i.e., having someone to talk to about a technical problem in a meaningful way, so that you get closer to resolving it) so much more effective than costly support contracts with big and faceless corporations that make you jump through all manners of hoops - only to end up with some expert level blame-shifting, and no real solution in the end.
  - 6510 6y ago
    Answering questions on irc is still a great way to learn.
thdrdt 6y ago
I think the success of Slack is that it's so easy to set up a team. It feels like Trello: you are up and running in a minute. As a freelancer I got a list of Slack teams and it is just very easy to switch. But like you said: that's about it. It is slow, the text input box is horrible and most of the time you loose track of conversations. What I lately notice is that teams start to use WhatsApp groups as Slack replacement. To me that shows that Slack is just a messenger.
- dirtnugget 6y ago
  Using WhatsApp groups for me is terrible since it means all my private and business stuff lands in the same app. Slack has neat features like tracking time zones and auto silencing. In WhatsApp im left with the option to completely mute. Terrible
krzyk 6y ago
Well, such collaboration was pre-slack - it was called IRC. I like it very much, it is like email, but faster, less formal (and no, it doesn't replace email, both have different uses for me). It is similar to instant messaging, but you can ask a question to more than one person at once.
- 6510 6y ago
  Mixing in users asking and answering questions keeps developers honest... ehh I mean kept. You also don't go blabbering about lunch on topical irc channels.
  - jimmydorry 6y ago
    Who else were you going to tell people about that good sandwich?
chime 6y ago
> I've never really "got" it when it comes to tools like Slack or Teams. I've used everything from IRC and ICQ through XMPP and HipChat to Slack, Discord, and Teams and let me share why I think Teams is so much more than all of its predecessors. As someone who manages a large Active Directory domain and Office365 setup, Teams comes free. All I had to do was install the Teams client on users desktops and everything just worked instantly. Users logged in, installed it on their mobile devices, all secured by O365 2FA. I created an AD group for managers and all of them got the ability to send out Teams meeting requests via a local dial-in number for $4/month. When they schedule a meeting, the attendees can use Teams desktop app, mobile app, web app, or just dial-in via phone. Without this $4/month, users get everything except the dial-in phone number. I created a few "Ask [Department]" channels in Teams and my users are using them in the appropriate way without over posting. Users message others in groups of 2-5 and create their own channels without asking IT. My users have conducted Teams webcasts for 40+ attendees, frequently video chat with groups of 8+, and have drastically reduced texting via their personal cellphone or using the old internal IM client. All of this without any training from IT. So Teams is different because except for email, it has replaced text IM, SMS/MMS, forums, audio conferencing, video conferencing, and screen-sharing. It can also replace file-sharing and co-authoring but for business reasons I disabled that as much as I could. Also it automatically integrates with Outlook Calendar so users are alerted the same as before, just with a Join URL now. We were paying over $2k/mo for audio conferencing and now it's barely a few hundred dollars for a better, more stable product. Other than audio dial-in, Teams is effectively free for us because we have been on the O365 Enterprise plan for years now. I last used Slack about 6 months ago and back then it had poor audio conferencing and no built-in video conferencing or screen-sharing. I was hoping after they bought Screenhero, at least screen-sharing would be native quickly but that was not my experience. Overall I like Slack, just that for enterprises already on O365, Teams is a no-cost no-brainer. Not even going to try setting up Slack.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  My users have conducted Teams webcasts for 40+ attendees, frequently video chat with groups of 8+ How are you finding the Teams limitation of only 9 people on screen at once in a videoconference? That is the one major flaw that Teams lags the competition in, e.g. Zoom.
tarsinge 6y ago
I agree that Slack fails as a structured discussion tool, but I find that having one giant notification repository with channels that anyone can subscribe to and filter is great. A server is down, someone is ordering food for lunch, a new customer signup with a premium plan, a competitor tweets something relevant, someone has a good joke, etc... Then unlike email it allows for a quick reaction and discussion on the topic. Also as a generalist I find that being able to have some notifications and sometimes participate without silos on marketing and sales topics (and reciprocally) pretty valuable, both for the company and my personal growth.
ajuc 6y ago
It serves the same purpose as irc channels, jabber, skype, discord - always-on, no friction communication. It replaces the possibility of asking your friend who sits on the next chair a quick question. It can be abused, of course, but I think it creates a healthy hierarchy of information: If you need the answer today write an email. If you need the answer in 10 minutes write on irc/jabber/skype/discord/slack. If you need the answer now - go in person or use a voice call. We actually had our manager tell us this in my first job and set expectations for how fast you should reply on each channel (of course you can answer faster, up to you). This allows to communication without worrying about destroying other's flow. And of course you should check documentation and google before you ask, but that's tool-agnostic. Also for remote teams it shows who is currently available, which is useful in its own way and solves some trust problems employers have with remote workers.
- michaelbuckbee 6y ago
  The term seems impossibly dated, but the "watercooler" type moments or discussion also happen much more organically in an always-on communications system.
  - ncallaway 6y ago
    We've created a persistent Google Meet that we've nicknamed "the watercooler". It serves a similar purpose of being both a social gathering spot, and also a place where you can quickly ask an impromptu question. I find it super useful for building a social environment in a fully remote environment.
- mjmahone17 6y ago
  How do you get 2 hours of uninterrupted time if you’re expected to respond to slack within 10 minutes? This becomes a major problem if you’re part of a team that owns something that supports dozens of teams. Even if each other team only slacks you one question per day: you now are getting at least one question every hour or so. If you can’t control your calendar and create “office hours” to aggregate all those questions and answers, then you either need to be really great at multitasking and preserving mental state while dealing with unrelated problems, or you just can’t spend multiple hours of focused time on a problem during normal working hours. Even if a slack response expectation is only within your team, requiring people to check for notifications more than every hour seems really disruptive, unless you have designated “slack meeting” times.
alkonaut 6y ago
> a handful of mega topics that go on forever with worse (or no) pagination. Your conversations with the guy next to you, or the guy at the watercooler is unstructured. When you communicate about a specific issue you might communicate in an email or issue management system, but that doesn't mean there is a need for unstructured communication too. > people seeking out help should RTFM > Maybe Slack, etc. are popular because the informal nature lets people skip the part of the process where they're expected to make an effort. All informal/unstructured communication isn't just "people asking for help". It's navigating an organization and just communicating (who is it that manages thing X in our company? I can't use email today, is it just me? Who wants to go out for lunch?). It would be absolutely horrible to fit all this impromptu and unstructured chat into a forum or issue management system.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
If a big reason for the popularity of media like Slack is that problems get solved quickly, then it may well be worth it. One of the reasons I use StackOverflow, is that I can get a question -often a “showstopper”- answered fast. I’m quite capable of solving every question I ask, given time. It’s that “time” coefficient that I need to reduce. If I can resolve an issue by quickly formulating a question to get a useful response in fifteen minutes (versus spending a couple of hours trying different approaches), then it’s worth it -even if it is delivered with a side dish of condescension. That said, I’m not really a fan of Slack, or its ilk. I don’t like letting others have unfetterd access to my contiguous time. A forum like SO is better suited to that, where I’m not bothering others. In fact, they compete with each other to quickly answer my question (and maybe take dig at me).
Ididntdothis 6y ago
" To me they've always felt like a forum with a handful of mega topics that go on forever with worse (or no) pagination." After using Slack and Teams I have concluded that good, old forums would probably be a better solution. You can discuss a topic in focused way instead of big discussion threads that never end and have tons of things mixed with each other. Problem is that you can't propose such a thing in a company because something old can't be good.
thrower123 6y ago
Slack is fundamentally just a persistent chat room, so yeah, there's really nothing groundbreaking about it. A decade ago Microsoft Office Communicator or IBM Sametime had similar, if more clunky, solutions that did the same things.
rglullis 6y ago
I definitely share with you the view that Slack is a poor substitute for proper documentation and company communication. To me it just feels like that any project that is managed via Slack transplants the dynamic of open-floor offices to your computer and mobile phone. Yes, it is easy to gather everyone and share quick updates, but only in a fast-food kind of way. One big change that I got with my team to do successfully in a company was to change the attitude regarding communication and documentation on Slack. It involved one single, simple rule: whenever you want to ask anything you need to do your work on Slack, phrase it a way that relates to the Wiki/Knowledge Base. In our case it was Confluence. So, instead of getting questions on channels such as "How do I do X?", we would ask "Can someone point me to the Confluence page that explains how to do X?". Instead of asking someone to send a file or spreadsheet with data that I needed, I would ask them to revise and update the Confluence page, and so on. That would apply even for meetings that were held. If someone missed a meeting and wanted a re-cap, it was easy to point to the page with the minutes of the meeting, and so on. In the beginning we did have to prod and nag some of the colleagues so they would drop old habits, but after a couple of weeks when the majority understood that Wikis are meant to be editable freely it was working really well. There were no longer huge threads on Slack and there was no more stress about missing anything that happened on Slack. It did help (a lot) that we had the support from upper management in implementing this, as they were the ones worried the most about losing communication scattered in a million threads and channels.
- ebiester 6y ago
  So, how did you solve the organization problem? That has always been the biggest problem with confluence and wikis in general. People actively dislike confluence. (And it's something that's stuck in my craw - how do we build documentation that's easy to organize? That's my quarantine project. :)
  - matwood 6y ago
    I've thought about this problem a lot and the conclusion I came to is that tools like Confluence are like the original Yahoo directory of links. Organizing seems like a good idea when there are a small number of items, but it quickly becomes unwieldy. What I've settled on, while not perfect, is shared Google docs where owners of the doc allow suggestions to help keep it up to date.

mxcrossb 6y ago

I mean, if we’re talking old fashion, before all these fancy issue trackers a lot of times you could find devs on their irc channel.

c0l0 6y ago
For many projects, you still can - if you know where to look. It's what makes FOSS "support" (i.e., having someone to talk to about a technical problem in a meaningful way, so that you get closer to resolving it) so much more effective than costly support contracts with big and faceless corporations that make you jump through all manners of hoops - only to end up with some expert level blame-shifting, and no real solution in the end.
- 6510 6y ago
  Answering questions on irc is still a great way to learn.

thdrdt 6y ago

I think the success of Slack is that it's so easy to set up a team. It feels like Trello: you are up and running in a minute. As a freelancer I got a list of Slack teams and it is just very easy to switch. But like you said: that's about it. It is slow, the text input box is horrible and most of the time you loose track of conversations. What I lately notice is that teams start to use WhatsApp groups as Slack replacement. To me that shows that Slack is just a messenger.

dirtnugget 6y ago
Using WhatsApp groups for me is terrible since it means all my private and business stuff lands in the same app. Slack has neat features like tracking time zones and auto silencing. In WhatsApp im left with the option to completely mute. Terrible

krzyk 6y ago

Well, such collaboration was pre-slack - it was called IRC. I like it very much, it is like email, but faster, less formal (and no, it doesn't replace email, both have different uses for me). It is similar to instant messaging, but you can ask a question to more than one person at once.

6510 6y ago
Mixing in users asking and answering questions keeps developers honest... ehh I mean kept. You also don't go blabbering about lunch on topical irc channels.
- jimmydorry 6y ago
  Who else were you going to tell people about that good sandwich?

chime 6y ago

> I've never really "got" it when it comes to tools like Slack or Teams. I've used everything from IRC and ICQ through XMPP and HipChat to Slack, Discord, and Teams and let me share why I think Teams is so much more than all of its predecessors. As someone who manages a large Active Directory domain and Office365 setup, Teams comes free. All I had to do was install the Teams client on users desktops and everything just worked instantly. Users logged in, installed it on their mobile devices, all secured by O365 2FA. I created an AD group for managers and all of them got the ability to send out Teams meeting requests via a local dial-in number for $4/month. When they schedule a meeting, the attendees can use Teams desktop app, mobile app, web app, or just dial-in via phone. Without this $4/month, users get everything except the dial-in phone number. I created a few "Ask [Department]" channels in Teams and my users are using them in the appropriate way without over posting. Users message others in groups of 2-5 and create their own channels without asking IT. My users have conducted Teams webcasts for 40+ attendees, frequently video chat with groups of 8+, and have drastically reduced texting via their personal cellphone or using the old internal IM client. All of this without any training from IT. So Teams is different because except for email, it has replaced text IM, SMS/MMS, forums, audio conferencing, video conferencing, and screen-sharing. It can also replace file-sharing and co-authoring but for business reasons I disabled that as much as I could. Also it automatically integrates with Outlook Calendar so users are alerted the same as before, just with a Join URL now. We were paying over $2k/mo for audio conferencing and now it's barely a few hundred dollars for a better, more stable product. Other than audio dial-in, Teams is effectively free for us because we have been on the O365 Enterprise plan for years now. I last used Slack about 6 months ago and back then it had poor audio conferencing and no built-in video conferencing or screen-sharing. I was hoping after they bought Screenhero, at least screen-sharing would be native quickly but that was not my experience. Overall I like Slack, just that for enterprises already on O365, Teams is a no-cost no-brainer. Not even going to try setting up Slack.

goatinaboat 6y ago
My users have conducted Teams webcasts for 40+ attendees, frequently video chat with groups of 8+ How are you finding the Teams limitation of only 9 people on screen at once in a videoconference? That is the one major flaw that Teams lags the competition in, e.g. Zoom.

tarsinge 6y ago

I agree that Slack fails as a structured discussion tool, but I find that having one giant notification repository with channels that anyone can subscribe to and filter is great. A server is down, someone is ordering food for lunch, a new customer signup with a premium plan, a competitor tweets something relevant, someone has a good joke, etc... Then unlike email it allows for a quick reaction and discussion on the topic. Also as a generalist I find that being able to have some notifications and sometimes participate without silos on marketing and sales topics (and reciprocally) pretty valuable, both for the company and my personal growth.

ajuc 6y ago

It serves the same purpose as irc channels, jabber, skype, discord - always-on, no friction communication. It replaces the possibility of asking your friend who sits on the next chair a quick question. It can be abused, of course, but I think it creates a healthy hierarchy of information: If you need the answer today write an email. If you need the answer in 10 minutes write on irc/jabber/skype/discord/slack. If you need the answer now - go in person or use a voice call. We actually had our manager tell us this in my first job and set expectations for how fast you should reply on each channel (of course you can answer faster, up to you). This allows to communication without worrying about destroying other's flow. And of course you should check documentation and google before you ask, but that's tool-agnostic. Also for remote teams it shows who is currently available, which is useful in its own way and solves some trust problems employers have with remote workers.

michaelbuckbee 6y ago
The term seems impossibly dated, but the "watercooler" type moments or discussion also happen much more organically in an always-on communications system.
- ncallaway 6y ago
  We've created a persistent Google Meet that we've nicknamed "the watercooler". It serves a similar purpose of being both a social gathering spot, and also a place where you can quickly ask an impromptu question. I find it super useful for building a social environment in a fully remote environment.
mjmahone17 6y ago
How do you get 2 hours of uninterrupted time if you’re expected to respond to slack within 10 minutes? This becomes a major problem if you’re part of a team that owns something that supports dozens of teams. Even if each other team only slacks you one question per day: you now are getting at least one question every hour or so. If you can’t control your calendar and create “office hours” to aggregate all those questions and answers, then you either need to be really great at multitasking and preserving mental state while dealing with unrelated problems, or you just can’t spend multiple hours of focused time on a problem during normal working hours. Even if a slack response expectation is only within your team, requiring people to check for notifications more than every hour seems really disruptive, unless you have designated “slack meeting” times.

alkonaut 6y ago

> a handful of mega topics that go on forever with worse (or no) pagination. Your conversations with the guy next to you, or the guy at the watercooler is unstructured. When you communicate about a specific issue you might communicate in an email or issue management system, but that doesn't mean there is a need for unstructured communication too. > people seeking out help should RTFM > Maybe Slack, etc. are popular because the informal nature lets people skip the part of the process where they're expected to make an effort. All informal/unstructured communication isn't just "people asking for help". It's navigating an organization and just communicating (who is it that manages thing X in our company? I can't use email today, is it just me? Who wants to go out for lunch?). It would be absolutely horrible to fit all this impromptu and unstructured chat into a forum or issue management system.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

If a big reason for the popularity of media like Slack is that problems get solved quickly, then it may well be worth it. One of the reasons I use StackOverflow, is that I can get a question -often a “showstopper”- answered fast. I’m quite capable of solving every question I ask, given time. It’s that “time” coefficient that I need to reduce. If I can resolve an issue by quickly formulating a question to get a useful response in fifteen minutes (versus spending a couple of hours trying different approaches), then it’s worth it -even if it is delivered with a side dish of condescension. That said, I’m not really a fan of Slack, or its ilk. I don’t like letting others have unfetterd access to my contiguous time. A forum like SO is better suited to that, where I’m not bothering others. In fact, they compete with each other to quickly answer my question (and maybe take dig at me).

Ididntdothis 6y ago

" To me they've always felt like a forum with a handful of mega topics that go on forever with worse (or no) pagination." After using Slack and Teams I have concluded that good, old forums would probably be a better solution. You can discuss a topic in focused way instead of big discussion threads that never end and have tons of things mixed with each other. Problem is that you can't propose such a thing in a company because something old can't be good.

thrower123 6y ago

Slack is fundamentally just a persistent chat room, so yeah, there's really nothing groundbreaking about it. A decade ago Microsoft Office Communicator or IBM Sametime had similar, if more clunky, solutions that did the same things.

rglullis 6y ago

I definitely share with you the view that Slack is a poor substitute for proper documentation and company communication. To me it just feels like that any project that is managed via Slack transplants the dynamic of open-floor offices to your computer and mobile phone. Yes, it is easy to gather everyone and share quick updates, but only in a fast-food kind of way. One big change that I got with my team to do successfully in a company was to change the attitude regarding communication and documentation on Slack. It involved one single, simple rule: whenever you want to ask anything you need to do your work on Slack, phrase it a way that relates to the Wiki/Knowledge Base. In our case it was Confluence. So, instead of getting questions on channels such as "How do I do X?", we would ask "Can someone point me to the Confluence page that explains how to do X?". Instead of asking someone to send a file or spreadsheet with data that I needed, I would ask them to revise and update the Confluence page, and so on. That would apply even for meetings that were held. If someone missed a meeting and wanted a re-cap, it was easy to point to the page with the minutes of the meeting, and so on. In the beginning we did have to prod and nag some of the colleagues so they would drop old habits, but after a couple of weeks when the majority understood that Wikis are meant to be editable freely it was working really well. There were no longer huge threads on Slack and there was no more stress about missing anything that happened on Slack. It did help (a lot) that we had the support from upper management in implementing this, as they were the ones worried the most about losing communication scattered in a million threads and channels.

ebiester 6y ago
So, how did you solve the organization problem? That has always been the biggest problem with confluence and wikis in general. People actively dislike confluence. (And it's something that's stuck in my craw - how do we build documentation that's easy to organize? That's my quarantine project. :)
- matwood 6y ago
  I've thought about this problem a lot and the conclusion I came to is that tools like Confluence are like the original Yahoo directory of links. Organizing seems like a good idea when there are a small number of items, but it quickly becomes unwieldy. What I've settled on, while not perfect, is shared Google docs where owners of the doc allow suggestions to help keep it up to date.