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Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?

skadamat 5y ago
Highly recommend World Without Email by Cal Newport on this exact topic: https://www.calnewport.com/books/a-world-without-email/ https://www.calnewport.com/books/a-world-without-email/
- mr_tristan 5y ago
  Was about to recommend this, too. Newport's description of the "hyperactive hive mind" is almost dead on what this author is calling "Slack-mania". And Newport shows this is much bigger in scope than just the introduction of Slack or MS Teams. New technologies have repeatedly created way too many points of communication now that it's so easy to, well, communicate with anyone. I found his observations about needing to separate specialist time from support-style time to be very intriguing.
nicoburns 5y ago
We're a very small company which makes this all easier, but we've ended up with a similar Slack convention of everything being in threads and it makes Slack a lot more managable.
- Trasmatta 5y ago
  This works well until your team hits a certain size and suddenly you've got dozens of threads going on per day, and you're trying to somehow manage following threads, channels, and DMs. I'm sick of Slack for this reason, and I think I'm going to start participating only as much as is required not to lose my job.
  - coffeefirst 5y ago
    Right. I'm here for norms and organizing principles, but their answer just moves the firehose around, he still has 5 notifications, it's just... now they're buried in lengthy threads instead of lengthy channels. There's a place for async chat. But it isn't good at replacing actual processes, documents, conversations, and organizing principles.
e2021 5y ago
One of the things I miss working at Facebook is the internal FB (called Workplace). It basically replaced email for the whole company, and worked really well for long form posts where maybe you would write some proposal up or make an announcement and get a bunch of comments. I now work at a slack centric company, and it just doesn't compare - there is no 'newsfeed', so unless you remember to check all the channels, you end up missing stuff. You can send out a group email, but people are reluctant to reply-all, so this doesn't get good discussion either.
- kevin_b_er 5y ago
  How did that work well when nothing was ever in order?
- vchynarov 5y ago
  I work there currently and I agree - I can imagine frustration for a while after leaving and not having a good place to make a bunch of posts. Posts and work groups are actually a generally good way for scalable work communication - and leaving a public and searchable record. This doesn't replace Google docs and wikis, but serve as another layer to organize them. (I promise this doesn't lead to needless bureaucracy, that still happens but not because of Workplace).
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  Does it show completely different posts each time you reload the page, like it does on Facebook.com?
  - novok 5y ago
    Yeah you miss a lot with newsfeeds lol. If people need you to see something, they can message you directly. I just look at some priority channels semi regularly. No channels create notifications for me, thread replies do not either only DMs and direct @mentions do.
- kleinsch 5y ago
  Workplace Chat is like Slack and depending on the team, that can be where a lot of the discussion happens. For a couple of my teams I feel like it’s been the worst of both worlds. I still have emails, gotta check my WP posts, but also have discussion happening in chat all day long.
22c 5y ago
I wish Slack had a feature to "threadify" comments that have already been made. I wouldn't even mind if Slack channels could designate certain users as "thread czars" that had the ability to move other users comments into a thread.
- Cellentel 5y ago
  Never mind the thread czars — I wouldn't mind the ability to do this with my own comments. Often I reply to something in the channel, realize after the fact that it should have been in a thread, and then become sad when people start replying to it not in a thread.
- boopmaster 5y ago
  This is a brilliant idea. I work in a slack jungle most of the workday in a very large org across possible 100+ channels. Multiple instances on top of that. Sometimes replies bucket up under the thread, sometimes they do not. Sometimes what should be threaded get fragmented into separate threads. Love this idea. Some of the old school IRC-channel ops functions could go a long way too (I think discord is more like that).
golemiprague 5y ago
dhbradshaw 5y ago
In the main article Slack communication is assumed to be synchronous. I find life to be a little happier when it's assumed to be asynchronous. That means turning off some channel notifications. When I really want effective synchronous communication I tend to escalate from Slack to audio or video a screen share -- it seems like there's an extra layer of collaboration that you can have with a bit higher bandwidth. For meetings I like to have audio plus a screen share of a shared document -- usually not a Slack document, because it's valuable to have more than one person be able to make edits.
- jsemrau 5y ago
  Is there a way to have this async communication presented in a better way? I am on Discord, Telegram, and Slack sometimes with thousands of members. Yet, I mostly don't read posts anymore because it's just a full marketplace talking and finding that needle in a haystack of good information is impossible. So unless I am in sync I can't read.
- lmarcos 5y ago
  Slack would become the best chat app for every company out there with just one simple feature (or the lack of it): - remove the "user is online" green dot. Really, it's not needed. Once it's removed then everything becomes async by default (and so everything slows down a little bit =>everyone is happier)
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    E-mail is inherently async. Async to the core. Why not just send your async requests as an e-mail so the other person can handle it as they process their inbox? Slack excels at real-time, interactive communication. It's chat, designed for back-and-forth. Your messages will get scrolled into the backlog if there's a lot of chat while you're away. The green dot (or the "busy" setting) is great for understanding whether the other person is going to receive your message as a notification at their computer or a push message on their phone. That's highly relevant.
    - 5y ago
radoshi 5y ago
I agree with the author that threading is quite critical to maintaining sanity. In my experience, it's insufficient by itself. I would recommend coupling with some naming conventions around channels and discouraging group DMs for anything substantial. I wrote up some of my thoughts on this in a post: https://rushabhdoshi.com/posts/2021-08-02-taming-slack/ https://rushabhdoshi.com/posts/2021-08-02-taming-slack/
ssivark 5y ago
Did they just re-invent Zulip? :P
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> For the next five years I operated in “Slack culture”, the communication paradigm that I suspect is in use by many companies these days. Email inboxes were more or less reserved for broadcasts from exec and HR along with JIRA spam. Everything else happens on Slack. This is the real problem, IMO. Slack shouldn't be replacing e-mail or meetings or phone calls. It's great for impromptu discussions with a lot of back-and-forth, but once it becomes a serious conversation with multiple parties you need to escalate to a call or meeting or e-mail. Casual, asynchronous chat is great for low-importance conversations that aren't time sensitive. It's terrible for coordinating and making important decisions in a timely manner, though. Don't be afraid to schedule a synchronous communication session in whatever flavor you prefer. Once you start making Slack the center of communication, you stop making deliberate decisions about who is included in e-mails/meetings. Now everyone in the channel has to skim everything to make sure they're not missing out on anything important. Busybodies love it because they can be a fly on the wall for everything. Heads-down workers hate it because they have to choose between focusing on their work or checking into Slack all of the time. It optimizes for the wrong kind of engagement. Trying to enforce a lot of rules around threading is a band-aid, IMO. The real solution should be to create a culture where people aren't trying to force every interaction into Slack or avoid meetings at all costs. Excessive meetings are a problem, but going out of your way to avoid all meetings will waste more time than it frees up.
- admax88qqq 5y ago
  > but once it becomes a serious conversation with multiple parties you need to escalate to a call or meeting or e-mail. Why? Having multiple different communication buses seems like a problem as well. Possibly a worse one IMO
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    If you need a specific list of people engaged in a conversation, you can either: 1) Schedule something in a time slot that works for everyone. Everyone arrives prepared to focus on the conversation and reach a conclusion before returning to work. 2) Ping them in Slack or @channel and try to pry them away from whatever they're working on. Get a mix of half-attention and hurried responses and force your devs to choose whether to continue focusing on their work and risk missing out, or to drop everything and alt-tab over to Slack and try to catch up on the backlog as quick as possible. Using synchronous comms or e-mail for everything is a mistake, but trying to force everything into asynchronous commons or Slack is just as bad. Know when to use the right tool for each job. You can get away with a lot of Slack sins in small teams or companies, but try to scale Slack-only communication up to company scale and it's a nightmare. I worked at a company where I would accumulate upwards of 200 (not a typo) Slack notifications every single day because it became a battle ground of people competing for attention and trying to give drive-by input as they rushed on to the next Slack thread. Moving to e-mails forces people to put some minimal thought and prep into organizing their thoughts, which makes all the difference. > Having multiple different communication buses seems like a problem as well. Possibly a worse one IMO You have different types of communication. Why would you want to try to force them all into the lowest common denominator medium? Trying to force everything into Slack is a disaster. Slack is great for real-time, interactive communication. Information has a very short half-life in Slack, though. Once something requires a longer half-life than Slack supports or a more careful handling, you move it to a better medium.
_8j50 5y ago
I have two tabs of slack open, each taking up closr to 4GB ram. I miss IRC.
- folmar 5y ago
  weechat-slack will meet your demands.
hackandtrip 5y ago
To me, it is incredible that Slack is used WITHOUT threads. There is no way that information and discussions can be effective without a threaded conversation - it would just be pure cause otherwise. Also, I find feature-specific channels to be such a pleasure. It's easy to have everyone focused on the same topic in a given channel, without any confusion or missing information between different channels or private messages. Moreover, I have also considered Slack to be asynchronous - meetings are necessary for sync work, but I find Slack to be working perfectly if no one expects that you reply within minutes, but within a few days (if you are not actively working on a project - in that case a lot of times is just easier to schedule very fast meetings during no-focus times)
- mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
  What are "no-focus times"?
  - icedchai 5y ago
    Some companies these days have so many interruptions (often in the form of Zoom meetings) that you need to dedicate "focus time" to get any actual work done.
    - mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
      Thanks, I thought that this person might have been describing something other than that because they said "no-focus" as opposed to "focus", and also because they made mention of scheduling meetings during "no-focus times". I was wondering whether maybe "no-focus time" might have been something even wackier, like time in which it's explicitly encouraged to interrupt everyone as much as possible, which I know sounds silly, but you never know these days...
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  > To me, it is incredible that Slack is used WITHOUT threads. The first time information you need is sent in a thread that started a week ago and that you're not already on, you'll get why folks don't like Slack threads. They're an anti-feature, IMO. If Slack offered a way to show all messages whether or not they're in a thread, as they come in, I'd be down. I wouldn't like 'em but at least I could work around their fundamental flaws.
tptacek 5y ago
I think the answer here is pretty straightforward: run a Discourse board alongside your Slack, and nudge conversations out of the Slack and onto the board. The board works for long-form stuff, and for stuff you need to reference in the future; Slack works for interactivity when you want the interactivity. We've been doing this for over a year at Fly.io and it's worked out great; I wish every other place I've worked that did a Slack or Slack-like thing did a dual chat/board strat, instead of pretending that chat/email is a serious alternative.
- sneak 5y ago
  I think an issue tracker can also be repurposed for this sort of thing if a team doesn't want to run Yet Another Thing. This is what I do. Practically there is little difference between an issue tracker that supports comments and Discourse, and most teams already have the former.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > and nudge conversations out of the Slack and onto the board Getting serious conversations out of Slack and into a more thoughtful medium seems to be the key to success. Every time I've seen Slack used as the central repository of communication and information, it's a disaster. No, I don't want to sift through 30 pinned messages in each of the 5 channels vaguely related to a topic to find some piece of information I need. Treat Slack as casual, interactive chat, but get the information and decision-making into a better medium as soon as it becomes more important.
- dllthomas 5y ago
  At a previous company we added an emoji that meant "this needs to be captured somewhere better than Slack", and those would be surfaced in a channel, and then links would be added in response as things were actually moved out.
- kasey_junk 5y ago
  Question. What is the value of slack at that point? It seems, as someone with no experience with this setup, that it’s just notifications? Couldn’t your threaded system just poll more?
DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
interesting article because Stripe had quite a couple of "culture & hiring" issues the past months. This is just another example that the company is toxic and they rather focus on existing process/tools than people. Working in shops that used slack (usually it means it's used heavily) has taught me to avoid any shop that uses that tool because knowledge isn't captured properly. There was a critical thread here accusing the same of Discord (for good reason). But Slack doesn't get the same fire from the HN crowd and it makes me wonder. I guess you can create the same mess with Teams, but in the end it's the company culture that decides where to have discussions and at what point that value generated by those should be captured via which means. I certainly will not scroll up more than 2 pages in a chat so if info is lost better write an email.
- dimgl 5y ago
  Really…? You won’t work at a place because they use a certain chat application?
zestyping 5y ago
Or you could use Zulip, where everything is organized into first-class topics for exactly the reasons described.
munchbunny 5y ago
My main gripe with so much of the communication moving to Slack is that a lot of highly technical discussion moves into synchronous chat, and that removes the expectation which email often carried that the author spends time organizing their thoughts into clear linear writing. Of course emails don't always come out coherently either, but my personal experience has been that moving into the streamed sentences model overall reduces the amount of effort put into organizing thoughts before communicating.
- xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
  I think this is on the money. Often in my career I find myself on the other side of an opinion after noodling on it for a while. The process of typing out a long-winded email, realizing the hole in your argument, then saying Fuck It, deleting it and instead replying LGTM, is a powerful instrument. Everyone wins when discourse is more thoughtful.
rtpg 5y ago
To everyone frustrated at this, I would highly recommend checking out Twist. It is "threads-only", and async-by-default. Interface is pretty nice too. The biggest issue with email is that by default it only goes to the people in the To/CC/BCC list, so information is silod. But so much else about it is _very good_, and I think that Twist gets to most of that. The main issue with Twist preventing professional adoption for me is lack of custom emoji support. Especially in full-remote land, custom emojis help with building a fun internal corp. culture, and serve as a way to ad-hoc workflows as well. Twist, add custom emoji you cowards! https://twist.com/slack-alternative https://twist.com/slack-alternative (EDIT: to those who roll their eyes at "fun corp culture", not talking about dancing parrots, just like stuff like our own corp logo or little stamps to say something is done and the like)
alberth 5y ago
Has anyone used P2 (by Wordpress) as a replacement for Slack? https://wordpress.com/p2/ https://wordpress.com/p2/ It seems most similar to FB Workplace from what I’m reading.
- aheckler 5y ago
  I work at Automattic (makers of P2) and even we don't use it as a replacement for Slack. What P2 replaces for us is all internal email. In fact, we use Slack quite heavily ourselves, for any real-time/synchronous discussions. P2 is for non-realtime/async discussions, and more or less serves as the "paper of record" for the company.
julianlam 5y ago
Are any Mozzers reading HN? I worked with the Moz team on a project as a consultant, and their slack thread discipline was very strong, much like what OP described in his post. It was equal parts confusing and refreshing at the same time.
_HMCB_ 5y ago
Precisely why I’ve come to like Twist app, from the maker’s of Todoist. It needs some refinement and better thread management, but it’s asynchronous from the start.
kibwen 5y ago
> A practice that was already in place was one of diligent threading – not only was threading encouraged, but by strong convention, every topic goes into one. We thread like our lives depend on it. This is describing Zulip. And indeed, Zulip is excellent. The only downside is that the mandatory-thread paradigm makes it difficult to find the appropriate place to deliberately fuck around, which is also a valid mode of human socialization. But if you want to get work done, use Zulip, not Slack.
philip1209 5y ago
I'm tired of constant chatting. Slack encourages quick, stream-of-consciousness, short responses. Plus, it's hard to find past discussion, and it's hard to jump in after being gone for a few days (or, even a few hours). Threads are absolutely the answer. But, the defaults matter - Slack isn't encouraging threaded, long-form messages. Instead, it makes all messages feel urgent - and it makes the cost of sending a message way too cheap. I'm on a mission to bring back forums, where threading is the default. Inspired by YC's Bookface software, I'm working on a project to make forums as slick as Slack or Notion [1]. I think that long-form discussions and slow notifications are the key to bringing sanity back to discussions. And, I think the key is one amazing email summary per day - and few (if any) other notifications. If you're interested in this problem - please reach out! [1] https://booklet.group https://booklet.group
- edgyquant 5y ago
  I’m interested in your idea, bringing what we’ve mastered in chat to the forum, but I don’t want to give my phone number or spin up a forum just to see. Is there an example forum?
  - philip1209 5y ago
    I've been posting updates here, where you can see a demo: https://bookletupdates.substack.com https://bookletupdates.substack.com I'm working on "public" groups, so that I can link directly to a meta group about the project from the homepage. It should be live early next week! -- I'm using phone number as primary login for these reasons: 1. I want passwordless login 2. Passwordless login with email is confusing because most people have multiple emails. But, most people have only one phone number. 3. I want to support per-group email preferences easily (i.e., multi-email) 4. iOS auto-fill makes it trivial to sign in 5. Phone number verification hopefully provides enough spam control that I can avoid deploying tools like Recaptcha - which I think are more invasive to privacy. (I'm aiming to be 100% Google-free and Facebook-free)
    - eropple 5y ago
      YMMV, but I'm absolutely not giving my phone number to a service of dubious providence because my employer told me to. I'd suggest federated login ASAP.
Tempest1981 5y ago
> It was rare to open Slack in the morning and not already be immediately underwater by 3 to 5 mentions representing conversations that needed to be waded into. The "Remind me later" feature is a good way to avoid morning-overload syndrome. Just snooze the ones requiring a reply for 1 hour, 3 hours, tomorrow. Feels great. Then turn off notifications, and go get stuff done.
dariusj18 5y ago
For me Slack did not replace email, it replaced Instant Messenger. It replaced standing up from my desk and walking into another office to ask a question that I ether needed the answer to now, or never. EDIT: I hate how all these code projects have their own Slack though, it's super annoying and has been a horrible way to engage with the community and get answers to questions. (Discord too)
- shmerl 5y ago
  I'm more annoyed that more of them don't use Matrix.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    I'd prefer Discord itself since it has better UX than matrix.
    - shmerl 5y ago
      I prefer to avoid closed and non federated IM services if possible.
bogota 5y ago
no. Slack sucks and I don't think companies realize just how much time and energy it wastes. I am lucky if I can get one day of focused programming in anymore. Most days I am exhausted from constant interrupts and when I finally do get time at the end of the day I am completely spent. Everyone needs a personal guide through AWS/K8s/Infra Tool when about 50% of the time we have internal documentation answering the questions that are linked to at the top of the channel. Another 40% of questions could be figured out with light googling and 5 minutes of reading. The last 10% are legit questions around issues we have in our environment or require a deep knowledge of how the systems work together. But hey. If companies want to pay me to babysit lazy developers I'll do it for a good price. I'm fairly close to leaving the company at this point but this seems to happen at every company I have been at once you get to a few hundred developers and my motivation has been completely sapped. Slack is for leeches.
- AceJohnny2 5y ago
  People will always prefer asking, as that comes with a built-in lookup table and related links and probably up-to-date information. It's just easier than to spend time sifting through documentation that may or may not have the information they seek. Don't blame the medium. Instead, change your response so that they stop expecting your time.
black_13 5y ago
mesozoic 5y ago
Work at a pretty big place and we very frequently use threads it works well and people picked up on it fairly fast.
mayop100 5y ago
My team just launched a product on Tuesday designed to solve this exact problem. Email has a better threading model than Slack, but email clients lack the realtime features needed for synchronous collaboration. So we're trying to fix. The idea is to let you do long-form, async and short-form, synchronous communications using the same tool, and to do it over email so you can still talk to anyone. Our product is Shortwave (https://www.shortwave.com/ https://www.shortwave.com/) -- we had a Show HN on Tuesday. We have a video here that walks through our team collaboration features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex_o2d1GXf4&t=5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex_o2d1GXf4&t=5s
novok 5y ago
You don't have to talk sync with chat, you don't have to do one line back and forths on chat, you can take hours or days to reply if you so choose on chat like email, you can easily do rich paragraphs. Slack is not synchronous communication, video / voice calls are. Slack wins over discourse forms, stack overflow and email because it adds too much friction to do essentially the same thing. Slack wins because it's the least friction interface that gives you form and email equivalents, plus it organizes a bit better naturally . If you want to beat slack and change the communication defaults, you need to make a UI that works with less friction than slack. You can change your chat culture with changing your behaviors and encouraging changes like nohello.net and threading like this post is doing and setting boundaries with how you will communicate. Also, different people work better with different communication mediums, the slack hate that you see on HN is not universal, there is a quiet majority that works well with slack, otherwise you wouldn't see it naturally adopted so much like the author encountered themselves. There will always be a set that hates whatever the default is. Now WFH is default in the industry, there is a subset that hates it greatly and wish we had offices again. Go back to offices with private rooms or open offices, there will be a set that doesn't like it too.
whoisthemachine 5y ago
I always felt like the ultimate flow with Slack was to make focused channels for a given topic; threads are too generic and hard to track and I generally get the impression that they're meant to be ephemeral, whereas a focused channel will of course ensure all participants know the intent of the channel, and the content is not lost. Essentially, a channel should be treated as an e-mail thread. Once the topic has finished, you can close the channel and archive it for future reference.
ryukoposting 5y ago
I work at a company that has taken Slack-mania to the absolute extreme, and it's one of the reasons why I daydream about leaving on a weekly basis.
solatic 5y ago
No, Slack-mania can't be cured with systemized discipline. Slack is a pox. It's not just about endless notifications that kill your ability to focus, it's an environment that actively encourages organizational anti-patterns. If you have a question, first you ask your manager. If Slack makes it easy to reach out to someone directly, your manager will tell you to Slack them. If you don't have Slack, and you don't have people's phone numbers, instead you get directed to documentation / wiki / support ticketing. Organizational choice architecture matters. Slack makes bad choices easy and good choices difficult. That's enough reason to ditch it.
- kanonieer 5y ago
  > No, Slack-mania can't be cured with systemized discipline. This matches with my (n=1) experience. The only way to cure "yourself" is to get away from organizations that use Slack in the way that OP describes.
- nxpnsv 5y ago
  All comms through manager sounds like a dystopian nightmare worse than slack if you ask me...
  - solatic 5y ago
    I don't mean all communication, I just mean in the case that you aren't aware of what to do because you're new.
    - nxpnsv 5y ago
      That’s way saner :)
inevaexisted 5y ago
I introduced a similar thing at my work place and it works (there's a few points where people forget or sometimes there's cross over) we added some state to it to so in the context of triaging bugs. we reacted to the original message with: ticks - to indicate the bug or issue was accepted and we had enough information to raise the problem/issue into our tracking system cross - to indicate not a bug jiraicon - to indicate a ticket had been raised (and linked into the thread) all the information so far would be in the ticket and further comms hence forth would be in the ticket system. in the channels we did this in, messages would be pinned till they were given the tick/cross so people knew what needed triage and what didn't (treated triage as a team sport, whomever got to it first saved the rest from having to dive into it, unless they so wished)
- woutr_be 5y ago
  I don't really understand this workflow, why does this need to happen in Slack at all, when you already use Jira? Wouldn't it be far easier to raise a ticket in Jira directly, have all the info there, and then mark is as a bug/no bug?
scarface74 5y ago
What if you had culture where Slack messages don’t warrant immediate replies? I set aside time to do “deep work” where I quit Slack and Outlook. If there is something urgent someone could text me (it never happens). If it is an “emergency”, I would get a page through my paging app that has a special entitlement to allow it to bypass silent and DND.
vvoyer 5y ago
If you want to be ahead of other engineers and have a meaningful impact, then you’ll want to maximize the number of uninterrupted deep work sessions. The more you can fit in a week the more you’ll achieve (rfcs, implementations, reviews). This is one of the biggest contributor for high performing profiles. To manage this when using Slack you can: - set your status as “deep work” and decide to pause notifications for x hours - use “mark as unread”. when you want to peek something but not act on it yet - use “remind me” on messages you want to deal later on through the week - avoid DMs has much as possible, so not just one person can help you, but anyone from your team - avoid Slack on the phone Then deal with notifications in bulk. Slack isn’t killing our productivity, HN and twitter are not killing it either. Our addictions to notifications is, but we can manage this with discipline and training.
wintercarver 5y ago
At my company we have a “thoughtful communication” guide[1] that addresses Slack and other communication tools. The simple rule for Slack is it’s for ephemeral or urgent communication only. All “conversation” material essentially routes through email and it works great. Takes some getting used to but our Slack instance is very, very relaxed. Most employees silence all Slack notifications and are encouraged to do so to (try our best to) preserve focus. [1] https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/company/thoughtful-communication https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/company/thoughtful-communicatio...
- eitland 5y ago
  > The simple rule for Slack is it’s for ephemeral or urgent communication only. [...] Most employees silence all Slack notifications and are encouraged to do so [...] How do urgent combine with silencing notifications? Honest question, it seems I am missing something from the context here.
  - wintercarver 5y ago
    Fair question and good point. Our Slack isn’t absolutely quiet - we do have a channel for coordinating on customer issues (meets our urgent and ephemeral criteria) and it might be that some matters are raised by other processes outside of Slack but Slack itself is a good fit for in-the-moment collaboration. But in short we aren’t absolutists, it’s a mix of a few specific channels for certain contexts, channel-specific muting, and updating one’s Slack status - all under the guidance that Slack immediate responsiveness is not generally expected but more the exception. It sounds like a lot as I write that, but as a broader cultural norm within the company it does (so far!) support itself. That said, I’ll pass your question on to the team as feedback, we should make the answer more clear.
  - R0b0t1 5y ago
    The default setup for Slack (I think) dings you on any traffic in any channel. This is insane. Dinging on a direct message or a mention in a channel is a lot more reasonable and basically mimics the behavior of IRC.
  - 5y ago
pictur 5y ago
Slack encourages a fast but irregular communication habit. For example, if you could document something that you discussed with someone for half an hour, maybe many people would benefit from it.
vegai_ 5y ago
I love chat software like Slack and Discord. But I gotta say, those products really nailed their product names. Slack. Almost nothing to do with work. Discord. Almost nothing to do with communication.
throwaway743 5y ago
If you're in the US, be careful with what you write on a company channel/email. Both Slack and email can legally be read by management. Know someone who works at a well known digital radio company. Prior to joining management they were in a coworkers channel where people vented about management, with the exception being them. Upon joining management they were asked why they didn't report on the gossip/venting earlier even though they never partook and it was explained that management was tracking all channels on the company's Slack. Those that were gossiping/venting all got let go
- tomduncalf 5y ago
  From a quick skim of search results (e.g. [1]) it sounds like it’s unlikely (although not impossible) that they’d be reading private Slack messages as it usually requires a request to Slack who will ask for appropriate employee or legal consent. Of course this could be much easier to achieve (or avoid needing) than it sounds, I have no experience of this. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was more likely that they were either told about the chat by someone, or perhaps saw it over someone’s shoulder or whatever. Still, it’s good advice to treat what you write on there as something that could one day be read by someone unintended for sure. [1] https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/2020/1/24/21079275/slack-private-messages-privacy-law-enforcement-lawsuit https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/2020/1/24/21079275/s...
politelemon 5y ago
Our experiences don't match regarding threading, and I don't think the author's are necessarily representative. Slack's threading implementation is an afterthought, a bandaid solution. With it, conversations usually end up as a mix of some replies in a thread and some in the default clutterspace. In this regard even Teams has a better approach, it's really obvious if you're in a topic thread or not.
- dijit 5y ago
  Agree completely; if you've only used slack check out Zulip for an example of how a good threading model works.
Falkon1313 5y ago
This doesn't really sound like a problem with Slack, but rather a personal or cultural problem with a lack of setting or respecting boundaries. Slack has options to communicate: - that you're away - that you're on a call or in a meeting etc. - to pause notifications for an hour or whatever - to star the most relevant channels - to mute less-relevant channels - to leave irrelevant channels - to sideline conversations into threads All of that is just Slack itself, in addition to things like putting meetings and vacations and other appointments on the shared team calendar. Some people where I work book meetings with themselves to guarantee focused distraction-free time. That's completely valid. Part of being a professional is setting boundaries, communicating them, setting the expectations that the rest of your team will do the same, and of course, respecting those boundaries. That includes not calling or pestering people that are on vacation. Which also requires that you don't "check in" while you're on vacation, because if you do, then other people will feel like they're expected to as well. Set and communicate your boundaries, and in a team that respects each other, it shouldn't be a problem.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  All the options you mention are designed in order to reduce the main problem: that it requires synchronous communication. That is, after you "come back" from a meeting or being away, you can't just work in peace and when you want just send a reply: no, you are expected by design to engage in a conversation. I'm not interested in engaging in a conversation at all unless there is something really extremely important that requires my undivided attention for a specific period of time. But when companies use Slack, they integrate it as a part of the culture. You are expected to be ready to answer. Sure, you can pause notifications - but you know people are waiting. Are you a good team member if people are asking questions and you are not answering? For contrast, I found out that many people I worked with are too lazy to write an email and will prefer to solve the problem themselves rather than write to me if I don't answer soon enough. Which shows another interesting aspect of Slack-type culture.
  - AlecSchueler 5y ago
    I don't understand the attitude where it's lazy not to write an email but it's an unreasonable chore to respond to a question on Slack? In mind Slack is preferable to email for many things because the issues are resolved in public and I can later look back on what questions have been asked etc.
quartesixte 5y ago
I (and somehow the rest of our company) has been spared the constant slack problem but I still don’t know if this is the nature of our work (we work on hardware) or the culture this company has somehow cultivated. Or both. First, we use Teams. And we have set up Teams to be messenger/chat oriented first, and group chat second. In fact, the group chat feature is heavily controlled and limited to posting domain/company-wide updates. I don’t know if this was intentional, but so it goes. Result: people use Teams as a substitute for walking across campus to ask a quick question. Or to bounce off an idea. Or to quickly check status. Or to send gifs in meetings. Second, as a hardware focused company, traceability is super important. You don’t want to be leaving technical decisions on ephemeral chat. You don’t want drawings, schematics, and instructions lost to people just chatting in Slack/Teams. Result: email/Jira/wiki it is. Third: as a hardware focused company, the personnel is divided into technicians and engineers. And the technicians do not actively look at their phones/computers. It can be hours sometimes before one of them responds. Last thing you want is a tech looking at their phone every 10 minutes while wielding a rivet gun. Don’t expect a design engineer to be so quick on their response time either. They’re either deep into a CAD design, in a design meeting, or on the floor with a tech. Don’t Ask to Ask is not specifically taught but most everyone learns to Just Ask because who knows when you’re “Hey I have a question” is getting answered. Result: most online communication is asynchronous anyways. Urgent matters will result in a call or someone running across campus. I’m sure Slack plagues many a hardware company. But somehow we have cultivated a culture that discourages spending too much time in chat or storing important info there. If a question becomes too long or complicated, we ask each other to email. If a question is asked too frequently, it is logged in the wiki. If a question becomes rather convoluted, we call each other to quickly resolve the matter. Messaging doesn’t need to be the enemy. It can be a powerful tool to keep in touch with others flung across the campus/globe.
habosa 5y ago
I'm new to Slack (just leaving a FAANG for a startup) and all the inbox management skills I've built up over the years seem to be useless now. Is there a good way to create an async task list from Slack? Right now if I get a message on Slack that I want to handle later I can: a) Ignore it, so I keep the unread "red dot" b) Use the "remind me" feature to make it synchronous but later c) Just ... handle it now (sigh) What I want is a list of threads I am meaning to get back to, but without having to actually use a separate list-making app. Is there a Slack app or workflow for this?
- madeofpalk 5y ago
  Just don't look at slack that often? I work at an all-remote company and I just... don't notice when someone messages me on Slack, and i check it on my own schedule. It all just works. I mute all channels I join apart from a few directly related to me on a daily basis. I very deliberately completely silence Slack so it's impossible for it to make a noise. I'm on windows so I don't get the notification toasts or the jumping in the Mac dock, so someone messaging me isn't distracting.
- folmar 5y ago
  Add it to "saved items".
Jiejeing 5y ago
Microsoft has a solution to that problem: Teams. It is so painful to use and to do anything in it that it encourages people to actually use the bug tracker or other venues to discuss any serious topic.
- geewee 5y ago
  I honestly don't think it's that bad. I've used both Slack and teams simultaneously for a few years, and I honestly don't see a lot of differences.
  - Jiejeing 5y ago
    Search is horrendous across the board, list of conversations is where messages go to die, the "teams" part which is a weird hybrid forum has an awful UI and no way to not collapse messages by default (and little to no options). What works well is A/V meetings planned in the outlook calendar. There is no third-party reliable API that we can use to have anything else than the web (or electron) client), which happen to be fairly buggy and very heavy, while at the same time leaking unwanted information to other people. Calls are intentionally crippled on firefox to make sure you use chrome, their web browser, or their app. But I guess it allows management to spy on employees while being integrated with the microsoft ecosystem, so it gets a free pass.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    Have you ever tried discovering a team you were not already part of? Or tried having any reasonable conversation outside a chat room? I figured I could get used to teams, but it’s just so useless compared to Slack it isn’t even funny.
  - ziml77 5y ago
    Teams is garbage. I'll end up with conversations or images that don't load until I click back and try again. If I search a chat for something, clicking the result will often not scroll the correct message into view. It doesn't allow you to be on a call on multiple devices at once so I can use the desktop I'm remoted into for viewing a screen share while using the app on my phone for audio. It tries to retain the formatting of what you're pasting in, often resulting in a mess and sometimes getting stuck with certain font formatting.
fraktl 5y ago
[dead]
pkrumins 5y ago
The solution to Slack is Twist.
d4rkp4ttern 5y ago
One thing I have not seen mentioned here is the “slack status”. I find that it has a subtle stress inducing effect: * if it’s green are people expecting me to reply right away? And if I don’t respond do they feel anxious? * do employees feel pressure to keep it green to show they are working? I told my team that I will keep my status to AWAY always, and they can feel free to do the same. Just because slack provides a surveillance method doesn’t mean you have to use it. This also reduces expectations of immediate replies and keeps it more async
- nerdponx 5y ago
  I am fully remote at my current job, and I actually rely on the Slack status to indicate whether I am "in the office" or not, because obviously my physical presence is not a useful indicator of my availability. But you are right, it also sets an expectation that messages can only be asynchronous up to a point. Maybe this is one downside to remote work: there is no way to distinguish between "performatively demonstrating that I am actually working" and "currently available for active discussion". I have noticed that some people actually schedule "heads down" time on their calendar and set their Slack status accordingly. I could try that and see if people respect it.
- folmar 5y ago
  The problem is that they have too few. The one I miss the most is "free for chat", but it'd be also nice to copy Teams with separate Busy and Do not disturb.
nutanc 5y ago
Slack was supposed to cure email. Instead it created a new "mania"?
jpalomaki 5y ago
Maybe instead of Slack we should use more collaborative editing tools (like Google Docs or Miro). I haven’t really tried that, but it might be interesting if for example during troubleshooting session everybody was putting the facts to same document. At least the end result could be easier to consume than a very long chat log.

Highly recommend World Without Email by Cal Newport on this exact topic: https://www.calnewport.com/books/a-world-without-email/ https://www.calnewport.com/books/a-world-without-email/

mr_tristan 5y ago
Was about to recommend this, too. Newport's description of the "hyperactive hive mind" is almost dead on what this author is calling "Slack-mania". And Newport shows this is much bigger in scope than just the introduction of Slack or MS Teams. New technologies have repeatedly created way too many points of communication now that it's so easy to, well, communicate with anyone. I found his observations about needing to separate specialist time from support-style time to be very intriguing.

nicoburns 5y ago

We're a very small company which makes this all easier, but we've ended up with a similar Slack convention of everything being in threads and it makes Slack a lot more managable.

Trasmatta 5y ago
This works well until your team hits a certain size and suddenly you've got dozens of threads going on per day, and you're trying to somehow manage following threads, channels, and DMs. I'm sick of Slack for this reason, and I think I'm going to start participating only as much as is required not to lose my job.
- coffeefirst 5y ago
  Right. I'm here for norms and organizing principles, but their answer just moves the firehose around, he still has 5 notifications, it's just... now they're buried in lengthy threads instead of lengthy channels. There's a place for async chat. But it isn't good at replacing actual processes, documents, conversations, and organizing principles.

e2021 5y ago

One of the things I miss working at Facebook is the internal FB (called Workplace). It basically replaced email for the whole company, and worked really well for long form posts where maybe you would write some proposal up or make an announcement and get a bunch of comments. I now work at a slack centric company, and it just doesn't compare - there is no 'newsfeed', so unless you remember to check all the channels, you end up missing stuff. You can send out a group email, but people are reluctant to reply-all, so this doesn't get good discussion either.

kevin_b_er 5y ago
How did that work well when nothing was ever in order?
vchynarov 5y ago
I work there currently and I agree - I can imagine frustration for a while after leaving and not having a good place to make a bunch of posts. Posts and work groups are actually a generally good way for scalable work communication - and leaving a public and searchable record. This doesn't replace Google docs and wikis, but serve as another layer to organize them. (I promise this doesn't lead to needless bureaucracy, that still happens but not because of Workplace).
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
Does it show completely different posts each time you reload the page, like it does on Facebook.com?
- novok 5y ago
  Yeah you miss a lot with newsfeeds lol. If people need you to see something, they can message you directly. I just look at some priority channels semi regularly. No channels create notifications for me, thread replies do not either only DMs and direct @mentions do.
kleinsch 5y ago
Workplace Chat is like Slack and depending on the team, that can be where a lot of the discussion happens. For a couple of my teams I feel like it’s been the worst of both worlds. I still have emails, gotta check my WP posts, but also have discussion happening in chat all day long.

22c 5y ago

I wish Slack had a feature to "threadify" comments that have already been made. I wouldn't even mind if Slack channels could designate certain users as "thread czars" that had the ability to move other users comments into a thread.

Cellentel 5y ago
Never mind the thread czars — I wouldn't mind the ability to do this with my own comments. Often I reply to something in the channel, realize after the fact that it should have been in a thread, and then become sad when people start replying to it not in a thread.
boopmaster 5y ago
This is a brilliant idea. I work in a slack jungle most of the workday in a very large org across possible 100+ channels. Multiple instances on top of that. Sometimes replies bucket up under the thread, sometimes they do not. Sometimes what should be threaded get fragmented into separate threads. Love this idea. Some of the old school IRC-channel ops functions could go a long way too (I think discord is more like that).

golemiprague 5y ago

dhbradshaw 5y ago

In the main article Slack communication is assumed to be synchronous. I find life to be a little happier when it's assumed to be asynchronous. That means turning off some channel notifications. When I really want effective synchronous communication I tend to escalate from Slack to audio or video a screen share -- it seems like there's an extra layer of collaboration that you can have with a bit higher bandwidth. For meetings I like to have audio plus a screen share of a shared document -- usually not a Slack document, because it's valuable to have more than one person be able to make edits.

jsemrau 5y ago
Is there a way to have this async communication presented in a better way? I am on Discord, Telegram, and Slack sometimes with thousands of members. Yet, I mostly don't read posts anymore because it's just a full marketplace talking and finding that needle in a haystack of good information is impossible. So unless I am in sync I can't read.
lmarcos 5y ago
Slack would become the best chat app for every company out there with just one simple feature (or the lack of it): - remove the "user is online" green dot. Really, it's not needed. Once it's removed then everything becomes async by default (and so everything slows down a little bit =>everyone is happier)
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  E-mail is inherently async. Async to the core. Why not just send your async requests as an e-mail so the other person can handle it as they process their inbox? Slack excels at real-time, interactive communication. It's chat, designed for back-and-forth. Your messages will get scrolled into the backlog if there's a lot of chat while you're away. The green dot (or the "busy" setting) is great for understanding whether the other person is going to receive your message as a notification at their computer or a push message on their phone. That's highly relevant.
  - 5y ago

radoshi 5y ago

I agree with the author that threading is quite critical to maintaining sanity. In my experience, it's insufficient by itself. I would recommend coupling with some naming conventions around channels and discouraging group DMs for anything substantial. I wrote up some of my thoughts on this in a post: https://rushabhdoshi.com/posts/2021-08-02-taming-slack/ https://rushabhdoshi.com/posts/2021-08-02-taming-slack/

ssivark 5y ago

Did they just re-invent Zulip? :P

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> For the next five years I operated in “Slack culture”, the communication paradigm that I suspect is in use by many companies these days. Email inboxes were more or less reserved for broadcasts from exec and HR along with JIRA spam. Everything else happens on Slack. This is the real problem, IMO. Slack shouldn't be replacing e-mail or meetings or phone calls. It's great for impromptu discussions with a lot of back-and-forth, but once it becomes a serious conversation with multiple parties you need to escalate to a call or meeting or e-mail. Casual, asynchronous chat is great for low-importance conversations that aren't time sensitive. It's terrible for coordinating and making important decisions in a timely manner, though. Don't be afraid to schedule a synchronous communication session in whatever flavor you prefer. Once you start making Slack the center of communication, you stop making deliberate decisions about who is included in e-mails/meetings. Now everyone in the channel has to skim everything to make sure they're not missing out on anything important. Busybodies love it because they can be a fly on the wall for everything. Heads-down workers hate it because they have to choose between focusing on their work or checking into Slack all of the time. It optimizes for the wrong kind of engagement. Trying to enforce a lot of rules around threading is a band-aid, IMO. The real solution should be to create a culture where people aren't trying to force every interaction into Slack or avoid meetings at all costs. Excessive meetings are a problem, but going out of your way to avoid all meetings will waste more time than it frees up.

admax88qqq 5y ago
> but once it becomes a serious conversation with multiple parties you need to escalate to a call or meeting or e-mail. Why? Having multiple different communication buses seems like a problem as well. Possibly a worse one IMO
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  If you need a specific list of people engaged in a conversation, you can either: 1) Schedule something in a time slot that works for everyone. Everyone arrives prepared to focus on the conversation and reach a conclusion before returning to work. 2) Ping them in Slack or @channel and try to pry them away from whatever they're working on. Get a mix of half-attention and hurried responses and force your devs to choose whether to continue focusing on their work and risk missing out, or to drop everything and alt-tab over to Slack and try to catch up on the backlog as quick as possible. Using synchronous comms or e-mail for everything is a mistake, but trying to force everything into asynchronous commons or Slack is just as bad. Know when to use the right tool for each job. You can get away with a lot of Slack sins in small teams or companies, but try to scale Slack-only communication up to company scale and it's a nightmare. I worked at a company where I would accumulate upwards of 200 (not a typo) Slack notifications every single day because it became a battle ground of people competing for attention and trying to give drive-by input as they rushed on to the next Slack thread. Moving to e-mails forces people to put some minimal thought and prep into organizing their thoughts, which makes all the difference. > Having multiple different communication buses seems like a problem as well. Possibly a worse one IMO You have different types of communication. Why would you want to try to force them all into the lowest common denominator medium? Trying to force everything into Slack is a disaster. Slack is great for real-time, interactive communication. Information has a very short half-life in Slack, though. Once something requires a longer half-life than Slack supports or a more careful handling, you move it to a better medium.

_8j50 5y ago

I have two tabs of slack open, each taking up closr to 4GB ram. I miss IRC.

folmar 5y ago
weechat-slack will meet your demands.

hackandtrip 5y ago

To me, it is incredible that Slack is used WITHOUT threads. There is no way that information and discussions can be effective without a threaded conversation - it would just be pure cause otherwise. Also, I find feature-specific channels to be such a pleasure. It's easy to have everyone focused on the same topic in a given channel, without any confusion or missing information between different channels or private messages. Moreover, I have also considered Slack to be asynchronous - meetings are necessary for sync work, but I find Slack to be working perfectly if no one expects that you reply within minutes, but within a few days (if you are not actively working on a project - in that case a lot of times is just easier to schedule very fast meetings during no-focus times)

mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
What are "no-focus times"?
- icedchai 5y ago
  Some companies these days have so many interruptions (often in the form of Zoom meetings) that you need to dedicate "focus time" to get any actual work done.
  - mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
    Thanks, I thought that this person might have been describing something other than that because they said "no-focus" as opposed to "focus", and also because they made mention of scheduling meetings during "no-focus times". I was wondering whether maybe "no-focus time" might have been something even wackier, like time in which it's explicitly encouraged to interrupt everyone as much as possible, which I know sounds silly, but you never know these days...
notreallyserio 5y ago
> To me, it is incredible that Slack is used WITHOUT threads. The first time information you need is sent in a thread that started a week ago and that you're not already on, you'll get why folks don't like Slack threads. They're an anti-feature, IMO. If Slack offered a way to show all messages whether or not they're in a thread, as they come in, I'd be down. I wouldn't like 'em but at least I could work around their fundamental flaws.

tptacek 5y ago

I think the answer here is pretty straightforward: run a Discourse board alongside your Slack, and nudge conversations out of the Slack and onto the board. The board works for long-form stuff, and for stuff you need to reference in the future; Slack works for interactivity when you want the interactivity. We've been doing this for over a year at Fly.io and it's worked out great; I wish every other place I've worked that did a Slack or Slack-like thing did a dual chat/board strat, instead of pretending that chat/email is a serious alternative.

sneak 5y ago
I think an issue tracker can also be repurposed for this sort of thing if a team doesn't want to run Yet Another Thing. This is what I do. Practically there is little difference between an issue tracker that supports comments and Discourse, and most teams already have the former.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> and nudge conversations out of the Slack and onto the board Getting serious conversations out of Slack and into a more thoughtful medium seems to be the key to success. Every time I've seen Slack used as the central repository of communication and information, it's a disaster. No, I don't want to sift through 30 pinned messages in each of the 5 channels vaguely related to a topic to find some piece of information I need. Treat Slack as casual, interactive chat, but get the information and decision-making into a better medium as soon as it becomes more important.
dllthomas 5y ago
At a previous company we added an emoji that meant "this needs to be captured somewhere better than Slack", and those would be surfaced in a channel, and then links would be added in response as things were actually moved out.
kasey_junk 5y ago
Question. What is the value of slack at that point? It seems, as someone with no experience with this setup, that it’s just notifications? Couldn’t your threaded system just poll more?

DyslexicAtheist 5y ago

interesting article because Stripe had quite a couple of "culture & hiring" issues the past months. This is just another example that the company is toxic and they rather focus on existing process/tools than people. Working in shops that used slack (usually it means it's used heavily) has taught me to avoid any shop that uses that tool because knowledge isn't captured properly. There was a critical thread here accusing the same of Discord (for good reason). But Slack doesn't get the same fire from the HN crowd and it makes me wonder. I guess you can create the same mess with Teams, but in the end it's the company culture that decides where to have discussions and at what point that value generated by those should be captured via which means. I certainly will not scroll up more than 2 pages in a chat so if info is lost better write an email.

dimgl 5y ago
Really…? You won’t work at a place because they use a certain chat application?

zestyping 5y ago

Or you could use Zulip, where everything is organized into first-class topics for exactly the reasons described.

munchbunny 5y ago

My main gripe with so much of the communication moving to Slack is that a lot of highly technical discussion moves into synchronous chat, and that removes the expectation which email often carried that the author spends time organizing their thoughts into clear linear writing. Of course emails don't always come out coherently either, but my personal experience has been that moving into the streamed sentences model overall reduces the amount of effort put into organizing thoughts before communicating.

xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
I think this is on the money. Often in my career I find myself on the other side of an opinion after noodling on it for a while. The process of typing out a long-winded email, realizing the hole in your argument, then saying Fuck It, deleting it and instead replying LGTM, is a powerful instrument. Everyone wins when discourse is more thoughtful.

rtpg 5y ago

To everyone frustrated at this, I would highly recommend checking out Twist. It is "threads-only", and async-by-default. Interface is pretty nice too. The biggest issue with email is that by default it only goes to the people in the To/CC/BCC list, so information is silod. But so much else about it is _very good_, and I think that Twist gets to most of that. The main issue with Twist preventing professional adoption for me is lack of custom emoji support. Especially in full-remote land, custom emojis help with building a fun internal corp. culture, and serve as a way to ad-hoc workflows as well. Twist, add custom emoji you cowards! https://twist.com/slack-alternative https://twist.com/slack-alternative (EDIT: to those who roll their eyes at "fun corp culture", not talking about dancing parrots, just like stuff like our own corp logo or little stamps to say something is done and the like)

alberth 5y ago

Has anyone used P2 (by Wordpress) as a replacement for Slack? https://wordpress.com/p2/ https://wordpress.com/p2/ It seems most similar to FB Workplace from what I’m reading.

aheckler 5y ago
I work at Automattic (makers of P2) and even we don't use it as a replacement for Slack. What P2 replaces for us is all internal email. In fact, we use Slack quite heavily ourselves, for any real-time/synchronous discussions. P2 is for non-realtime/async discussions, and more or less serves as the "paper of record" for the company.

julianlam 5y ago

Are any Mozzers reading HN? I worked with the Moz team on a project as a consultant, and their slack thread discipline was very strong, much like what OP described in his post. It was equal parts confusing and refreshing at the same time.

_HMCB_ 5y ago

Precisely why I’ve come to like Twist app, from the maker’s of Todoist. It needs some refinement and better thread management, but it’s asynchronous from the start.

kibwen 5y ago

> A practice that was already in place was one of diligent threading – not only was threading encouraged, but by strong convention, every topic goes into one. We thread like our lives depend on it. This is describing Zulip. And indeed, Zulip is excellent. The only downside is that the mandatory-thread paradigm makes it difficult to find the appropriate place to deliberately fuck around, which is also a valid mode of human socialization. But if you want to get work done, use Zulip, not Slack.

philip1209 5y ago

I'm tired of constant chatting. Slack encourages quick, stream-of-consciousness, short responses. Plus, it's hard to find past discussion, and it's hard to jump in after being gone for a few days (or, even a few hours). Threads are absolutely the answer. But, the defaults matter - Slack isn't encouraging threaded, long-form messages. Instead, it makes all messages feel urgent - and it makes the cost of sending a message way too cheap. I'm on a mission to bring back forums, where threading is the default. Inspired by YC's Bookface software, I'm working on a project to make forums as slick as Slack or Notion [1]. I think that long-form discussions and slow notifications are the key to bringing sanity back to discussions. And, I think the key is one amazing email summary per day - and few (if any) other notifications. If you're interested in this problem - please reach out! [1] https://booklet.group https://booklet.group

edgyquant 5y ago
I’m interested in your idea, bringing what we’ve mastered in chat to the forum, but I don’t want to give my phone number or spin up a forum just to see. Is there an example forum?
- philip1209 5y ago
  I've been posting updates here, where you can see a demo: https://bookletupdates.substack.com https://bookletupdates.substack.com I'm working on "public" groups, so that I can link directly to a meta group about the project from the homepage. It should be live early next week! -- I'm using phone number as primary login for these reasons: 1. I want passwordless login 2. Passwordless login with email is confusing because most people have multiple emails. But, most people have only one phone number. 3. I want to support per-group email preferences easily (i.e., multi-email) 4. iOS auto-fill makes it trivial to sign in 5. Phone number verification hopefully provides enough spam control that I can avoid deploying tools like Recaptcha - which I think are more invasive to privacy. (I'm aiming to be 100% Google-free and Facebook-free)
  - eropple 5y ago
    YMMV, but I'm absolutely not giving my phone number to a service of dubious providence because my employer told me to. I'd suggest federated login ASAP.

Tempest1981 5y ago

> It was rare to open Slack in the morning and not already be immediately underwater by 3 to 5 mentions representing conversations that needed to be waded into. The "Remind me later" feature is a good way to avoid morning-overload syndrome. Just snooze the ones requiring a reply for 1 hour, 3 hours, tomorrow. Feels great. Then turn off notifications, and go get stuff done.

dariusj18 5y ago

For me Slack did not replace email, it replaced Instant Messenger. It replaced standing up from my desk and walking into another office to ask a question that I ether needed the answer to now, or never. EDIT: I hate how all these code projects have their own Slack though, it's super annoying and has been a horrible way to engage with the community and get answers to questions. (Discord too)

shmerl 5y ago
I'm more annoyed that more of them don't use Matrix.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  I'd prefer Discord itself since it has better UX than matrix.
  - shmerl 5y ago
    I prefer to avoid closed and non federated IM services if possible.

bogota 5y ago

no. Slack sucks and I don't think companies realize just how much time and energy it wastes. I am lucky if I can get one day of focused programming in anymore. Most days I am exhausted from constant interrupts and when I finally do get time at the end of the day I am completely spent. Everyone needs a personal guide through AWS/K8s/Infra Tool when about 50% of the time we have internal documentation answering the questions that are linked to at the top of the channel. Another 40% of questions could be figured out with light googling and 5 minutes of reading. The last 10% are legit questions around issues we have in our environment or require a deep knowledge of how the systems work together. But hey. If companies want to pay me to babysit lazy developers I'll do it for a good price. I'm fairly close to leaving the company at this point but this seems to happen at every company I have been at once you get to a few hundred developers and my motivation has been completely sapped. Slack is for leeches.

AceJohnny2 5y ago
People will always prefer asking, as that comes with a built-in lookup table and related links and probably up-to-date information. It's just easier than to spend time sifting through documentation that may or may not have the information they seek. Don't blame the medium. Instead, change your response so that they stop expecting your time.

black_13 5y ago

mesozoic 5y ago

Work at a pretty big place and we very frequently use threads it works well and people picked up on it fairly fast.

mayop100 5y ago

My team just launched a product on Tuesday designed to solve this exact problem. Email has a better threading model than Slack, but email clients lack the realtime features needed for synchronous collaboration. So we're trying to fix. The idea is to let you do long-form, async and short-form, synchronous communications using the same tool, and to do it over email so you can still talk to anyone. Our product is Shortwave (https://www.shortwave.com/ https://www.shortwave.com/) -- we had a Show HN on Tuesday. We have a video here that walks through our team collaboration features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex_o2d1GXf4&t=5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex_o2d1GXf4&t=5s

novok 5y ago

You don't have to talk sync with chat, you don't have to do one line back and forths on chat, you can take hours or days to reply if you so choose on chat like email, you can easily do rich paragraphs. Slack is not synchronous communication, video / voice calls are. Slack wins over discourse forms, stack overflow and email because it adds too much friction to do essentially the same thing. Slack wins because it's the least friction interface that gives you form and email equivalents, plus it organizes a bit better naturally . If you want to beat slack and change the communication defaults, you need to make a UI that works with less friction than slack. You can change your chat culture with changing your behaviors and encouraging changes like nohello.net and threading like this post is doing and setting boundaries with how you will communicate. Also, different people work better with different communication mediums, the slack hate that you see on HN is not universal, there is a quiet majority that works well with slack, otherwise you wouldn't see it naturally adopted so much like the author encountered themselves. There will always be a set that hates whatever the default is. Now WFH is default in the industry, there is a subset that hates it greatly and wish we had offices again. Go back to offices with private rooms or open offices, there will be a set that doesn't like it too.

whoisthemachine 5y ago

I always felt like the ultimate flow with Slack was to make focused channels for a given topic; threads are too generic and hard to track and I generally get the impression that they're meant to be ephemeral, whereas a focused channel will of course ensure all participants know the intent of the channel, and the content is not lost. Essentially, a channel should be treated as an e-mail thread. Once the topic has finished, you can close the channel and archive it for future reference.

ryukoposting 5y ago

I work at a company that has taken Slack-mania to the absolute extreme, and it's one of the reasons why I daydream about leaving on a weekly basis.

solatic 5y ago

No, Slack-mania can't be cured with systemized discipline. Slack is a pox. It's not just about endless notifications that kill your ability to focus, it's an environment that actively encourages organizational anti-patterns. If you have a question, first you ask your manager. If Slack makes it easy to reach out to someone directly, your manager will tell you to Slack them. If you don't have Slack, and you don't have people's phone numbers, instead you get directed to documentation / wiki / support ticketing. Organizational choice architecture matters. Slack makes bad choices easy and good choices difficult. That's enough reason to ditch it.

kanonieer 5y ago
> No, Slack-mania can't be cured with systemized discipline. This matches with my (n=1) experience. The only way to cure "yourself" is to get away from organizations that use Slack in the way that OP describes.
nxpnsv 5y ago
All comms through manager sounds like a dystopian nightmare worse than slack if you ask me...
- solatic 5y ago
  I don't mean all communication, I just mean in the case that you aren't aware of what to do because you're new.
  - nxpnsv 5y ago
    That’s way saner :)

inevaexisted 5y ago

I introduced a similar thing at my work place and it works (there's a few points where people forget or sometimes there's cross over) we added some state to it to so in the context of triaging bugs. we reacted to the original message with: ticks - to indicate the bug or issue was accepted and we had enough information to raise the problem/issue into our tracking system cross - to indicate not a bug jiraicon - to indicate a ticket had been raised (and linked into the thread) all the information so far would be in the ticket and further comms hence forth would be in the ticket system. in the channels we did this in, messages would be pinned till they were given the tick/cross so people knew what needed triage and what didn't (treated triage as a team sport, whomever got to it first saved the rest from having to dive into it, unless they so wished)

woutr_be 5y ago
I don't really understand this workflow, why does this need to happen in Slack at all, when you already use Jira? Wouldn't it be far easier to raise a ticket in Jira directly, have all the info there, and then mark is as a bug/no bug?

scarface74 5y ago

What if you had culture where Slack messages don’t warrant immediate replies? I set aside time to do “deep work” where I quit Slack and Outlook. If there is something urgent someone could text me (it never happens). If it is an “emergency”, I would get a page through my paging app that has a special entitlement to allow it to bypass silent and DND.

vvoyer 5y ago

If you want to be ahead of other engineers and have a meaningful impact, then you’ll want to maximize the number of uninterrupted deep work sessions. The more you can fit in a week the more you’ll achieve (rfcs, implementations, reviews). This is one of the biggest contributor for high performing profiles. To manage this when using Slack you can: - set your status as “deep work” and decide to pause notifications for x hours - use “mark as unread”. when you want to peek something but not act on it yet - use “remind me” on messages you want to deal later on through the week - avoid DMs has much as possible, so not just one person can help you, but anyone from your team - avoid Slack on the phone Then deal with notifications in bulk. Slack isn’t killing our productivity, HN and twitter are not killing it either. Our addictions to notifications is, but we can manage this with discipline and training.

wintercarver 5y ago

At my company we have a “thoughtful communication” guide[1] that addresses Slack and other communication tools. The simple rule for Slack is it’s for ephemeral or urgent communication only. All “conversation” material essentially routes through email and it works great. Takes some getting used to but our Slack instance is very, very relaxed. Most employees silence all Slack notifications and are encouraged to do so to (try our best to) preserve focus. [1] https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/company/thoughtful-communication https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/company/thoughtful-communicatio...

eitland 5y ago
> The simple rule for Slack is it’s for ephemeral or urgent communication only. [...] Most employees silence all Slack notifications and are encouraged to do so [...] How do urgent combine with silencing notifications? Honest question, it seems I am missing something from the context here.
- wintercarver 5y ago
  Fair question and good point. Our Slack isn’t absolutely quiet - we do have a channel for coordinating on customer issues (meets our urgent and ephemeral criteria) and it might be that some matters are raised by other processes outside of Slack but Slack itself is a good fit for in-the-moment collaboration. But in short we aren’t absolutists, it’s a mix of a few specific channels for certain contexts, channel-specific muting, and updating one’s Slack status - all under the guidance that Slack immediate responsiveness is not generally expected but more the exception. It sounds like a lot as I write that, but as a broader cultural norm within the company it does (so far!) support itself. That said, I’ll pass your question on to the team as feedback, we should make the answer more clear.
- R0b0t1 5y ago
  The default setup for Slack (I think) dings you on any traffic in any channel. This is insane. Dinging on a direct message or a mention in a channel is a lot more reasonable and basically mimics the behavior of IRC.
- 5y ago

pictur 5y ago

Slack encourages a fast but irregular communication habit. For example, if you could document something that you discussed with someone for half an hour, maybe many people would benefit from it.

vegai_ 5y ago

I love chat software like Slack and Discord. But I gotta say, those products really nailed their product names. Slack. Almost nothing to do with work. Discord. Almost nothing to do with communication.

throwaway743 5y ago

If you're in the US, be careful with what you write on a company channel/email. Both Slack and email can legally be read by management. Know someone who works at a well known digital radio company. Prior to joining management they were in a coworkers channel where people vented about management, with the exception being them. Upon joining management they were asked why they didn't report on the gossip/venting earlier even though they never partook and it was explained that management was tracking all channels on the company's Slack. Those that were gossiping/venting all got let go

tomduncalf 5y ago
From a quick skim of search results (e.g. [1]) it sounds like it’s unlikely (although not impossible) that they’d be reading private Slack messages as it usually requires a request to Slack who will ask for appropriate employee or legal consent. Of course this could be much easier to achieve (or avoid needing) than it sounds, I have no experience of this. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was more likely that they were either told about the chat by someone, or perhaps saw it over someone’s shoulder or whatever. Still, it’s good advice to treat what you write on there as something that could one day be read by someone unintended for sure. [1] https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/2020/1/24/21079275/slack-private-messages-privacy-law-enforcement-lawsuit https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/2020/1/24/21079275/s...

politelemon 5y ago

Our experiences don't match regarding threading, and I don't think the author's are necessarily representative. Slack's threading implementation is an afterthought, a bandaid solution. With it, conversations usually end up as a mix of some replies in a thread and some in the default clutterspace. In this regard even Teams has a better approach, it's really obvious if you're in a topic thread or not.

dijit 5y ago
Agree completely; if you've only used slack check out Zulip for an example of how a good threading model works.

Falkon1313 5y ago

This doesn't really sound like a problem with Slack, but rather a personal or cultural problem with a lack of setting or respecting boundaries. Slack has options to communicate: - that you're away - that you're on a call or in a meeting etc. - to pause notifications for an hour or whatever - to star the most relevant channels - to mute less-relevant channels - to leave irrelevant channels - to sideline conversations into threads All of that is just Slack itself, in addition to things like putting meetings and vacations and other appointments on the shared team calendar. Some people where I work book meetings with themselves to guarantee focused distraction-free time. That's completely valid. Part of being a professional is setting boundaries, communicating them, setting the expectations that the rest of your team will do the same, and of course, respecting those boundaries. That includes not calling or pestering people that are on vacation. Which also requires that you don't "check in" while you're on vacation, because if you do, then other people will feel like they're expected to as well. Set and communicate your boundaries, and in a team that respects each other, it shouldn't be a problem.

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
All the options you mention are designed in order to reduce the main problem: that it requires synchronous communication. That is, after you "come back" from a meeting or being away, you can't just work in peace and when you want just send a reply: no, you are expected by design to engage in a conversation. I'm not interested in engaging in a conversation at all unless there is something really extremely important that requires my undivided attention for a specific period of time. But when companies use Slack, they integrate it as a part of the culture. You are expected to be ready to answer. Sure, you can pause notifications - but you know people are waiting. Are you a good team member if people are asking questions and you are not answering? For contrast, I found out that many people I worked with are too lazy to write an email and will prefer to solve the problem themselves rather than write to me if I don't answer soon enough. Which shows another interesting aspect of Slack-type culture.
- AlecSchueler 5y ago
  I don't understand the attitude where it's lazy not to write an email but it's an unreasonable chore to respond to a question on Slack? In mind Slack is preferable to email for many things because the issues are resolved in public and I can later look back on what questions have been asked etc.

quartesixte 5y ago

I (and somehow the rest of our company) has been spared the constant slack problem but I still don’t know if this is the nature of our work (we work on hardware) or the culture this company has somehow cultivated. Or both. First, we use Teams. And we have set up Teams to be messenger/chat oriented first, and group chat second. In fact, the group chat feature is heavily controlled and limited to posting domain/company-wide updates. I don’t know if this was intentional, but so it goes. Result: people use Teams as a substitute for walking across campus to ask a quick question. Or to bounce off an idea. Or to quickly check status. Or to send gifs in meetings. Second, as a hardware focused company, traceability is super important. You don’t want to be leaving technical decisions on ephemeral chat. You don’t want drawings, schematics, and instructions lost to people just chatting in Slack/Teams. Result: email/Jira/wiki it is. Third: as a hardware focused company, the personnel is divided into technicians and engineers. And the technicians do not actively look at their phones/computers. It can be hours sometimes before one of them responds. Last thing you want is a tech looking at their phone every 10 minutes while wielding a rivet gun. Don’t expect a design engineer to be so quick on their response time either. They’re either deep into a CAD design, in a design meeting, or on the floor with a tech. Don’t Ask to Ask is not specifically taught but most everyone learns to Just Ask because who knows when you’re “Hey I have a question” is getting answered. Result: most online communication is asynchronous anyways. Urgent matters will result in a call or someone running across campus. I’m sure Slack plagues many a hardware company. But somehow we have cultivated a culture that discourages spending too much time in chat or storing important info there. If a question becomes too long or complicated, we ask each other to email. If a question is asked too frequently, it is logged in the wiki. If a question becomes rather convoluted, we call each other to quickly resolve the matter. Messaging doesn’t need to be the enemy. It can be a powerful tool to keep in touch with others flung across the campus/globe.

habosa 5y ago

I'm new to Slack (just leaving a FAANG for a startup) and all the inbox management skills I've built up over the years seem to be useless now. Is there a good way to create an async task list from Slack? Right now if I get a message on Slack that I want to handle later I can: a) Ignore it, so I keep the unread "red dot" b) Use the "remind me" feature to make it synchronous but later c) Just ... handle it now (sigh) What I want is a list of threads I am meaning to get back to, but without having to actually use a separate list-making app. Is there a Slack app or workflow for this?

madeofpalk 5y ago
Just don't look at slack that often? I work at an all-remote company and I just... don't notice when someone messages me on Slack, and i check it on my own schedule. It all just works. I mute all channels I join apart from a few directly related to me on a daily basis. I very deliberately completely silence Slack so it's impossible for it to make a noise. I'm on windows so I don't get the notification toasts or the jumping in the Mac dock, so someone messaging me isn't distracting.
folmar 5y ago
Add it to "saved items".

Jiejeing 5y ago

Microsoft has a solution to that problem: Teams. It is so painful to use and to do anything in it that it encourages people to actually use the bug tracker or other venues to discuss any serious topic.

geewee 5y ago
I honestly don't think it's that bad. I've used both Slack and teams simultaneously for a few years, and I honestly don't see a lot of differences.
- Jiejeing 5y ago
  Search is horrendous across the board, list of conversations is where messages go to die, the "teams" part which is a weird hybrid forum has an awful UI and no way to not collapse messages by default (and little to no options). What works well is A/V meetings planned in the outlook calendar. There is no third-party reliable API that we can use to have anything else than the web (or electron) client), which happen to be fairly buggy and very heavy, while at the same time leaking unwanted information to other people. Calls are intentionally crippled on firefox to make sure you use chrome, their web browser, or their app. But I guess it allows management to spy on employees while being integrated with the microsoft ecosystem, so it gets a free pass.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Have you ever tried discovering a team you were not already part of? Or tried having any reasonable conversation outside a chat room? I figured I could get used to teams, but it’s just so useless compared to Slack it isn’t even funny.
- ziml77 5y ago
  Teams is garbage. I'll end up with conversations or images that don't load until I click back and try again. If I search a chat for something, clicking the result will often not scroll the correct message into view. It doesn't allow you to be on a call on multiple devices at once so I can use the desktop I'm remoted into for viewing a screen share while using the app on my phone for audio. It tries to retain the formatting of what you're pasting in, often resulting in a mess and sometimes getting stuck with certain font formatting.

fraktl 5y ago

[dead]

pkrumins 5y ago

The solution to Slack is Twist.

d4rkp4ttern 5y ago

One thing I have not seen mentioned here is the “slack status”. I find that it has a subtle stress inducing effect: * if it’s green are people expecting me to reply right away? And if I don’t respond do they feel anxious? * do employees feel pressure to keep it green to show they are working? I told my team that I will keep my status to AWAY always, and they can feel free to do the same. Just because slack provides a surveillance method doesn’t mean you have to use it. This also reduces expectations of immediate replies and keeps it more async

nerdponx 5y ago
I am fully remote at my current job, and I actually rely on the Slack status to indicate whether I am "in the office" or not, because obviously my physical presence is not a useful indicator of my availability. But you are right, it also sets an expectation that messages can only be asynchronous up to a point. Maybe this is one downside to remote work: there is no way to distinguish between "performatively demonstrating that I am actually working" and "currently available for active discussion". I have noticed that some people actually schedule "heads down" time on their calendar and set their Slack status accordingly. I could try that and see if people respect it.
folmar 5y ago
The problem is that they have too few. The one I miss the most is "free for chat", but it'd be also nice to copy Teams with separate Busy and Do not disturb.

nutanc 5y ago

Slack was supposed to cure email. Instead it created a new "mania"?

jpalomaki 5y ago

Maybe instead of Slack we should use more collaborative editing tools (like Google Docs or Miro). I haven’t really tried that, but it might be interesting if for example during troubleshooting session everybody was putting the facts to same document. At least the end result could be easier to consume than a very long chat log.