11 ms·

The Problem with Slack at Scale

73 points by prawnstar 4y ago

cyberpunk 4y ago
I mean, good luck… Getting into enterprise IM in 2022 is complete idiocy, but… Good luck. We already have the solution, it’s zulip, yet no one uses it or cares. > Slack is based on IRC Not true any more, maybe in ancient history. > It was built for synchronous communication. Also wrong.
- dvt 4y ago
  Totally agree with this, not to mention that chat apps are some of the most boring, uninteresting, and braindead "problems" to solve and they have been basically completely "solved" over and over again since bulletin boards.
  - jamesfinlayson 4y ago
    And yet Atlassian managed to not solve it with HipChat and not solve it again with Stride.
    - glotzerhotze 4y ago
      What does that tell about Atlassian?
      - paulryanrogers 4y ago
        They're rich enough to try twice?
        jamesfinlayson 4y ago
        I only vaguely remember Stride but I don't think it amounted to much more than a rebranding of HipChat.
      - antifa 4y ago
        Atlassian is weird in that they seem to have vacuumed up the entire market but all of their products are (AFAIK and experienced) objectively shitty and have negative demand.
  - hericium 4y ago
    It's different with Google products. Every new iteration of Hangouts/Chat (or whatever it's called this week) is a bit more "unsolved" than what they're killing to introduce it. It's less boring when your tools are getting shittier over time.
  - antifa 4y ago
    A zulip clone written in end to end rust sounds interesting, with reasonable allowances for non-rust code on android/iOS. So maybe just end to end swift would also be fine. But instead, probably instead we're going to get something like kernels written in electron forced onto us by our IT departments out of nowhere just because it's included in our Microsoft or Atlassian plan at no additional cost.
- jamesfinlayson 4y ago
  I remember at a previous company there were discussions on what to go with (HipChat/Stride had just been killed by Atlassian) and Zulip seemed to be the best free solution. But ultimately we went with Slack.
- fulafel 4y ago
  The word "enterprise" is notable in its absence in the article. Framing your problem as "enterprise xxx" would evoke Teams and HipChat, not improved Slack.
- FateOfNations 4y ago
  >> Slack is based on IRC > Not true any more, maybe in ancient history. I see that comparison more in the conceptual sense, rather than using the actual IRC protocol.
fulafel 4y ago
I'd add security to the list of things to address. Aggregating all of the institutional knowledge of the company to one perpetually searchable global workspace hosted in a US company's shared cloud vulnerable to being downloaded and abused by a global breakin or any compromised employee account is bad.
- calvano915 4y ago
  I thought much the same. Controlling the custody and flow of information is impossible with tens of thousands of users and pretty much no policies or significant monitoring in place.
  - fulafel 4y ago
    I think centralised control by company IT admins would be more catering to Teams customers than to Slack customers. To keep the attraction and user satisfaction of Slack it needs to be user / team centric. Maybe something federated or sharded like Mastodon or Discord. Might even be possible to distrust the servers and have end2end crypto.
meitros 4y ago
Quill tried to solve this, but they eventually got acquired https://web.archive.org/web/20220122150126/https://quill.chat/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220122150126/https://quill.cha...
synicalx 4y ago
One thing I think Teams does well in this space, and where I feel Slack falls short, is the organisation of channels. With Teams you can put people in... well teams, and each team has channels and other data associated with it. This hierarchy makes it easy for people to keep a multitude of channels and data organised without actually having to do it themselves. Another thing I have to (begrudgingly) concede to Teams is that it's essentially "free" and from the perspective of an exec it does the same thing as Slack + has better video conferencing. Even simple things like meeting with 3rd parties is very easy to do on Teams - just send an invite. Whether or not the A/V actually works during the call or peoples PC's don't run out of memory mid-meeting is another matter, but on paper it looks good.
- happymellon 4y ago
  Teams gets really confusing with its channel based "click here to start a new thread which will bury all other existing conversations". Not sure why, but I find it to be the worst way of communicating anything.
- veb 4y ago
  Teams also has the BEST accessibility (at least for live captioning). I have not used Google Meet or anything, but I'm constantly surprised by the level of sophistication from Teams live captioning and transcripts. You can be watching it "type" in real time. It'll write the wrong word, but several seconds later (as the person has added more context) you see the word, or even sentence completely change to be more on point! It's wonderful. I hope they continue to improve that. '
  - kybernetikos 4y ago
    Google meet has a very similar feature. The missing piece is it seems to only work during the meeting when obviously it'd be great to get a downloadable and searchable transcript afterwards.
    - disillusioned 4y ago
      They announced this is coming later this year, today.
slg 4y ago
>Slack is based on IRC and is a messaging client. It was built for synchronous communication and not for collaboration. As a result, the way to scale Slack for a large company is to create more and more channels. This increases the amount of information generated in a company. Whilst this can be a good thing, Slack users don’t have the ability to filter high-quality information from low-quality. [emphasis mine] This is the crux of the issue for me personally. The way Slack handles notifications and badges creates basically only three levels of importance: read this immediately, read this relatively quickly, or never read this. That works for small teams in which the gap between the second and third option is rather small. However as companies grow they generate more data and a huge gulf starts to form between the second and third option. There is now a wealth of information that necessitates a "you might want to read this eventually" category. Yet Slack provides no native way to handle this and the end result is that either you subject yourself to frequent interruptions for messages that aren't relevant to you or you ignore messages that are.
- 1123581321 4y ago
  Reminders are the 2.5 option. Scan and postpone until a better time to read.
  - slg 4y ago
    How do you identify if a message is of the 2.5 variety without first reading it to confirm it is not a 2? You still need to be interrupted to read the message. In my experience reminders have always been a way to manage work and not a way to manage notifications.
    - 1123581321 4y ago
      I misunderstood and thought you were talking about making sure you didn’t forget to fully deal with the message. I think it’s worth being notified about important messages, even if you have to deal with them later. If you’re truly too busy to triage Slack, the unread status keeps the message for you while you do non-chat work, or work out of an urgent channels synchronously and ignore the others. The other suggestion to save is a good one, too.
karmakaze 4y ago
> Slack Alternatives > 2. Slack clone but with Feature X. Feature X is usually something like task management, project management, notes etc. Examples of these apps are Chanty, Rock.so, Flock, Ryver, Twist (there are many more). > The problem with the apps in the second category is that they end up competing with two existing tools. I use 4 written communication tools: 1. Slack for (a) async & sync team chat (b) async company/other-teams channels 2. Email for formal company communication (I don't send email, other than auto calendar invites) 3. git/GitHub for project work 4. Google Docs for RFCs In addition there are sync meets and pairing sessions. The only thing that I find missing is a good shared whiteboard and hallway/watercooler chats. The problem with Slack exists between chair and keyboard--it's about finding a way to use it that works. If the culture is for anyone to post arbitrary volume in a large channel, then that's on you. Similarly if your company/teams create too many channels that many people should be in, you're doing it wrong. My policy is that if there's more than X people in a channel I don't need to pay attention (except for the 1 official company announcements channel).
- happymellon 4y ago
  I'm always curious about how different teams have "solved" whiteboarding with distributed teams, as they are normally then not whiteboarding but using a collaborative diagramming tool which is much too restrictive. The closest I've found is making sure everyone has a decent sized tablet and using Google Jam.
  - senko 4y ago
    Miro works well for this, you don't need to use it as a diagramming tool. AWW was awesome at this, free-form drawing was the default, you'd just doodle whatever you wanted, no structure required.
    - happymellon 4y ago
      I disagree about Miro, it is definitely a diagramming tool. Jam is shared Paintbrush, so everyone sketches like a whiteboard which sounds like the AWW you mention.
ngrilly 4y ago
I think Zulip has the potential to become a dominant solution in this space if they find way to make the UI as appealing as Slack. Zulip offers a new approach on how to structure discussions by threads while still being a chat application with a “linear” flow.
- jimkleiber 4y ago
  Yes I want to use Zulip but very often feel disoriented when opening up, borderline dizzy. I'm not sure why, what about the UI causes that for me. Are there any specific UI recommendations you'd give?
- molsongolden 4y ago
  I switched companies which meant moving from Zulip to Slack. I don’t understand why people like Slack or what they like about the UI. Threading is terrible, async catchup is difficult, gif links don’t convert cleanly, group DMs are limited to 8 users then Slack suggests creating a new channel…?!
  - epivosism 4y ago
    I've never used Zulip, and prefer slack threads to discord's attempt. Could you explain how they work in Zulip?
    - kibwen 4y ago
      Zulip requires all conversations to happen inside of topics; think of it like an extremely lightweight and synchronous email, where the topic is the subject line. You can view a channel to see all its messages chronologically, and in the sidebar you can narrow to a single topic. Zulip is great, I highly recommend it. On projects where I have to use Slack or Slack clones, I end up closing them when it's time to get work done because they're terrible at being productive and hopeless at preserving information for more than a few seconds. With Zulip I have successfully searched for information sent months ago/thousands of messages ago and still found it, thanks to the powerful search and mandatory topics.
  - 4y ago
citizenpaul 4y ago
>I spent nearly 4 years working on Workplace from Meta, so I’m familiar with building in this space. Some VC guy said this is one of the biggest red flags he looks for in a startup. It almost always leads to failure. I dont remember the exact reasons but something like it means the startup doesnt understand fundamental market segment issues and grit required to overcome them.
- mikebenfield 4y ago
  Sorry, could you clarify? What specifically is the red flag?
  - vehementi 4y ago
    Presumably making your own Slack, or more generally spending time on things you don't have a competitive advantage at by reinventing someone else's wheel
  - WJW 4y ago
    The statement "I worked on X at BigCo Y" does not imply that the person has enough knowledge about X to start a startup with. The problems you have when starting a new project under the wings of an existing company (especially one so large as Meta) are very different than you get when starting a new startup, so the experience does not carry over to the new company as some people expect.
- JacobAldridge 4y ago
  I have a similar 'rule' (advising to small businesses) - as a company scales from 1 to 12 to 35 to 120 to 1000 people [1], they move through different phases. So I see a lot of my clients in the 12-35 person 'Process' phase being excited when they hire someone from a 120+ person company, because of all the expertise they can bring. But that 'Strategy' phase expertise, often when they have a full team and budget to execute their ideas, rarely translates to a smaller business where they also have to roll up their sleeves and GSD. Sitting in a team building stuff for Meta is definitely a whole other ballpark to convincing Dave's Accounting LLC to give your Slack-competitor a chance. [1] https://jacobaldridge.com/business/the-growth-transitions-that-disapparate-organisations/ https://jacobaldridge.com/business/the-growth-transitions-th...
FullyFunctional 4y ago
We adopted Slack and I hate it but use daily. What I find so frustrating with Slack is that it's 1. Super terrible at threading. Threads are clearly discouraged and don't nest. This appears to be by design, but even Usenet handled threading better. 2. Slack is an information wastebasket - at least in my experience it's really hard to find information once there's a significant traffic in a deployment. 3. Too Much Notification! I have to mute channels that has a high rate of addressing the channel. However there's no denying that it's popular. Seems like every place I go is using Slack. At least slack allows me to edit my typos.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  I used to hate Slack, then I got involved with some projects that require Teams,....
  - LilBytes 4y ago
    I'm fairly certain this feeling is ubiquitous across anyone and everyone who's had to transition from Slack to Teams.
  - diarrhea 4y ago
    It's baffling the degree to which Teams doesn't work on a purely technical basis, before UI and UX even come into play. Half an hour ago I accepted an invitation to join a Team. Logged into MS in the browser, checked remember me, and then... a naked JSON response. It had a field "result", value "Success". Good! What now? Nothing else happened. I firmly believe Teams is only usable if you're a Microsoft shop (don't even think about Firefox and friends) and is managed by a central IT (I somehow have two MS accounts under the same [work] email and no idea which is which). Don't get me started on being on Teams as an external employee. Things like Slack just work much more and are much less surprising in their behaviour.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Microsoft shops are one of our customer bases, and that doesn't make me like Teams any better. I cannot understand how the Teams team does their product management.
chupchap 4y ago
When buying a new software larger companies need to think about 1. Costing 2. Who will manage it and how integrated is it with everything that exists 3. How much manual effort and time is needed to set it up and maintain it? 4. Who will provide long-term support? Will the company be around in five years for sure? 5. Who else is using it? 6. Does it work on all platforms? Quality is not a quantified criteria and it is because of these questions raised that a lot of bigger enterprises end of with Teams. From what I have seen, the decision to use Slack is made bottom-up, which is not how most orgs work. Lastly, most companies in the world are not massive to have scaling issues. Even in those that are massive, most of the teams work in silos.
peterbonney 4y ago
It’s wild that Google, despite being the leader in startup email/business software and literally giving their Slack competitor to everyone for free as part of their Google Business subscription, STILL has such low mindshare in this space that it didn’t even merit a mention in the blog post. (Full disclosure: my company used Google Chat, and I find the integration ecosystem so pitiful that I’m constantly thinking about paying up for Slack. I don’t know how Google is screwing this market up so badly.)
- schimmy_changa 4y ago
  Especially because they came so close so early with Google Wave! That was it, I think, but Google didn't have the confidence at the time to stick with it, and it was just too unpolished to keep out in the public at a time when everyone thought that whatever Google did was gold. Seriously, I think the Wave ideas were the ones that hit the perfect feature-set for informal electronic business communication.
- mattwad 4y ago
  For personal use, GChat has really been hurt ever since they merged it into Mail. It's much harder to share files and access now. Also they took away video for some reason
- renewiltord 4y ago
  I literally have no idea which of Google’s numerous chat apps you’re talking about
  - antifa 4y ago
    Eh, but you remember the first one that around when AIM was around, and pretty much nothing used today performs as good as it or AIM did on the average computer 20 years ago.
- grandinj 4y ago
  The original Google Chat (with the little Windows client that sat in your taskbar) was surpringly good. And then, of course they killed it and made it a web UI thing and made it majorly worse at the same time
vemv 4y ago
I've long held the opinion the best chat app is no chat app, i.e. delegate everything to your favorite issue tracker and other forms of knowledge keeping (e.g. Git commits, design documents). Let everything be either fully 'literate' (for lack of a better term: abundant context, complete paragraphs and argumentation, hyperlinking), or fully sync and human (meetings), with no in between other than email, used thinly. I'd wager that this approach will be increasingly obvious as more people burn out from messy remote settings - many of which were improvised due to the pandemic, yet are here to stay. It's a model that has worked well for OSS - many projects do just fine with Github alone, sustainably, for years.
- PikachuEXE 4y ago
  I think there might be a term for it - Async-First Communication You can take a look at https://blog.doist.com/async-first/ https://blog.doist.com/async-first/
  - vemv 4y ago
    Good resource, thanks! I'm familiar with the term (as popularized by http://asyncmanifesto.org/ http://asyncmanifesto.org/) but perhaps 'async' is not enough of a self-sufficient term. Something can be async but also happen to be poor.
    - PikachuEXE 4y ago
      I agree and there are benefits on some sync activities too. Being better is another thing after we understand and adopt necessary concepts/strategies like 'async'. But without those the ability to improve would be more limited.
- fnord123 4y ago
  > It's a model that has worked well for OSS - many projects do just fine with Github alone, sustainably, for years. What's the biggest OSS project you know of with no IRC, Discord, Slack or other chat presence?
smorgusofborg 4y ago
Left out matrix as an alternative? Matrix is even more overwhelming than slack in the same sense that email is more overwhelming than lotus notes. Maybe overwhelming is fine if the use for the tech isn't siloed to solving communication in only one part of their life.
httpz 4y ago
I sort of want a Hacker News/Reddit style tool for work with upvotes and nested threads. Slack is good for realtime discussions but it's really hard to find a conversation from last week or a popular discussion that I should read. For any topic that doesn't have to be discussed realtime, I just want a front page sorted Hacker News style based on upvotes and recency. This will also make it easier to find the context of a decision years down the road.
- disgruntledphd2 4y ago
  Sounds like you want Workplace from FB.
rtpg 4y ago
I think Twist is the right answer. It's basically a forum, which is nice because: - people have to write "real messages", with a beginning, middle, and end. Subject line. - Doesn't suffer from e-mail's "I wasn't on the original to/cc" problem where information is completely silo'd by default - Messages by default need to be categorized and a bit organized. Less of a firehose E-mail gets a lot of shit, but from my experience the biggest issue is just the transmission issue. Forums/stuff like Twist solve this nicely, in my opinion. I think Twist is totally undersold as the future. If only they would put custom emoji (this is, I swear, a blocker for moving to it at $JOB. In a full/mostly remote world, we want ways of expressing at least a bit of company culture!) Really you want a mix of tools, of course. You want stuff for synchronous discussions, you want recorded minutes/"serious discussions", you want a place where you write up big documentation (Confluence/xWiki etc).... there's not gonna be a single tool that solves it all. And if you have shitty communication culture, all tools are going to be miserable. But there are interesting tools that go beyond "messaging" out there!
- maarf 4y ago
  I use Twist daily and it seems abandoned. There are few UI/UX problems that hurt me constantly and I don't remember when was the last time the app was updated.
  - janejeon 4y ago
    > I don't remember when was the last time the app was updated checks app store Uhhhhhh... 17 hours ago?
robertlagrant 4y ago
> Teams is extremely well integrated with the rest of the Microsoft suite. Erm. Not sure someone who's used it would say that :-)
- LilBytes 4y ago
  He's not wrong, it's well integrated, but they're all shit just easily connected. E.g, SharePoint is absolutely awful.
Manheim 4y ago
I have used Slack, Teams and Discord. If I should choose one I would go for Discord. Discord is much better in the collaboration department for distributed teams, and I love their open audio channels. It just works. Teams is good when it comes to integration with office and onedrive (of course). Slack is, in my opinion, just another chat service. A hugely successful one with a big user base and a strong brand, but not superior when it comes to collaboration.
Dave3of5 4y ago
I'm actually really interesting in this. What are the top 3 things you could change in slack / teams that would make you switch. I'll go first: * Notifications settings are annoying I'm either swamped with notifications or miss them. I want to be able to switch of notifications for short periods * I want to group discussions about certain things. I.e. if we are discussing a JIRA issue I can select the message and group them into something that I can attach to the issue we are discussing * Too many private chats - I'd like to ban private chats as I find there's some great info in these which are often not shared to the group
- another-dave 4y ago
  Notifications need to be more intelligent — if Mary rarely posts in a channel (or joined the channel just to post) it might be worth more attention than John who keeps pressing enter mid stream of consciousness. If you've a long running channel like a "developers channel" it probably has some bot integrations — "the last PR failed linting". It should be possible to mute these without muting the whole channel. A lot of problems come down to company culture though. I think the hard work of fostering good practices is something outside of a tool's remit. Maybe it should be a point on people's annual review if you want to get people to use it as less of a rubbish bin. "Sorry Peter, you won't get a pay rise this year as you sent an at-channel message to the team every day in Feb even when we told you that was really disruptive"(!) Most places don't care about these efficiencies enough though (yet). E.g. if people were as wasteful with company expense accounts as they are with other people's attention it would definitely get sorted out.
  - Dave3of5 4y ago
    Yeah a lot of orgs and employees are pretty toxic and Slack and teams makes it very easy to be like that. I wonder if there is a tech solution to this or if it's something that has to be handled outside of the tool.
hexo 4y ago
I cant believe I read Slack and fast in one sentence. We use mattermost and its mostly OK to the point i'm willing to use it which cannot be said about Slack. Forcing me to have Slack open all the time was reason I left a job. It was unbearable.
- Jailbird 4y ago
  It's surprising to read that. No one at work hates it so much, afaik. I wonder what's different about our channel lineup, usage habits, or anything else that is such a contrast to your experience.
- norman784 4y ago
  I think is fast if you compare with the other products mentioned, I hope they get their shit together (Slack and Teams) and build a real native app that is fast and use a lot less ram.
bengale 4y ago
It feels to me that the type of communication slack is used for can't scale to a huge company, rather than it being a tooling issue. It's useful to be able to pull disparate people into a channel when working on a project, or to be able to find someone from another team to ask a question. But, expecting people to be able to discuss things with everyone from a large organisation all of the time just seems destined for failure. At a certain size it probably makes sense to have actual humans in each department working out what communication needs to flow to the rest of the organisation and moving it in a different tool. Maybe links to those "publications" are posted in an all hands channel that most people have muted until they're ready to sit down and catch up with what everybody else is doing, but I can't imagine a situation where they should be getting notifications in real time about it.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
Not to get off topic but the problem I find (consistently) with online comms (i.e., email, Slack, Teams, FB Groups, LinkedIn, etc.) is subpar human to human communication skills. Typically, adding (unnecessary) friction is: vagueness or ambiguity. We can't read each others' minds. We're not sitting in each other's seats / moments. My current context (i.e., what I'm focused on) has influence on where my thought process can go next. Dropping your without-warning thought bomb in the middle of that without a hint of context is too assuming. Assumption-based Comms creates unnecessary noise and friction. And yes, these missteps at scale certainly don't help.
brixtonbrew 4y ago
This is spot on. But most software for work doesn't function at scale. It's not just Slack. That's the central thesis behind Qatalog - which is really cool. It says it's a 'Work Hub that helps teams collaborate at scale'. Read more here if interested - https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-founder-ceo-tariq-rauf/ https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-founder-ceo-tariq-rauf... Some have described it as a structured Notion, but it combines lots of functionality from project management, to org charts, to threads and discussion, as well as knowledge management.
SMAAART 4y ago
We use Slack at work, and I hate it. The ratio of Signal to Noise is brutal, and there's no accountability. But the issue is not Slack per se, Slack does what Slack does: synchronous, instant, INFORMAL communication. If we want better processes we don't need a better Slack, we need better processes and enforcing better habits. If we want traceability of information, we need data-rich communications and structured communications, and we have other tools to do that, from emails to databases to actual systems that reside outside Slack. So now the problem is enforceability and not the tool per se. My favorite solution is an Agile organization with Agile team. Vertically integrated where each lead has 4-5 reports, each responsible for projects, processes and documentation. The problem to adoption is that the C-suite doesn't understand processes, and leads don't want to be bothered. So the broken information system enterprise continue its crippled path, akin to walking in the dark. The enterprise needs process innovation, not technical innovation.
kevincox 4y ago
I feel like the cycle of Slack is: 1. Everyone subscribes everyone to tons of notifications and people send email to everyone. 2. Everyone gets too much email and starts ignoring it. 3. Everyone hates email, no one responds. 4. They switch to Slack. It is great, high signal-to-noise, channels to organize. 5. People start adding notifications, subscriptions, blasting messages to many channels. 6. You are back to all of the problems of email.
lamplovin 4y ago
I think the author should invest in learning the keyboard shortcuts and search more often. They’re great and allow me to move around slack with ease. Also reminders for things you don’t want to think about at the moment work well too The noise issue seems tool agnostic to me, if you converse with noisy people who are sporadic with posting and put important messages in threads/channels with less visibility then you’d have issues no matter what tool you use. Does anyone ever read a company wide email longer than 1 paragraph anyway? At least with slack you can search it

73 points by prawnstar 4y ago

I mean, good luck… Getting into enterprise IM in 2022 is complete idiocy, but… Good luck. We already have the solution, it’s zulip, yet no one uses it or cares. > Slack is based on IRC Not true any more, maybe in ancient history. > It was built for synchronous communication. Also wrong.

dvt 4y ago
Totally agree with this, not to mention that chat apps are some of the most boring, uninteresting, and braindead "problems" to solve and they have been basically completely "solved" over and over again since bulletin boards.
- jamesfinlayson 4y ago
  And yet Atlassian managed to not solve it with HipChat and not solve it again with Stride.
  - glotzerhotze 4y ago
    What does that tell about Atlassian?
    - paulryanrogers 4y ago
      They're rich enough to try twice?
      - jamesfinlayson 4y ago
        I only vaguely remember Stride but I don't think it amounted to much more than a rebranding of HipChat.
    - antifa 4y ago
      Atlassian is weird in that they seem to have vacuumed up the entire market but all of their products are (AFAIK and experienced) objectively shitty and have negative demand.
- hericium 4y ago
  It's different with Google products. Every new iteration of Hangouts/Chat (or whatever it's called this week) is a bit more "unsolved" than what they're killing to introduce it. It's less boring when your tools are getting shittier over time.
- antifa 4y ago
  A zulip clone written in end to end rust sounds interesting, with reasonable allowances for non-rust code on android/iOS. So maybe just end to end swift would also be fine. But instead, probably instead we're going to get something like kernels written in electron forced onto us by our IT departments out of nowhere just because it's included in our Microsoft or Atlassian plan at no additional cost.
jamesfinlayson 4y ago
I remember at a previous company there were discussions on what to go with (HipChat/Stride had just been killed by Atlassian) and Zulip seemed to be the best free solution. But ultimately we went with Slack.
fulafel 4y ago
The word "enterprise" is notable in its absence in the article. Framing your problem as "enterprise xxx" would evoke Teams and HipChat, not improved Slack.
FateOfNations 4y ago
>> Slack is based on IRC > Not true any more, maybe in ancient history. I see that comparison more in the conceptual sense, rather than using the actual IRC protocol.

fulafel 4y ago

I'd add security to the list of things to address. Aggregating all of the institutional knowledge of the company to one perpetually searchable global workspace hosted in a US company's shared cloud vulnerable to being downloaded and abused by a global breakin or any compromised employee account is bad.

calvano915 4y ago
I thought much the same. Controlling the custody and flow of information is impossible with tens of thousands of users and pretty much no policies or significant monitoring in place.
- fulafel 4y ago
  I think centralised control by company IT admins would be more catering to Teams customers than to Slack customers. To keep the attraction and user satisfaction of Slack it needs to be user / team centric. Maybe something federated or sharded like Mastodon or Discord. Might even be possible to distrust the servers and have end2end crypto.

meitros 4y ago

Quill tried to solve this, but they eventually got acquired https://web.archive.org/web/20220122150126/https://quill.chat/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220122150126/https://quill.cha...

synicalx 4y ago

One thing I think Teams does well in this space, and where I feel Slack falls short, is the organisation of channels. With Teams you can put people in... well teams, and each team has channels and other data associated with it. This hierarchy makes it easy for people to keep a multitude of channels and data organised without actually having to do it themselves. Another thing I have to (begrudgingly) concede to Teams is that it's essentially "free" and from the perspective of an exec it does the same thing as Slack + has better video conferencing. Even simple things like meeting with 3rd parties is very easy to do on Teams - just send an invite. Whether or not the A/V actually works during the call or peoples PC's don't run out of memory mid-meeting is another matter, but on paper it looks good.

happymellon 4y ago
Teams gets really confusing with its channel based "click here to start a new thread which will bury all other existing conversations". Not sure why, but I find it to be the worst way of communicating anything.
veb 4y ago
Teams also has the BEST accessibility (at least for live captioning). I have not used Google Meet or anything, but I'm constantly surprised by the level of sophistication from Teams live captioning and transcripts. You can be watching it "type" in real time. It'll write the wrong word, but several seconds later (as the person has added more context) you see the word, or even sentence completely change to be more on point! It's wonderful. I hope they continue to improve that. '
- kybernetikos 4y ago
  Google meet has a very similar feature. The missing piece is it seems to only work during the meeting when obviously it'd be great to get a downloadable and searchable transcript afterwards.
  - disillusioned 4y ago
    They announced this is coming later this year, today.

slg 4y ago

>Slack is based on IRC and is a messaging client. It was built for synchronous communication and not for collaboration. As a result, the way to scale Slack for a large company is to create more and more channels. This increases the amount of information generated in a company. Whilst this can be a good thing, Slack users don’t have the ability to filter high-quality information from low-quality. [emphasis mine] This is the crux of the issue for me personally. The way Slack handles notifications and badges creates basically only three levels of importance: read this immediately, read this relatively quickly, or never read this. That works for small teams in which the gap between the second and third option is rather small. However as companies grow they generate more data and a huge gulf starts to form between the second and third option. There is now a wealth of information that necessitates a "you might want to read this eventually" category. Yet Slack provides no native way to handle this and the end result is that either you subject yourself to frequent interruptions for messages that aren't relevant to you or you ignore messages that are.

1123581321 4y ago
Reminders are the 2.5 option. Scan and postpone until a better time to read.
- slg 4y ago
  How do you identify if a message is of the 2.5 variety without first reading it to confirm it is not a 2? You still need to be interrupted to read the message. In my experience reminders have always been a way to manage work and not a way to manage notifications.
  - 1123581321 4y ago
    I misunderstood and thought you were talking about making sure you didn’t forget to fully deal with the message. I think it’s worth being notified about important messages, even if you have to deal with them later. If you’re truly too busy to triage Slack, the unread status keeps the message for you while you do non-chat work, or work out of an urgent channels synchronously and ignore the others. The other suggestion to save is a good one, too.

karmakaze 4y ago

> Slack Alternatives > 2. Slack clone but with Feature X. Feature X is usually something like task management, project management, notes etc. Examples of these apps are Chanty, Rock.so, Flock, Ryver, Twist (there are many more). > The problem with the apps in the second category is that they end up competing with two existing tools. I use 4 written communication tools: 1. Slack for (a) async & sync team chat (b) async company/other-teams channels 2. Email for formal company communication (I don't send email, other than auto calendar invites) 3. git/GitHub for project work 4. Google Docs for RFCs In addition there are sync meets and pairing sessions. The only thing that I find missing is a good shared whiteboard and hallway/watercooler chats. The problem with Slack exists between chair and keyboard--it's about finding a way to use it that works. If the culture is for anyone to post arbitrary volume in a large channel, then that's on you. Similarly if your company/teams create too many channels that many people should be in, you're doing it wrong. My policy is that if there's more than X people in a channel I don't need to pay attention (except for the 1 official company announcements channel).

happymellon 4y ago
I'm always curious about how different teams have "solved" whiteboarding with distributed teams, as they are normally then not whiteboarding but using a collaborative diagramming tool which is much too restrictive. The closest I've found is making sure everyone has a decent sized tablet and using Google Jam.
- senko 4y ago
  Miro works well for this, you don't need to use it as a diagramming tool. AWW was awesome at this, free-form drawing was the default, you'd just doodle whatever you wanted, no structure required.
  - happymellon 4y ago
    I disagree about Miro, it is definitely a diagramming tool. Jam is shared Paintbrush, so everyone sketches like a whiteboard which sounds like the AWW you mention.

ngrilly 4y ago

I think Zulip has the potential to become a dominant solution in this space if they find way to make the UI as appealing as Slack. Zulip offers a new approach on how to structure discussions by threads while still being a chat application with a “linear” flow.

jimkleiber 4y ago
Yes I want to use Zulip but very often feel disoriented when opening up, borderline dizzy. I'm not sure why, what about the UI causes that for me. Are there any specific UI recommendations you'd give?
molsongolden 4y ago
I switched companies which meant moving from Zulip to Slack. I don’t understand why people like Slack or what they like about the UI. Threading is terrible, async catchup is difficult, gif links don’t convert cleanly, group DMs are limited to 8 users then Slack suggests creating a new channel…?!
- epivosism 4y ago
  I've never used Zulip, and prefer slack threads to discord's attempt. Could you explain how they work in Zulip?
  - kibwen 4y ago
    Zulip requires all conversations to happen inside of topics; think of it like an extremely lightweight and synchronous email, where the topic is the subject line. You can view a channel to see all its messages chronologically, and in the sidebar you can narrow to a single topic. Zulip is great, I highly recommend it. On projects where I have to use Slack or Slack clones, I end up closing them when it's time to get work done because they're terrible at being productive and hopeless at preserving information for more than a few seconds. With Zulip I have successfully searched for information sent months ago/thousands of messages ago and still found it, thanks to the powerful search and mandatory topics.
- 4y ago

citizenpaul 4y ago

>I spent nearly 4 years working on Workplace from Meta, so I’m familiar with building in this space. Some VC guy said this is one of the biggest red flags he looks for in a startup. It almost always leads to failure. I dont remember the exact reasons but something like it means the startup doesnt understand fundamental market segment issues and grit required to overcome them.

mikebenfield 4y ago
Sorry, could you clarify? What specifically is the red flag?
- vehementi 4y ago
  Presumably making your own Slack, or more generally spending time on things you don't have a competitive advantage at by reinventing someone else's wheel
- WJW 4y ago
  The statement "I worked on X at BigCo Y" does not imply that the person has enough knowledge about X to start a startup with. The problems you have when starting a new project under the wings of an existing company (especially one so large as Meta) are very different than you get when starting a new startup, so the experience does not carry over to the new company as some people expect.
JacobAldridge 4y ago
I have a similar 'rule' (advising to small businesses) - as a company scales from 1 to 12 to 35 to 120 to 1000 people [1], they move through different phases. So I see a lot of my clients in the 12-35 person 'Process' phase being excited when they hire someone from a 120+ person company, because of all the expertise they can bring. But that 'Strategy' phase expertise, often when they have a full team and budget to execute their ideas, rarely translates to a smaller business where they also have to roll up their sleeves and GSD. Sitting in a team building stuff for Meta is definitely a whole other ballpark to convincing Dave's Accounting LLC to give your Slack-competitor a chance. [1] https://jacobaldridge.com/business/the-growth-transitions-that-disapparate-organisations/ https://jacobaldridge.com/business/the-growth-transitions-th...

FullyFunctional 4y ago

We adopted Slack and I hate it but use daily. What I find so frustrating with Slack is that it's 1. Super terrible at threading. Threads are clearly discouraged and don't nest. This appears to be by design, but even Usenet handled threading better. 2. Slack is an information wastebasket - at least in my experience it's really hard to find information once there's a significant traffic in a deployment. 3. Too Much Notification! I have to mute channels that has a high rate of addressing the channel. However there's no denying that it's popular. Seems like every place I go is using Slack. At least slack allows me to edit my typos.

pjmlp 4y ago
I used to hate Slack, then I got involved with some projects that require Teams,....
- LilBytes 4y ago
  I'm fairly certain this feeling is ubiquitous across anyone and everyone who's had to transition from Slack to Teams.
- diarrhea 4y ago
  It's baffling the degree to which Teams doesn't work on a purely technical basis, before UI and UX even come into play. Half an hour ago I accepted an invitation to join a Team. Logged into MS in the browser, checked remember me, and then... a naked JSON response. It had a field "result", value "Success". Good! What now? Nothing else happened. I firmly believe Teams is only usable if you're a Microsoft shop (don't even think about Firefox and friends) and is managed by a central IT (I somehow have two MS accounts under the same [work] email and no idea which is which). Don't get me started on being on Teams as an external employee. Things like Slack just work much more and are much less surprising in their behaviour.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Microsoft shops are one of our customer bases, and that doesn't make me like Teams any better. I cannot understand how the Teams team does their product management.

chupchap 4y ago

When buying a new software larger companies need to think about 1. Costing 2. Who will manage it and how integrated is it with everything that exists 3. How much manual effort and time is needed to set it up and maintain it? 4. Who will provide long-term support? Will the company be around in five years for sure? 5. Who else is using it? 6. Does it work on all platforms? Quality is not a quantified criteria and it is because of these questions raised that a lot of bigger enterprises end of with Teams. From what I have seen, the decision to use Slack is made bottom-up, which is not how most orgs work. Lastly, most companies in the world are not massive to have scaling issues. Even in those that are massive, most of the teams work in silos.

peterbonney 4y ago

It’s wild that Google, despite being the leader in startup email/business software and literally giving their Slack competitor to everyone for free as part of their Google Business subscription, STILL has such low mindshare in this space that it didn’t even merit a mention in the blog post. (Full disclosure: my company used Google Chat, and I find the integration ecosystem so pitiful that I’m constantly thinking about paying up for Slack. I don’t know how Google is screwing this market up so badly.)

schimmy_changa 4y ago
Especially because they came so close so early with Google Wave! That was it, I think, but Google didn't have the confidence at the time to stick with it, and it was just too unpolished to keep out in the public at a time when everyone thought that whatever Google did was gold. Seriously, I think the Wave ideas were the ones that hit the perfect feature-set for informal electronic business communication.
mattwad 4y ago
For personal use, GChat has really been hurt ever since they merged it into Mail. It's much harder to share files and access now. Also they took away video for some reason
renewiltord 4y ago
I literally have no idea which of Google’s numerous chat apps you’re talking about
- antifa 4y ago
  Eh, but you remember the first one that around when AIM was around, and pretty much nothing used today performs as good as it or AIM did on the average computer 20 years ago.
grandinj 4y ago
The original Google Chat (with the little Windows client that sat in your taskbar) was surpringly good. And then, of course they killed it and made it a web UI thing and made it majorly worse at the same time

vemv 4y ago

I've long held the opinion the best chat app is no chat app, i.e. delegate everything to your favorite issue tracker and other forms of knowledge keeping (e.g. Git commits, design documents). Let everything be either fully 'literate' (for lack of a better term: abundant context, complete paragraphs and argumentation, hyperlinking), or fully sync and human (meetings), with no in between other than email, used thinly. I'd wager that this approach will be increasingly obvious as more people burn out from messy remote settings - many of which were improvised due to the pandemic, yet are here to stay. It's a model that has worked well for OSS - many projects do just fine with Github alone, sustainably, for years.

PikachuEXE 4y ago
I think there might be a term for it - Async-First Communication You can take a look at https://blog.doist.com/async-first/ https://blog.doist.com/async-first/
- vemv 4y ago
  Good resource, thanks! I'm familiar with the term (as popularized by http://asyncmanifesto.org/ http://asyncmanifesto.org/) but perhaps 'async' is not enough of a self-sufficient term. Something can be async but also happen to be poor.
  - PikachuEXE 4y ago
    I agree and there are benefits on some sync activities too. Being better is another thing after we understand and adopt necessary concepts/strategies like 'async'. But without those the ability to improve would be more limited.
fnord123 4y ago
> It's a model that has worked well for OSS - many projects do just fine with Github alone, sustainably, for years. What's the biggest OSS project you know of with no IRC, Discord, Slack or other chat presence?

smorgusofborg 4y ago

Left out matrix as an alternative? Matrix is even more overwhelming than slack in the same sense that email is more overwhelming than lotus notes. Maybe overwhelming is fine if the use for the tech isn't siloed to solving communication in only one part of their life.

httpz 4y ago

I sort of want a Hacker News/Reddit style tool for work with upvotes and nested threads. Slack is good for realtime discussions but it's really hard to find a conversation from last week or a popular discussion that I should read. For any topic that doesn't have to be discussed realtime, I just want a front page sorted Hacker News style based on upvotes and recency. This will also make it easier to find the context of a decision years down the road.

disgruntledphd2 4y ago
Sounds like you want Workplace from FB.

rtpg 4y ago

I think Twist is the right answer. It's basically a forum, which is nice because: - people have to write "real messages", with a beginning, middle, and end. Subject line. - Doesn't suffer from e-mail's "I wasn't on the original to/cc" problem where information is completely silo'd by default - Messages by default need to be categorized and a bit organized. Less of a firehose E-mail gets a lot of shit, but from my experience the biggest issue is just the transmission issue. Forums/stuff like Twist solve this nicely, in my opinion. I think Twist is totally undersold as the future. If only they would put custom emoji (this is, I swear, a blocker for moving to it at $JOB. In a full/mostly remote world, we want ways of expressing at least a bit of company culture!) Really you want a mix of tools, of course. You want stuff for synchronous discussions, you want recorded minutes/"serious discussions", you want a place where you write up big documentation (Confluence/xWiki etc).... there's not gonna be a single tool that solves it all. And if you have shitty communication culture, all tools are going to be miserable. But there are interesting tools that go beyond "messaging" out there!

maarf 4y ago
I use Twist daily and it seems abandoned. There are few UI/UX problems that hurt me constantly and I don't remember when was the last time the app was updated.
- janejeon 4y ago
  > I don't remember when was the last time the app was updated checks app store Uhhhhhh... 17 hours ago?

robertlagrant 4y ago

> Teams is extremely well integrated with the rest of the Microsoft suite. Erm. Not sure someone who's used it would say that :-)

LilBytes 4y ago
He's not wrong, it's well integrated, but they're all shit just easily connected. E.g, SharePoint is absolutely awful.

Manheim 4y ago

I have used Slack, Teams and Discord. If I should choose one I would go for Discord. Discord is much better in the collaboration department for distributed teams, and I love their open audio channels. It just works. Teams is good when it comes to integration with office and onedrive (of course). Slack is, in my opinion, just another chat service. A hugely successful one with a big user base and a strong brand, but not superior when it comes to collaboration.

Dave3of5 4y ago

I'm actually really interesting in this. What are the top 3 things you could change in slack / teams that would make you switch. I'll go first: * Notifications settings are annoying I'm either swamped with notifications or miss them. I want to be able to switch of notifications for short periods * I want to group discussions about certain things. I.e. if we are discussing a JIRA issue I can select the message and group them into something that I can attach to the issue we are discussing * Too many private chats - I'd like to ban private chats as I find there's some great info in these which are often not shared to the group

another-dave 4y ago
Notifications need to be more intelligent — if Mary rarely posts in a channel (or joined the channel just to post) it might be worth more attention than John who keeps pressing enter mid stream of consciousness. If you've a long running channel like a "developers channel" it probably has some bot integrations — "the last PR failed linting". It should be possible to mute these without muting the whole channel. A lot of problems come down to company culture though. I think the hard work of fostering good practices is something outside of a tool's remit. Maybe it should be a point on people's annual review if you want to get people to use it as less of a rubbish bin. "Sorry Peter, you won't get a pay rise this year as you sent an at-channel message to the team every day in Feb even when we told you that was really disruptive"(!) Most places don't care about these efficiencies enough though (yet). E.g. if people were as wasteful with company expense accounts as they are with other people's attention it would definitely get sorted out.
- Dave3of5 4y ago
  Yeah a lot of orgs and employees are pretty toxic and Slack and teams makes it very easy to be like that. I wonder if there is a tech solution to this or if it's something that has to be handled outside of the tool.

hexo 4y ago

I cant believe I read Slack and fast in one sentence. We use mattermost and its mostly OK to the point i'm willing to use it which cannot be said about Slack. Forcing me to have Slack open all the time was reason I left a job. It was unbearable.

Jailbird 4y ago
It's surprising to read that. No one at work hates it so much, afaik. I wonder what's different about our channel lineup, usage habits, or anything else that is such a contrast to your experience.
norman784 4y ago
I think is fast if you compare with the other products mentioned, I hope they get their shit together (Slack and Teams) and build a real native app that is fast and use a lot less ram.

bengale 4y ago

It feels to me that the type of communication slack is used for can't scale to a huge company, rather than it being a tooling issue. It's useful to be able to pull disparate people into a channel when working on a project, or to be able to find someone from another team to ask a question. But, expecting people to be able to discuss things with everyone from a large organisation all of the time just seems destined for failure. At a certain size it probably makes sense to have actual humans in each department working out what communication needs to flow to the rest of the organisation and moving it in a different tool. Maybe links to those "publications" are posted in an all hands channel that most people have muted until they're ready to sit down and catch up with what everybody else is doing, but I can't imagine a situation where they should be getting notifications in real time about it.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

Not to get off topic but the problem I find (consistently) with online comms (i.e., email, Slack, Teams, FB Groups, LinkedIn, etc.) is subpar human to human communication skills. Typically, adding (unnecessary) friction is: vagueness or ambiguity. We can't read each others' minds. We're not sitting in each other's seats / moments. My current context (i.e., what I'm focused on) has influence on where my thought process can go next. Dropping your without-warning thought bomb in the middle of that without a hint of context is too assuming. Assumption-based Comms creates unnecessary noise and friction. And yes, these missteps at scale certainly don't help.

brixtonbrew 4y ago

This is spot on. But most software for work doesn't function at scale. It's not just Slack. That's the central thesis behind Qatalog - which is really cool. It says it's a 'Work Hub that helps teams collaborate at scale'. Read more here if interested - https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-founder-ceo-tariq-rauf/ https://qatalog.com/blog/post/qatalog-founder-ceo-tariq-rauf... Some have described it as a structured Notion, but it combines lots of functionality from project management, to org charts, to threads and discussion, as well as knowledge management.

SMAAART 4y ago

We use Slack at work, and I hate it. The ratio of Signal to Noise is brutal, and there's no accountability. But the issue is not Slack per se, Slack does what Slack does: synchronous, instant, INFORMAL communication. If we want better processes we don't need a better Slack, we need better processes and enforcing better habits. If we want traceability of information, we need data-rich communications and structured communications, and we have other tools to do that, from emails to databases to actual systems that reside outside Slack. So now the problem is enforceability and not the tool per se. My favorite solution is an Agile organization with Agile team. Vertically integrated where each lead has 4-5 reports, each responsible for projects, processes and documentation. The problem to adoption is that the C-suite doesn't understand processes, and leads don't want to be bothered. So the broken information system enterprise continue its crippled path, akin to walking in the dark. The enterprise needs process innovation, not technical innovation.

kevincox 4y ago

I feel like the cycle of Slack is: 1. Everyone subscribes everyone to tons of notifications and people send email to everyone. 2. Everyone gets too much email and starts ignoring it. 3. Everyone hates email, no one responds. 4. They switch to Slack. It is great, high signal-to-noise, channels to organize. 5. People start adding notifications, subscriptions, blasting messages to many channels. 6. You are back to all of the problems of email.

lamplovin 4y ago

I think the author should invest in learning the keyboard shortcuts and search more often. They’re great and allow me to move around slack with ease. Also reminders for things you don’t want to think about at the moment work well too The noise issue seems tool agnostic to me, if you converse with noisy people who are sporadic with posting and put important messages in threads/channels with less visibility then you’d have issues no matter what tool you use. Does anyone ever read a company wide email longer than 1 paragraph anyway? At least with slack you can search it