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Give it a couple years, you'll learn to hate it. I have dozens of channels and countless group chats with 1-5 people. I was added to those channels when the cha

Give it a couple years, you'll learn to hate it. I have dozens of channels and countless group chats with 1-5 people. I was added to those channels when the channel members needed my two cents about something, but now I'm still in these channels, months later. Do I really want to be the guy purging all his Slack channels? Just wait until you're trying to look up a really, really important message, but you can't figure out what word (or synonym thereof) to search for that will give you the results you need. Better hope you didn't leave that channel in an effort to clean up your channels. It sounds like your organization already has a solution, which is a combination of GH issues and Jira. Slack is fine as a supplement to more structured methods of communication, but as the main communication method, it's a disaster. Maybe Slack is better than the "unnamed but awful FAANG tool," but by your own admission, the bar is on the floor. We can do better.

chrisbolt 4y ago
> Do I really want to be the guy purging all his Slack channels? Why not?
- slotrans 4y ago
  It screams "I'm about to quit"
  - progman32 4y ago
    This is group culture dependent. For us, people popped in and out as needed. We cheered when someone said "I need a slack break" and signed out for a day, and were glad when we saw people clean up their channels because we knew they'd be able to get more actual work done. We got there because people just decided to purge one day, despite maybe looking bad. This normalized the behavior over time. It's just like walking out of a meeting saying "y'all got this, I'm not going to be of help". It can seem rude to some, but it can also seem rude to stick around just to for looks.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      > It's just like walking out of a meeting saying "y'all got this, I'm not going to be of help". It can seem rude to some, but it can also seem rude to stick around just to for looks. Rude or not, sticking around in meetings you can't add/receive value to/from is a great way to get nothing done.
  - carlivar 4y ago
    You've never witnessed a communications existential crisis?
  - 4ndrewl 4y ago
    It screams "I'm organised and capable of planning"
jxramos 4y ago
Yes, jumping in and out is a freedom of your choice. I do it all the time. Do it ruthlessly when channels stagnate. We have a convention of prefixing channels with wg_ to denote working group channels which are short lived projects of limited duration. They get archived once the objectives are met. By all means leave fruitless channels, wait until someone pings you with an @ or they add you back to a channel. You can also mute channels that are too noisy but require your membership.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  Agreed. If anyone feels some kind of way about you leaving a Slack channel, parent's company is using it wrong. I'd kinda guess parent's corporate culture also tends to accrete huge email CC lists? As that's the same human problem: add, but never remove. And also, Slack search by default is global: you don't have to be in a channel to get a search hit.
akdor1154 4y ago
> Do I really want to be the guy purging all his Slack channels? Yeah I think you do, if it's an endemic issue then there are probably loads of people in the same boat, who would like to see a first mover to do something about it.
progman32 4y ago
For many years at an old gig it was either a) almost zero docs or b) meager docs in the form of Slack archives. A terrible situation no matter the choice of A or B, but we chose B and at the end of the day we had something to show. Did it prolong our dysfunction? Hard to say. When I left the culture was shifting a bit towards expecting slack convos to be rewritten as formal documentation after the immediate question is resolved, which is much better. If nothing else it lit a fire under me to improve my technical writing. Seeing someone use your doc to breeze through a challenge is a special feeling. A good manager will notice that. By analogy, chat tools are the coal-fired plant to more formal documentation's solar. Coal is comparatively easy and will get you bootstrapped, but it will wreck your environment. Use it to get to solar and things will be OK.
- ryukoposting 4y ago
  > When I left the culture was shifting a bit towards expecting slack convos to be rewritten as formal documentation after the immediate question is resolved I am suddenly grateful that I work in an industry with heavily regulated documentation requirements.
type-r 4y ago
why does it matter what channels you're in? i just mute all channels except for the ones that i actually care about. my channel list is probably in the low hundreds but i hide it anyway and just use stars to show the ones i often navigate to
- ryukoposting 4y ago
  Why aren't channels muted by default?
hello2023 4y ago
In my team when someone asks me to look at some issues, my very first question is always where they see the alert. Because there are a huge number of "alert" channels. And I am very "happy" spending most of my days doing nothing much than searching and looking up things lolz

chrisbolt 4y ago

> Do I really want to be the guy purging all his Slack channels? Why not?

slotrans 4y ago
It screams "I'm about to quit"
- progman32 4y ago
  This is group culture dependent. For us, people popped in and out as needed. We cheered when someone said "I need a slack break" and signed out for a day, and were glad when we saw people clean up their channels because we knew they'd be able to get more actual work done. We got there because people just decided to purge one day, despite maybe looking bad. This normalized the behavior over time. It's just like walking out of a meeting saying "y'all got this, I'm not going to be of help". It can seem rude to some, but it can also seem rude to stick around just to for looks.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    > It's just like walking out of a meeting saying "y'all got this, I'm not going to be of help". It can seem rude to some, but it can also seem rude to stick around just to for looks. Rude or not, sticking around in meetings you can't add/receive value to/from is a great way to get nothing done.
- carlivar 4y ago
  You've never witnessed a communications existential crisis?
- 4ndrewl 4y ago
  It screams "I'm organised and capable of planning"

jxramos 4y ago

Yes, jumping in and out is a freedom of your choice. I do it all the time. Do it ruthlessly when channels stagnate. We have a convention of prefixing channels with wg_ to denote working group channels which are short lived projects of limited duration. They get archived once the objectives are met. By all means leave fruitless channels, wait until someone pings you with an @ or they add you back to a channel. You can also mute channels that are too noisy but require your membership.

ethbr0 4y ago
Agreed. If anyone feels some kind of way about you leaving a Slack channel, parent's company is using it wrong. I'd kinda guess parent's corporate culture also tends to accrete huge email CC lists? As that's the same human problem: add, but never remove. And also, Slack search by default is global: you don't have to be in a channel to get a search hit.

akdor1154 4y ago

> Do I really want to be the guy purging all his Slack channels? Yeah I think you do, if it's an endemic issue then there are probably loads of people in the same boat, who would like to see a first mover to do something about it.

progman32 4y ago

For many years at an old gig it was either a) almost zero docs or b) meager docs in the form of Slack archives. A terrible situation no matter the choice of A or B, but we chose B and at the end of the day we had something to show. Did it prolong our dysfunction? Hard to say. When I left the culture was shifting a bit towards expecting slack convos to be rewritten as formal documentation after the immediate question is resolved, which is much better. If nothing else it lit a fire under me to improve my technical writing. Seeing someone use your doc to breeze through a challenge is a special feeling. A good manager will notice that. By analogy, chat tools are the coal-fired plant to more formal documentation's solar. Coal is comparatively easy and will get you bootstrapped, but it will wreck your environment. Use it to get to solar and things will be OK.

ryukoposting 4y ago
> When I left the culture was shifting a bit towards expecting slack convos to be rewritten as formal documentation after the immediate question is resolved I am suddenly grateful that I work in an industry with heavily regulated documentation requirements.

type-r 4y ago

why does it matter what channels you're in? i just mute all channels except for the ones that i actually care about. my channel list is probably in the low hundreds but i hide it anyway and just use stars to show the ones i often navigate to

ryukoposting 4y ago
Why aren't channels muted by default?

hello2023 4y ago

In my team when someone asks me to look at some issues, my very first question is always where they see the alert. Because there are a huge number of "alert" channels. And I am very "happy" spending most of my days doing nothing much than searching and looking up things lolz