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>Our mission is to build a product that makes work life simpler, more pleasant and more productive. I know it would be impossible but I wish we go back to the

• matthewmacleod 2y ago
  No, I don’t think Slack does play a role in this. It is quite literally a communication tool (and I’d argue one that encourages far _more_ open communication than others). If Slack is a cesspool, that’s because your company culture is a cesspool.
  • grob-gambit 2y ago
    I think open communication in a toxic environment can obviously amplify toxicity or at least less open communication can act as a damper on toxicity. Slack is surely not the generator of toxicity but it seems obvious it could act at increasing the bandwidth. You can't have it both ways.
• vasco 2y ago
  I disagree slack plays a role. You only mentioned human aspects, nothing to do with technology. There was always going to be instant messaging as software once computers and networks were invented. You'd just say this happens over email and blame email.
• rjh29 2y ago
  > That probably speaks more to the overall culture of the company Yep. Fun fact, my last workplace had a fairly nontoxic Slack... but there was a whole second Slack dedicated to bitching and shitposting where the bosses weren't invited. Humans gonna human.
  • grepfru_it 2y ago
    Was not limited to just the bosses who were not invited. If you weren’t in the cool club you also did not get an invite. A very inclusive company on paper that was very exclusionary behind the scenes.
    • eggdaft 2y ago
      What happened when someone from the cool club got promoted and became a boss?
• barkbyte 2y ago
  Your company sucks. I’ve used slack at four workplaces and it’s not been at all like that. A previous company had mailing lists and they were toxic as you describe. The tool was not the issue.
  • muglug 2y ago
    Yeah, written communication is harder than in-person communication. It’s easy to come across poorly in writing, but that issue has no easy resolution unless you’re prepared to ban Slack, email, and any other text-based communication system between employees. Slack can sometimes be a place for people who don’t feel heard in conventional spaces to vent — but that’s an organisational problem, not a Slack problem.
• userbinator 2y ago
  Switch to Teams instead. Only half-kidding, but it's an application which is so repulsive it seems to discourage people from communicating at all.
• rcaught 2y ago
  Keyboard warriors
• zemo 2y ago
  HN isn't really a bastion of media literacy or tech criticism. If you ever ask "does [some technology] affect [something qualitative] about [anything]", the response on hn is always going to be "technology isn't responsible, it's how the technology is used that is responsible!", asserting, over and over again, that technology is always neutral. The idea that the mechanism of how people communicate affects what people communicate is a pretty foundational concept in media studies (a topic which is generally met with a hostile audience on HN). Slack almost certainly does play a role, but people who work in technology are incentivized to believe that technology does not affect people's behaviors, because that belief allows people who work in technology to be free of any and all qualitative or moral judgements on any grounds; the assertion that technology does not play a role is something that technology workers cling to because it absolves them of all guilt in all situations, and makes them, above all else, innocent in every situation. On the specific concept of a medium of communication affecting what is being communicated, McLuhan took these ideas to such an extreme that it's almost ludicrous, but he still had some pretty interesting observations worth thinking on, and his writing on this topic is some of the earlier work. This is generally the place where people first look, because much of the other work assumes you've understood McLuhan's work in advance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Media