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I'll offer a counterpoint: The one thing I like better about Slack over email is the lack of constant spam from random apps. Working in a company means that o

by whstl 2y ago

I'll offer a counterpoint: The one thing I like better about Slack over email is the lack of constant spam from random apps. Working in a company means that only 1% of my email is actually from humans. I must constantly add new filters, because even small companies today use dozens of SaaS products that are constantly fighting for my attention, and only a small fraction of those messages is actually useful for me. Slack so far is just humans. Plus integrations mostly added by developers for developers. Of course this can change at any time, and I'll have random robot spam in Slack. Which means I will have no option other than start ignoring Slack as well and start asking people to come to my desk. Which might cause me to finally go into carpentry as I have been promising to do for the last 15 years.

VectorLock 2y ago
And if they do make them to slack, usually all those things that you would have to manually make filters for are usually in their own channels that you can just mute.
margana 2y ago
This. It's gotten to the point where I don't check email at all because of the constant spam of mails that are not actionable and/or urgent. There are so many different types of automated mails that setting up filters is a never-ending battle. For me, email now serves as an archive/log of everything that has been going on in the company. I search my email to find details about things I am notified about via other channels. Due to many people doing this, all important notifications that are actually actionable are now sent via Slack as well. So far these notifications are only for things where I actually need to urgently respond or do something, so none of the spam has yet reached Slack. Also, no one ever seems to personally send an email to another employee because Slack is always the better option, and people actually respond on Slack, unlike via email.
darkwater 2y ago
No "Slack apps" or Slack used as a notifications dump in your org? You are lucky. But I would warn you: Slack doesn't solve the "stealing your attention issue" that you are currently experiencing only with email.
- whstl 2y ago
  We add some apps ourselves to our own profiles (I have the Google Calendar one for example) but this is at least opt-in. The problem with email is that you subscribe to a service (or “get subscribed to”) and suddenly there’s 200 messages per week on your inbox that you gotta filter out and figure what the heck you’re gonna do with… The worst part is that you often NEED some of those notifications, a small portion of them at least, but an email notification is the shittiest form of notification ever when SaaS apps are involved, and SaaS apps rarely allow for good configuration granularity.
- brightball 2y ago
  The nice thing about those Slack integrations is that you can usually have a conversation with your team to adjust them for usefulness, such as better signal to noise ratio.
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    "usually" is the key word there. A previous employer had a "learning" team that used their slack bot to send unblockable DMs to everyone in the company every time they released optional employee trainings. "Work like an NBA player!" The manager was verbally abusive to anyone who brought it up as an issue too. They didn't program the bot very well though, because it had a separate employee->acct list from the org that you could modify to change who was messaged.
vultour 2y ago
That really depends on the company, mine has ~5k employees and the only spam I get is a daily "AI slop training" invitation from Microsoft.
- whstl 2y ago
  By spam I mean unsolicited transactional notifications that can't be disabled, or can't be disabled without affecting important notifications.
bigfatkitten 2y ago
I have 30-40 Slack apps or bots at work that spam me about pointless things. I can't block or filter their messages.

by whstl 2y ago

VectorLock 2y ago

And if they do make them to slack, usually all those things that you would have to manually make filters for are usually in their own channels that you can just mute.

margana 2y ago

This. It's gotten to the point where I don't check email at all because of the constant spam of mails that are not actionable and/or urgent. There are so many different types of automated mails that setting up filters is a never-ending battle. For me, email now serves as an archive/log of everything that has been going on in the company. I search my email to find details about things I am notified about via other channels. Due to many people doing this, all important notifications that are actually actionable are now sent via Slack as well. So far these notifications are only for things where I actually need to urgently respond or do something, so none of the spam has yet reached Slack. Also, no one ever seems to personally send an email to another employee because Slack is always the better option, and people actually respond on Slack, unlike via email.

darkwater 2y ago

No "Slack apps" or Slack used as a notifications dump in your org? You are lucky. But I would warn you: Slack doesn't solve the "stealing your attention issue" that you are currently experiencing only with email.

whstl 2y ago
We add some apps ourselves to our own profiles (I have the Google Calendar one for example) but this is at least opt-in. The problem with email is that you subscribe to a service (or “get subscribed to”) and suddenly there’s 200 messages per week on your inbox that you gotta filter out and figure what the heck you’re gonna do with… The worst part is that you often NEED some of those notifications, a small portion of them at least, but an email notification is the shittiest form of notification ever when SaaS apps are involved, and SaaS apps rarely allow for good configuration granularity.
brightball 2y ago
The nice thing about those Slack integrations is that you can usually have a conversation with your team to adjust them for usefulness, such as better signal to noise ratio.
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  "usually" is the key word there. A previous employer had a "learning" team that used their slack bot to send unblockable DMs to everyone in the company every time they released optional employee trainings. "Work like an NBA player!" The manager was verbally abusive to anyone who brought it up as an issue too. They didn't program the bot very well though, because it had a separate employee->acct list from the org that you could modify to change who was messaged.

vultour 2y ago

That really depends on the company, mine has ~5k employees and the only spam I get is a daily "AI slop training" invitation from Microsoft.

whstl 2y ago
By spam I mean unsolicited transactional notifications that can't be disabled, or can't be disabled without affecting important notifications.

bigfatkitten 2y ago

I have 30-40 Slack apps or bots at work that spam me about pointless things. I can't block or filter their messages.