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Your criticisms of Slack are actually criticisms of your company's use of Slack. You can tell people to keep non-work chat to a few channels that people who don't want to see that stuff can mute. You can have a rule that states "Notifications of server fires should not be done over the company chat application". You can have a per-team, per-project channel for conversations about those things.

It's not really any different to email. I've worked in offices where people use group lists to inform everyone that there's donuts in the kitchen, and dozens of people reply-all to say thank you. That doesn't mean email is broken; it means people use email badly. In exactly the same way, Slack is a tool. How you use it determines how effective it is.

A better app would holistically encourage proper use. Slack does not. For example, what if we could schedule group chats? We schedule meetings (well, I hope we do). Group chat is just digital meetings. If all chats are just throwaway (metaphorically, it's all archived, of course!) private chats with only the people that need to be included, then we can schedule them for a specific time (with a Doodle-type scheduler, even).

Group chat is just digital meetings.

I think of group chat as more akin to a digital open-plan office, with both the good and the bad connotations of that.

For example, what if we could schedule group chats?

You can: https://meekan.com/slack/

I'd argue that an open office, in the absence of strict library rules, is analogous to an all-day meeting, e.g. "quick question!".

Meekan looks interesting, and they have the idea right (since as a third-party they are limited), but it's a plugin, and it's a bot[1]. Scheduling would be a core concept of my theoretical group-chat app - something you were incredibly encouraged to do by the interface, instead of bothering an arbitrary number of people that are probably trying to focus.

[1] the problem with bots is that it pushes stuff that ought to be "interface" into public view, with all of the notification and visual noise baggage that is implied by that.

Date/time localization should just work, here Amy needs to manually ask for it, and everyone else is notified that she did! And that doesn't even cover language localization! If I'm having a meeting with a colleague whose English is weak and prefers Chinese, will it just drop even more noise into the chat when she requests a translation?

> and dozens of people reply-all to say thank you

And then when you tell them off they reply (to all) saying sorry

We all know who does that

> There are only three notification states

...and they apply equally to all channels. I'm in the company "what to get for lunch" channel, but I do not ever want notifications from that channel unless someone specifically mentions me. I don't even want to see there are unread messages in it. Can I configure this? Of course not.

I also don't want to receive any notifications from some bot users. Can I ignore notifications specifically from particular users? Of course not.

And don't get me started on searching. I want a simple incremental search in the current buffer, ideally regex capable. Why does it have to open a god damned sidebar that doesn't even fit in the window to show the results?

Actually, the whole thing about how incredibly inefficiently it uses the screen space it's given is a real bother. I disliked Skype for taking up way too much space, but Slack is even worse!

I realise most of these complaints are about the official client but it's provided as a part of the service and there aren't many alternatives yet, which is a problem with the service.

Actually, you can do that, it's "Muting" the channel. Click the gear icon for that channel and go to notification preferences.

Thanks! Is this a new feature? I tried searching for it a couple of months ago and didn't find anything. I'd still like to get notifications when I'm specifically mentioned (but not when @everybody is) but this is better than nothing.

I think that feature has been around for at least a year

"@channel notifications Suppress notifications for @channel and @here mentions" on the notification preferences.. but for whatever silly reason, you cant flip this toggle while the channel is muted, so if its muted, unmute->checkbox->mute

I feel that in almost any discussion about slack, someone pops up with essentially my parent comment's message -- listing the ills of the app, which I interpret roughly as "people's communication styles are a bother, and interruptions are my bane, therefore slack is bad"

Each time, I'm inclined to dismiss these messages. They make me think "well, I don't want to work with you because you sound like an uptight asshole who insists on everyone wearing a suit to maintain decorum, and no hats indoors". I end up feeling that we would not get along at all in real life, and I (usually) ignore the message and (sometimes) scoff.

But every time, there is a minor host of "thank you for expressing exactly how I feel about this" messages beneath, and frequently the comment is highly upvoted, so, I am now forced to confront the facts: that you are not a bad person, that you probably aren't as rare as I imagine, and that you (and authors of similar posts) are probably a perfect pleasure to know and to work with. We just hold different preferences -- both of which are equally valid.

To express my own: I like most of the structural elements of slack. I am not bothered by the interruptions it can cause. I send short streams of messages sometimes because I feel it can convey useful information about how the thoughts were chunked.

I am also (hopefully) not a bad person or a pain to work with, but might come off as such to you, were I to merely state my opposing preferences as fact or to note that slack's support for them makes it great.

Perhaps slack should change, or another product should fill that gap. Perhaps there are other groups with preferences that don't align with you or me at all! Either way, I find these thoughts much more interesting and healthy than imagining that I might dislike you, which was my former attitude. So, thanks. :)

I think that bad group chat behavior (which is encouraged by the UI of group chat applications that I've used) and dress codes both fall under the same category. They make me less productive, which generally translates into longer hours and more stress.

I like strict workplace policies iff they actually improve my productivity. Otherwise, they are harmful.

I wonder if there's an overlap with people that like strict static compilers that scream if anything is even remotely incorrect.

I love those compilers. The suit analogy is way off.

Not to mention an incredibly heavy web-wrapper Mac app, a memory hog especially if you join multiple Slacks. I actually like using Slack, but this kills it for me. Wishing that a company whose core product is a chat client invested into building a great chat client.

Yes, code reuse, can iterate faster, saves engineering time, etc., but does this all matter if the user experience is sacrificed?

(Spotify, I'm also looking at you.)

slack web client is hot garbage -- it takes a 5-count to switch threads.

I'm fine with them using a web view for the chat display (even Apple does that, IIRC), but the wrapper interface, and especially the text input fields, should be Cocoa. NSTableView isn't that hard.

Every Eve Online teamspeak chat I have ever been in had a better discipline than any skype or slack work chat I have ever been in.

Then try to implement teamspeak as your work communication tool and see how that works out.

Eve Online player are incredibly well organised, they would probably have no issue on Slack either.

Don't use a team of volunteer who share the same goal, passion and vision to judge the quality of a communication tool intended to be used at work where people disagree, backstab each other and generally don't want to be there, those are two very different populations.

> people disagree, backstab each other and generally don't want to be there, those are two very different populations.

So, may be the problem doesn't lie with a tool anyway.

Imagine a future with guaranteed minimal income, where all the companies are staffed by people whose primary motivation is the same as Eve Online players...

Telegram has a great reply feature so you can respond to someone's message and give your comment some reference when there are either a few conversations happening at the same time or if you haven't been on in a while and want to comment on a message that was a bit back in the dialog.

Good points all round. I enjoy StackOverflow's contextual IM implementation - as soon as a conversation becomes too lengthy it creates a room for you and attaches that room to the question/answer.

If I were to have a shot at disrupting Slack, I'd definitely contextually interleave IM and email into a variety of systems: tickets, bugs, processes, etc. Just today I spent an unacceptable amount of time hunting down an email related to a ticket. Communication should occur within the context of work, not alongside it.

> At least emails could be responded to at relative leisure.

We thought IM was the answer to the email problem. Instead, we've found out that we've replaced it with a far greater demon.

I recently started using Flowdock after a similar experience with Slack and it seems to solve a lot of these problems with threaded conversations in channels.

Thanks you echoed my exact sentiments. I thought everyone else was drinking the Slack Koolaid. To me Slack is one of those tools that make people feel like they're productive and getting things done. When in actuality it can be a net negative.

interruption rate is a critical productivity metric and we sweep it under the rug. until last year I was never in a 1-on-1 when someone stopped to look at their phone but something changed; blame at-work chat for the cultural shift.

I agree with you completely. The notification ecosystem is toxic to work and slack, by camouflaging itself as work, is the worst offender.

I've experimented with remote work and bad actors on chat can still ruin that. Unless it's your job to answer the phone, the expectation of being interruptible is killer no matter where you are.

You have a culture problem, not a technology problem.

SVN says this better than I can:

> It’s common in the software industry to blame the users. It’s the user’s fault. They don’t know how to use it. They’re using it wrong. They need to do this or do that. But the reality is that tools encourage specific behaviors. A product is a series of design decisions with a specific outcome in mind. Yes, you can use tools as they weren’t intended, but most people follow the patterns suggested by the design. And so in the end, if people are exhausted and feeling unable to keep up, it’s the tool’s fault, not the user’s fault. If the design leads to stress, it’s a bad design.

https://m.signalvnoise.com/is-group-chat-making-you-sweat-74...

Don Norton agrees

And what would that culture problem be?

The culture problem is that the team believes a tool to help get work done is to be used for frivolous activities. No amount of technological solutioning is going to prevent people from mixing "donuts in the break room" in with important "the server crashed" messages.

But isn't one of Slack's main ideas that groupchat should be colorful and fun? Adding support for animated gifs and emoji is an important design choice.

The culture of blaming technological problems on culture, of course.

So culturally most teams value communication, therefore you need notifications because communication is an inherently valuable good. But this is a tool for a business sector where the $$$ are generated by people in deep flow, and notifications disrupt flow. So there is a technological design failure of including a notification system but culturally not being allowed to say no to it.

For example, everyone hates the (non slack) IM system where I work because its a disruptive annoyance of little value, so we all complain much like op about the users using it wrong, when whats really wrong is the design and we don't have the strength to overrule the cultural value.

I don't think Slack is perfect, but a few of your points don't line up with how I've seen Slack used with many different groups.

In business (and outside of business), anyone can be interrupted at any time regardless of Slack. If people are expecting immediate replies 100% of the time, that's a cultural thing, not a Slack thing. It's very common to send a message to someone who's on vacation and get a response a week later, just like with email. Of course _more_ conversation happens in real time on Slack as compared to email, but that's kind of the point. They are fundamentally different types of conversations. The various notification options that slack provides (per-channel per-device type, global pattern notifications, etc) mean you can pretty much avoid being interrupted except when you really want to be. People who get mad that you don't respond to Slacks right away are the same people who get mad that you don't respond to emails right away.

Three notifications states is pretty much the same or better than any other sort of emergency communication. Pagers, text alerts, emails, etc have essentially the same degree of distinction between messages, with the reader having to determine severity from context. A text message from GrubHub is less important to me than one from PagerDuty, but my text messaging system doesn't know that. So it's true that if you had a single channel in slack where people were talking about donuts and server fires you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. But you shouldn't have a channel where people are talking about donuts and server fires.

Slack makes it very clear that channels should be treated as disposable. I agree that they shouldn't be spun up and down as quickly as email subjects/threads, but again we're talking about different forms of communication. Slack is, by definition, _chat_, which means there's a lot more of if than email. For the most part chat is meant to reach some end point, whereas email _is_ the end point. It's rarely valuable to go back and read through a chat transcript on some topic, even if it's nicely delineated. Are there extremely verbose email threads? Yes, but they are equally as useless after the fact.

I think part of the Slack backlash confuses me, because it really just moved where this type of conversation was happening. Across every Slack team I see stats for, the ratio of private to public chats is huge, and private chat was happening before Slack (in IM, Gooogle Chat, etc). And I don't think the way those messages are being treat, or the expectation for replies, is really any different. The new chat that's happening tends to be very low volume.