Actually, Slack really sucks

Now try this in Slack. Remember, it’s one of 10 issues you’ll have in a day, so you start with creating a group chat instead of a dedicated channel.

Stop. All of the problems that follow this statement are a result of creating a group chat instead of a channel. If you're creating a group chat, you're most likely doing it wrong. You should have long-running specialized channels by topic that includes the relevant people. For example, if you're discussing a bug in XYZ analytics, post in #xyz-analytics. If you're discussing something specialized and short-lived, create a channel anyway. For example, #xyz-1.1-release. This helps in allowing engineers to focus on channels that are relevant to them.

Go through all the channels with notifications showing, reading through each channel. Realise most of the content wasn’t relevant to me. Sometimes miss content that was that had shot too far up the page overnight.

Unless that communication simply wasn't happening (in which case, Slack is a making a positive impact), that communication existed in some form elsewhere. It might have been email or in person, but either way, if the volume increased for you it's probably because you are simply privy to it now where you weren't before. Perhaps it's not relevant for you. That's fine, because at some point it will be, whereas you would have been excluded before. That means being able to head off bad decisions before they've had much time to gestate.

I've established a guideline for my group that all (non-sensitive) communication should happen in public, and that means on Slack. That alone has made a big difference in making sure people are in the loop and that bad decisions are visible to everyone. Slack isn't my ideal vehicle for this (I'd prefer something behind a firewall), but if it gets people talking out loud, then sure.

- If you need a way to discuss specific topics with specific people over time, you make a new mailing list.

- If you want to have one single conversation within a specific group and topic, and follow it logically, just reply to the thread. You can forward the thread and the conversation remains, and can continue.

- You can ignore all conversations that aren't addressed to you, or go back and read them, one thread at a time.

- You can archive all of this, hierarchically, per mailing list, and search or browse it later.

Now - if you want to have a LIVE conversation, nothing's going to beat a chat room. It really does not matter what kind of chat room. But sometimes you join the chat late - it's good to see the old conversation and catch up. And after the conversation, you might want a log of it later. Somehow, most chat services in the world seem to miss this.

IRC has kludges that support this. Jabber was supposed to fix this (I think?), in a platform-independent way. Yet nobody wants to use Jabber. (Probably because most implementations suck or are incomplete)

Here's my question:

If an entire ecosystem of software has thrived for a generation using existing tools (IRC, mailing lists, and now Jabber), why the hell is every corporation in the world dead-set on running away from them screaming? THEY'VE WORKED FOR 20+ YEARS! edit answering my own question: they don't have support contracts.

I'm usually in 50 IRC channels at once. My workflow when I open irc is to check my hilight window for pings, and then glance at the channel list for backscroll chatter in channels I follow closely (if bored, also look at chatter in other channels). I then respond to things, and switch back to the hilight window. I occasionally glance at this window to check for more pings and chatter in said channels. Each check is a quick glance, and can be done without context-switching.

I am in a bunch of slack teams, but I only really care about one channel in each. It takes much longer to handle these, since I need to open a tab for each, and if I've been pinged go look for the ping.

IRC sucks, but at least everything is in one place. I'd be far more productive with slack if there was a unified app for all teams with a dedicated notifications panel.

We never found any tool that would completely satisfy our collaboration needs, so we created Missive: https://missiveapp.com

It’s built on the idea that conversations should be scoped and archivable, just like emails. It’s both a full-featured email client and chat app. We can share emails and comment within threads, as well as create new chats from scratch and invite only the right people to discuss specific matters. When a topic is over, we just archive or snooze it like emails.

I have written in details about our vision: https://medium.com/missive-app/building-the-team-communicati...

Love it!

Why do I need to create a new account for each slack team I want to join? I am the same person.

Joining a slack team should be an entitlement that gets granted to my identity -not an entirely separate account.

As well people using @channel gets tiresome when you're on vacation and slack is on your phone.

Basically slack is noisy in my situation, i wonder if for many?

Also because chat is so informal, everyone posts needlessly (shoot from the hip with no consideration for whether you're wasting someones' time)

One solution is the judicious use of @ (in Hipchat at least). People should also consider chat to be informal mail rather than chat when you're in the office.

@mention which generates an email is the only way to pull me in a thread. Meaning that my email client is still the main source of communication.

Slack is good for non-work related threads with my co-workers. We have a channel dedicated just to miscellaneous non-sense which can be rather entertaining. What is nice about the channel is that it isn't a long running email thread that needs to be muted and I only check it out when I want to. However, it could just as well be an IRC channel...

My biggest gripe with using Slack is that teams are managed individually. I can't have one Slack account from which I can view all of my teams and interact with them. Rather, I have to create separate accounts for each one, as if each team is using a completely different service. Then I have to remember a multitude of emails, usernames, and passwords.

But this is where the OP totally lost me:

> In the olden days, you’d send around a group email. As things progressed, relevant people would be added to the email chain and irrelevant people removed. It wasn’t on trend and it might have been clunky but it served its purpose. If a person needed information from one specific person, they could contact them individually in the chain. Everyone could input ideas and get the issue solved. When the issue was out of the way, the whole thing could be shut down with a press of the delete key.

Those are some seriously rose-tinted lenses. Again, I haven't used Slack for work, but unless Slack is significantly clunkier than HipChat/Gchat, and the Slack client sends an electrical shock upon each message sent/received, I'm having a hard time believing that Slack is overall less pleasant than the email-chain-discussions of the past.

Ignoring the fact that the OP describes the most idyllic discussion-by-email-chain situation in this history of the universe when arguing why Slack chat is so inferior, the main flaw in his argument is that maybe his company has cultural communication problems overall that are exacerbated by features of Slack that are helpful to others?

Here's his main complaint:

Now try this in Slack. Remember, it’s one of 10 issues you’ll have in a day, so you start with creating a group chat instead of a dedicated channel. Now add someone. Yup. You’ve now just started an entirely different group chat. All the context of the conversation has gone and you’ve found yourself starting over, having to re-explain the whole situation for each new person added. You’ve also suddenly got a shitload of group chat windows open. Oh, and they aren’t named like channels, so which one of those four group chat windows you’ve now got open was it again? Oh shit. You got it right, but someone else didn’t. They’ve responded in the chat you were all using previously before you realised someone needed adding.

Sure, it's annoying to have to bring someone up to speed when inviting them into an ongoing conversation. Has the OP considered how fucking annoying it is to the person you've just forcefully invited into your conversation to read through several paragraphs/pages of pre-existing chatter to get themselves up to speed? It sounds like there are issues in Slack's interface that could be cleaned up, but the problem of new people being added into a group chat without being able to see the history is a feature that compels a few good practices:

1. Don't start a group chat for something that could be sussed out in a channel.

2. Don't start an important group chat without thinking of all the relevant stakeholders who might have input on the issue. Is it possible in Slack to invite someone into a group chat even if they're AFAIK (which would allow them to see the history of the conversation without having had to actively participate)?

3. For those situations in which you need to invite someone ad-hoc, make sure you can sum up the issue in a couple of sentences (e.g. "Hey Jane, Bob tells me you know about this [URL to Github issue]"). For situations in which the new person needs to know all of what you've discussed before and behind her back before you decided to rudely invite her to your chat, see Point 2.

I prefer https://flock.co (disclosure: was once part of the team that built it) it is fast, not buggy and makes different choices than slack for almost all the same problems.