Introducing Highlights
slack.engineering
slack.engineering
The jokes, wit, and quips on the other hand... those get reacted to. So there's a good chance those are going to be the highlights. Which, while fun, is a complete waste of screen real estate and isn't going to help me be more productive.
When our DB is being updated, or our staging instance is gonna be down briefly, or "Here's an article about security updates just released for x," there isn't huge engagement. You know, stuff that actually affects my work as a dev.
I really don't want to see highlights of "@channel can someone dog sit for the weekend? here are pictures!" or similar things that aren't pertinent to work.
Then I remembered I was thinking of Discord, which to me is better than Slack at most of the things I use Slack for. So...yeah, that's a weird decision for Slack.
Me too. The all threads list being in opposite chronological order as the all unread list blew my mind also.
So I've moved everything to discord and have never been happier. Faster, smoother, chat as it should be, with no 10,000 message limit and broken search. I really wish every public slack group would switch (like Elixir and others). With a 10,000 message limit and 700+ users online, it's practically snapchat...
Not to mention webhooks being dead simple and dead awesome.
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I know there's third party sites that act as directories but it's a bit of a hassle, I wish they'd have two separate products, the gaming one with a public directory and one to create private communities that can be used for other purposes.
When you have too much money and a large enough product team, the path of least resistance seems to be: keep them busy building as many features as they can.
The end result is that a product that was successful _because_ of its simplicity loses its primary appeal and switches to a business model predicated on networking effect and/or marketing.
Sadly, WinAmp Syndrome is usually fatal.
I guess I am just not sophisticated user to configure it to my requirements.
Over time though, you get used to it, and it is imho much less cumbersome to use than any alternatives (certainly IRC). Need to send a large XML file? Hit the plus button next to where you type messages. Want to just dump it to chat? Surround in triple backticks.
I think this is much better solved as a social problem. Use mentions sparingly so they have value and have company conventions about what's expected to be read/skimmed/ignored.
Seems like a case of fitting a solution to a problem.
How about a native desktop app.
Currently, anyone who wants to write a 3rd-party client has to use the IRC bridge. That doesn't have the same capabilities as Slack's client.
Note this does not use the IRC gateway, but it plugs the slack API into WeeChat, and supports most slack functionality not found with the IRC gateway.
[1]https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack/blob/master/README.md
But it's not just chat. With interactive messages, Slack is becoming more like an OS for communications and business processes. And there are seemingly infinite ways for it to evolve to better serve the needs of just about anyone using it to communicate with others.
On the topic of feature engineering: I think the use of those inline-emojis on a message are a good indicator of importance. That could be another feature for the logistic regression.
Overall seems like a fun modeling challenge. It's nice to see people not just throw deep learning at the problem...
Upon first reading that, I thought you meant that more emojis implies more importance, and I was very curious about what kind of conversations you and your peers were having on Slack
Especially if I get prompted to read them- I hope they are configurable unlike so many other components in slack too.