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Comment by dood | Hacker News Reader

It is true that Slack allows multi-line posts and discrete conversations, but both go totally against the grain of the system design.

Expecting people to use Slack in a way it wasn't designed for can only result in failure or constant friction.

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Not just the system design, but also the culture. I know a few people who post coherent, properly punctuated and capitalized sentences and paragraphs here on HN, but they write on Slack like this:

one line at a time

no caps or periods

stream of thought

enter each time

I posted a parody of this style a while back:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11239614

Guilty at charged

^ as

its funny i found out something

i never new

* knew

^ is something else

* is to correct

and never use the edit button!

oops,

I meant *

thanks

What you describe is the most natural, effortless way to use Slack. Conversely the design makes it very cumbersome to compose thoughtful, well-formatted responses. And the more people use the former style, the less value the latter has. So users tend toward spewing out crap rather than having considered discussion, because Slack's system design strongly encourages it.

It takes so much cultural pressure, moaning and nagging to use Slack in a high signal-to-noise manner that I'm quite bearish on it's long-term prospects, and applaud OP's effort at building a system designed more for collaboration than shitposting.

How are shift+enter newlines "totally against the grain of the system design"? Most every chat system I'm aware of supports this and displays it in a sane way. If people are misusing the system, training/instruction is in order.

It may seem like a little thing, but you have to be very careful while typing not to accidentally press Enter. I've found this to be surprisingly difficult, and it makes typing a lot more stressful.

For a while gmail had this ui "feature" where <tab><enter> or <tab>string-of-characters<space> would send an email without prompting.

I still fear the web UI. I guess emailing out bullet lists was against the implicit use case the gmail UI team had in mind.

Stuff like this definitely changes how tools are used.

In the case of Gmail (and most email systems really) I always start out by putting my own address in the To: field. That way if I accidentally send it will just come back to me. It can also be useful because I can first send the email to myself to double check the way it will look on the receiving end before sending it to the actual recipient.

This exact problem led to my current behavior that I now use in all email apps: I delete/never fill in the "to" fields leaving that for last. Can't accidentally send an email to nowhere...

Entirely unrelated to the Slack discussion, but I wonder if that could be a positive pattern for a mail client: only allowing you to define the recipients when you have written out the full message.

Also, when replying to a long mail thread, showing you the previous list of recipients and requiring you to select those that you want to include in your next mail. Could limit CC sprawl quite a bit.

The trick I use if I'm writing anything more than one paragraph is to write it first in my #mike personal channel (easy to get to with Ctrl+K or Cmd+K), and then copy and paste it to the channel it's intended for.

This way I don't have to worry about hitting Enter at the wrong time. I can also preview the message so I see exactly how it will be formatted, and no one has to see the "mike is typing" messages while I edit.

I also went to the extreme of creating a private Slack team just for myself. I was using the personal channel trick and found that if I included an image in my talking-to-myself message, and then pasted it to another channel, it didn't automatically display the image in that channel. I guess Slack figured the image had already been displayed somewhere within the team even though it wasn't in a public or private channel. I have a feeling this has been fixed by now.

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