Why I hate Slack and you should too | Hacker News Reader

Why I hate Slack and you should too

bitquabit.com

38 pointskornish30 comments

I fail to see the point of the post. In the situation that OP describes, Slack would only really replace IRC in his equation and maybe the phone calls since people can interrupt you by calling now. You can definitely snooze notifications and, if you're missing critical to-dos and tasks because they're getting lost in Slack chats, then you and your coworkers are not using Slack correctly (or, at the very least, you're not good at communicating urgency and/or priorities). He's/she's complaining about a human problem and blaming it on a piece of technology.

If you have soda and water within reach on the same shelf, and children choose soda over water, should we blame the results on the children or the arrangement of soda and water on the same shelf?

It's possible to modify the interface or situation to accommodate the person, rather than asking the person to change to the interface.

What slack is to me is a disruption of the traditional methods of communication which often comes with a disruption of ideas of sacredness and profanity.

There's always room for better tools but what I think Slack allows is leaving behind asynchronous email (which often devolves into real time chat) and instead embracing a stream of real time information.

One thing it very much leaves behind though is contextual information since that can often be interspaced with lots of garbage information. (Fun) perhaps a smart bot that can quickly summarize a weeks worth of info for you.

Regardless of slacks actual efficacy amongst people with varying expectations to work communication I think it draws attention to a need to improve our tools for communication for new work methodologies.

"So sometimes Slack notifications are totally not time-sensitive [snip] , and sometimes they require an immediate action [snip] and until I’ve read the message, I have absolutely no idea whether it deserves my immediate attention."

Isn't that the same problem with the other communications media they listed, at least with email and IRC?

Missing from the list: it encourages group conversation and therefore pointless (and often damaging) flame wars where opinions differ. At one point or another some otherwise decent human being starts using it as a platform to spread their particular brand of BS, be it opinions about programming languages / frameworks, past employers, social issues, their favorite (or disfavored) political candidate, and so on and so forth. Those being hot issues, people find it difficult to stay away, and it inevitably ends in tears. Signal to noise ratio ends up being abysmal, and the "productivity" tool ends up being very counterproductive.

That's why I turned off Slack at one point and told people that we're in the same building, and if they need to urgently talk to me, they can just stop by my desk, and if things can wait for a few hours, send me an email. Easy.

If that kind of thing is routinely happening in your office, it was probably happening without Slack as well. And that company probably has some bigger issues to address.

Not really, no. Once you give up Slack it's a much better place to work at. Thankfully the use of Slack is not mandatory here.

I agree with the informal and non-archival nature of Slack. Whenever a serious/word-related decision has been made or somebody drafted a summary for a slack discussion, it should be posted to Trello or some other platform which makes it easier for latecomers to glance through. 1500+ unread msgs after vacation is not fun. Do I miss anything important and work-related? Or just some random cat pictures and movie critics?

In addition, it's hard to track progress with Slack. It's multi-channel, multi-topic, multi-project, and etc. I mean, Slack is great for quick discussion, but terrible at keeping records.

I have no problem with Slack and I use it at work everyday. It's a lot better than the jabber/aim/Skype/salesforce combo the company was using before Slack.

That's like saying a root canal is better than extraction with a set of differently sized pliers.

I mean it is... but it's still not ideal.

I have said this a few times, but slack's biggest miss is the failure to offer a concise digest of what you missed while you were away. They could design the feature based on channels i'm in, @mentions, or even topics of discussion based on keywords used commonly in convo's i take part in.

Such a feature would remove much of the catchup FOMO people suffer from, whether you were signed out for an couple of hours, the evening or even a long vacation.

https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/226410907-View-all-...

My overwhelming experience has been that the people who hate Slack are people who don't know how to use it:

1. Learn how to mute channels.

2. Learn how to use the /channel action to bypass mutes (but only use when absolutely necessary)

3. Create channels for different topics, and for different groups of people. Create a "#random" channel where people can post silly crap without cluttering the main channels, for example.

4. Create channels for important announcements (with rules to keep these channels clear of random conversation).

5. Allow people to join and/or mute the channels that make sense for them.

6. Use threaded conversations instead of cluttering the main feed.

These simple mechanisms, once spread throughout your organization and used by everyone, will make Slack your friend. You will only get notifications for the things you want to see and/or things that are very important.

yes, i know im old and quaint, but most of these problems are completely solved by connecting to slack via an IRC client. they do a good job with the compatibility, snippets are just links, they echo your own msgs back to you if you use the app, etc. this way, you are only getting notifications like @here when you are using your computer, aka, working. i like to use smuxi, with a headless remote server configuration, this way i have slack, gchat, irc, and twitter all in one window that sync with all my other computers.

Seams like Automattic went the right way with using WordPress and their P2 Theme for internal use. [0] Departments, groups, or people can have their own "boards". Within that you can write posts or comment, mention people. The P2 theme is great for one liners to walls of text and pictures. Plenty of plugins to expand as need desire...

[0] https://ma.tt/2009/05/how-p2-changed-automattic/

they use slack.

I think the OP fails to realize that Slack has custom and flexible notifications. I'm hardly ever notified on my team's Slack (and boy howdy do they love using it), and the messages I do get notified about are important.

It is definitely hardcore lock in though, but what isn't these days?

Why I hate "Why I ___ and you should too" posts and you should too:

It reeks of attention seeking so from right off the bat I don't even want to read. It doesn't sound genuine. Also you don't get to tell me what to do or what not to do. Just share your experience modestly.

While I agree in principal, in practice this type of post gets far, far more attention. The more controversial / edgy you can be on social networks (and yes that even includes HN) the more hits and comments you can get.

The bad behavior gets reinforced and continues. Not sure what can be done to minimize it either.

I'd like to see some kind of client that combines a Slack-like real-time communications tool with an email client.

I don't know what I'd actually like this client to do, but I feel like there would be room for some interesting things there.

(Bring back Google Wave!)

Hello! Allow me to introduce Zoho Mail to you. Full disclosure - I work for Zoho Mail. But that aside, I believe we have the perfect client for your requirements.

Zoho Mail is designed for teams and works better if you're using it for your entire company. We've built a tool inside the inbox called Streams, which is a real-time communication tool around your email.

Streams help you talk to your team around an email. You can make a stream and @mention anyone on your team, then send a quick message to them. It's a bit like team chat or a company Facebook—a simple way to discuss things with colleagues without having to make a full email with a title and signature. You can read all about Streams here - https://www.zoho.com/mail/streams.html

Zoho Mail is free for 25 users, so I recommend you sign up for our free plan and give it a try. If you like what you see, you can always then upgrade to one of our paid plans. https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html

Ditto HipChat.

I just wish Slack had read receipts.

Why?

Or the ability to recall messages like Microsoft Exchange?

Can't you just erase them?

Hey, you want some cheese with that whine?

Snackis offers an open, safe and distributed alternative; and as an added bonus, it has a plain old responsive GTK+ UI and the executable is 1.7Mb:

https://github.com/andreas-gone-wild/snackis

Besides the obvious "lock in" point from the article in what ways does this software address the other points made?

It's different enough to encourage different patterns of behavior; being based on email means that it's not very practical for nonsense chat-traffic. Snackis isn't aiming to rule the world, there are no incentives to fuck users over for profit. It has basic project/tasks built-in, so that separates that information from the feeds. And it can be set up for offline use, where it doesn't touch the network unless you ask for it. And it doesn't eat all your disk and ram space.

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