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Comment by peterevans | Hacker News Reader

My worry is that if Slack is replacing your documentation, then it may be that your organization did not have good (or any!) documentation that predated its use of Slack. As such, I'm not sure if that's a fair thing to criticize of Slack.

Slack is a tool for productivity. (Go on––I'll give you a minute to laugh.)

Slack does make it easier to talk to people, particularly so in a group setting. Any company can make use of that; if you are a remote company, you need that. JIRA and Trello are also mentioned as "hates", but these are also tools that make it easier to work (notably, to make it easier to organize and catalog work). If you aren't using them, you've probably written a hack that does something like them, only worse.

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> if you are a remote company, you need [to make it easier to talk to people]

From the article:

> Remote work culture is a defense mechanism against the distracting open office, and slack is the end run around that defense mechanism.

Slack kills off any benefit there is of being remote, because it is immediate: you need to be online all the time, and you need to answer / participate / chat instantly.

A good alternative to Slack would be a Reddit-like interface with threads and an asynchronous model. That's also the superiority of email over any chat solution. I don't understand why people and organizations get so excited about real-time conversations.

We always had real time. Cavemen had real time. Writing was invented to free us from real time, to transfer information in non-real time and to future generations.

But now it seems the cavemen are back, with a vengeance.

Surely the two can go hand in hand. Most issue trackers provide an asynchronous/threaded environment, and slack is useful if you have a real time question

I think that there are more reasons for remote that just office distractions.

It sure does help with my, otherwise, 6000 mile commute!

It is an organisational question whether a chat like Slack has to be immediate. What's needed are enough channels to split social "noise" from things which need a response so that everybody has a chance to see those things, even if they are five time zones behind or deep in a debugging session. The other thing needed are non-intrusive notifications. A small icon in the notification bar is enough for me, to do a quick check when I have the capacity. (I'm always wonder how those people with big notifications popping up on each mail can work at all, ...)

> you need to be online all the time, and you need to answer / participate / chat instantly

When I work from home, I explain to my colleagues that I mute slack and check it once in a while. If something is really critical, they call, otherwise they'll get an answer later. If I wouldn't communicate about this, people would expect me to be online, but I communicated about this, so they understand why I'm not.

>you need to be online all the time, and you need to answer / participate / chat instantly

No, you don't.

They do and they make sure of it by not having any way to stop notifications.

Having it closed and only replying when I get a notification email for unread messages works quite well for me (if you know how to limit your email checking). Same as donkeyd's comment I've communicated this to my clients and they've adjusted and it's a non-problem.

Seems like they let you turn off all notifications:

https://imgur.com/a/nLePu

I'm fairly sure you can set do-not-disturb times as well.

When you open preferences, Notifications is the top pane. Literally the top notification option is "Notify me about..." and an option is Nothing. In what sense can't you stop notifications?

Well, must be new since last year.

Has always been there.

It's not. Here's a still relevant medium post from 2014 about setting things up: https://medium.com/@shawnzvinis/how-to-get-the-most-out-of-s... .

It's fair to be frustrated by defaults or how your org uses Slack (or any other tool), but these discussions often cross the line to FUD by exaggerating annoyances.

Can you envision that it didn't work as intended and that it was missing on mobile? Thank you.

incorrect!

/dnd, per-channel notif muting, and "away" status combine for reasonably fine-grained control

I only use Slack's web client and I explicitly don't give it the ability to raise desk-top notifications.

Should I use an IM to coordinate complex work, I would like to not only be away/online, but publish some schedule (if I have one) and create few tags so people could tag their messages as project-related, organisational, question, asap, etc. And their messages will be inactive until tag time, e.g. all org-related goes to lunch and all failures ring until everyone hears it. Also, to mark messages unread/todo/newtag would be helpful, since I always forget about chats that I delayed to answer. If comm system also allows to say “busy; 3 min ETA” in one click, it would be nice.

Simple group-posting is stupid – groups are muted or annoying, or induces a fear to ask questions. But the absense of group/topic alarm can also turn into inconvenience.

/never used slack, know nothing about it

This is an important original post, and I wish the Slack community were having these conversations more often and openly.

The original post nails some important issues: companies really need topic focused discussions, intentional, thoughtful writing, not just chat, more asynch so there is time for deep work and time for more thoughtful discussion and replies, and much better, topic-based search.

I believe in the impact of this problem so deeply that a team of us have been working on an open source solution to it for a couple years now. https://github.com/open-company

What we're trying to build is a place for companies to have focused, asynch discussions about the things that really matter, outside the stream of chat. The UI we've come up with isn't "Reddit-like" really, but it's an attempt to supplement Slack with what's missing, and it will evolve as we learn more.

If anyone is interested in trying it out, you can sign up for early access (we'll get you in very quickly) at: https://carrot.io/

I don't see how you can ever get something named carrot out of beta (carotene). Your product looks a lot like Yammer (which we have in addition to slack, XMPP and email) in that there are threads. Threads make Yammer better than Slack but there are still two things that I hate (and that Google/Apache Wave got/gets right): 1) Comment threads are hierarchical so side conversations can happen in-line but also be out of the way. 2) Blips that I've read or that I'm not interested in can be collapsed.

The best conversations in Slack should really be a conversation in an issue tracker. Unfortunately, nobody will see those comments when they look at the issue. One issue I see with the carrot UI is that there's not really enough room to have a real conversation in the comments side-panel.

Slightly more than half of my working days in my 19-year career have been remote. In my experience, Slack is hands-down the best tool for bridging onsite/remote. I can choose to engage with it in real-time for active participation for inevitable unplanned discussions, but there's also a historical record to reference. If the real-time chat merits "let's hop on a call" it happens then and there (in which case someone needs to be scribe, to summarize the takeaways in-channel, for posterity). Catching up w/ the conversation after a heads-down stretch (or vacation, whatever) is straightforward. Proper use of channels is important (ie, not just a firehose in #general) but very easy to establish, and the benefits compound.

It's not just real-time, it's real-time plus async/archival. Best of both worlds if done right.

To borrow your "cavemen" analogy: email and undocumented verbal conversations strike me as prehistoric / uncivilized, in comparison.

(That's leaving aside the benefits of having a single hub for ~everything, which Slack is ~uniquely suited for given all the integrations.)

Great thoughts. Remote companies are async by nature, and Slack goes against that. It means that people need to be always on to get the benefits of Slack - which is silly, you'd rather focus on actual work and let people get back to you when they're ready to.

> A good alternative to Slack would be a Reddit-like interface with threads and an asynchronous model.

You're describing Twist -- twistapp.com.

one issue is that Slack _does_ try to sell itself as the repository for information. It tries to suck in Google Docs links, it has its "Files" tab, it sells its search.

It's an awesome chat application, of course. Not as much of a fan of it as a document store.

They have those features, and (possibly) those intentions.

If I use a chainsaw to slice my morning butter, is that the chainsaw's fault?

(I haven't seen Slack identify itself as a document store; I have seen almost every company encompass that use-case. Is that Slack's fault?)

Well what if the chainsaw says "great for butter"?

I'm not trying to nitpick, and this might be misinterpretation, but I do feel like Slack is trying to sell itself as a Basecamp-y tool, instead of chat.

From the features page: > It helps everyone find the answers they need (some blurb about the search)

There's this ad running in trains in Tokyo for Slack which also shows this notion of Slack consuming everything that used to be e-mail attachments and whatnot + finding stuff in it (can't find a clip of this online).

Slack's own Google Drive integration exists almost purely to suck stuff into the system, for easier access.

I do think Slack has a huge potential to be powerful in this space, but it will be hard if everything has to be exposed through the lens of chat.

one issue is that Slack _does_ try to sell itself as the repository for information

Right, wasn’t it originally Single Log of All Chat Knowledge or some acronym like that?

I find that Slack creates worse "accidental" documentation than some other forms of communication. Prior to my team's adoption of slack, major decisions/designs were usually documented in an email at some point, because they needed to be broadcast. If you can find that email then you have a fairly good self-contained resource for understanding whatever it was about.

Slack is easy and it's broadcast, so some people use it preferentially whenever they need to broadcast. However, the form that it takes is lines of text barfed out and interleaved with unrelated lines of text. There's no summary metadata (like subject lines), there's no organization except time, people put very little thought into what they type so it's at best rough draft form. It's hard to search, and even worse, your team or organization may be hip but cheap, and just get the free version that disappears your message history making search moot.

In short, we used to get better documentation for free, now we get none. Sometimes, old emails can be immensely useful in trying to figure out why something was done, or recovering old understanding and history.

How many emails just ended up going to a limited distribution list? Worse, many email systems have a retention period. (This is also a problem with Slack, mind you.)

> How many emails just ended up going to a limited distribution list? Worse, many email systems have a retention period. (This is also a problem with Slack, mind you.)

I'm not saying that email is perfect and doesn't have its issues, I'm just saying Slack is worse.

The kind of use case I was thinking of is myself and others searching through our own personal archives for stuff (which people at my company use to get around server retention policies). That works with email but not with Slack.

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