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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.)

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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