Ask HN: Would you use slack if you started a new startup?

2 points·elbasti··4 comments

Hating on slack/always-on communication is a bit in-vogue these days. I've also seen an org suffer a bit from notification overload, but I don't know what the alternative is.

If you were starting a new venture from scratch today, would you use slack? At what headcount scale would you layer it in, if ever? If you wouldn't use slack, what would you do?

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I missed a beat, is slack hated now? And how does it relate to always-on? You can log off, even better, not have it on your phone but only on your work machine.

Anyhow, even if somehow Slack is taking the blame for always-on, I think it's definitely not the culprit. The problem is a toxic company culture. Even if you were to use only email it wouldn't fix a culture where people are not allowed time off.

For me the issue with slack isn't that it's always-on (because as you said, you can log off, or turn notifications off), it's that it's an unstructured forum for ideas. I think it foments shallow commenting/debating over deeper conversations and planning.

Of course all these problems can be fixed with "culture" but I think the tool itself rewards instant-replies, since conversations quickly move into the past, where "out of sight is out of mind".

slack sells itself as a psychological replacement for the constant communicating feedback people are used to thanks to our shift to always-on social networking apps. companies realized that trying to block this employee behavior is impossible, so they try to harvest it into internal interactions at least. slack is a last ditch effort to try to squeeze productivity, but not in the way you think.

I wouldn't use Slack, because it's a proprietary / closed source application that creates another walled garden. So no.

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