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Comment by davidscolgan | Hacker News Reader

Whether or not Slack encourages workflows (and I can see how it would), I think in order to be an effective human in the modern era _requires_ thinking critically about technology choices and how to use them. Cal Newport's new book Digital Minimalism was a great read about this - be intentional about your tech choices, and be intentional about when and how you use them. Otherwise it's super easy to just get sucked into spending all day wasting time on the most distracting and addicting sites. Company culture can be shaped (though it's definitely hard when you are on the bottom of the hierachy).

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I completely agree, but I don't think that means we should ignore or withhold criticism when a company like Slack has immense power over how other companies operate. We should be scrutinizing the decisions they make because it does affect us.

Many of these decisions you refer to are not made by the individual employee, but by the team lead, PM, or the executives, who are not always very connected to how those decisions affect developer happiness. So getting control of your personal digital life often has no bearing once you enter the workplace with an entirely different set of expectations.

Slack being a public company worries me even more, because there is now an even greater drive for them to make ever-increasing revenue/profits, which usually means keeping people on Slack and active within the client and increasing daily active user / engagement metrics. In many ways there isn't great alignment between a company being productive and Slack's financials; Slack is incentivized to boost revenue even more now, likely at the expense of end-user productivity.

Absolutely, I see two avenues of attack. As an individual, I see that Slack exists and is widely used in tech. I can't really say no to using them, but I can do what I can to protect myself. If a company requires bad online hygiene, that's certainly a difficult problem.

On the broader level, I definitely think the larger the company and the larger influence it has, the more scrutiny it needs. People who are in charge need to recognize the externalities of what they are making, and the potential negative side effects they can have. I have been somewhat encouraged at least in that this conversation seems to be happening lately.

Good point about choices being lead by executives in distance. I once had a client CEO obsessed with slack because he had developed a Pavlovian association between Slack knocks (upon got commits) and product delivery. He wanted to hear more and more knocks and people started to commit more and more often with increasingly trivial deltas.

But slack isn't supported by ads is it? Why would investors care about increasing engagement/screen time?

I would think they would care more about adoption of the service across more kinds of companies.

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