Ask HN: Why do people love Slack? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do people love Slack?

66 pointsgruglife82 comments

I use Slack on a daily basis and view it as just another chat app. I don't understand why people love it. Can someone please explain this to me? Not looking to smear it but want to understand to see if I am missing any functionality.

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Slack is a huge time waster. It is a constant distraction. As as it becomes standardized it’s assumed you will be on it all the tome. Through the workday and even after. The only time can get work done without distractions is after hours.

With slack the world becomes one big long meeting. Lol

Also as a consultant it is a problem. With email I have paper trails of conversations. But with slack when engagement is ending I lose all that discussion & history. It forces me to double up my note taking (more lost time) and try to hack a backup of some of that stuff as an engagement ends.

Yes I get the advantages but those have long since been buried by all it’s problems

We use slack but there is no expectation that someone will respond after hours. Your time is your time. If you’re in a meeting or just working on something, I don’t expect you to respond. I’m just dropping a message to you. Respond when you have some free time. If we are both free and can chat interactively that great and we can resolve this right away.

If you are currently on-call, I would expect that you check for slack messages on a regular basis.

BTW I don’t have any notifications turned on for Slack. I periodically check for new message flags. For most channels, I keep them on mute unless it is a channel that I am personally active in.

I treat email the same way. Not notifications. It drives me crazed when I’m talking to someone at their desk and they are constantly getting pop ups telling that they got an email or a slack message. Stop that shit! Get it under control. Push back.

This is a very good approach. I have become ruthless at removing inbound interruptions from my devices:

I have all notification pop-ups disabled across all of my devices, with the sole exception of an incoming phone call (unless the caller is not in my contacts list, in which case it goes straight to voicemail without ringing my phone).

Beyond notifications, all badges are also disabled across all devices, with the sole exception of text messages (if I unlock my phone and go to the home screen, I can see that I have unread text messages).

This enables me to live largely in a pull fashion, without every communication channel constantly breaking my flow.

Because people can respond to Slack messages immediately it enforces the expectation of quick back and forth dialogue, and anxiety on the part of those who want focus time and mute their channels and notifications. This is why it's more like IRC and less like a forum.

When I quit Slack I still feel the expectation of others at work for me to respond to messages in a timely manner and thus feel I have to check Slack periodically. This then enforces the implied importance of Slack in the workplace. Considering this, perhaps people do not love Slack but rather feel subject to it.

I wish Slack would have the option on a slack to make UI changes to make it a bit harder to post, and encourage full thoughts over quick one liners. In the meantime, we can try and reject writing quick responses ourselves.

In another Slack with a group of friends, there is no expectation to respond and therefore there is not the anxiety.

Slack is hard to leave. I work on a 100% remote team- it is our office. Few of us have met in person, there just isn't budget for travel. Therefore all of our emotional connections with each, all of our work-life are built atop the Slack (and Zoom) UI. That's a hard thing to replatform.

Slack also almost never falls down. Its remarkably fast, the search is fast and faceted, and they manage cross-device notification state better than... well Apple for one. That truly 'instant' messaging experience across devices is why they are superior to IRC and decentralized alternatives. 'Instant' editing and deleting your malformed message is a killer app.

Its a safe social network. I'd much rather post memes in Slack than on Facebook or Twitter, which is a persistent battlefield. If I slip up in front of my colleagues, it happens in context and can be sorted out among the tribe, but if I do so on a public social network, it could invite angry mobs or end my career, now or years into the future.

That said, I don't love Slack. I hate how it dominates my day. I hate how I find myself checking it in the car. I hate how I get into it while I'm running a build, post something funny and suck everybody's attention. I truly despise how their DM and notification read system means that have to check everything at all times to feel up to date. I'm in a half dozen public channels, and the blue alert in my tray shows that I have something to look at.

I want control of the UI. Its my workplace, but Slack can change it to their liking, not me to mine. Sometimes if we're lucky we'll get a feature flag, otherwise, its all up to them. There are a million Hacker News clients, but only one for Slack.

I want more nuanced prioritization.

I want my life back.

> they manage cross-device notification state better than... well Apple for one. That truly 'instant' messaging experience across devices is why they are superior to IRC and decentralized alternatives

I recently deployed workplace chat for ~100 people using XMPP. People use whatever clients they want (but we have a list of recommended clients, and in practice everyone is using one of those). With the modern extensions (SMACKS, carbons, MAM, push service integration) cross-device notifications are totally seamless. A bunch of the users are non-technical and they have had no trouble.

Slack has a lot of advantages over the likes of XMPP but I don't think technical superiority is one of them.

> There are a million Hacker News clients, but only one for Slack.

There’s also emacs-slack, which is exactly what it says on the tin. It means that I control my Slack experience.

There's another, unofficial, client for slack that I know of but I've never tried it: https://volt-app.com/

> What language is Volt written in? V. It's a new language I created to develop Volt. You can read about it here.

What could possibly go wrong.

There's also https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ which is pretty good.

> Its a safe social network. I'd much rather post memes in Slack than on Facebook or Twitter

Facebook has private groups, too. (I assume Twitter has something similar.) At worst, this is a great demonstration that defaults matter. I often hear people speak as though Facebook/Twitter/Slack/IRC/etc are only usable in their default mode, even though most people I know don't actually use them that way.

> Slack also almost never falls down. Its remarkably fast

I feel like the chat software I used to use called "Slack" was completely different than what I hear other people talk about by that name.

Because it's good enough, has nice integrations, and is better than email. Convincing non-technical parts of my team to use a chat application is impossible if it can't go on their phones and is basically one single step to get going. Slack fits that criteria.

That being said, their notification logic. I remember seeing this insane flowchart demonstrating how complicated slack's logic was when determining whether to do a push notification. I wonder why it never occurred to them that one of the primary considerations should be that if you've sent me over 3 notifications in the past 5 minutes, and I haven't checked, please fucking stop.

> I wonder why it never occurred to them that one of the primary considerations should be that if you've sent me over 3 notifications in the past 5 minutes, and I haven't checked, please fucking stop.

Because sometimes reading the notification is enough to get the information I need, and I want to keep watching the notifications, but I don't need to respond to any of them.

This is an increasing problem with email too. If you don't open the email, you did not engage, so you can get removed from lists or, much worse, gmail will think something is spam. But gmail shows me most of the email in the UI next to the subject, so I don't need to open it. :sigh:

> is better than email

You need to define better first, for many a-synchronous tasks or less-time-critical email is superior to Slack

Every time someone ask this question I think people are forgetting that Slack was the first of these SaaS chat programs to find major success. Discord, Teams, and everything else came riding on the heels of Slack's success. While it might just be "another chat app" now, at the time Slack was an easy to setup tool with tons of integrations.

And before Slack, HipChat was quite good.

So good that Atlassian sold it.

I used the Hipchat web client for a year. It worked perfectly.

I heard from others that the native app didn't.

I had a chance to talk to one of the Hipchat PMs. Atlassian didn't seem too attached to operating it for some reason.

Before HipChat was Skype-for-Business...uh... Lync... uh... Office Communications Server... uh... Exchange Server Instant Messaging (using Windows XP’s Windows Messenger) back in 2001!

What, it looks identical to Slack as well!

The geek version of “Seinfeld is Unfunny”....

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...

If you don’t understand why people love Slack, then you don’t understand what usable enterprise software means or why people love it.

Imagine how many people never used a chat app in a business context before. Maybe this is hard, as you can’t imagine who they could be — or you don’t remember a time _before_ the ubiquity of chat apps in the workplace. But trust me those people are a majority of the workforce.

Now imagine you are an enterprise user who has no control over how they work, and they’re told to use “something new to increase productivity”. They sigh because it is probably bullshit and they’re being forced to use it by the “decision maker”.

But lo and behold, Slack is actually useful and usable! Because in large part the value of any chat app is how well it is adopted by one’s (relatively non techy) teammates!

Slack is a masterclass in commercializing enterprise software through ease of adoption and use. The core tech is completely undifferentiated, but the understanding of enterprise environments and workplace psychology is second to maybe only Microsoft.

Slack doesn't bring me anything new that the other enterprise communication tools did not provide all the way back to Netmeeting, other that wasting my CPU resources.

Slack didnt invent messaging. Skype was and is ubiquitous. Apparently slack is an incremental improvement

Skype was revolutionary, but has since devolved into a hot mess.

Pretty much every developer I know hates slack. They use it because it is required of them.

It is a great tool for non-doers to slack off with though. You can pretend like you are working by posting funny pics, random thoughts, etc.

Hey look at me, I am communicating, I am being seen to communicate. As I am being seen to communicate, people who matter will notice my industry and reward me; never mind that I am actually a net loss to the productivity of the organization. That's slack, that is.

I like the shared workspaces feature.

If your company works with customers directly (a project for example or sales support), it’s easy to create a new channel, create a share link, and send it to an admin on the other side. Now you’ve connected two Slack instances of invited users to a channel. Cuts down on email threads and phone calls. Life saver for where I work.

I get this, but often it results in 10+ messages back and forward when really what I want is one nice succinct email with only what's important and no pressure for me drop everything and reply immediately.

I haven't looked, but is it possible to change your online status on a room by room basis?

Probably not, Slack is even more obnoxious than that, I installed the app on my phone, but didn't want my phone buzzing all the time, so I snoozed notifications on it. Guess what it did? It snoozed notifications on the desktop client too...

So disable notifications on the device for that app, not in the app.

I suspect much of the hate for slack is from two types of people. Those who are too young to know the tyranny of email and those who used to ignore their email. As to why it’s so popular, it was the first good business chat solution that went mainstream. And I still haven’t seen another that matches it’s quality

Why is email more of a tyranny than Slack (or any chat app)? I'd say it's less of a tyranny, because there's less of an expectation of real-time response.

Slack prevents deep work.

I respond to e-mails 2-4 times a day during task transitions. The sender does not anticipate an immediate response so the 1-2 hours delay is OK.

Compare this to Slack which requires constant monitoring where senders anticipate an immediate response. Not to mention the increase in casual "water cooler" conversations.

The find the same people that recommend Slack are the same people that recommend 3-hour meetings. It's procrastination veiled as productivity.

If you think that Slack requires constant monitoring then I think you are using it wrong. I believe there is zero difference in the reply expectations of Slack and email. As per my initial comment, you are someone who doesn't check email and that's ok, in my engineering manager role I receive over 200 emails a day. Most of these could be 3 - 10 word slack messages but they arrive in my inbox with the same urgency as every other message requiring the same level of triage as a very important contract.

I check (and respond to) e-mails multiple times a day. I said that in the comment you're replying to. Your replies make it clear that you do not have experience at scale. Replying to e-mails in 2-3 hours is not "someone who doesn't check email" and receiving 200+ e-mails where most could "be 3 - 10 work slack messages" is not effective nor efficient leadership.

This seems more a problem with the culture. Where I've worked, messaging and emails are used for non-urgent, handle this when you're available type notices. If something was urgent, we walk up to their desk and tell them. Slack actually cuts down on desk-related interruptions; we'd literally just Slack each other even though we're sitting across.

Water cooler conversations are a kind of stress dissipation response for some people. It's great for some, bad for others. Slack means that it stays in a channel instead of at the water cooler when all you want is a drink, not a chat.

Most software development companies of any size, even small companies, have some mixture of people in office, working from home, remote workers, separate offices etc.

I disable Slack notifications, and approach the replies just like I do with email.

The only exception are meetings and escalations when something is on fire.

Is there a benefit to using Slack and e-mail if there's no distinction in the use case? Perhaps that's where I'm differing from others here.

We are a smallish B2B SAAS company where new clients (whales) can add 5% to our revenue and enough load to our servers to need to monitor and add resources.

The first few weeks before and after a major go live, especially if there is new functionality, management will expect their team leads/single responsible individuals to respond immediately. Even if they don’t say it. The CxO’s, sales, and implementations folks will send you an email then immediately send you a Teams message asking you did you get the email and if they don’t hear from you, call you on Teams.

On the other hand, most days if it isn’t a major client issue, it’s mostly like you said, there isn’t a real expectation of an immediate response.

I don't use slack but what 's wrong with email? Slow , long form responses is a feature, not a bug in our lines of business. Maybe customer service people do need an instant messengers, but the rest?

Dear gruglife,

I write this comment as a response to your inquiry about the reasons for why people like slack.

Now personally I mostly use Teams, but the system is similar.

The reason I like to use Teams as opposed to e-mail is mostly just the expected process around it.

Please note that I’ve cc’ed your manager, as I talked to him just before and he told me to add him. I’m not trying to seem passive aggressive or cause issues in communication.

Anyways, please come by my desk so we can repeat this entire discussion once again since you likely tuned out after the first paragraph anyway.

And yes IRC does the same, but trying to get an organization to use IRC is like trying to replace word with vim.

Kind regards and all the best, Boublepop

Is this a parody of something related to Slack? I don't get the joke.

Yes, it’s a parody of a widely used classic medium.

It's a parody of how tiresome emailing is in real world applications.

In an ideal world, you ask someone to do something, they ask you for details, you give them details, it's done.

In a less ideal world, you have busy people, lazy people, and people who have been given unreasonable schedules.

They drop emails, overlook, glance it over. They dread the back and forth long email threads, so they sit and think and procrastinate for an hour before sending a short email like the above.

And what let's say there's three teams involved. One person drops the ball or ignores an email. What next?

That's why you have to cc them. I once had an issue with this guy who I just kept giving him instructions, having meetings, and he still did the wrong things. I brought it up to the boss and he yelled at me and told me I don't know how to work in a team -- I never cc'ed him in these emails.

And I quickly learned that whenever an email cc-ed the boss, things moved, and when it didn't, they'll say okay, but the work would disappear.

Then the obvious solution is to cc every time right? But because of this, every time you cc someone, it implies that you don't trust them to get it done.

Something like Slack just automates this process. You post something in a team channel, it gives a slight-but-not-passive-aggressive pressure. You can send a document and it doesn't get lost (and you can't blame someone for not sending you the documents).

This isn’t the only way email could be. You can remove the whole ‘cc’ aspect, make it work within channels just like Slack, and most of the awkwardness melts away, while you keep the good, async parts.

The reason email is stuffy is that it allows you too granular an ability to choose and modify who gets to see it as a conversation goes on. A simpler concept of a channel goes some way to solve that.

That said, be forewarned: I’m biased, I make a tool that makes email work like Slack. (https://aether.app)

If anything, one thing we’ve noticed using Aether is that it makes people drop ‘Hi Jane’ style heading and signatures at the bottom after a while, naturally.

I think part of this is a cultural issue with older "traditional" companies. I have worked at such a company and, after introducing Slack, people used it in exactly the same way including cc'ing everyone at the end of the message and needlessly escalating every thread if it's not answered immediately.

The annoying thing with Slack is that it's impossible to mute individuals who use it disruptively so I either get all or none of these notifications. It's easy to change people's behaviour in smaller companies but when there are hundreds of people in the workspace it gets tricky.

@boublepop good day

are you around

can you explain to me how this comm style isn't also annoying pls

dropped VOIP call

@channel can anyone else help me with this

I can’t explain to you why you find it annoying. I honestly don’t. What’s annoying about asking people if they are around? Or asking a question in a channel?

Maybe in your org people are better communicators. In mine, Slack gets in the way of deep work. Then you turn off notifications and eventually your manager asks you why you are not on Slack.

So you end up reading memes, news, answering same question 100th time, and you realize you are just glorified assembly worker. You are not solving real problems, just making another distraction for your primate family. You are a monkey!

I mean, apart from anything else it's literally exactly the same issues you were highlighting with email: unnecessary verbiage to warm the discussion up and copying in loads of people indirectly involved, which may or may not be related to internal politics. And the fact the discussion which actually resolves the issue often won't take place in the channel.

With Slack you've got the added irritation of an expectation of real time responses, especially when someone's @mentioning the boss or everyone else in the division a minute after you haven't responded...

My CTO asks me this everyday. I guess the answer is they marketed it well as a comprehensive tool for teams/companies. Everyone knows about it. A lot of ppl use it. It has integrations built in. No need to install anything. Does the job.

There are things we don't like about it but it does the job well enough that the opportunity cost of trying to replace it too high for us at the moment. So we keep going with it.

I don't love it. On my time being forced to use it I hated pretty much every aspect of it that wasn't its text features (threads, custom emojis) or ready made integrations. Everything else, from the technical aspects to their API gave me nothing but headaches. And even then it's still better than Discord.

> I use Slack on a daily basis and view it as just another chat app.

Can you edit a message once sent in Facebook messenger?

Once you understand why that's important, you'll start to get it.

Slack actually cared what the users wanted. Not what managers or IT teams cargo culting current message apps thought workers should have.

This is upside down .

People secretly installed Slack at workplaces (there are old articles on this) and the managers had to get it. The rest is history.

Last month Signal got a Thumbs up and Thumbs down icons, after how many years.... The IT teams are partly to blame here on top of the managers.

Because we've tried Teams?

Seriously, though, I don't love any chat app that much. They're useful in some circumstances, but they can easily devolve into a horrific time-suck. People use them for important info that ought to go in emails, for example. Or hammer channels with loads of chaff and the occasional critical wheat kernel, so that you have to waste time on them looking for the latter.

These days, I check mine once a day. I guess that's equivalent to having someone xerox a website for me, but I get a lot more done that way.

> Because we've tried Teams?

That scans. I hate chat apps, personally, but we are required to use Teams at my workplace. Teams is truly horrendous. I would strongly prefer that we used Slack.

Microsoft Teams really is horrendous.

I've used a lot of chat apps over decades. Teams might be the first one that manages to be _confusing_ - a feat I'd never seen in a chat app - because of the way it rearranges new threads, yet hides the recent part of the thread. Plus various other half-implemented features. The wiki and sharepoint/file integration doesn't work very well. There's no wiki search. It's super easy to delete an entire wiki. I've lost notifications on entire channels for > 1 month without realizing it. Just a ton of little stuff like that; my team will never go back.

Slack is "fine" - it mostly works, and has a lot of app integrations.

Teams is ok, it's just too much functionality. I have problem finding the correct chat room for the voice call right away, I always have to double check if I am in the correct chat.

My problem with Teams really boils down to the absolutely terrible desktop user interface. It's fiddly, hard to work with, and hard to figure out how to do a lot of things. You can't make the window smaller than a certain (way too large) size, and you can't have more than one window. It's just painful, intrusive, and unpleasant.

Worst is the new thread vs reply are confusing... I like in Android that the new thread is a separate floating button to the bottom/right... they should use that UX for their web/desktop interface.

There are a few things I do like better with teams. I haven't used slack much since before it had its' own voice conf/chat, used to use the hangouts integration for that.

In the end, there's parts about them all that suck... I think the biggest mistake with Teams is actually using wiki and files in more than the main channel on very few team groups. Also, creating more team groups is a big issue. I see the same happen with slack, but it's less intrusive.

With slack, I hate that multi-org logins are a pain, if you're in multiple communities.

It boggles my mind how Teams can be this terrible.

How?? How did they fuck it up this badly?

It's the only program I've ever used ever where I have difficulty finding the options menu. I still have trouble finding it. Like it's not something I figure out once and I'm like, "huh, that's weird" and then I know where it is. I have to relearn where it is every time, clicking and right clicking on random UI elements until the menu bar pops up.

Why can't I turn off the highlights for "random user 10000 has joined the channel"? I don't fucking care.

Why is the notification configuration so confusing? What the shit is a "banner"? What is a "feed"? Why is it that I don't know what half of the events even mean?

I don't understand how everything about it can be so bad.

Teams is the choice of CFOs. If you’re buying a bazillion Office licenses anyway, MSFT will practically give Teams away if you boot Slack.

Ugh I hate Teams with a passion and hope it dies asap.

Service providers such as IT or Marketing companies, for long projects slack is amazing. Every company has its own workplace. We don't email or call. They drop us a message, we add the task to asana if needed, if not, answer briefly and move on.

It is not for everyone in my opinion. Very small companies will waste time (under 20 employees) or very large companies will waste resources instead of using project management systems.

It has a very niche use, I don't think everyone is using it the right way.

There are positives and negatives to them all. I'm relatively partial to MS Teams (now that it works well in Linux), since it has decent integration with Outlook and group chat/meetings, integrations are on par.

That said slack and the like are better mostly because of integration which is smoother than custom IRC bots and clients by contrast... Some obsess over security, groups, etc... other features are just that features.

On the flip side, they all suck... MS Teams' wikis aren't in markdown and can't be edited outside of the teams client, other sharing is actually integrated into Sharepoint, and those integrations with system syncing breaks a lot and sucks worse.

I haven't used slack but very little for one project I'm on in a few years... it now has a lot of the features I was missing before. I think Google's Hangouts had a lot of potential before they shifted gears into their client of the month and started breaking the UX.

In the end, what will be around in 5+ years, who knows. Things shift around and change... Things get re-invented in better and worse ways.

People love Slack because IRC is loveable. People use Slack because its advantages over IRC are in areas that favour it being installed in corporate environments, while benefits of IRC (such as being free and open, simple and extensible, running in a shell) are neutral or even negatives for that environment.

I have a few features I want in a work chat app:

Room topic with link support, private rooms, the ability to add more people to that room, direct messaging, phone notifications (and proper sync and the ability to set do-not-disturb), and emoji/gifs. I know some folks don't like those, but I think they are fun and help convey emotion that is otherwise lost in text.

Nice to haves: Search, pinned items, api for bot integration. Color themes. Limited markdown support.

What I never want: link expander: seriously, I don't like it - it takes up space for no value. WYSIWYG editor: I don't think rich text beyond simple markdown is useful.

Hipchat was ok. Slack is ok. I think Slack is a bit better as Hipchat had regular outages.

I don't love it at all, haven't used it since the last Web 1.9 SaaS company I worked in, and hopefully never will again. I found the SNR to be too low, but perhaps that reflects more on that particular company than Slack itself.

What inevitably happens with laws that create such a drastic power imbalance between your average citizen and the governing entity is that those with power and status are exempt.

Related: "Slack is the opposite of organizational memory"

https://abe-winter.github.io/plea's/help/2018/02/11/slack.ht...

In a lot of places being busy is a proxy of being productive and Slack allows you to display how busy you are by constantly chatting in channels. They also added some dopamine based notifications.

At the end of the day it probably makes you lose more productivity than you gain but that's difficult to measure.

Personally I'd say it's a combination of traction and API for me.

It's pretty useful to have a ubiquitous comms tool that integrates with most saas infra out the box...I do loathe its shoddy audio/video/screenshare

personally i find the ux of slack to be pretty appalling, from the newly added “visual formatting” to the weird dichotomy of left/right split of chat and thread (to say nothing about the lack of back button for the right-hand-side drilldown), downloads covering the right hand side chat, the lack of multiple windows, inability to drag and drop attachments to the “threads” channel... etc etc

BUT the plethora of integrations is what really makes it almost worth it to me personally, and i suspect very much so for my workplace as well

I hate Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp and all of this new shit. I was very happy with just my email and Pidgin ;) Slack is just business, making money with stupid people, it's the new/old mode.

I don't, it was imposed on me as part of my daily job tooling.

I like that I don't have to stand up and ask my colleague something.

don't feel bad - i don't get it either - doesn't add material value over email or texts, or skype, or any of the other tools we have - i think it may just be a millenial thang...

I suspect it has to do also with the culture of places that use it well.

This post reminded me to check Slack :^)

because everyone and their mom is on it so its a readymade community.

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