Slack is about to become a nightmare | Hacker News Reader

Slack is about to become a nightmare

gizmodo.com

26 pointsdpeck16 comments

> Slack is about to become a nightmare

> On Wednesday, the company made good on that promise by opening Slack Connect DMs for anyone currently paying for their Slack subscription.

So where is the nightmare? I was expecting at least some analysis on why this is a bad thing.

This has to be some kind of joke-headline. I know the Gizmodo group has a weird sense of humor.

the articles from the same authors look pretty much on the same line, catchy click-bait titles

Maybe nightmare is a bit extreme, but it does seem open to abuse: https://twitter.com/44/status/1374737695444901891

That does seem quite bad. The article probably should have lead with that. I also don't want random recruiting firms trying to invite me to DM them on Slack all day long. They fill up my inbox enough as it is. Just another avenue for spam. Hopefully they will have a report spam and shut down the abusers fast. But seems they haven't thought that far ahead yet.

Meh, there are a million easier ways than this to email someone a bad word (that too fully anonymously, which this isn't), so not sure why this is such a big deal.

And now it's already been rolled back.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/24/22348743/slack-connect-dm...

The technology exists for communicating anyone over the internet - its called email and we've done 20 years of work to prevent spam.

My email is useless. It's become so clogged with automated notifications that I legitimately can't sift out the useful stuff. I can barely even manage to reliably find all the messages sent by actual humans. I've tried everything I can think of, to no avail. No combination of configurations, rules, or filtering fixes this problem for longer than a week. Even if I do manage to turn the eighty gazillion auto-emailing systems down to a dull roar, somehow they manage to ramp themselves back up again.

The problem with email isn't email, it's that we've tried to make it do double-duty as a communications medium and a push notification system. These are different things and they shouldn't be in the same stream.

As much as I dislike Slack, et al. for being just another distraction I have to check and keep up with, they did manage to isolate communications from the noise for a little while. Of course, because we can't help ourselves, on day two everyone started writing Slack bots to channel notifications into the chat.

Perhaps having your own email domain and therefore many accounts would be a solution?

A secondary problem with email is that businesses/web services (free greeting cards, etc.) encourage friends and family to sign you up for junk mail. But I have no idea how to fix that.

Can’t send work email to my personal account, so that’s out.

The spammers have been at work for 20 years as well. Not exactly a success story.

It is exactly the opposite. It is a success story given how wide spread the use of Email is. Wait until spammers start a campaign on Slack open invites.

It depends how you define success. I don’t get much, if any, email trying to sell me v1xagra anymore, but functionally email is where messages go to die. Inbox zero is laughably out of reach, with between 1,000 and 10,000 unread emails, depending on the last time I declared email bankruptcy. You can blame this situation on me, but I’m not alone here, so blaming me doesn’t solve anything, fixing email with better tools does. In my ideal world, Google would have doubled down on Inbox rather than the other way around.

Did paying customers ask for this feature?

Impossible! It cannot become what it already is.

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