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Comment by hackernewds | Hacker News Reader

Why are these kinda things opt-out? And need to be discovered..

We're literally discussing switching to Teams at my company (1500 employees)

If you switch to Teams only for this reason I have some bad news for you - there’s no way Microsoft is not (or will not start in future) doing the same. And you’ll get a subpar experience with that (which is an understatement).

I think a self hosted matrix/irc/jitsi is the way to do it.

We've been using Mattermost and it works very well. Better than Slack.

The only downside is their mobile app is a bit unreliable, in that it sometimes doesn't load threads properly.

I would guess Microsoft has a lot more government customers (and large customers in general) than Slack does. So I would think they have a lot more to loose if they went this route.

The Universal License Terms of Microsoft (applicable to Teams as well) clearly say they don't use customer data (Input) for training: https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/terms/product/ForallOnli... Whether someone believes it or not, is another question, but at least they tell you what you want to hear.

What if they exfiltrate customer data to a data broker and they buy it back?

It's not customer data anymore.

Unless your company makes a special arrangement with them, Microsoft will steal all of your data. It's at least in their TOS for Outlook, and for some reason doubt they wouldn't do the same for Teams.

> Why are these kinda things opt-out? And need to be discovered..

Monies.

> We're literally discussing switching to Teams at my company (1500 employees)

Considering what Microsoft does with its "New and Improved(TM)" Outlook and love for OpenAI, I won't be so eager...

You’d be better off just not having chat than switching to Teams.

But the business will suffer by most likely being less successful due to less cohesive communication.. it's "The Ick" either way.

The idea that Slack makes companies work better needs some proof behind it, I’d say the amount of extra distraction is a net negative… but as with a lot of things in software and startups nobody researches anything and everyone writes long essays about how they feel things are.

Good point, could be that it reduces friction too far in some instances. However, in general less communication doesn't seem better for the bottom line.

Distraction is not enforced. Learning to control your attention and how to help yourself do it is crucial whatever you do in whatever time and in whatever technological context or otherwise. It is the most long term valuable resource you have.

I think we start to recognize this at larger scale.

Slack easily saves a ton of time solving complex problems that require interaction and expertise of a lot of people, often unpredictable number of them for each problem. They can answer with delay, in a good culture this is totally accepted and people still can independently move forward or switch tasks if necessary, same as with slower communication tools. You are not forced to answer with any particular lag, however slack makes it possible when needed to reduce it to zero.

Sometimes you are unsure if you need help or you can do smthing on your own. I certainly know that a lot of times eventually I had no chance whatsoever, because knowledge requires was too specialized, this is not always clear. Reducing barriers to communication in those cases is crucial and I don't see Slack being in the way here, only helpful.

The goal of organizing Slack is such that you pay right amount of attention to right parts of communication for you. You can do this if you really spend (hmm) attention trying to figure out what that is and how to tune your tools to achieve that.

That’s a lot of words with no proof isn’t it, it’s just your theory. Until I see a well designed study on such things I struggle to believe the conjecture you make either way. It could be quite possible that you benefit from Slack and I don’t.

Even receiving a message and not responding can be disruptive and on top I’d say being offline or ignoring messages is impossible in most companies.

Your idea also comes with no proof, just your personal experience.

Which is extremely clear from what I’m saying, it’s completely anecdotal.

This is your choice to trust only statements backed by scientific rigour or trying things out and applying to your way of life. This is just me talking to you, in that you are correct.

Regarding “receiving a message”: my devices are allowed only limited use of notifications. Of all the messaging/social apps only messages from my wife in our messaging app of choice pop us as notifications. Slack certainly is not allowed there

I'm not sure chat apps improve business communications. They are ephemeral, with differing expectations on different teams. Hardly what I'd label as "cohesive"

Async communications are critical to business success, to be sure -- I'm just not convinced that chat apps are the right tool.

From what I’ve seen (not much actually) Most channels can be replaced by a forum style discussion board. Chat can be great for 1:1 and small team interactions. And for tool interactions.

we use Teams and it's fine.

Just don't use the "Team" feature of it to chat. Use chat groups and 1-to-1 of course. We use "Team" channels only for bots: CI results, alerts, things like that.

Meetings are also chat groups. We use the daily meeting as the dev-team chat itself so it's all there. Use Loops to track important tasks during the day.

I'm curious what's missing/broken in Teams that you would rather not have chat at all?

Obviously because no one would ever opt in.

Possible alternatives that may not be OpenAI behind the scenes.

https://www.producthunt.com/categories/team-collaboration

There's also a Lot of "Best Slack Alternatives in 2024" and such.

Teams is in the same AI business. Better go with open source chats: https://itsfoss.com/open-source-slack-alternative/

Ugh Teams = Microsoft. They are the worst when it comes to data privacy. I'm not sure how that is even a choice.

I'd make sure to do an extended trial run first. Painful transition.

Teams have better voice/video. But chat is far worse, absolutely shit, though Slack seems to be working to get there.

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