Slack wants to become the 'long-term memory' for organizations
computerworld.com
computerworld.com
Yes, context switching is expensive. I don't see how never leaving Slack changes that, there is enough going on there to make it hard to stay on task. Plenty of windows, DMs, channels, integrations pinging you, meetings about to happen.
I can only imagine they are starting to dream of SlackOS where everything is AI powered and you never leave Slack but you are still wasting the same amount of time, just in their product.
About features:
Calls and screen sharing work well.
Threads are horrible, it's where messages go to hide and die because nobody notices them.
Search is poorly implemented: for some reason it's difficult to find stuff.
A customer of mine would like a mix between a chat and a forum software, to give threads a name and persist them in a menu and reference them later on.
How much of that was like google wave?
Discord does a lot more than a typical chat app like messenger/whataspp and thus UI is more complex. But it is not bad; let alone pretty bad. Their UX is amazing. Complex but great.
But discord is simply the best messaging app out there. Ofc I'd love to have a self hosted discord but...
Anyways, you are free to stay in denial.
Zulip is closer to that I think
So slack is mostly great for chatting. For audio/video calls it's sub-par (and somehow it messes up with microphone input levels on my work macbook).
But the most important thing: somehow both the two slack-paying jobs had automatic, age-based message deletion.
Not sure why
Excessive record-keeping makes it hard to perform cover-ups, and can lead to regulators having evidence of your crimes - that's the last thing a big corporation wants.
Consider, for example, the case of Boeing where there are a bunch of instant messages from test pilots revealing they knew about the lethal problems with the 737 MAX's MCAS system. Test pilots telling engineers "it’s running rampant in the sim on me" and in other messages saying "so I basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly)" - very embarrassing stuff.
From Boeing's perspective, it would be very nice if those messages had been automatically deleted a few weeks after they were sent.
Or let's say people removed some bolts from a door, forgot to refit them, and didn't track it through the official system because they wanted to get defect numbers down, then the door fell out mid-flight.
Except someone took timestamped photos showing the door with the bolts missing, so the regulators could figure out what was going on. If Boeing had a process in place to erase those unsanctioned extra records, they could have just shrugged and said there was no evidence the bolts were missing.
Many corporations like time-based message deletion, because although it reduces employee productivity, that's an acceptable trade-off to facilitate cover-ups.
You are right, I wanted to subtly imply that.
I forgot to mention that both jobs were in fields with stringent or very stringent legislation.
So... I guess I'm going to assume/hope that was preventive ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Threads are kinda horses-for-courses.
If you've got a 3000+ person organisation, they're useful because all-to-all messaging channels don't scale very well. If you've got a 500-member #linux-users channel you can have multiple discussions going on in different threads without them getting mixed up, and when someone posts about wifi issues some people can jump in to help without every single message alerting all 500 members.
On the other hand, if your organisation only has 30 people? Channels alone are probably all you need.
https://i.imgur.com/XxV5b2Q.png
Programming discord servers usually have chat rooms like #general and then forum channels (like threads but organized).
Here’s a sample convo where you can try out the functionality: https://jonline.io/post/4zHQSj
If people noticed the top message and they care they can subscribe and get notifications and it won't bother anyone else.
If something is sufficiently important people post the reply in the channel in one go. People can also tag people or groups.
Anyone who isn't using threads fundamentally misunderstands slack and is using it as WhatsApp/Facebook.
You can pin conversations and I agree that giving stuff names would be good but within slack, it would probably be too unwieldy. There's different patterns of communication and slightly ephemeral chat, which is often disorganised shouldn't be your long form. If you want, just copy and paste it but the forum/ticket thread probably deserves better quality.
Not much money in that though.
What I find slack enables though, is technical documentation being stored in such chats instead of something more formal, like an API or an up to date README.
Even more horrible is technical know-how being shared in video calls, as video-calls are easy to make, are interactive, you can draw, you can have fun, "it is easier and takes less time this way".
Hah - yes. Or the I'm-a-human gambit: "Why can't we just have a conversation?"
If slack wants to integrate AI, it should focus on auto-updating other services that people actually want to use to store information like google drive, notion, git, etc based on chats. That would be useful. Trying to lock people into slack harder is not.
How about code highlighting in markdown-style triple-backtick blocks instead of requiring snippets? Or the ability to have a separate window per workspace in the native app? Or maybe marking thread responses that echo to the channel marked as read when I see them in the channel, rather than requiring an explicit click into the Threads section? Or a huddle video feed that isn’t blurry at 4K so I can actually read the text getting shared?
I do like Slack, but some of these missing features just feel like missed table-stakes, and their focus seems elsewhere.
Aside for the Slack users I see in action... Get something useful for the long term is well... Less valuable then the cost 99% of the time... It's not version control for a software project, the signal/noise ration of information is so terrible to the point of being just garbage.
When I was working with Slack I felt that most of the communication had more depth and broadnesses and after transition to MSTeams I personally feel that the whole chatter decreased significantly and folks are more prone to start a call than to “Create a Post” with title and write down.
Teams is...fine.
For instance, query times for search is not optimal, file upload times, especially on mobile, are slower than my internet connection speed.
Of course then we switched to teams which isnt as useful for finding anything, so that problem is solved /s.
https://slack.engineering/how-we-built-slack-ai-to-be-secure...
Short summary on Twitter:
> Slack AI – which is our generative AI experience natively built in Slack – is a separately purchased add-on that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) but does not train those LLMs on customer data. Because Slack AI hosts the models on its own infrastructure, your data remains in your control and exclusively for your organization’s use. It never leaves Slack’s trust boundary and no third parties, including the model vendor, will have access to it.