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Comment by e40 | Hacker News Reader

Agreed.

And let's not forget focus modes... I have them that narrow greatly my default set of notifications, so I have a 3 tiers of notifications.

It's like the complaint I used to hear all the time: "Slack ruins work for me! OMG I can't work with constant interruptions!!" That is bewildering, because if that's how you feel, you haven't tuned your setup. Slack never interrupts me, yet I am response enough to slack messages. No one has ever complained about my response time. And I'm probably the most-messaged person on our Slack.

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> if that's how you feel, you haven't tuned your setup

The withering cry of the software engineer "just tune your setup!" This is simply not a thing that people will do.

The defaults are so, so important. They are crucial. The vast majority of people rely on the defaults to be sane. The defaults should be sane.

Absolutely agreed.

How much time must everyone be asked to waste to “tune” a working set of applications to something reasonably sane for human beings.

Sure, what is sane for one human might not be for the next, but it’s not as if trends cannot be discerned.

How ridiculous would it be to be told “if you don’t want people constantly barging into your office, lock the door”?

It wasn't much time at all. Honestly, the push back on this always baffles me.

And when I had an office, I closed (not locked) the door to signify I was in a focus mode. I don't get your point.

The other problem with Slack is that it just straight up... doesn't do what you tell it to. I have a set of notification settings that work for me. Slack goes ahead and just does something else, and you simply can't fix it to do what it's told. (Or couldn't, anyway; I've been off Slack for a while.)

The idea that software like Slack could be setup as "one size fits all" is just ludicrous to me. We have options because different people require different settings.

For Slack, I find just changing the default notification sound to a simple and subtle ding works well.

When I’m focused, I don’t hear it because it’s too subtle. But when I’m not concentrating on anything, it’s more noticeable and I don’t mind the distraction.

This might not work for everyone (“YMMV” and all), but I’ve personally found it a very effective yet simple solution.

If you are very present on slack, ofcourse you dont feel that you are interruped.

I don't know what that means.

I have no audible sounds from notifications. They don't go to my phone, with few exceptions. I get no popups. Yet, I am responsive. It was trivial to set up.

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