
Actually, Slack really sucks - amelius
https://medium.com/@chrisjbatts/actually-slack-really-sucks-625802f1420a#.yz78a6rku
======
mratzloff
At least for our company, Slack has been a net positive. Most issues around
notifications are resolved by customizing your notification preferences per
channel.

 _Now try this in Slack. Remember, it’s one of 10 issues you’ll have in a day,
so you start with creating a group chat instead of a dedicated channel._

Stop. All of the problems that follow this statement are a result of creating
a group chat instead of a channel. If you're creating a group chat, you're
most likely doing it wrong. You should have long-running specialized channels
by topic that includes the relevant people. For example, if you're discussing
a bug in XYZ analytics, post in #xyz-analytics. If you're discussing something
specialized and short-lived, create a channel anyway. For example,
#xyz-1.1-release. This helps in allowing engineers to focus on channels that
are relevant to them.

 _Go through all the channels with notifications showing, reading through each
channel. Realise most of the content wasn’t relevant to me. Sometimes miss
content that was that had shot too far up the page overnight._

Unless that communication simply wasn't happening (in which case, Slack is a
making a positive impact), that communication existed in some form elsewhere.
It might have been email or in person, but either way, if the volume increased
for you it's probably because you are simply privy to it now where you weren't
before. Perhaps it's not relevant for you. That's fine, because at some point
it will be, whereas you would have been excluded before. That means being able
to head off bad decisions before they've had much time to gestate.

I've established a guideline for my group that all (non-sensitive)
communication should happen in public, and that means on Slack. That alone has
made a big difference in making sure people are in the loop and that bad
decisions are visible to everyone. Slack isn't my ideal vehicle for this (I'd
prefer something behind a firewall), but if it gets people talking out loud,
then sure.

~~~
gingerlime
> I've established a guideline for my group that all (non-sensitive)
> communication should happen in public, and that means on Slack. That alone
> has made a big difference in making sure people are in the loop and that bad
> decisions are visible to everyone.

This is one of the main challenges I'm seeing. Getting people off DM's and
into public chats. I explained several times that DMs should only be for
sensitive, personal conversation. Everything else should go into channels. But
people seem to drift into DMs to "not disturb" others, or because it's only a
question to one person etc. Our stats show around 40% public chat vs. 60% in
DM (sometimes even 30/70).

I some times wish I could block DMs completely, but I don't think it's
possible. Any tips?

~~~
captn3m0
Whenever someone sends me a DM, I usually reply with a "please use #tech" or
whatever the relevant channel is.

Our company onboarding guide includes the line: "All communication on slack
_must_ be in public channels. All emails must be cc'ed to a mailing list." Of
course there are sane exceptions to this, but everyone follows this generally,
and we get >90% public communication over slack every month.

Our current stats are:

>95% public channels, 0% private channels, 4% DMs (>1M messages)

~~~
LinuxBender
You probably know this, but any public channel a user is in can be relayed to
a 3rd party (entirely) if that user subscribes to an app that was approved.
All of those messages are also available for any of your admins to pull on
demand. All of this said, I'm sure your org is ultra careful what things you
talk about in Slack. I am just saying this in the event someone doesn't know.

------
peterwwillis
Email is really useful and nobody cares.

\- If you need a way to discuss specific topics with specific people over
time, you make a new mailing list.

\- If you want to have one single conversation within a specific group and
topic, and follow it logically, just reply to the thread. You can forward the
thread and the conversation remains, and can continue.

\- You can ignore all conversations that aren't addressed to you, or go back
and read them, one thread at a time.

\- You can archive all of this, hierarchically, per mailing list, and search
or browse it later.

Now - if you want to have a LIVE conversation, nothing's going to beat a chat
room. It really does not matter what kind of chat room. But sometimes you join
the chat late - it's good to see the old conversation and catch up. And after
the conversation, you might want a log of it later. Somehow, most chat
services in the world seem to miss this.

IRC has kludges that support this. Jabber was supposed to fix this (I think?),
in a platform-independent way. Yet nobody wants to use Jabber. (Probably
because most implementations suck or are incomplete)

Here's my question:

If an entire ecosystem of software has thrived for a generation using existing
tools (IRC, mailing lists, and now Jabber), why the hell is every corporation
in the world dead-set on running away from them screaming? THEY'VE WORKED FOR
20+ YEARS! _edit_ answering my own question: they don't have support
contracts.

------
Manishearth
I've found that slack takes up way more time for me too.

I'm usually in 50 IRC channels at once. My workflow when I open irc is to
check my hilight window for pings, and then glance at the channel list for
backscroll chatter in channels I follow closely (if bored, also look at
chatter in other channels). I then respond to things, and switch back to the
hilight window. I occasionally glance at this window to check for more pings
and chatter in said channels. Each check is a quick glance, and can be done
without context-switching.

I am in a bunch of slack teams, but I only really care about one channel in
each. It takes much longer to handle these, since I need to open a tab for
each, and if I've been pinged go look for the ping.

IRC sucks, but at least everything is in one place. I'd be far more productive
with slack if there was a unified app for all teams with a dedicated
notifications panel.

~~~
Bedon292
Have you tried the slack desktop app? It is much better than having to keep a
bunch of different tabs open. I find it easier to handle multiple teams that
way.

~~~
Manishearth
I will, thanks

------
rafBM
We (founders of ConferenceBadge.com) never enjoyed Slack nor other chat apps
because they encourage immediate attention, or you just end up missing out.
And we are a team of 4… can’t imagine using it in larger organizations.

We never found any tool that would completely satisfy our collaboration needs,
so we created Missive: [https://missiveapp.com](https://missiveapp.com)

It’s built on the idea that conversations should be scoped and archivable,
just like emails. It’s both a full-featured email client and chat app. We can
share emails and comment within threads, as well as create new chats from
scratch and invite only the right people to discuss specific matters. When a
topic is over, we just archive or snooze it like emails.

I have written in details about our vision: [https://medium.com/missive-
app/building-the-team-communicati...](https://medium.com/missive-app/building-
the-team-communication-app-of-the-future-ec5418517738)

~~~
mavhc
The way you describe it reminds me of Google Wave. That was way too complex
for most people though.

------
btcboss
"It’s kinda like having 10 Facebooks to simultaneously look through, then make
sense of. Actually, no, its worse. Facebook isn’t about returning back to, its
about relaxed consumption of content. Slack on the other hand is meant to be
about getting things done and being there to respond."

Love it!

~~~
nadezhda18
yeah right to the point

------
wstrange
Slack's identity management is really painful.

Why do I need to create a new account for each slack team I want to join? I am
the same person.

Joining a slack team should be an entitlement that gets granted to my identity
-not an entirely separate account.

------
vannevar
Slack and the other various IRC-reinventions start with the assumption that
more communication is always better. I think it's time we challenged that
assumption in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary.

------
mizzao
The author makes a good point that the reliability of Slack on intermittent
connections is indeed pretty horrible. It's nearly impossible to send or
receive messages, as I experienced while in foreign countries.

------
maerF0x0
My main gripe with slack is the abuses. At my company its mostly a water
cooler or a way to break the headphones contract.

As well people using @channel gets tiresome when you're on vacation and slack
is on your phone.

Basically slack is noisy in my situation, i wonder if for many?

~~~
neuronexmachina
I just set myself as "away" when I'm on vacation. @channel won't send you a
notification when you're away, it'll by default only notify you when somebody
directly messages or tags you.

If you're focusing on something you can put slack in "Do Not Disturb" mode for
a desired amount of time.

------
kartD
This is surprisingly common with any chat app. I'm sure Whatsapp users are
familiar with groups (with family, friends or coworkers) where everyone just
sits and blabs on and on and it becomes a nuisance (especially with large
group sizes).

Also because chat is so informal, everyone posts needlessly (shoot from the
hip with no consideration for whether you're wasting someones' time)

One solution is the judicious use of @ (in Hipchat at least). People should
also consider chat to be informal mail rather than chat when you're in the
office.

------
erjjones
I've found that Slack is a big time suck as well.

@mention which generates an email is the only way to pull me in a thread.
Meaning that my email client is still the main source of communication.

Slack is good for non-work related threads with my co-workers. We have a
channel dedicated just to miscellaneous non-sense which can be rather
entertaining. What is nice about the channel is that it isn't a long running
email thread that needs to be muted and I only check it out when I want to.
However, it could just as well be an IRC channel...

------
jswny
I see similar criticisms of Slack a lot, and I think a solid portion of these
are general gripes with using one chat system instead of Email + other
solutions.

My biggest gripe with using Slack is that teams are managed individually. I
can't have one Slack account from which I can view all of my teams and
interact with them. Rather, I have to create separate accounts for each one,
as if each team is using a completely different service. Then I have to
remember a multitude of emails, usernames, and passwords.

------
mjt0229
I work remotely, and I use Slack to keep an open dialog with my team. I used
HipChat before that. They both have their upsides for this use case, but I
think that it's basically a great tool for what I'm doing. I can easily see
how wide use of Slack at a large company could get overwhelming quickly, but
that's not so much Slack's fault (HipChat would do the same thing) as much as
a general probelm of communication.

------
danso
Torn on this one. I'm sympathetic because of how the OP complains that he's
been pulled into Slack because of its popularity. I don't think being virally
popular is a demerit -- sometimes popular things are popular because they are
good -- but the trade off comes when bystanders are forced into the hivemind
if they want to do things that previously didn't require that hot-app-du-jour.
And I've only used Slack as a social outlet, not in the workplace, so I can't
comment how it compares to Hipchat or good old fashioned Gchat in overall
trade offs in the workplace.

But this is where the OP totally lost me:

> _In the olden days, you’d send around a group email. As things progressed,
> relevant people would be added to the email chain and irrelevant people
> removed. It wasn’t on trend and it might have been clunky but it served its
> purpose. If a person needed information from one specific person, they could
> contact them individually in the chain. Everyone could input ideas and get
> the issue solved. When the issue was out of the way, the whole thing could
> be shut down with a press of the delete key._

Those are some seriously rose-tinted lenses. Again, I haven't used Slack for
work, but unless Slack is significantly clunkier than HipChat/Gchat, and the
Slack client sends an electrical shock upon each message sent/received, I'm
having a hard time believing that Slack is overall less pleasant than the
email-chain-discussions of the past.

Ignoring the fact that the OP describes the most idyllic discussion-by-email-
chain situation in this history of the universe when arguing why Slack chat is
so inferior, the main flaw in his argument is that maybe his company has
cultural communication problems overall that are exacerbated by features of
Slack that are helpful to others?

Here's his main complaint:

 _Now try this in Slack. Remember, it’s one of 10 issues you’ll have in a day,
so you start with creating a group chat instead of a dedicated channel. Now
add someone. Yup. You’ve now just started an entirely different group chat.
All the context of the conversation has gone and you’ve found yourself
starting over, having to re-explain the whole situation for each new person
added. You’ve also suddenly got a shitload of group chat windows open. Oh, and
they aren’t named like channels, so which one of those four group chat windows
you’ve now got open was it again? Oh shit. You got it right, but someone else
didn’t. They’ve responded in the chat you were all using previously before you
realised someone needed adding._

Sure, it's annoying to have to bring someone up to speed when inviting them
into an ongoing conversation. Has the OP considered how fucking annoying it is
to the person you've just _forcefully_ invited into your conversation to read
through several paragraphs/pages of pre-existing chatter to get themselves up
to speed? It sounds like there are issues in Slack's interface that could be
cleaned up, but the problem of new people being added into a group chat
without being able to see the history is a _feature_ that compels a few good
practices:

1\. Don't start a group chat for something that could be sussed out in a
channel.

2\. Don't start an important group chat without thinking of all the relevant
stakeholders who might have input on the issue. Is it possible in Slack to
invite someone into a group chat even if they're AFAIK (which would allow them
to see the history of the conversation without having had to actively
participate)?

3\. For those situations in which you need to invite someone ad-hoc, make sure
you can sum up the issue in a couple of sentences (e.g. "Hey Jane, Bob tells
me you know about this [URL to Github issue]"). For situations in which the
new person needs to know all of what you've discussed before and behind her
back before you decided to rudely invite her to your chat, see Point 2.

~~~
datihein
Actually, maybe you should try Slack in earnest with a project team before
assuming the OP criticisms are wacked.

I tried it with my team about a year ago, and all of the OP criticisms
resonate with me. We don't use Slack anymore.

~~~
danso
I think what turned me off was the headline. If it had been more well-scoped,
e.g. "Slack sucks balls when it comes to doing real work", I'd be less
complainy. I've enjoyed Slack for conversation in medium-ish interest
groups/clubs (100 <= x < 500), in which the channels aren't overwhelming and
there's almost never a need to do private chat with more than one other
person.

Everything in the context of work loses its allure, such as "unlimited"
vacation time.

------
kashif
Slack is so buggy - why is that not an issue. The android app is just the
pits.

I prefer [https://flock.co](https://flock.co) (disclosure: was once part of
the team that built it) it is fast, not buggy and makes different choices than
slack for almost all the same problems.

------
milansm
Shameless plug regarding Slack being distraction source: I am trying to
scratch my own itch here so I'm working on a Slack app that should help with
that, www.collabq.com. Would love to hear your opinions!

