

The week I tried to unplug from Slack - kirk21
http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/27/9213653/the-week-i-tried-to-unplug-from-slack

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emergentcypher
I don't understand the big deal with Slack. It's a glorified web-based IRC-
like thing? And __yet another __centralized, privately owned, third-party
service. This is always the big turn-off here. Are there good self-hosted or
federated slack alternatives?

~~~
golgappi
We had a perfectly working internal IRC system at work. For some managerial
reasons, the decision was made to 'keep up with the trend and adapt to new
softwares, firstly by moving on to Slack'.

I am young, in my mid-twenties. I like new. I like Slack too. But I honestly
couldn't see any reason why we moved to it. We pay slack probably more than
what we needed to maintain our own old tiny IRC box. But money aside, there
are real issues with Slack that are just not there with hosting your own IRC.

The major one being privacy. For a field that is almost religiously against
abuse of privacy, we sure as heck don't seem to have an issue with all of our
work conversations being stored on another company's server.

Another quip I noticed was archiving. While my IRC allowed archiving without
any limits, there are limits imposed on how much archives you can have access
to on Slack. Of course, its customizable, but for that first time you're
looking for something said 6 months ago by an ex-employee, you realize that
there is no way to go back. You set your preference and learn to move on,
cause well, its a different company after all. And you're paying for it.

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ant6n
I just turned off all notifications on desktop and phone except direct
messages, and instances of (my n6me/my name) anywhere else. So I only get
notified if somebody wants something from me personally.

~~~
warriormonk5
That was my approach as well. It helped my productivity immensely, but I do
notice that I'm slightly less aware of current events.

~~~
ant6n
Agreed about the reduced awareness

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kirk21
I try to focus on DM's only. Written about my addiction to Slack bots here:
[https://medium.com/@RecurVoice/rise-of-the-slack-
bots-5a7928...](https://medium.com/@RecurVoice/rise-of-the-slack-
bots-5a7928d404e7)

