
Curing Our Slack Addiction - ingve
https://blog.agilebits.com/2016/04/19/curing-our-slack-addiction/
======
bhuga
Slack does a good job overall, but I'm glad to see articles like this one
challenging the enthusiasm that they've seen of late. I'm starting to share
the article's opinion that Slack encourages unthoughtful communication. I do
wish the author had spent a little time pointing out some specific product
decisions that lead to the kinds of problematic communication they were
seeing.

For example, basic product choices like "every message highlights a room for
attention" creates, for me, a feeling of "farmville for corporate
communications." There's always another channel to click, another few
sentences to read. This makes Slack very engaging at first, and makes it
highly successful at lodging itself into organizations. And that's great,
because Slack's a far sight better than email. But this rapid-fire feel
encourages synchronous communications, and everyone quickly learns that
@-mentions and DMs get quicker responses. That in turn leads to communicating
with individuals instead of teams (or instead of searching issues, or Jira, or
a wiki, or whatever). I don't think chat has to be this way; product decisions
can encourage a more thoughtful question and answer flow.

I think that Chat may be like product management: the product opinions matter
quite a bit, and teams have varying styles, so there's room in the market for
several different products. Slack does a great job for a certain communication
style, but it's not the only style out there. I hope some competing products
with different opinions gain enough traction to keep them honest.

~~~
gumby
I have a hard time agreeing that "Slack's a far sight better than email."

The lack of threading and context (mentioned in AB's writeup) means you have
to maintain a lot of state (and keep up to date) in order to get any value.
That defeats the point of having automation!

For good or ill, the 40+ year history of mail means there are various tools
and conventions that allow your computer to do part of the work _for_ you.

~~~
stevetrewick
I recently disabled threading in my email as I have an unfortunate number of
people who regularly : send mail using identical subject lines, reply to
whatever my previous email to them was rather than come up with a new subject
line or send multiple versions of important documents under the same
subject/RE the same message over the course of months. This results in a
hideous nightmare of thread spaghetti where I can't find stuff, or worse, I'm
looking at the wrong iteration of something. Oh, and did I mention all the
people who have MIME attachment email footers so that figuring out which email
contains the document they sent means looking through every single mail? [0]

So I flattened it back down to chronological order and it feels like that
restored a lot of sanity.

[0] Obviously a lot of this chaos can be tamed with a more aggressive process
for inbox management, but that kind of plays into my point, that's all out of
process manual work that a better communication tool should help me with.

~~~
pjmlp
I have seen this among all my friends that aren't that computer knowledgeable.

They just search for an email with the same set of people that they want to
sent an email to, choose reply all and change the content.

------
educar
Here's my best practices list:

1\. The best use of slack is the free edition which has limited history. Once
this lack of history is made clear, people use it simply for online pings.
Since notes, files and everything will disappear, people will automatically
put the effort to put those things in the right tools (wiki, bug tracker etc).

2\. Don't expect people to be online. It's the same as irc. If people are
there, they are expecting to be interrupted / they are feeling helpful at that
moment.

3\. Integrations.. are a gimmick. There is really no value in knowing someone
commented on some github issue _instantly_. Or someone committed something.
Use integrations only for firefighting. But because of 2) use this carefull
because you shouldn't expect anyone to be around. Paging/sms/email is best for
this. After all, these are already used and it's not slack makes these
obsolete.

~~~
mmaunder
I disagree. Twitter integration is great because it gives us a way to have
tweets about our brand appear and we can discuss each one if needed.

Munin integration via our bot just alerted us to the Linode DDoS today.

We've created our own bot which recognizes bug ID's and expands the bug with
title, description and status and a link. Same with support tickets.

Also our bot can draw cows on demand. Very important that.

~~~
rekoros
Twitter-wise, even better is to respond from Slack to tweets in real time with
this integration — [https://sameroom.io/integrations/respond-to-twitter-from-
sla...](https://sameroom.io/integrations/respond-to-twitter-from-slack) [0]

[0] shameless

~~~
mmaunder
Thanks for sharing. A channel for every tweet would create a lot of channels
for us. We've had a few hundred tweets today.
[https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=wordf...](https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=wordfence&src=typd)

In general our workflow is to have 2 people in the org able to reply to
tweets. And the rest of us are the peanut gallery just expressing what we
think in the channel. So it works better to have it read-only in a single
channel - at least for our purposes.

Right now we just see name, username, link and tweet. So it might be useful to
unfurl that a little and show number of followers/following and give
permissions to specific usernames to reply in-channel. Also create @channel or
@username alerts when a twitter user has more than X followers - although I
really hate that idea because I've seen people who (I'm pretty sure) buy
followers bullying companies on twitter to get VIP treatment - but I guess
that could be useful too.

~~~
rekoros
It's a channel for every "conversation", not tweet. The benefit here is that
you can keep talking to someone without asking them to email
support@company.com.

There is usually a window of open channels -- 15 or 40, say, that remain
active in parallel. Oldest channels outside the window get auto-archived. You
can also favorite directly from Slack with "-sameroom <3".

Only those people who are "on call" will actually see the channels (for
details, see
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Cg7LQOVZbkm8tmUyc_yJsp8e...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Cg7LQOVZbkm8tmUyc_yJsp8eKHimWBS3XbaejQL3GCU/edit#))

~~~
te_chris
This seems terrible. If much rather people used proper support software like
desk for support

~~~
dvanduzer
That is one way of thinking about the world. Another way is to consider _all_
software as support software. The machines are supposed to be there to help
us.

There are countless players offering _transactional_ support systems, and just
like every other Big Software Vertical, the industry is still re-aligning
around "Web 2.0". Desk's primary market distinction is that Salesforce owns
them. (That's a huge selling point in the enterprise, but not necessarily
interesting to the HN crowd.)

The grandparent post is describing a workflow for more conversational customer
interactions. The industry term-of-art for this is something like multi-
channel support, but Slack's Big Philosophy is to just be more playful. The
"proper software" to use is the software that gets stuff done.

If you get more than two people defining what "proper support software" is,
you end up with something like this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMC_Remedy_Action_Request_Syst...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMC_Remedy_Action_Request_System#Applications_using_Action_Request_System)

People just have different workflows. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
alanh
Off-topic, but: AgileBits is one of my favorite companies ever.

\- Fantastic product

\- … which genuinely helps people

\- … which has evolved and matured in an impeccable manner

\- … which has, as far as I’m aware, never failed critically (no data loss or
security breaches – hell, they are so proactive that 1Password saves multiple
DB backups for you just in case they eventually mess up)

\- … which sports good and native apps for all major platforms, including icky
ones I’m sure the founders don’t prefer. (They have this in common with
WhatsApp!)

\- Helpful, knowledgeable, and quick support

\- Didn’t shut the company down after 2, 3, 4, or 10 years just because they
weren’t on track to be a billion dollar company in the next few quarters

Whatever culture these guys have? Copy that.

~~~
bad_user
On the other hand they've been moving to a subscription model, starting a slow
deprecation of the standalone product. Towards this end they've introduced the
$5 / month family plan and killed the Mac-only option, while raising the price
of the Mac+Windows option. At this point it's worth noting that the Windows
client is old and buggy. They did this, as I said, to raise attractiveness of
the $5 / month family plan, being the oldest trick in the book: setting an
anchor for comparisons.

First of all I find $5 / month to be expensive. Yes, that may be the price of
2 coffees, but if you pay that kind of money for any service/app used, pretty
soon you're talking about real money. I also like to own things and I hate
renting things, being a terrible tenant. I cannot justify a rent of $60 per
year for services/apps unless they are investments producing money. Something
like 1Password keeps me safe, but it doesn't make me more productive when
programming and it's not helping me with sales either. I can justify
subscriptions for Dropbox or IntelliJ IDEA or for keeping my domain active,
but not for password storage.

I guess what really bothers me is that 1Password is moving away from the
things that made me pick it in the first place: standalone app, Dropbox/Wifi
sync, Everywhere interface. I expected them to build the Everywhere interface
for opvault, to introduce GDrive/OneDrive sync as an option, to fix their
Windows client and maybe to introduce a Linux client. Their new Windows client
that's the successor to the old one is a "modern Windows" app distributed
through the Windows store, which means I won't even be able to keep running
1Password through Wine.

But there's another reason I prefer standalone apps. With the family/business
plans they promise a web interface and they promise that after you are dead
your wife or children will be able to access your vault. Of course, if I'm
dead, the subscription would end because nobody would realize that they need
to renew it in time, so that's an odd point to make. But skipping over that,
this means that the vault is now stored on their servers and they have access
to it and to your one password whenever you login. If you thought the Dropbox
sync was insecure, think again.

So unfortunately they took the bait and decided to spend resources on a
subscription model, which is exactly what makes me run away. In the grand
scheme of things I guess it makes sense and I hope it works out for them. But
along with DRM, trusted computing and the overall trend of bait and switch, I
find it to be quite treacherous.

~~~
mdaniel
> I expected them to build the Everywhere interface for opvault

I realize this may only partially help you, but onepasswordpy
([https://github.com/Roguelazer/onepasswordpy](https://github.com/Roguelazer/onepasswordpy))
has support for both Agilekeychain and the OpVault, if you find yourself on a
system that isn't Mac or Windows, or otherwise is a PitA to get to your
keychain/vault.

In fairness(?) to Agilebits, the 1Password Anywhere really was just the most
bare-bones possible, as it didn't support any of the encrypted items except
Login; so no Passwords, Secure Notes, no attachments on anything. Maybe they
just figured it wasn't worth the hassle to flesh it out, and then with opvault
it became a lower priority than it was before.

------
subpixel
> We all knew how great it would be to have a repository of knowledge for
> people to find their answers, but Slack was simply too good at providing the
> quick fix we all needed.

I'm seeing this across numerous open source project communities, and it's
really infuriating. B/c these communities are not paying Slack, they don't
have access to archives, and of course it's all invisible to Google. So a
valuable Q&A that might help thousands of people over many years were in on a
public forum winds up helping...the handful of people who were in the channel
on the day it happened.

~~~
op00to
Information dropping into a black hole happens in IRC on Freenode all day,
every day. The issue isn't just Slack.

~~~
prakashk
Many IRC channels are archived and the archives are searchable, so the
information is not necessarily lost.

~~~
scrollaway
Archives are a start, but the problem is most channels are not indexed. There
is no "google for irc" of sorts.

Even if the archives are searchable (the searches generally suck in the first
place), who's going to know to go into this specific archive, for this
specific channel, and search for this particular query?

As someone who was interested in this a few years ago: This is still an open
problem for someone to solve. The solution isn't particularly _hard_ , it's
just nobody has really gotten to it yet.

(And yes, you may come across the odd irc conversation in your google searches
once in a while - but it is not to scale with the immense amount of
information that comes _out_ of irc).

~~~
HappyTypist
Every single open source project's IRC channel I've seen is logged and
searchable, with a link in the topic.

~~~
scrollaway
Please re-read my post. Searchable doesn't mean indexed and mass-searchable.

Are you going to know that the problem you are encountering with your
bluetooth connection was solved in freenode's #pulseaudio 3 years ago?

------
llamataboot
I have no idea why the answer to this problem is "using Basecamp!" \- That
doesn't make sense to me at all. For me the answer has been to turn off
notifications and shut Slack when I need to go heads down, but review it
multiple times a day and chime in where needed. It's still such a vast
improvement over an email or email+issues based workflow.

~~~
T2_t2
The CEO of a flat company probably has a need to see everything, JIC. Not all
use cases are equal.

~~~
makeitsuckless
> The CEO of a flat company probably has a need to see everything

And Slack does an excellent job at demonstrating why that is idealistic
nonsense and simply bad management that doesn't work, simply by making it
possible to actually see almost _everything_.

It's one of the great things about Slack, it's much like Scrum in that
respect: it may not be the answer, but it sure as hell will confront you with
what the actual questions are.

Unfortunately, people who don't want to face their problems will immediately
turn around and blame the tool/method. So very typical.

~~~
KZeillmann
This is exactly the issue. Slack will expose more issues than it will create.
If people misuse a tool because of some underlying problems, switching tools
will just hide the problems, not solve them.

------
cik2e
Reading this article was honestly sickening. As I went on I got a growing
sense of something horribly wrong with the author/culture of the company. And
then these paragraphs all out confirmed my suspicions:

> Slack forced me to evaluate things very fast and respond quickly, otherwise
> I would miss my opportunity to join a conversation before it moved onto
> something else.

> Then there was the fact that we had so many channels and direct messages and
> group chats. It multiplexed my brain and left me in a constant state of
> anxiety, feeling that I needed to always be on guard.

> And I had to read everything. I felt that I had no choice as often decisions
> would be made in Slack that I needed to know. And in other ways it was
> simply an addiction that needed to be fed.

Blaming the tool for this kind of behavior would be comical but for the fact
that it's actually scary scary to see someone with this little self awareness.
At least he got the "addiction" part right.

Reality check. My company of ~80 people uses Slack (sparingly) as a slightly
better alternative to gchat/Skype. We have jira for issues and a wiki for
persistent knowledge. No one here likes being interrupted or always being on
guard for the next chance to participate in a conversation. So we just don't
do it and Slack has yet to force us to.

~~~
ramoq
I think I'll stick with email from now on.

~~~
Alex3917
For what it's worth, last week I asked for help with user testing a couple new
features on a startup in three different Slack groups I'm a member of, and
also via around 150 cold emails. Response rates were 21x better to the same
ask in a cold email versus a Slack message.

And this isn't just a one-off either, I've seen other people report the same
thing consistently, where 'conversion' rates in response to even the most
basic questions or asks are pretty much zero.

~~~
edoceo
Like IRC vs email. #shocker

~~~
Alex3917
The difference is that with Slack you usually have some sort of common bond
with the other people there, in terms of being either members of the same
organization or else mutual alumni of some organization.

Because of that it's not immediately obvious that Slack should be no different
than just asking a Linux question in some random FreeNode channel or whatever.
That's actually a pretty big issue that doesn't bode well for the longterm
viability of Slack, if (for example) it turns out that it leads to
significantly worse organizational decision-making than email due to lower
participation rates.

------
randomsearch
Recently I've seen a lot of anti-Slack articles.

Not once have I heard a colleague criticising Slack. Every startup I know is
using it and praising it.

When I work with some people who still use email to coordinate in situations
where I usually use Slack, I find it to be maddeningly time-wasting. Email is
terrible for group conversation.

It strikes me that there must be some more general for the Slack criticism.
Perhaps the hype cycle effect? Or the inevitable fact that at least some
companies will use a tool ineffectively, given enough adoption?

To anyone who hasn't already used Slack - I'd recommend a trial, especially if
your organisation has a culture of group discussion via email. I've found it
to be an excellent tool, particularly when coordinating remotely.

~~~
aaron695
I think you don't get the article at all.

Slack is heroin (is the point), it is great to start, and seems great for a
while, but for many people it gets worse and worse as time goes by.

You have not answered the point at all.

Obviously many people spend their lives enjoying heroin (with no bad affects)

But for many it's toxic, why are you not just an addict selling something you
yet don't understand?

~~~
julie78787
[Disclaimer: I work for AgileBits. I also started the #slack-murderer hashtag
inside :slack: before we switched over. My opinions are my own. Just ask
anyone at AG!]

"Slack is heroin" is pretty accurate. Instant communication (and video games,
and Facebook, and Y-Combinator ...) feeds the gratification / pleasure parts
of the brain. That's great if one is working on their own time and can enjoy
the inevitable crash when everyone else has finally gone to sleep, but when
you've got a company full of people flitting around like crazy, because their
neurochemistry says they have to "keep up", because "keeping up" is what keeps
the brain in a happy mood -- that's a bad thing.

Changing collaboration software won't do a damned thing until teams have a
chance to attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings.

------
firepoet
The article inspired me, next time I'm on a product team, to pair Slack with
the discipline of the Pomodoro technique. If a notification comes in and I
need to take a "soft interruption" to check it in the midst of a pomodoro,
I'll respond like I would IRL: ask "I'm in the middle of a pomodoro; can I get
back to you in 12 minutes?" If yes, write down a task on my to do list and
return to it at the end. If no, cancel the pomodoro and reflect on how to
improve our process in the future to avoid such costly interruptions.

If enough Slack interruptions happen, it will hopefully become clear that I
just need to close the app in the midst of the pomodoro, only opening it on
breaks, and even then only to triage to do items for future pomodoros. If not,
then simply continue down that path.

The trick would be to get everyone to buy in to protecting their own time to
focus. That requires a very disciplined culture indeed. One that values
balancing people's ability to create with clearing other people's obstacles
and above all else encourages every person to participate fully in the
governance of their team.

------
jesseg17
While I understand the motivation to move away from Slack, Basecamp, to me,
seems like a worse alternative.

Most of my Basecamp interactions come from the emails that are sent on every
thread change. It almost seems to be a proxy between conversation and email,
which is counterproductive to its goal.

The key issue in this article is about the lacking of separation of concerns
in Slack. I may be missing something, but it seems to be diametrically opposed
to Slack's "always-on" structure. I would argue that Basecamp tends to devalue
workplace communication through impersonal Basecamp-templated emails which
often hide the original sender and thus any sense of urgency that would
otherwise be generated. We have so many fantastic tools, but often email seems
to be the unsung, yet essential, hopper for all of our notifications. For
workplace communication and general project discussion, just email (under the
right direction and guidelines - along with supplemental direct chat) strikes
the perfect balance between urgency (or lack thereof), the ability to
compartmentalize, and personal touch, without interfering directly with work
by breaking concentration.

~~~
1123581321
The new version of Basecamp is pretty smart about notifications. If you have
the site open, it doesn't send you a ton of email. It also has something to
disable notifications during certain times of the day and catch you up later
(probably in one longer email.)

Sadly, some people need those emails to keep using the tool everyone else is
using directly. I wish it wasn't like that.

------
awinter-py
Chat is toxic to productivity. Teams need to get questions answered
'eventually' (exactly when depends on the team) without interrupting each
other.

~~~
cyphar
Except sometimes you're blocked on something and need to know the answer _now_
to finish a task. If you switch to something else while waiting for a 2 minute
answer, you end up wasting a lot of your time.

~~~
awinter-py
Interruptions are sometimes time-savers for the interruptor but they're costly
to the interuptee.

Some problems are important and merit an interruption, yes. But if you build a
culture around instant communication, your worst people will drag down your
best people.

The default should be digest mode (and god help me because my 50 year-old
desk-neighbor said that to me 2 years ago and at the time I thought 'man this
is an old human being').

------
dorfsmay
You have to think of slack channels as coworking place and meeting rooms.

You need to live mainly in one channel (the equivalent of the physical open
office), and go to the other channels when called in, or when you have a bit
of down time to check what's going on there. Like the buildings where we used
to work, you do not need to visit every room.

~~~
mr337
I guess the hard part is the self policing the author mentioned.

At my employer we are having the same situation. Some ppl are at the point
they check Slack 3 times a day, come in, lunch, before end of day.

~~~
cpeterso
Self policing doesn't help if other people are making decisions in Slack when
you're not online.

------
greenspot
I really do not get this hype around Slack.

Chat, group chat, video conferencing are nothing special. These applications
are commodities and included with so many other apps. Eg. if you use Google
Apps/Mail you get the fantastic Hangout for free, working on all devices.

Moreover, every time I login Slack it feels so crowded. If you want to change
something you have to navigate through a forest of settings here and there.

Finally, chatting and being messaged is the best thing to get out of flow and
to get ADD. Messaging is great, group messaging too but use it rather for
important stuff.

~~~
rocky1138
Slack is IRC with history. That's it. If IRC had history built in, Slack would
never exist.

------
jwr
The lack of threading is what really kills the usefulness of Slack. This is
why we settled on Flowdock in our company.

If you don't have threading, you lose the one best feature of those new chat
solutions, the single advantage they have over decades-old IRC: conversations
at least slightly detached from time. On Slack, you have to _be there_ all the
time in order not to miss things or to participate in just about any
conversation. If you aren't, soon it will be too late and no one will know
what you're replying to.

As for other advantages, I noticed that one of the biggest uses is file
exchange. If there was another simple way to just drag&drop a file somewhere
and have people access it, those chat apps would see less use. But there
isn't.

I haven't seen the bad effects in our company. Perhaps they occur at larger
company sizes.

~~~
robaato
Am I the only one who regrest the demise of nntp and good news readers?
Threading was great, and I found it very efficient to get through a lot of
stuff.

With the switch to html based forums, my personal efficiency plummeted. But I
went where the good conversations were.

Strikes me that the reported issues with Slack are just the next generation...

------
abraae
I can imagine this same article being written many years ago when email first
became ubiquitous in the workplace.

I worked at a large company where seemingly every day we would get several
"someone has left the lights on in their blue Honda" type emails sent to
everyone in the company.

Thankfully now I work in a small one without a carpark.

~~~
enobrev
I appreciate the idea of resolving a communication issue by removing a parking
structure and, if that doesn't work, removing the rest of the company.

------
erikb
I agree with many of the problems, but quite a few are actually advantages!
The biggest misconception I see here is that you try to change other's
behaviour instead of your own.

E.g. if there are decisions made without you, let them. Offline there are also
many conversations and decisions you are not a part of just because you were
so unlucky that you haven't been there at the time. But in an offline or
private-chat conversation you can't look up afterwards what each person said
exactly, you have to rely on hear-say. So in fact if you accept that decisions
are made without your participation (it's called "trust in your team") then
using a good chat tool is an advantage.

E.g. 2: People don't use your QnA software or wiki and instead use chat. Maybe
instead of convincing them to use the other tools you can learn and teach
others how to use the search function of the chat efficiently. You may find
that you don't need a QnA software when all the questions and answers are
searchable in the chat software. Here you can safe the cost (money, admin,
learning time for new guys) of one software.

E.g.3: You want tickets and tickets are really important to link activity like
commits. I'm not sure but I would assume that it's possible to find a chatbot
which creates tickets for you from your chattool, writes comments to them and
gives you back the ticket-id to use it in your commits. Then you also have a
kind of log for how a discussion and the creation of a ticket where
interlinked with each other, because you see the 'hubot create ticket "debug
problem"' in the middle of a conversation happening. More context for free.

To change others the first thing we need to do is change us, and that is
admittedly even harder.

------
paulcole
> And the notifications are to die for. They are simply amazing and fun to
> receive.

This is where the article lost me. How are Slack notifications different from
those in other services? I'm just not getting it.

To me, this is an example of somebody wanting to love something.

~~~
dceddia
In my experience comparing Slack vs HipChat (limited experience, but still),
Slack's notifications were more reliable. As in, Slack was smarter about
figuring out when I'd locked my laptop, or the screensaver had activated, and
then it would re-route notifications to my phone. It does this pretty
flawlessly, compared to HipChat that would mess it up sometimes (and so we
were never quite sure whether to trust it).

~~~
paulcole
OK, that clears things up a bit. I don't use Slack on mobile, only the desktop
app on Mac.

------
hspak
It sounds like a signal to noise ratio problem. The problem is that there
wasn't a sound way to filter noise (multiple channels failed) so they were
forced to deal with all the noise to make sure they didn't miss anything
relevant.

The constant policing they mention at the end was probably enough overhead for
them to consider alternatives, though I don't understand what they mean with
this quote: "Furthermore, Slack was not designed for the deep, meaningful
conversations that are needed to move 1Password forward."

On the surface, it sounds like a people/culture problem, but I'm sure there
were other factors at AgileBits that contributed.

------
EGreg
I think the key takeaway is this:

 _And even if we had been successful in changing people’s behaviour, the lack
of threading made it very difficult to have meaningful, deep conversations
about complex subjects anyway. Before you could even fully understand the
problem being discussed (let alone find a solution), someone would invariably
start a new conversation or reply to a previous discussion that happened
earlier in the channel._

Threaded, asynchronous discussions with notifications when someone actually
replied to _your_ message are much more useful.

And they can also be freaking decentralized and end-to-end encrypted! Woot!

I am building something like this. Anything like that exist?

~~~
mgpc
What you're describing is called email. Seriously - it is exactly this, right?

~~~
dingo_bat
I've always wondered about the viability of an email client that behaves like
a chat client. Instant send with the enter key, messages in bubbles, etc. You
get all the fun of IM without additional infrastructure or services, and in a
standard way too. No walled gardens of different apps.

~~~
Strom
Could be a pretty cool UI solution to have a chat client that uses PGP
encrypted e-mail in the background, but Gmail SMTP has a send limit of 100
e-mails per day. You would run into that rather quickly with a chat UI.

I guess the chat client could do all the e-mail sending from some of their
maintainer e-mail servers and not from under the chat participant e-mail. Then
we would start losing comaptibility with other e-mail clients though. Although
not completely, as we could set Reply-To headers and when another e-mail
client replies to user1234@chat-client.com, we could just forward it to the
correct e-mail.

An interesting concept indeed.

------
dsr_
Our private xmpp server logs everything into static HTML pages. This is useful
for compliance with legal things, but also for turning q&a sessions into wiki
documents -- cut, paste, a little editing and you're done.

It's also, you know, private.

------
pbw
Wow really surprised to hear they broke up with Slack. It seemed like a very
good long explanation of the problem, basically no mention of any attempt to
fix the problem, and then dropping the tool. We are deep into Slack and still
liking it, but seeing some strain. This really rings true: "some of the most
positive and uplifting individuals I know come off as curt and stressed and
pissed off in Slack conversations."

~~~
ben_jones
tht makes no sense, every1 i kno is rlly good at xpressing their emotions in
txt

For real though, it's amazing what core parts of human interaction people will
try to replace with an app. People need to understand what they're really
giving up with face-to-face or verbal communication.. thousands of years of
highly developed body language, tone, etc.

~~~
_delirium
It depends a lot on the person for me. Some people are very good at conveying
(and understanding) nuanced emotion in text, especially if they're people
you've conversed with a lot in text already. Others are better in person, in
videochat, or even on the phone (though some, like me, are particularly bad at
phone). A few people I know are significantly better to converse with in text
chat than in person, because they're much more fluent, confident, and open in
text, and comparatively not as good at expressing themselves in face-to-face
chats, stumbling over words and being more stressed and self-conscious.

In personal life, I find the people I'm closest to are people I talk to quite
a bit through both modalities. We have different types of conversation in text
chat compared to irl chat, which end up being complementary in my opinion.

------
tensiuyan
I think for a team work effectively you need differentt tools - Slack for
instant communication, Basecamp for tracking project status, Trello for
organising work flow and etc. It is impossible to have a tool that fits all
your needs.

------
errnoh
I was previously working in a company that used Flowdock[0]. Current place
uses Slack and I've noticed that there are multiple things bothering me.

Biggest complain for me is that the Slack UI gives too much weight on the fact
that someone has talked on a channel. This makes me feel like I should be
reading that, even though it might not have anything to do with me. This
creates a whack-a-mole situation where I end up constantly jumping between all
channels so that I wont miss anything.

Another thing that I really liked on Flowdock was that discussions had
separate threads. Especially on channels that weren't your main focus but
instead you were invited to in order to discuss some specific thing you could
follow just the discussion about that thing and everything else can be
filtered away. This also makes it easy to know what any comment is about,
since you can easily read the whole discussion thread without having to skim
through the whole channel. This works great even if the messages have days or
weeks between them. (Instead of having just the direct mention as a point of
interest you end up following the thread that you were mentioned on and you
might keep following it for longer time, even after the highlight is weeks
old)

There was a major annoyance with Flowdock as well. At least when I was using
it there wasn't a search that covered all channels. You had to either know
what channel the thing you were searching on had happened or you had to one by
one go through all channels and do a search on each one of them separately.

Main point here is that Slack fails to keep my attention on the things that
are relevant to me and instead seems to suggest that everything is critical to
me. This makes it feel like addiction instead of a tool that would be useful
all the time.

[0] [https://www.flowdock.com/](https://www.flowdock.com/)

~~~
mosburger
I also like that Flowdock splits into two panes, with one pane for
notifications about things like Pivotal Tracker, Github commits, etc. It was a
better way to separate noisy but occasionally useful notifications from the
more important conversations than having separate channels. I wish Slack would
implement something like this (separate pane for "Bot" users).

------
patcon
> For many months myself and a few others have been trying to make Slack work
> for us. We would be the bad cops and point out people’s bad behaviour and
> suggest alternatives.

> When someone would report an issue in Slack, we’d point out the appropriate
> JIRA or GitHub project where that should be reported.

This got me thinking: Part of the problem is that the attention of others is a
commons -- a vast wealth that we each have an interest in extracting from, but
which takes a toll collectively.

Perhaps there's a way to internalize for a "consumer of attention" their
attention-cost externality. So if certain people are extracting too much from
the commons in the form of "@person" and "@everyone/@channel" messages,
perhaps a bot could randomly ping them with noise messages in proportion to
their attention-grabbing actions, to make them feel some of that pain and
adjust accordingly without policing :)

------
pbw
I'm wondering if Slack will ever implement something like Sococo or
teamspeak's always-on voice chat. If you have not seen these it's quite a
weird idea. If you are in the channel your speakers are always-on. Someone can
speak to you without dialing and without you answering. They can simply say
"Hey Fred..." and start talking.

I have not worked with these, but did try Sococo briefly. The way this would
work in slack is you could opt-in to voice on a certain channel for
collaboration intensive work. Might be a horrible idea I'm not sure.

I guess you could use /call this way? Hmmm... didn't think of that.

~~~
yannyu
Discord is a bit like Slack but focused on voice chat for the gaming
community. It has voice rooms that work as you describe.
[https://discordapp.com/](https://discordapp.com/)

~~~
jeeva
> a bit like Slack

The UX and general usage is so similar (in my eyes), I actually assumed it was
a spinoff from the same company for a good while.

------
teen
My last 2 companies used slack. I thought it was amazing. After being at a
company that doesn't use slack, I realized how terrible it was for
productivity and also gossip.

------
tootie
I love electronic communication and Slack in particular. For a distributed
team, it's an absolute must that every important chat happen on Slack. Stuff
spoken in person is imprecise, secretive and easily forgotten. Slack is clear,
persistent, and public. Everyone is on the same page. I too feel the need to
read every conversation, but compare that to having those conversations just
happening without my knowledge.

The solution to this guy's problems are to chill out.

~~~
dingo_bat
>Stuff spoken in person is imprecise, secretive and easily forgotten. Slack is
clear, persistent, and public.

I don't get how verbal stuff is imprecise but slack is clear. I find it to be
the opposite. It's much better to have a face-to-face chat or a voice chat
than converse in writing. It's more clear and you can get more feedback from
the other person. Also, if you need to be more precise, you can just write
stuff on a board/notepad/chat while talking.

~~~
subsection1h
When you talk to people, they're more likely to support their assertions by
citing sources with precision than when they write? Really? When I talk to
people, I get a lot of "I read somewhere that X is true" and "I heard from
someone that Y is true". And when I request sources, they say they'll get back
to me, but they rarely do.

------
atmosx
I'm confused, I never used basecamp. Are slack and basecamp direct
competitors? Isn't basecamp primarily a project management software like
Jira/Redmine?!

~~~
bachmeier
Basecamp includes chat, plus message boards for conversations on a specific
topic and pings for 1 on 1 private communications.

------
marcus_holmes
"Slack as the new email" is spot on. And the article identifies it too.

The problem isn't the tool. The problem is people. Giving people more and
better ways to communicate creates more noise, not necessarily more signal.

Constraining communication to channels that only allow signal feels
bureaucratic (complete form 31/b to request new business cards and send to
purchasing no later than the second week of the month).

There's a happy medium (pun intended) somewhere between the two.

~~~
imtringued
Slack is the new telephone but it's treated like email. Conversations are
ephemeral, synchronous and the worst of all they can easily interrupt you.

~~~
marcus_holmes
Good point.

------
halflings
Slack is planning to release threaded conversations later this year [1], so
maybe this will answer some of the criticism on this post.

[1] [http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11418594/slack-threaded-
me...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11418594/slack-threaded-messaging-
chat-app-feature)

------
sickbeard
Email communication, slow, initiator feels ignored.

Slack/chat communication, instant, receiver feels overwhelmed.

The problem is not email or slack, it's the method in which we communicate. We
need to make sure we use the right tools, as the author mentioned, knowledge
bases, email, chat etc at the appropriate times.

The problem is not Slack per say, it's using Slack for all communications.

~~~
eeeeeeeeeeeee
Yep, a lot of these issues the OP reports can be resolved by, as a team,
discussing how you communicate and what is a priority. That team seems to be
lacking clear expectations. Oddly enough, that is a failure to communicate.

If someone does an @here or @channel or even an @person notify for a simple
question that is not urgent, that is rude. Non-urgent issues should go in the
channels and the person can respond when they get time, or e-mail it to
indicate it's not a priority.

I really like Slack, but I do agree that it's easy to get carried away with
notifications and integrations and it becomes a lot of noise. But most of
these issues can be resolved by talking as a team about how the tools should
be used.

------
an4rchy
Interesting read, will have to see how it turned out (in case you guys move
back to Slack :D). Although, I'm not sure changing tools is the right answer,
it sounds like you guys had everything you wanted and more. Why not modify
Slack to your liking and not change tools entirely, this eliminates the need
to learn a whole new set of tools to do the same work.

~~~
bojo
I think the point is to completely go cold turkey with the tool they know is
good and tackle the problem with something they are unfamiliar with,
disrupting existing habits. It sounds like they reached the point where
modifying Slack (or more importantly, their communication habits) would just
result in sliding back to the old ways.

------
andrewfromx
one day in our office slack was down from like 11:50am to 1:10 pm and it was
perfect. It was like a big sign lit up in the office that said "TALK TO
PEOPLE". Everyone took a much needed slack break and got lunch. Maybe the
admin of a slack network should be able to enable that timeframe to be off
everyday.

~~~
lttlrck
Slack admin can set a team wide do not disturb period. Users can override if
they wish.

------
aidenn0
We use jabber in my office, and it's definitely higher friction than slack;
this made me think of it as at least slightly a positive for the first time.
We also have a wiki, and a searchable database for topical mailing lists, and
those get used a lot.

If someone has to send me an IM to get an answer to something about our
product, and I can't link the answer to them by just searching our wiki (or
documentation if it's user-visible), then I file a note to add it.

I haven't ever felt the need to berate someone for asking me about easy to
find information, because someone who isn't at least slightly embarrassed to
have their question answered by a link to a resource they could have found on
their own in under 30 seconds is probably going to have enough problems in
other areas.

------
pierrebai
Why has SMTP evolved in all those years?

Email could handle much more automation, and be friendlier to on-demand
inclusion in discussion threads, but AFAIK, it doesn't support a standard way
to provide:

1\. End-user controlled behaviour.

2\. Whole-thread forwarding initiated by the end-user.

#1 would require a way to allow stantard plugins to be written, either by
sysadmin or end-users. (Obviously, the capability and authorization of each
would be different. End-user ones would only be allowed to touch end-user own
emails.)

#2 would allow easier evolution of email threads.

I'm not talking about proprietary extensions to a particular SMTP
implementation. I'm talking a standardized protocol addition to support these
scenarios.

Am I missing something? Were changes to SMTP ever attempted?

~~~
Someone1234
> Why hasn't SMTP evolved in all those years?

Real answer: A duopoly in the email space give two-three companies too much
power over SMTP and email in general (and they have no interest in changing
it, IE 6 style).

These companies? Microsoft (Exchange, Hotmail/Outlook.com), Google (Gmail,
Google Apps, Google Apps for Education), and Yahoo! (Yahoo! Mail).

If these "big three" don't want to support something then it doesn't exist. If
they do want to support something then you're adding it to your SMTP/mail
server stack regardless of how much you wish to.

Now, I know what you're going to say "what about Sendmail, Postfix, and other
SMTP daemons?" But these open source email daemons are very beholden to what
the "big three" do. If your SMTP daemon doesn't work with their servers then
it is effectively broken and nobody will run it.

The reality is that the SOURCE of almost all non-automated email on the
internet comes from these big three (Exchange shouldn't be under-estimated in
this context).

So that's why, we're in an IE 6 situation all over again, but this time Google
and Yahoo! are also playing gatekeeper in addition to Microsoft.

------
mmaunder
This is incredibly timely for me. We have grown from a team of 2 to a team of
18 in the past year, we're all remote and we literally huddle around Slack and
warm ourselves to it's glow from morning till night. It's the core of our
company culture and our comms.

I think Dave (the author and founder of 1password) is feeling the same thing
I'm feeling as a CEO. It's a kind of weird anxiety that creeps up on you as
the company scales and you feel like you're always-on from the moment you open
your eyes to the moment you close them at night. I think it's a symptom of a
virtual office and team. A real office on the other hand would provide that
very real sense of driving home in the evening that gives you a very solid
separation from work, the team, the opportunities and the issues.

To be clear: I'll never go back to a physical office, both for my own benefit
and that of my team's.

I became aware of this problem with being always-on recently. I also started
giving rather short unvarnished answers to questions on Slack and I realized
something had changed. I've put it down to having no sense of quiet time. I
don't mean not having any 'quiet time' but having no 'sense of quiet time'
because someone might have messaged me. So even if I set myself to away, I'm
still checking in just in case I dropped the ball because someone is waiting
for a reply.

I've changed two things so far to try and fix this:

\- Taking long walks (in addition to my regular bike rides) with Slack off. \-
I still code, so I turn Slack off and set my alarm for 1.5 hours from now or
whenever I need to be back on. Then turn Slack off.

Things I'm considering:

\- Banning Slack after a certain time at night (for me personally). Perhaps
8pm. \- Banning Slack for myself until I'm "on" in the mornings.

Being a remote team I see Slack as absolutely essential and I don't think we
could do without it. We are very productive via slack and we share music,
jokes, news, ideas for blog posts and many other things via Slack. We also do
our voice calls via Slack and we don't use video on purpose because it's
distracting. So for us, Slack won't go away any time soon. I think if you can
manage it, it's an amazing team platform.

On a broader note: I think digital addiction is a real problem. I think it's
subtle and it involves checking the same thing more than 20 times a day in a
non-productive obsessive way. Think Facebook, Reddit, Hacker News, hitting
refresh on a SaaS thing that gives you a quick endorphin or adrenaline rush
and of course Slack. I think the symptoms are subtle, the behavior is widely
accepted as normal and it's destructive in several ways.

So I think it's important to develop a discipline that allows us to exist
online safely, productively and in good health. I think what this discipline
is is just beginning to emerge in our culture because the problem of digital
addiction and being always-on is only beginning to be recognized.

~mark.

~~~
mmaunder
Posting an update on this for anyone else in a growing org using Slack: Our
team chatted today and decided to keep using Slack because it's awesome for
remote teams and our needs. It works well for us. What we are doing now though
is to us the 'Snooze' function which lets you set it on a timer. Then when
someone msgs you they are told that you're in snooze mode and given the option
to 'break through' the snooze and alert you anyway. We've agreed we'll only do
that if it's urgent.

I think this will work well and probably scale well too.

------
jsudhams
Completely agree with @mmaunder comment on setting time for checking slack and
not using it other times. No matter what tool be it outlook or blackberry, you
need to set timing for the communication and collaboration. For the people who
have collaboration/communication as not a primary job like
developers/designer/engineer etc..

Also it is completely unacceptable to call this checking a tool beyond your
shift/work a culture and it is indeed a bad practice setup by lead/ceo to keep
everyone working all the time. The companies pay you for your time, so unless
u get paid extra allowance to check these tools after hours please do not do
it. For emergencies situation let people SMS and if no response in 15 minutes
then call and that too have roaster who will be on call in which week or
month.

It is a job of the leader/manager to ensure people have work life balance and
they should setup internal polices and procedure to ensure people don't get to
appreciate the one who is always on rather the ones who contribute with in the
work hours. The management should make a culture of people talking about it so
that it does not become forceful as people start doing this always on and
others fear that they would be considered contributing less if they don't be
online hence everyone stays on line for no reason.

For a company like 1Password there is absolutely no reason to be online all
the time except for the support folks(and they too with in thier shift and
have enough people to cover 24/7) and dev's can be engaged on call as
required. All they need is setup couple of core hours every body is online to
communicate and status update. Even geo diverse teams you can have core hours
that ensure everyone is online for about 1 hour or 2 at the same for each team
, if it is absolutely necessary.

I wish startup ceo's understand this and account that 8 hours a day is what
person can reasonably put in work and if you need more hours it is going to
cost business and that is part of the budgeting process. If you can't afford
that then you are not yet ready to start the startup or do it it yourself. For
god sake it is 21st century and if you are going to change the world first
change your mindset and change the your company and make it a first class and
make it 22nd century company where employees are not exploited because they
can be(in the name passion, happiness, blah blah blah).

------
sgift
I still try to understand what Slack is that IRC isn't. At the moment I'm in
the "someone managed to make money out of copying IRC"-phase including copying
all the problems/pain points of IRC according to this article and comments
here so far (highlighting, channel inflation, multiple conversations in one
channel at the same time overlap ..) - what do I miss?

~~~
SunShiranui
I don't use Slack, but perhaps people prefer its UX?

~~~
Morgawr
IRC is a protocol, it has nothing to do with UX... You can tack IRC on top of
a pretty client and you can get pretty similar results I'd assume.

DISCLAIMER: I never used Slack.

~~~
Robin_Message
UX != UI

Simple example: with Slack (or another hosted, web-based chat app), I can
invite the non-technical head of sales to join it via e-mail, and they can.
They literally cannot install an IRC client.

I can get similar results, but "I" isn't enough for a communication tool to be
useful.

~~~
Morgawr
Why can't you do it through the web interface of a company-backed IRC network?
There's literally no difference there, IRC is just a protocol, you can still
wrap around your own local stack with registration, email notification, fancy
UI (I know UI != UX) and auto-invite system or whatnot.

I just don't get it...

~~~
paulddraper
"you can still wrap around your own local stack with registration, email
notification, fancy UI (I know UI != UX) and auto-invite system or whatnot"

Or pay someone to do that and maintain it for you.

------
lexhaynes
This article was much more focused than the "Slack, I'm breaking up with you"
artucke posted to HN a few weeks ago: [https://medium.com/better-people/slack-
i-m-breaking-up-with-...](https://medium.com/better-people/slack-i-m-breaking-
up-with-you-54600ace03ea#.p9r9cj57s)

------
cm3
I've seen teams rely only on Slack for communication, including technical
discussions.

I don't get it, and I'm concerned about the following:

1\. proprietary service with no interoperability and high potential for loss
of records

2\. important technical details/arguments hidden in a chat log and not made
part of a ticket/commit/comment

3\. removal of async communication leading to more interruptions and less
async emails one has thought about before responding

4\. teams boasting the use of 10 or more channels

There are other issues with relying solely on Slack and killing off email, but
these are the most important ones that always come up when I'm confronted with
a Slack-only team.

I've had the same issue with IRC, so it's not my kind of communication medium
to monitor 24/7, whereas I love bulk responding to emails and often ponder
about a response for a while.

If there's something urgent, one picks up the phone, and usually one thinks
twice before calling (interrupting) someone.

Using proper email threads, ticket discussions, etc. give you an electronic
trail of the technical decision, and that's also why Fossil's inclusion of a
distributed ticket system is such a great idea. Two years later, you can
easily inspect how the code evolved and why it did in a certain way.

How do dev teams cope with Slack? I couldn't work without async email and use
real time communications (text or voice) only on demand, in order to limit
interruptions.

------
Joof
Why not IRC, Jitsi, Jira and a wiki.

IRC for chitchat / asking questions (PMs and highlights so there's no
immediate need to respond)

Jitsi / IRC for meetings or small team collaboration.

Jira for bugs

Wiki for documenting design decisions and future work

~~~
qznc
IRC for chitchat and a issue tracker are great. I agree.

I prefer Etherpad for meetings, especially for virtual meetings. It includes a
simple chat, but I never used that.
[http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/meeting.html](http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/meeting.html)

A wiki is ok for meetings minutes, but I prefer documents now. Wikis always
seem to deteriorate to the point of uselessness.

------
jolux
Why can't you just search your Slack for answers to old questions? Isn't that
supposed to be part of the point? I've heard that's one of the main selling
points.

------
dogweather
Makes me think that something like Discourse should be used for all non-
ephemeral communication.

~~~
hardfire
Have the same thought as well.

------
hashkb
Imagine all of these comments in a flat, linear wall of text. Threads++

~~~
balls187
Slack != commenting system.

------
chadlavi
tldr: a better hammer is a better hammer, not a replacement for your whole
tool chest.

------
tunnuz
My understanding: free CI runners for everybody, 10 USD promo code to new
users. Considering that DigitalOcean has always been giving away 10 USD
coupons to non-users, the promo code is quite irrelevant. But the free CI
runners are great!

~~~
qwyxzy
Wrong article.

~~~
tunnuz
Woops. I thought I was on the DigitalOcean / GitLab one. Sorry.

