
Why a Slack Backlash Is Inevitable - kantrowitz
https://bigtechnology.substack.com/p/why-a-slack-backlash-is-inevitable
======
dleslie
> “They create problems, high-school-type problems,” one CEO of a midsized
> firm told me. “People are making fun of co-workers, they’re acting
> unprofessionally, and it’s technically a company system.”

The crux of this is that Slack enables long, heated arguments that normally
would be defused by:

1\. Being surrounded by your coworkers

2\. The frown of your manager

3\. The strain on the faces of those around you

It basically comes down to 80s/90s era concepts of netiquette: try to imagine
that the person you're writing your response to is a thinking and feeling
individual, and imagine their reaction to your words. Read out your words that
you've written in the heat of the moment and think hard about how they'll be
felt when read.

If you have an employee who is prone to ridiculing others and won't desist
from doing so when asked...

FIRE

THEM

~~~
Loughla
>If you have an employee who is prone to ridiculing others and won't desist
from doing so when asked...

>FIRE

>THEM

Honestly, why does this have anything to do with slack. If it's not there, it
will be in the break room or hallway or bathroom or wherever. That's a toxic
person being enabled by technology. Not toxic technology magically
transforming a person.

~~~
toss1
What it has to do with Slack and every other social media platform is that
(vs. break-room trash-talk) it magnifies the harassment - it's instantly
amplified, spread more broadly, and is more durable.

It also reduces the dampening influences of people's emotional responses in
meatspace.

Slack may or may not be better/worse than FB, Twitter, etc. in this regard,
but all can definitely magnify divisions in any group of people, from a clique
to a nation.

It is just the dark side of reducing the communication friction that helps
people work together better (kind of like a hammer is better than a rock for
both setting nails and breaking skulls).

~~~
hajile
As a manager/owner, if your team/company has such toxic people, you're better
off losing them.

I also wonder if tech ageism isn't at play here. The social rules of high-
school and college are _nothing_ like the social rules of the rest of society.
In those places, a person can create a group of friends and only interact with
them for the most part.

In a real job without high turnover, you have to learn to get along with
everyone all the time. Startups (the ones complaining here) aren't known for
having lots of older workers who've had time to polish their social skills and
have the rough edges worn down (programmers generally aren't known for their
amazing social skills in the first place).

I'd conjecture that moving 2-3 older devs onto each of those teams could
drastically improve the group dynamics.

~~~
toss1
Absolutely - must lose the toxic people as as fast as possible! They will
damage the team at a far faster rate than any possibly contribution they can
make.

The one good thing in this, is that, although these social media platforms can
amplify and spread the toxicity, they can also make it a lot easier to
identify & document.

------
neves
Sorry people, this isn't about about "high school" behavior. This is about
preventing workers organization. They are just building the narrative for
whats comes next.

Just other day, The Economist also said that Google must "grow up":
[https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/07/30/googles-
proble...](https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/07/30/googles-problems-are-
bigger-than-just-the-antitrust-case)

It looks like, big media point of view is that it is a childish behavior to do
anything against the company bottom line. Combat racial discrimination,
government surveillance or any corporation misdeed are insignificant compared
to the shareholders profits.

Google employees walkout was an alert for the Big Money. The backslash is
coming. Big Brother is watching you.

~~~
core-questions
> Combat racial discrimination

Interestingly, it has been shown that more diverse groups of employees are
less likely to organize and form unions or demand collective bargaining.

~~~
toss1
Interesting, got any citations handy?

~~~
core-questions
Yes. On the more academic front:

[https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019793915602253](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019793915602253)

On a more anecdotal front, Whole Foods is aware of this at the corporate level
and so is (apparently) deliberately pushing for a more diverse employee base
not to actually improve race relations, but to prevent unionization.

[https://observer.com/2020/04/amazon-whole-foods-anti-
union-t...](https://observer.com/2020/04/amazon-whole-foods-anti-union-
technology-heat-map/)

------
motohagiography
My experience with Slack was it is a litmus test for your company culture. If
you have people prone to histrionics and complaining, it's going to encourage
that. If you have cliquish attrition-game players, they're going to create
their own parallel channel scheme. If you have grandstanding drama queens who
work an audience, it's the weapon of choice for the sort of people who send
emails with long cc' lists. If you have hustlers who pretend you owe them
things and always seem to cc' your boss, they will use public channels for off
hours callouts that sit for hours before you can respond.

The one anti-pattern personality that Slack does mitigate well is people who
use in person meetings and phone calls to make after the fact
misrepresentations, and I suppose, sales.

~~~
lambdasquirrel
Yeah, I wonder what ever happened to the common-sense idea that culture flows
outward from the people with the "power." Maybe it's by example, or maybe it's
by unintended consequence. Maybe it's caused by some moralistic / idealistic
sort of policy, or maybe it's through ignorance of the unconscious biases that
people have.

To that end, Slack, being a communications enabler, merely accelerates the
rate of these things happening. You can turn it off, but then you can turn off
the company too. You can try to make everything out in the _open_ open, but
then you quench creativity as well as meaningful 1-1 interactions between
people.

~~~
motohagiography
We get what we reward, and leaders who espouse one set of values but reward
another in practice are necessarily going to promote a layer of jerks. It's
the literal recipe for a jerk factory.

To me, if there were a backlash against Slack, it is because it makes a great
scapegoat. It's different from a social media platform because social
platforms have to deal with the public, where a company has every tool it
needs to evolve its culture. Personally, I think Slack could be a much needed
twitter-killer by letting channels and instances promote messages to being
public facing, while providing much of the value twitter doesn't.

~~~
hideo
> leaders who espouse one set of values but reward another in practice are
> necessarily going to promote a layer of jerks

I had to read this comment a few times, because I think it's truly a wonderful
insight.

This is true for many things. We should be careful as leaders to espouse and
reward the same practices. We should be careful as the led to see what people
actually reward and ignore what they espouse.

------
at_a_remove
At first I was prepared to despise Slack as it being part of the baggage of
that job's sudden interest in Agile Cosplay, but then it looked IRC-like and I
figured I would give it a chance.

Ah, I should have known. My reasons, in no particular order:

First, it was Yet Another Communications Channel to Check. You know, email,
phone, voicemail, meetings, standups, calendar appointments, and so on. It was
one more place I had to scan through on an event loop. I would pay more
attention to Slack only to miss something somewhere else. Where was
communication happening? Anywhere. And Slack made it worse because we had a
skillion channels proliferate, so it wasn't as if Slack were _one_ email
inbox, it was dozens.

Second, Agile Cosplayer #1 was busy posting random things like his Spotify
playlist for the day (I don't have Spotify) and other stuff. You can't even
/ignore like in IRC.

It seemed especially silly when all of us were within ten feet of each other.

Partially my fault: I was late to the smartphone game and have no idea what
roughly half the emojis meant, and so I was missing whatever emotional tenor
of a lot of messages.

Probably the worst part was that the expectation was that always had one eye
on Slack instead of, you know, focusing on programming. There was no "getting
back to" someone on it. It was expected I would have it on my smartphone
(newly purchased) and have it just running all the freakin' time.

Most of this comes down to local implementation, hence I can point the finger
quite a bit at Agile Cosplay, but boy oh boy, does Slack enable and encourage
some lousy local implementations.

~~~
lnanek2
> Probably the worst part was that the expectation was that always had one eye
> on Slack instead of, you know, focusing on programming

Haha, yes, my job is exactly like this. If I turn off Slack for an hour to
write some code, I get a lot of angry emails from management about why I'm OoO
without notice.

Co-workers love to complain to management if you don't respond to them
immediately as well. One guy slacked me 6 times in the morning asking for
help, I gave him a clear next step of adding a certain formatted section at
the bottom of his spec for legal to review privacy concerns, then he never
even did that work and Slacked me 13 more times that day which I ignored to
get some work done, and management went ape shit.

Now I just double all my coding estimates because I know my real job is to be
on Slack 8-5 answering questions.

~~~
Tagbert
Sounds like your problem isn’t Slack. It’s an immature coworker and clumsy
management using an unproductive expectation of response.

When I’m doing that kind of work, I tend to work in 1 hour blocks. Then I take
a break, clear my head, check for significant comms, maybe rely to a couple,
and then get back to my work. I have most notifications disabled so I don’t
get that constant attention drain. This is all part of an effort to manage my
time.

------
chundicus
A lot of my CEO and founder friends talk about this"... rephrased: "My CEO and
founder friends are upset that their employees use a piece of software to talk
about the toxic culture my CEO and founder friends have cultivated"

~~~
steve_adams_86
This reflects my experience. The people I work with now use slack exclusively
for work and the odd share of more personal items while on
vacation/weekend/walk during lunch. We have similar interests so the content
is always welcomed. Any important discussion happens offline or on the phone,
though. I can’t imagine us using slack for anything outside of trivial,
asynchronous messages and events reported by bots.

At most other companies I’ve had people message me about salary concerns,
unionization, anger towards a manager or CEO, endless banter about anything
but work, etc. The main difference was that these places were run by people
who really didn’t care about their employees and slack ended up a reflection
of that. A lot of upset, frustrated, resentful venting in private channels.

If slack didn’t exist, these conversations would have happened some other way.
There’s no way everyone could keep sane in a bad work environment without some
degree of venting or comradeship.

------
outworlder
Oh, they are doing "unprofessional" things in a tool that facilitates informal
communication now, are they?

Well. It's called chatter. That will either happen over the watercooler, or it
will happen over text. The only problem is that off the cuff remarks can be
part of the permanent record now. But otherwise, they should be harmless.

And also... maybe go fix the problems people are "bearish" about? (also what's
this stock market lingo doing here)

> The problematic employee, the employee who would sit around at the lunchroom
> and tell people how bad this place is

Well, maybe the place IS bad. And if they are bitching about it, they may
still care – employees who have "checked out" won't complain nearly as much
(or at all), while looking elsewhere. Or maybe they are just venting and had a
bad week. Or it's a cry for help. If the place weren't as bad, other employees
could help the person.

> and it’s amplifying.

Oh, so other people agree with the person too? Maybe there is a problem
indeed.

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
> The only problem is that off the cuff remarks can be part of the permanent
> record now.

I don't think you appreciate the scale of how many headaches this can create
for a large company. Previously, A says something mean about B at the
watercooler, even if somebody overhears it's all he says, she says. With Slack
(or any other group chat/IM system), if A says the same thing, it's broadcast
to everybody else on the channel _and_ anybody can take out of context
screenshots and run squealing to HR/EEOC/lawyers/whoever. And it's all
accessible to anybody with a subpoena on a fishing expedition as well.

And you can't just fix the company or the people: beyond a certain scale, no
matter how good your hiring process and training, no matter how awesome your
company culture and benefits, you'll get permanently unhappy people, shit-
stirring trolls, wackos with extreme views and all the other weird creatures
that populate any Internet forum. So eventually you have to converge on
reserving chat only for strictly work-related comms and training people to
take anything with the mildest whiff of controversy to talking in person/over
video.

------
rigel_kentaurus
This article would've been better with some concrete examples, or a study, or
really anything to back it out. "Slack can be used for bad things". Well, so
can email, mailing lists, support forums, internal chat systems (jabber), etc.

Not even one example, just "A lot of my CEO and founder friends talk about
this".

As with any tool, it's how you use it. Best implementations I have seen of
Slack is when the rules are clear for the beginning. Maybe channels are meant
to be public and private is an exception, or the opposite (everything private
to avoid noise). And clear guidelines. And to be fair, the discussion is
usually a reflection of the company culture that is already present: formal,
informal, direct. The tool just facilitates it.

~~~
Cacti
Exactly. “High-school type problems” are created by immature people, not the
tool. That kind of behavior would never be tolerated at any of the companies
I’ve worked at, no matter what the medium.

Tech companies, and startups in particular, tend to have these problems
because their culture and leadership is sophomoric and immature, and those
people hire and promote (or fail to fire) similar people.

If a CEO thinks this is a problem in their company, then they need to, well,
be a CEO and do something about it. Leadership sets the tone. Lack of
leadership creates a void.

~~~
sharadov
Exactly I've worked at places like this and the cadence is usually set by the
people in leadership. If the boss up top is a drunk and boning every 20 year
old ( been at one such place ), it sets the tone for everyone else. Also does
not help if everyone in the team is young and DTF.

------
ashtonkem
I hate Slack, but for unrelated reasons.

Slack has no priority levels. Slack pings you: is it an alert, a question, an
outage, or someone sending you a funny gif? You can’t adjust the relative
priority of these alerts, so good luck!

I’ve also seen that it regularly replaces documentation for teams. This is an
issue, since slack just scrolls forever. You might have memorized the precise
sentence to search for (I’ve done this), but good luck to everyone else.

All in all I think more companies would be better off with just IRC for
ephemeral chats. IRC sets no expectation that you’ll catch up with everything
that happened when you were offline, which in this case is good.

~~~
coffeefirst
Yes! The Noise Machine aspects, the sprawling dumpster that is threads, and
the fact that there's no way for all 7 people DMing me at once to see that
there are 7 of them DMing me at once make the platform an indispensable
nightmare.

I'm starting to notice that organizations with long term remote experience
like Basecamp and Automatic rely a lot more on longer, async communication
over instant messaging. There might be something to that.

~~~
EForEndeavour
> the sprawling dumpster that is threads

Doesn't the Threads view (Ctrl T, Mac: Cmd T) list all threads you're involved
with in chronological order, navigable by mouse or keyboard, and searchable?
What's your pain point with threads?

> the fact that there's no way for all 7 people DMing me at once to see that
> there are 7 of them DMing me at once

This same objection applies to every other text-based communication medium out
there that I'm aware of.

------
scrose
As someone who moderates a several hundred person mailing list, the arguments
they listed are neither new nor unique to Slack.

If anything, Slack is much easier to moderate than e-mail or other mediums of
communication.

~~~
koolba
Bingo. Having a user tied to an actual person, and not just a dog with an
internet connection and email address must make it orders of magnitude simpler
to address offenders.

~~~
meowface
Isn't this kind of orthogonal to the software you choose to use? Those issues
are a factor of public vs. private Slacks or email lists. Internal email isn't
just dogs with internet connections, and big public Slack servers may just be
3 people with hundreds of alts and bots for all you know. (Hyperbolizing, but
you get the idea.)

------
aeyes
Turn off Slack and you'll have your employees in WhatsApp groups. What do you
prefer? Nobody is going back to email.

If people behave unprofessionally on Slack then that is because they are
unprofessional. I've been working with different corporate chat tools for
years and haven't seen any major drama. And if the former lunchroom
conversation moved to Slack, you can now hold the bad actors accountable.

~~~
wayoutthere
Heck the WhatsApp groups probably already exist. At my last company, the
malicious shit (e.g. "marry, fuck, kill" lists of coworkers, racist / casteist
memes, etc.) happened on WhatsApp, not the company chat platform. If you don't
discourage a "frat boy" culture, one can develop outside your control. People
who do that crap aren't stupid, so they'll keep it off company systems but
they'll still do it.

~~~
EForEndeavour
Did you say anything in any of these problematic WhatsApp groups to
"discourage a 'frat boy' culture"? Or did you stay in the groups to quietly
lurk, or did you laugh along to fit in?

~~~
wayoutthere
I did quietly lurk until I came out as trans, when I stopped being invited to
join them. No great loss to me, but you can understand why I was hesitant to
speak up in them.

------
andycowley
This sounds a lot more like your company culture is the issue than the tool.
If you think this sort of thing didn't happen via emails, or even in the
office kitchen, you're naive. If you're more interested in broad strokes like
banning a tool than addressing acute bad behaviour, you shouldn't be managing
people.

------
bigyikes
If decreasing the friction to communicate is causing problems in your company,
then maybe you don’t have a tooling problem or a communication problem, but a
culture problem.

------
colincooke
There is really no strong argument made in this article. It seems like most,
if not all, of the problems they talk about are _employee_ problems not slack
problems. Slack is simply a medium to chat with your company and team, one
which is pretty easy to use desipite its flaws. Employees being toxic is just
that, it's not because of slack.

As others have mentioned, this is a professional communication tool there is
no need for fully private conversations. Chats should always be accesible by
HR/admins.

~~~
outworlder
> _employee_ problems

Employee problems as perceived from some random "CEO"'s perspective.

------
macspoofing
Yes. It's only a matter of time before there is a backlash to Slack.

I won't understand the backlash when it comes, just as I didn't understand the
excitement. Slack is just a chat client. Chat has been around forever.
Corporate chat clients have been around forever. What am I missing?

~~~
overgard
Honestly it's just the little details... which are huge. For better or worse
emoji reactions and gifs really change the tenor of conversations. You can say
its just chat, and that's true, but people are complicated and the smallest of
chat features changes interactions so much.

Just as an example, "heres a new feature" vs "heres a new feature (+100 thumbs
up emoji)", for better or worse that changes people.

~~~
macspoofing
>For better or worse emoji reactions and gifs really change the tenor of
conversations.

As did emoticons. I miss emoticons.

------
mushufasa
We use Zulip, which is designed to avoid some of these issues.
[https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/](https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/)

I'm happy with it.

------
overgard
I think there's something there but I don't think I'd describe it as high
school culture. It's more that things are way more permanent/visible. A one
off watercooler comment from someone having a bad day is suddenly A THING.
Sometimes people need to vent and commune without it going on their permanent
record.

I personally find myself doing the opposite and censoring myself on slack,
because I know a comment that's funny in context might read terribly a year
removed.

------
Minor49er
My coworker wrote a bot for Slack that spams most of our channels with random
gifs throughout the day. Most of my other coworkers find it amusing, but to
me, it's quite distracting. I opened an issue with Slack to ask them to add an
"ignore" feature, but they responded that ignoring anyone is counterproductive
so they won't be adding it. Thanks, Slack.

~~~
paxys
Frustrating, but I agree with Slack here. It isn't their job to police the
behavior of your coworkers. Maybe try talking to the person directly? Or their
boss? Or HR?

~~~
Falkon1313
They don't need to police anyone. It would be you deciding who/what you choose
to mute. They give you the ability to mute channels, but not to mute bots. It
should be something they could add.

My company's approach is just that bot posts go in their own dedicated
channels that anyone can mute or watch as they see fit. That works ok for us.
But it doesn't give someone that option in a company that allows bot posts in
any channel.

~~~
paxys
I'm pretty sure you can mute bots, since they are just like any other user
(right click on bot DM -> mute conversation). Or you can mute/leave the
channel itself. You can also hide images/GIFs posted in channels by default.

~~~
detaro
Neither of the options you describe mutes the bot when posting in a channel,
which was the feature asked about.

------
ponker
This is an advantage of Microsoft Teams... the product is so utterly without
charm that I doubt anyone is recreationally loitering in it.

~~~
overgard
Yeah, Teams tends to murder conversation. It's not even broken, its just not
quite worth engaging with.

~~~
yborg
This is why it will win.

------
staticassertion
A lot of these issues seem to come down to:

1\. Just fire the shitty people. I don't know why companies don't do this more
in the US - it's at-will, just fire them.

2\. Why are you trying to stop your employees from organizing????

> “The onus is on the CEO,” Flory said. “Our focus has been on the values,”

Agreed on this last statement. Ultimately if Slack is becoming a toxic
environment there are obviously other issues - employees being able to quickly
communicate and organize is not one of them.

~~~
dreamcompiler
> 1\. Just fire the shitty people. I don't know why companies don't do this
> more in the US - it's at-will, just fire them.

I've asked this question of managers many times. The answer is usually some
variation on "The shitty ones are the ones who know how to work the system to
their advantage the best. They're the most likely to sue for wrongful
termination and otherwise make my life hell if I fire them."

~~~
swagasaurus-rex
The best thing to do is to closely and carefully document their inappropriate
behavior.

Anybody can do this, not just HR. If you have overwhelming evidence of job
misconduct and provide it to your company, it gives them ammunition to defend
themselves against those sorts of legal recourses.

------
gkoberger
This seems like a case of shooting the messaging app. It's just human
behavior, and it'll happen anywhere.

------
maxehmookau
This has cause and effect wrong. Slack may make bad culture worse, but it
won't be the cause.

------
smitty1e
Chat is a technology.

Blaming chat for having had a catalytic effect on a toxic corporate culture
may underscore the toxicity of the culture.

Maybe a cultural detox would be in order?

------
JackPoach
At first, I thought it was a repost of an article from 2017 or 2018. But yeah,
Slack sucks in many situations, especially in large companies. But it's a
great tool for a small group high intensity collaboration (small=8-9 people
max).

~~~
geephroh
Right now, Slack and Zoom are probably the only things holding my small org's
collective culture together. Email just doesn't cut it when we're not in the
same physical space anymore.

------
stunt
I don't understand the argument against Slack. Obviously this is not about
people making fun of co-workers. That's just a bad culture and toxic
environment and can happen even at the office. It's also not about Slack
creating distraction. That's just how they're utilizing it if they have that
issue, which is easy to fix.

Employees organizing union and protest is the big problem for some companies.
And I don't think they can live without a communication tool either. Perhaps
those companies wouldn't be happy about any tool for this matter unless it can
provide some surveillance features.

------
emptyparadise
The "high school problems" are the employees organizing, apparently.

------
eric4smith
The biggest problem with Slack is not even the "politics" or inappropriate
use. It's the fact that chat is a super-horrible way to farm out tasks.

Go ahead. Ask someone to do something over chat.

Very soon, that request is buried in succeeding messages and no one remember
the original task. To me that's why we will stop using Slack, even if it
causes some friction in casual communications.

The problem is that managers (i'm guilty) use Slack as a way to farm out tasks
to subordinates and then we're not thrilled when those tasks don't get done.

Ssshhhhoooocking....

~~~
imiric
> The biggest problem with Slack is not even the "politics" or inappropriate
> use. It's the fact that chat is a super-horrible way to farm out tasks.

I would file that under "inappropriate use". Slack is not a task or issue
tracker, use more appropriate tools for that. While it's certainly flexible
and can be adapted to many workflows, there are still limits with features it
arguably shouldn't have.

~~~
hajile
I'd also add that it might be better to PM someone if you want to be sure they
got a specific message.

------
irjustin
I don't disagree that a Slack 'backlash' is coming because anything that grows
eventually has to stop growing as teams find whatever, NoSQL, NoCode, Slack,
Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, was not the panacea they thought it was. That's okay.

I thoroughly dislike the basis for the argument. The author does clear it up
in the end that Slack isn't the problem, the culture is, but why wrap the
story that way just to sound good.

It reminds me of anti-maskers who blame restaurants for forcing them to wear
masks. Wrong attribution.

------
Brendinooo
I see articles like this periodically here, and I never understand them.

I've used Slack for 6 years with an organization, it's been indispensable, and
since I'm remote it's been my window into the company culture, which I'd
characterize as healthy.

But then again, my job before that one tried to start a corporate intranet
blog and then mothballed it while HR dragged their feet on a proper company
policy for the comments section.

So...maybe it's not about the tools of communication, but the people behind
them.

~~~
gameswithgo
It has been fine at my work as well. I understand that people get mad that is
uses more resources than is necessary, I have that same aversion but that is a
pretty ubiquitous software problem today, and is why I asked for the 6 core
xeon laptop =)

------
dwighttk
Is slack really causing these things, or were they just happening in secret
before?

I could see it increasing the instances, but it could also just be making the
instances more visible.

------
Jasper_
This article is basically complaining "employees are using Slack to organize
and try to push for a union", and then claiming that's a bad thing. Fun!

------
Olreich
I was thinking the article would be about the deteriorating quality of Slack
and the lack of improvement in their facilitation of perusing channels.

The article was instead that CEOs don’t want to get talked about behind their
back and so are going to shut it down. While Slack might increase the ease of
that, it’s not like employees couldn’t do it via email or at the water cooler
instead. This speaks to leadership problems more than anything else.

------
xwdv
Your organizations are doing a bad job at mitigating high-school type problems
because they are not clearly defining what bad behavior is nor the common
stereotypes of problematic Slack users.

If these were clearly defined, people could reference this information when
they identify it, and people's behavior would become more policed. Without a
strong definition, people can inflict harm from safe gray areas.

------
mr_tristan
A favorite quote: "culture eats strategy for breakfast".

Slack and Teams just feed this instinct to spew thoughts without thinking
about your communication first. Everything about modern society reinforces
this. And it's not remotely generational; or, I haven't noticed much of a
difference between generations in regards to depth of conversation. It's just
different tools of choice.

So, I'm sure everyone will hate these tools, but really, they just haven't
figured out how to communicate deeply and meaningfully together. And no tool
is gonna make that happen for you. It's a culture problem.

I'm 100% sure if they ban Slack and Teams, and go back to email, everyone is
just gonna hack email to say all the same stupid crap they're saying right
now. Maybe it'll slow things down a bit, but I can't see it transforming much
of anything.

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nashashmi
So slack is amplifying a problem... one that happens to be quite common in
more paralyzed mediums such as the water cooler ... And before CEOs would
ignore it or sweep it under the rug but now it is getting in their way.

Awesome! STOP ignoring your employees! Stop dismissing their complaints. And
start LEADING! Yes, when employees complain, leaders are put in the hot seat.
Yes, when employees organize, they are being ridiculous. Yes, when babies cry,
they need to be consoled. Yet, the solution is not to keep the baby sleeping
or be threatening or just dump the baby. These CEOs need to lead. And the
employees need to speak louder.

This article is is all about Slack. And designed to make slack look bad. Other
communication platforms have the same problem. But the author only focuses on
slack. This looks like the opposite of a PR article.

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catchmeifyoucan
Twist. We’ve been using it as a slack alternative and it truly works as a
better email replacement. It’s great for announcements, and isn’t super
overwhelming with every channel organized like an inbox. The UX is super
simple. Haven’t played with it too much just yet, but like it so far

~~~
steviedotboston
which one?

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pontus
Feel like they missed an obvious opportunity to coin the term slacklash...

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Falkon1313
"Ultimately, many CEOs and analysts I spoke with said it’s up to company
leaders to create a healthy culture and make sure it’s lived out."

That's the key takeaway from that article. It has nothing to do with Slack or
any other specific form of communication. The headline is just clickbait. Even
the CEOs complaining about it admit that the problem isn't the media, it's the
culture that they create and control that's the problem.

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aogaili
It easier to blame the tool then the culture and human nature.

Those tools just exposed many people subjective/inner feelings/views to the
surface. It is up to leader to learn how to deal with the exposure.

I agree that these need to better managed and leaders need to step up, but the
older culture of repressing and hiding info is gone in this age, and leader
need to learn how to lead in today's world effectively.

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gdsdfe
I don't get it, so if you use a hammer to wreck a car or whatever now hammers
are bad? and we should ban hammers?

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beamatronic
I remember when HipChat was in the position that Slack is in now. At the time
it seemed unassailable.

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peteretep
> The problematic employee, the employee who would sit around at the lunchroom
> and tell people how bad this place is — that’s just happening on Slack, and
> it’s amplifying

Great, on Slack it’s documented, so you can fire them.

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yalogin
If something as toxic as described in the post is feared, it says nothing
about Slack/Teams. It means the company is dysfunctional and the culture is
bad. It will happen with or without slack.

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0xFFFE
Bring back the IRC, half the high school problems will go away automatically,
fire the immature employees and the remaining half will go away too.

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ykevinator
I miss hipchat, I truly don't understand why slack exists

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robot
is the problem slack or people? same argument is said for facebook and
facebook serves people since they use it a lot. This only validates the
existence of slack for me.

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tus88
Isn't everyone on teams now?

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imglorp
No. It's not wonderful.

edit, I'll be more helpful with criticism. I feel like Teams is well
integrated into their cloud stuff on the good side. The cons are it very much
feels like it is aimed at checking some CIO and HR requirements around control
and auditability. Spontaneity and usefulness suffer.

