
Slack's core flaws require topic modeling to fix - awinter-py
https://abe-winter.github.io/2020/04/01/slopic.html
======
Wowfunhappy
...aren't these all problems that emails have too, in more-or-less equal
measure?

Of course, Slack needs to be _better_ than email, or there's no point—but I'd
posit that it already is, despite being unable to address these problems. The
overall interface of a "chatroom" just works better for quick conversations
compared to long email chains. Maybe not _much_ better, but better.

As I see it, the problems pointed out in this article are the eternal problems
of all communication within a large group—including face-to-face. It's why
small companies can be more nimble despite less resources, and why managing
the size of a team is so important.

And while the author's suggestions are great in theory, I can't imagine how
you'd even go about implementing them. At least, not until AI gets much, much
better than it is today.

~~~
jasonv
I think I'm officially bored of the "Slack is a problem" threads.

Just spent time in a dev org where 500+ members of a technical team used
email, Teams & Slack. However you want to slice it, there are organizational
habits of a department that large, and nothing deep in a licensed product
stack is likely to fix/influence how a big dept runs itself.

They superficially used all the enterprise tools at their disposal, because
relying on implementations complicated enough to need documentation wouldn't
live long in a big org that had lots of turnover (how's your Sharepoint
doing?).

Said team had people at all levels who were unreachable in any way, except
when you slacked them. You disrupted them, told them they'd ignored an email
that you really needed a response to, and they gave you what you needed. Slack
fixed the "I'm ignoring my inbox and I have 40K unread emails in there"
problem that feels typical in enterprises.

Teams worked to connect tech and non-tech business units. It helped to keep
business teams off Slack.

Slack was noisy for the ops team.

How Slack is supposed to "fix" disorganized, i-don't-care-about-management
principles of big departments is beyond me.

The flip side: the business thrived, everyone worked pretty sane house, and
the paychecks arrived every other week without fail.

There was a lot to complain about, but no one ever complained about Slack (or
even Teams).

~~~
SahAssar
You're saying that email was overloaded so people turned to slack instead?

People can change how notifications are handled for email too, so that is not
at all new and I think that changing communications to a proprietary protocol
instead of configuring an email client is stupid.

~~~
visarga
You're treating two different forms of communication as if they were the same.
Slack is organised by person and topic, while email is just a large sack of
messages, possibly ranked and divided in a few folders. I find Slack's model
much more efficient.

~~~
bathtub365
The problem I have with Slack’s model is that it’s inflexible and I’m unable
to organize things in a way that makes sense to me. With email the only
constant is messages and threads. I’m free to organize or tag these artifacts
however I want

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tomduncalf
Slack just need to fix threads. The UI right now is crazy if you are in more
than one thread, I don’t understand why you have to click “x more replies” to
see new messages - I don’t think they fixed this in the new update either.
Right now it makes me (and others) avoid threads which clutters up channels
for everyone.

~~~
rmdashrfstar
Everyone has complained for years about this — nothing from the Slack team!

~~~
tomduncalf
I asked them about this on Twitter, they did have a rationale that "We do want
to be careful that folks don't miss threaded replies if they're looking at All
Threads and then replies come through and they click into another channel,
which is why that exists now."

They did say they were looking to tackle it but this was around a year ago :/

[https://twitter.com/tomduncalf/status/1134141543626018816](https://twitter.com/tomduncalf/status/1134141543626018816)

It mainly frustrates me because I think the rest of Slack is great!

~~~
thebean11
Yet I still constantly miss threaded replies. If I have click "threads" when I
have multiple new replies, I often only see the top one, the ones below it are
still marked as read if I don't scroll down.

~~~
tomduncalf
Exactly this :(

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Jasper_
I don't want an algorithm helpfully randomly deciding that someone trying to
ping me is "noise". AI is not robust enough for this yet, and never will be.

Even Facebook has enough restraint to not include AI in their messaging app.

~~~
jfim
Why not? They could use an algorithm that checks if the message looks
important, and if it doesn't, asks the sender if it's urgent. They already do
it for messages that are out of hours anyway.

~~~
michaelt
Some users prefer simple predictability (with the ability to customise) over
'smart' functions with inscrutable behaviour.

Just look at how often people complain about Facebook/Twitter/Youtube making
it hard to see a chronological list of all posts from everyone you've
followed.

------
nikisweeting
I much prefer Zulip to Slack because it forces you to split your convos into
topics, making it more like a forum than a realtime chat system. It also
intentionally eschews push notifications in favor of keeping everything
asynchronous (unless you're specifically @mentioned).

I haven't seen any chat system other than Zulip quite nail this yet, but I'm
optimistic that others will eventually catch on. I'm not convinced that human-
provided topic labels could ever be replaced by an AI deciding which things
should be clustered, but maybe I'm wrong...

~~~
maelito
What I miss in Zulip is Slack-like threads. In Slack, when you don't care
about a thread, you just don't open it, it doesn't clutter your view. But
Slack also misses Zulip's model.

~~~
molsongolden
These are topics in Zulip. Async usage for me looks like:

    
    
        1) Skim list of Streams in the org, streams show 
        the number of new messages in a bubble next to the name
    
        2) Click on the Streams relevant to me to expand 
        the list of Topics with new messages 
    
        3) Skim the active Topics to see which are relevant 
        to me and click into each of those to skim new 
        messages and reply if necessary 
    
        4) Feel good knowing I've caught up on everything 
        relevant to me without needing to see the thousands 
        of other messages in the org
    
        5) Click the dropdown for each Stream and select "mark
        all messages as read" so I'm back to the equivalent of
        inbox zero and can repeat the process later.

------
bobbiechen
Since "topic model" is not explained in the post:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_model)

------
jedbrown
Everyone I work with is part of at least a dozen Slack workspaces with
disparate notification settings. I get loads of notifications at times when I
can't reply immediately, but there is no system comparable to _not archiving
an email_ so I remember to come back to it. I get the convenience of semi-
synchronous conversations and being able to engage and catch people up better
than forwarding an email chain, but Slack and its ilk are very, very far from
replacing email.

~~~
lemoncucumber
I've always wished that Gmail (or some other email client) would add support
for creating arbitrary "folders" each with an "inbox" and an "archive"
section.

The Gmail inbox -> archive flow works really well, but I'd like to have
multiple such inboxes for different mailing lists.

A prime example is pull request notification emails: I want them to skip my
inbox and go into a "folder", but I want to keep track of which ones I still
need to review so the archiving model would be great.

I could hack such a workflow together using multiple labels, but it wouldn't
have the convenience of a universal "archive" keyboard shortcut / button.

~~~
anoncake
Something like Thunderbird's "Keep existing folder structure of archived
messages"?

------
SahAssar
> Having AI in your DNA isn’t just a buzzword anymore

I haven't read or seen anything that suggests this, including in this article.
If this article is suggesting that all companies have to use AI/ML to survive
then that's wrong IMO.

AI/ML is great for a certain subset of problems but I don't think textual
inter-human communication is one of them and there are a lot others where
AI/ML will not be a silver bullet.

------
jfjrjri9nn
I’m short on real time chat mattering as much in 5 years.

My company is sick of the nuisance, and is working towards real time
communication via git & CI/CD, PD alerts, and self guided copy paste of
boilerplate framework manifests, without the constant forced check ins to
sooth attitudes seeking conformity and compliance in behavior of people who
are generally non-hostile.

Traditional office life is falling down just as much because the people that
built it are dying off as it is tech.

The masses commuting to offices on the far edges of our towns is a
generational thing that the future isn’t obligated to give a shit about.

------
matchbok
People like slack because using it feels like "working".

It's not. Everyone who has described to me how their "productivity" went up
because of slack I am able to explain away. It's not work, it's keeping up
with slow chats and a mess of interlaced conversations. That's not work.

Test: In a popular channel wait until someone asks a question. Immediately
then post _another_ question. This should be ok behavior (it is with email).
See what happens. The previous one quickly goes away as other people type.
What a mess.

Chat isn't how work gets done, it's how people trick themselves into thinking
they are "working".

~~~
cuchoi
A big part of most jobs is communication. Any tool that improves that is a
win. For me Slack has replaced email in a good way (can set up reminders,
bots, have sub-threads, among others). This doesn't mean that it will work for
everybody...

> The previous one quickly goes away as other people type

Not if we use threads.

------
zippergz
When all you have is a hammer…

------
JackPoach
I think that Slack has economic problem as well. They are just chat, no matter
what they say. And Slack is pricey, too. Once the coronavirus pandemic is
over, but the recession/depression hits hard, many IT heads will look for ways
to cut costs. Many organizations will dump Slack in favor of other solutions.

------
nurettin
slack requires some priorities (better platform support for drawing on screen,
less lag on connections like 50mbit down/ 5 mbit up) and for that, they need
more programmers who know what they are doing and less product managers who
want to "renovate the UI".

------
simonhamp
The solution isn’t AI. The solution does however require some intelligence to
skim over the content and re-label it.

Humans are the engine here. And Slack is already starting to show some promise
with things like threads, reminders and actions.

However to be truly beneficial, this has to be baked into the core of Slack’s
being; it must support labelling of historical activity, it must treat threads
differently, and reminders and actions need to be customisable based on your
intended level of interaction with the underlying conversations.

Until Slack gets on top of that, shifting the UI around won’t help.

~~~
zeroimpl
Yeah, they need to make it possible for users to clean up/label things after
the fact (including changing things posted by others - like stack overflow’s
edits), and perhaps they can have some AI reminders to encourage this behavior
(“hey, looks like this conversation is over, would you like to summarize and
archive it?”)

Recently, in the middle of an important team discussion where we had a brief
lull waiting for senior people to respond, one coworker decided to ask me some
off-topic questions. It would have made 10x more sense to send them as DM, or
at least start a single thread. But converting messages to a thread or moving
to another channel is hard so there was nothing I could do (aside from asking
them to delete all the messages)

------
swiley
I don’t mind real time chat honestly, but I wish it were done right, at least
on par with email:

No erasing edit history

Open source

Self hostable

The iPhone means the last two won’t happen and people who set their clients to
auto load remote images means the first one won’t.

~~~
molsongolden
Zulip hits all of these if the "view edit history" feature fulfills #1 for
you.

There's also an iOS app.

[https://github.com/zulip](https://github.com/zulip)

~~~
swiley
Wow ok, that's pretty great.

------
Der_Einzige
My experience is that basically all types of topic modeling tools just kinda
blow.

You might as well use traditional clustering techniques instead since topic
models are basically a type of clustering

------
JoeOfTexas
On Slack, I just mute all the channels, unless I'm active on a project related
channel. But having to jump through each workspace to clear out messages is a
pain.

One view to see all or every workspace unreads would be great... I'm jumping
through hoops just to find the damn unread messages sometimes.

------
ThomPete
Slack, like Dropbox and almost any tool in this category are great for a few
people, and horrible the more you become.

Dropbox for +100 people isn't fundamentally better than a windows network
drive.

------
lettergram
A lot of those issues are actually handled by our product:

[https://insideropinion.com/](https://insideropinion.com/)

Which indeed, does use topic modeling :)

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myspy
Yeah, Slack is a chat tool no work organization tool. We use Basecamp for
that. Organizing work in an ordered and calm way.

------
topkai22
I feel like a lot of the authors recommendations for Slack are talking points
in Office 365 keynotes.

------
dividedbyzero
The thing I like most about Slack is the ability to add custom emoji –
absolutely ingenious. We got a couple of different checkbox ones for status
updates, with a question mark inside the box, an exclamation mark, crossed
out, checked, which makes it really easy to convey different nuances of "done"
and "not done". We have lots of product icons (AWS, GCP etc.) as emoji, so
alerts can have the appropriate service logo in them, so people can scan and
filter them much easier, plus consistent emoji for different urgency levels.
And a lot of fun ones, too, which add some lightheartedness to overly serious
conversations. There's a kind of meta-level communication and inside jokes
going on in our team via Emoji reactions that otherwise would only work in
person. Might not be for everyone, but it works tremendously well for us.
Custom emoji give us a really neat way of making such a clean virtual space
ours, of making it a bit more human; something that feels sorely needed in a
world of cleanly UXed platforms and tools and walled gardens where people get
data-driven into funnels.

Human-ness is also something that I feel state-of-the-art AI routinely takes
away from things and spaces where it is a dominant feature. What AI we have is
quite useful to blur the background of a video call; after all, that requires
an understanding of what a human form looks like on video and not much more.
After herculean efforts and gazillions of metric tons of training data, that
works quite well nowadays. But getting human communication to a degree that
would allow for any meaningful assistance in a chat app? Color me very
sceptic. If my social ads are any measure for this, there's still a long way
to go, and that should be orders of magnitude easier – I interact with a lot
of content that isn't that hard to categorize, just show me photography
equipment ads already! You don't even necessarily need to deep-mine my natural
language content for that. And yet I get shown all those smart toilet ads, no
idea why. That's not just unhelpful – it ensures the whole social media
experience won't ever feel human and welcoming in the way random threads on
low-tech PHP forums did back in the day, or the way a Slack convo can feel
nowadays. Not while that stupid robot ant-brain is constantly breathing down
my neck and interjecting smart toilet content; it's weird and uncanny, please
stop.

I really don't understand why AI would be required to make people convert to
premium in an app like Slack, or stay beyond the lockdown. Whatever happened
to just making a great tool that's helpful and useful and a joy to use? If
anything, it might be the opposite: Annoying, unhelpful, obnoxious AI
assistance would drive people off quickly – think Clippy, but in a product
that isn't remotely as entrenched and without alternative as MS Office back in
the day. The way modern software tends to replace user choice with data-driven
fits-for-most defaults, there might not even be a proper "off" setting for
such a thing. Please don't, thank you very much.

------
DonHopkins
>Slack actively hinders all non-communication forms of work by distracting the
shit out of people and frying their brains worse than Broxholm.

>(Broxholm’s brain fryer was in fact beneficial, if parasitic. Slack is
probably neither).

TIL the story and moral philosophy behind Broxholm’s brain fryer (which helps
me understand Slack better).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Teacher_Is_an_Alien#My_Teac...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Teacher_Is_an_Alien#My_Teacher_Fried_My_Brains)

Here's a great review that questions its dubious assumptions about human
nature and plot inconsistencies (click the "more" button at the end of "User
reviews: LibraryThing member StormRaven"):

[https://www.librarycat.org/lib/cctesttc1/item/139177749#](https://www.librarycat.org/lib/cctesttc1/item/139177749#)

>[...] Eventually, the alien is revealed as is the alien's plot concerning
Duncan and the machine used to make him smarter. This is more or less merely a
vehicle for Coville to work into the book his argument that humanity is
fundamentally inhumane. Duncan's previous behavior, bullying and crude, is
contrasted with his nicer, more thoughtful behavior after he has been made
smarter. Duncan is also alerted to the fact that the Interplanetary Council
(an organization all the alien races of the galaxy belong to) is concerned by
the violence and nastiness of humans and is considering what steps to take to
neutralize the threat humans pose.

>Coville's thesis may be true, but I have some serious problems with some of
the elements of the book. The most glaring is the idea that when Duncan
becomes smarter, he also becomes nicer and more humane. One only has to think
back on human history to realize that being more intelligent does not seem to
correlate in any significant way with being nice. I also think that the way
the alien treats Duncan - performing experiments on him without his knowledge,
kidnapping and then imprisoning him to use his brain as a communications
device - seems to pretty much destroy any claim the Interplanetary Council may
have to the moral high ground. Coville's theme, that humans are bad and the
aliens are more moral and kind, seems to depend on the idea that whatever bad
things the aliens do is justified by circumstance (this is not the first time
in the series that an ostensibly non-evil alien has kidnapped and imprisoned
an innocent human to further their goals). This sort of moral inconsistency
simply saps away some of the message that the books are trying to convey.

>In the end, some dubious assumptions about human nature and some plot
inconsistencies regarding the moral nature of the aliens mar an otherwise fun
little book about kids dealing with alien teachers. While My Teacher Fried My
Brains has flaws that undermine the message of the story, it remains at the
very least a decent book for younger readers.

~~~
awinter-py
this review is wrong but still kind of delightful, thank you for posting it

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Roritharr
Slack needs to buy hopin.to or a competitor. now.

