
Ways scientists use Slack - kungfudoi
http://www.nature.com/news/how-scientists-use-slack-1.21228
======
eschaton
I'm constantly amazed by professionals who complain about their email inbox.
Do they not bother to learn their tools, and set up simple mail filters?

Mailing lists are actually one of the best collaboration tools available
because:

(1) They can be, but don't have to be, nearly real-time;

(2) The content comes to you, you don't have to check it;

(3) They allow a full suite of content to be exchanged, if participants are
willing to accept the overhead; and

(4) They're straightforward to build tools atop, including archives,
autoresponders, and various kinds of automation.

Realtime tools like IRC & Zephyr and their awful browser-based clones like
HipChat and Slack can be useful too, but should be treated as supplements, not
primary.

Web forums aren't quite as awful as browser-based chat, but they're generally
better treated as a front-end to a mailing list for people who don't otherwise
have access to a good mail client.

(Really, all of this would be even better served by NNTP instead of mailing
lists, but almost nobody runs organizational NNTP servers and mail clients
long ago dropped support for it.)

~~~
VMG
> Do they not bother to learn their tools, and set up simple mail filters?

You know the answer. They don't, because they have actual work to do.

~~~
verletx64
Set it up once, get more value out of your email. It's a quick job, it's not
going to come close to derailing their work.

~~~
empath75
You're leaving out the time it takes to learn enough about email to know what
the correct configuration is. And you're assuming that you're going to get the
configuration right the first time and not have to continually tinker with it.

------
whyagaindavid
In my uni, I strongly forbid use of any proprietary apps, as much as possible.
Please forgive me, I do agree software devs needs to eat ... etc. but let me
explain. We all moved to macs in the last 5 years, which means when I upgrade
from mountain lion to Mavericks to sierra, we need to get a BUY Endnote. Every
second major version of OSX needs and new EndNote. Even with academic license,
it costs, about EUR 600 for every device. 1 Prof, 2 Staff scientists, 4
postdocs, 6 PhDs (charged a bit lower EUR 200 per year). You calculate. There
are universities where Endnote is cheaper but subsidized by the bulk-
contracts.

Oh yes, we do use MS-office. Atleast MS does not force us to buy new MS-Office
for every OS upgrade. Also remember, that grants pay mainly for equipment and
rarely any/expensive software.

As other posters indicated, mailing-lists + proper filtering is the optimal.

~~~
walterstucco
I don't get why people still use proprietary software for team communication.
Slack is just a glorified IRC owned by a private company that you have to pay
to get something remotely useful. My teammates hate me for not even having
slack installed on my computer.

~~~
mac01021
The killer feature is out-of-the-box server-side logging of all conversation
history with full-text search.

Make an free/opensource product that will do that for me with no configuration
or administration effort and I'll gladly use that instead.

~~~
michalskop
we use Telegram as a free (no cost) alternative, "poor-man Slack"

~~~
eitland
+1 for Telegram.

HN loves to hate it and I know I should treat it as unencrypted as the crypto
might or might not be good but both mobile and desktop clients works nicely
(actually IMO brilliantly) across Android, IPhone, Linux desktop and Windows
desktop. Bonus points for bot API and channels.

------
nemoniac
Very disappointing to see such a fluff piece in Nature.

One scientist who says "I have a lot more discipline" while another says "“I'm
just typing whatever comes into my head".

The "ability to incorporate 'bots'" is lauded as a feature, suggesting that
it's not possible with email while further down reporting how one lab has
triggers from email to post to Slack.

To top it all off, every "feature" of Slack mentioned is also a feature of
email.

~~~
whyagaindavid
If anyone from Nature/influential is reading, you cant even close your
Nature.com account. I tried closing my 10 year old account, they replied that
according to terms and conditions I _had_ agreed while opening the account, it
will stay forever.

~~~
brianwawok
Small claims court.

~~~
freyir
On what grounds?

~~~
brianwawok
Sure you can figure out something, angry lawyer letters tends to get people to
fix things for you. :)

------
isostatic
The features of slack I like that traditional irc lacks

* Sms 2 factor authentication

* Historical logs

* instant search

* Offline messages

* The client isn't called "BitchX"

It's replaced IRC at my work because our own irc servers were cert based which
is a pain to set up, but mostly because you don't miss things when you're
offline, it's easy to get new starters and non tech people (especially
developers) on board, and the history functionality is seemless.

~~~
mugsie
* Sms 2 factor authentication

\- Yup, slack has IRC beat there

* Historical logs

\- Eh, that is increadibly easy for an IS/IT team to set up and run.

* instant search

\- As ^

* Offline messages

\- It is called an IRC bouncer - again easy to set up and run

* The client isn't called "BitchX"

\- mIRC, XChat, irssi, weechat, KiwiIRC, the list goes on. Not using IRC
because you don't like the name of one client out of probably hundreds short
sighted. (and you know you can connect to slack from BitchX right?)

I grant it is not perfect, and for some use cases just paying the money to
slack is worth it, but IRC can have most of these features.

~~~
brianwawok
How many IT hours does it take to set all that up? And a nice phone client?
Seems cheaper to pay slack a few bucks...

~~~
CaptSpify
Really? I set up an IRC in a couple of hours. Why pay slack a few bucks over
years when you can pay a decent admin a couple hours worth of work?

(I do admit I've not seen a good IRC phone client)

~~~
brianwawok
So IRC is giving me a subset of Slack features, at the expense of

1) IT team to set it up

2) IT team to maintain it when it breaks

3) Servers to run it on.

And give up features such as a nice phone client?

What size of company are you? A 5 person company can use slack for free or
~$480 per year. You are going to have trouble getting all 3 of the above for
less than that price. And even if you do equal the price, you, as you
admitted, lose features like a nice mobile client.

If you are a 200 person company you can make a better argument on the price
front, but then you have kinds of new things like legal discovery
requirements. Those will add much time and complexity to your IRC setup. And
you still are missing lots of Slack features.

IRC has never been that great. It works. It's a free standard. It's not great.

~~~
CaptSpify
1) You don't need a team, just a subset of an existing team. One person can do
it.

2) Same as above. The time-sink in that is quite minimal.

3) We just run it on an existing mail server. No additional server required.

I agree it could heavily depend on the size of the company, but I'd argue
bigger companies have an even greater incentive to keep things on their own
servers, and probably more resources for doing so.

I can't account for any of the other slack features as I've never used it, so
I'll have to take your word for it.

------
johnhenry
In every industry that I have worked in, there has always been a battle
between using the latest innovative technology to improve everyone's job, and
holding back to ensure that nothing breaks. I've always been an advocated of
the latter and it appears that some industries may not be ready to start using
slack. Take Ginkgo Bioworks, for example. Sure, being able to open a door
through slack because you don't have your keycard is convenient, but this
introduces a few security holes and likely makes the whole keycard system
useless. Also, there doesn't seem to be any mention of the need for data
security in the article, but it should be noted that slack does not use end-
to-end encryption, so they can read everything your organization shares. And,
even if they are a trustworthy third-party, they have been hacked before
([http://www.businessinsider.com/slacks-security-breach-may-
be...](http://www.businessinsider.com/slacks-security-breach-may-be-worse-
than-its-letting-on-2015-3)), so it's worth noting.

~~~
eschaton
How is browser-based chat like Slack "the latest innovative technology?" It's
just IRC or Zephyr, but accessed via a browser. It's not something people
didn't have in the early 1990s. Hell, it's not substantially different than
AOL or Yahoo chat rooms either, except that it's so heavyweight you couldn't
even think about accessing it from systems that accessed those just fine.

~~~
tluyben2
Many people including me say this but people do not want to see it. It is even
worse tham IRC imho as the clients are slow and wonky, they just 'look better'
which is perception. They did their marketing very well indeed.

~~~
vehementi
Slow, wonky, heavyweight clients are not a factor in productivity. If it takes
an extra 1 second to send/display a message, it doesn't matter. The
communication is close enough to real time. The tradeoffs (which are being
massively and hilariously exaggerated here) are worth it because anyone can
easily use it from anywhere without having to stay connected or set up logging
systems etc.

~~~
tluyben2
You are obviously on solid internet. I am almost never and then Slack is
unusable because of those performance issues; they are enlarged 100x because
of performance. If my connection is wonky and I have a window of less than a
second to pass my message in and get messages back, that 1s wait for the
client is what makes it exactly unsusable. Wechat and Whatsapp understand
this; Slack assumes only people in highly connected cities use it, which
ofcourse is normally the case. But that does not make it's problem less real
for a lot of people around the world. Most of China for example.

And losing messages, which actually happens when I have bad connections, is a
problem; a) i have to type them multiple times and that takes me out of
concentration b) i assume that my colleagues read something while they never
got it. Large issues indeed.

~~~
brianwawok
Are you full time remote working on this internet connection? Seems like
perhaps you need to upgrade your connection vs demand everyone switch tools to
support your 3rd world internet connection? Do you get mad if people email you
attachments too?

~~~
tluyben2
I don't get mad nor am demanding anything from anyone. I don't think it hurts
anyone if programmers would make connections more fault tolerant. And I don't
have a choice; there is no 'upgrade' in most cases. But nice that you don't
have that issue.

~~~
brianwawok
And your employer is OK with you working remote on a flakey internet
connection? I can't say I would hire someone remote that can't get past a 99%
or so uptime... if their internet is that bad, they would need to move to come
into the office or find another position.

This isn't trying to be some kind of espousing my values on someone, but it
seems a basic requirement to work remote. 99% of programming jobs have an
office. If your net is not stable, those seem a better fit.

------
superkuh
tldr; some labs adopt a proprietary communication and content management
system (instead of using existing open protocols) because they don't have the
technical support, or time, to do it right.

In the short term this increases productivity but in the long term the lock-in
will constrain.

~~~
eschaton
At the largest CS schools there was some use of a federated Zephyr system for
a while from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s. While Zephyr the protocol isn't
great, the culture was. And being based on an open protocol and Open Source
codebase — since it came out of MIT Project Athena — lots of fun hacks were
written atop it too.

Also, the primary client "zwgc" (Zephyr WindowGram Client) could run
reasonably on a low end workstation like a DECstation 3100 or SPARCstation 1
(8MB RAM, 25MHz RISC CPU, thin Ethernet or SLIP/PPP via dialup). None of this
megabytes-of-HTML-and-JavaScript, gigabytes-of-RAM nonsense.

------
rl3
Imagine how much more productive they would be with threading support.

[https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/804971838271004672](https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/804971838271004672)

As an aside, I think it's delightful someone made a Twitter handle named
@slackThreadsYet for this.

~~~
neximo64
And if the client used some kind of reliable and fault tolerant connection
method so that the app open opened up and connected really quickly instead of
being behind layers of websocket over socket handshaking. At the moment it
takes nearly 30s-1m from open to latest chat message visible.

Instead of improving the speed they've put more effort into making the loading
screens dynamic and appealing, which is quite myopic.

I think i've written to Slack over 2 years ago letting them know how painful
it is to use slack in Africa, Australia or where latency is high (even with a
fast connection). I was hoping their valuation and billions and funding would
help them improve their software or even make a native mac app.

~~~
shade23
They have a native(if electron can be called native) App now for mac. I agree
with the latency and performance issues though. The Slack app practically
freezes on changing network or if you wake you mac from sleep.

~~~
eschaton
It's not native.

------
lyschoening
It works well in our research center. It offers advantages over mail (instant,
accommodates multiple people writing short messages at once) and IRC (file
sharing with preview, longer posts, editable messages, zero configuration
client software). With its multiple modes of communication it works both for
people who are in the lab and those who spend most of their day at the desk.
The search is a big advantage too. It is better than any search in email
clients or IM clients I have seen. It even looks into files. With the academic
discount it also comes at a reasonable price.

I don't want to make this a sales pitch, but unlike earlier collaboration
tools, Slack actually adds some value. Competitors are well advised to study
its features.

~~~
snarf21
Do you find that you spend collectively more time checking Slack than you used
to spend dealing with email? Do you think you spend more time in switching
costs from concentrating on your work to focusing on the Slack conversations?
I've found it to be analogous to converting all my emails and meetings into a
500 mini meetings and email but spread across the whole day with no real
opportunity to compartmentalize them.

~~~
lyschoening
No, I don't. When the messages become a distraction, you can just snooze the
notifications for a few hours. If a message pops up in a channel with a topic
that isn't a priority, you can just leave it unread until the more important
things are dealt with. In these regards Slack is not very different from email
for me.

------
elkos
I wish more people in science and medicine used open source solutions like
Matrix (even the riot.im Matrix instance would be nice).

~~~
terraforming
I agree. I seriously hope Matrix becomes the open standard for everyone to
use.. I dream of the day my contacts will stop using skype.

~~~
elkos
To be honest, I'm a bit disappointed when I see open source projects adopting
closed source platforms. While they can have similar functionality with
Matrix, without having to support a Matrix instance.

------
jboggan
Back when Google Wave came out I got my lab to use it and they really liked it
for awhile. Alas.

~~~
paveway
I feel like the Google Drive/Docs/Hangouts combo pack provides all the things
that Wave was supposed to be, no?

All the ground-breaking features, such as live interactive multi-user caret
presence are part of Docs. Did Wave promise more than that?

What are the missing pieces that got lost along the way, and never made the
jump?

~~~
aub3bhat
An Open client server protocol.

I think Google Wave debacle is a great example of how the advice/vision dished
out on HN is disconnected from the reality of consumer
experience/expectations.

With Wave Google saw writing on the wall and discontinued Reader and GChat
XMPP integration.

~~~
paveway
So you're saying Google Wave was an undertaking born directly out of events
that happened here on HN?

That's not what I remember about Google Wave. Where are the moments of these
facts recorded?

And because that protocol didn't work, they killed off and/or radically
altered unrelated chat and RSS products?

I don't feel that's true. Google has implemented other new consumer facing
protocols and products since then.

What are the pieces that tie together Wave, Reader and XMPP integration, other
than timing and the fact that RSS and XMPP are open standards?

~~~
aub3bhat
Google Wave was an undertaking born directly out of advice-given/beliefs-held
by people similar to those on HN. The advice being all you need is a
decentralized protocol like Email/XMPP and its possible to succeed in Social.
Google tried that with Wave and failed spectacularly. As a result it stopped
listening-to/caring about what tech-savvy users say and started dismantling
other open standards social tools such as Reader (RSS), XMPP etc.

------
stevesun21
I think it's not quite right and fair as people keep comparing email vs Slack.
Email is a open info transfer protocol, anyone can create their own email
system as long as they follow the email protocol, however, Slack is app and
owned by a company. Yes you can say it has some advantages than email, but, I
hard to believe that people willing to shift from a protocol to a specific
software – this sounds to me like people give up on buying appliances which
computable with standard power outlet, and get started buying appliances from
a specific brand and these appliances can only plugged into this brand owned
power outlet. I think this is ok as long as you are a big fun of this brand
and bless the it will not be disappear early than you :-)

------
slack_hater
> When geneticist Daniel MacArthur checks into his lab, the first thing he
> does is fire up Slack, a workplace messaging app.

I am sorry for this geneticist. His life sucks as much as a software
engineer's.

~~~
pvdebbe
Luckily Slack isn't that big a deal abroad. For instance, we didn't jump into
that wagon since it cost money. We tried MS Teams, I was able to argument our
people off of it.

~~~
cyberferret
I assume you meant "augment", but "argument" may actually fit the context
better!

~~~
pvdebbe
'Argument' is what I meant. Not being a native English speaker my sentence was
probably throwing you off guard!

