
How Slack hooks users through artificial urgency - jshakes
http://jshakespeare.com/how-slack-hooks-users-through-artificial-urgency
======
ravenstine
Mute all the channels. Ignore messages that don't matter. Configure it to
notify you if someone mentions "lunch". Done.

Coworkers aren't your friends. Don't have FOMO on their Slack postings.

~~~
rsj_hn
You're going to get a lot of denial, because chatting with colleagues and
sharing memes/news is fun -- and hey, it's _related_ to work. And every once
in a while, important info is transmitted.

Also, people swear they can multi-task just fine, when in fact they can't.
Just like people swear they only need 4 hours of sleep. It's strange, but very
few people say "Hey, I eat 300g of sugar each day, and my body loves it!
That's just the way I am. Whatever works for you, right?" But when it comes to
cognitive performance, it's as if the human brain is so diverse that there are
no behaviors that objectively impede cognitive functioning in all cases.
Multi-tasking _always_ makes _everyone_ less productive. It lowers your
(effective) IQ. It makes you slow and dumb. It is also an objective fact that
those who multi-task are generally unaware about their drop in cognitive
performance. [ * ]

Also, there is a bit of a technological bias here. If you were to ask someone
what is the worst possible kind of work meeting, they would tell you that it's
the meeting that has no clear agenda, no one seems to be in charge, everyone
is piping in with whatever's on their mind, and there is no well-defined stop
period so the meeting goes on until no one has anything left to chime in
about. Basically, Slack.

I wouldn't volunteer to attend a meeting just for fun, nor would I sign up for
an open office floorplan, so why spend half the day in a virtual chat when I
have work to do.

Once I'm done working, then I can meet with friends at a restaurant or bar, or
be on social media.

[ * ]
[http://www.apa.org/research/action/multitask.aspx](http://www.apa.org/research/action/multitask.aspx)

~~~
ravenstine
Multi-tasking is insidious because there are plenty of people who can sustain
productivity whilst spending a significant amount of time on Slack; their
acceptable level of production blinds them to just how much further ahead they
could get without Slack(and other distractions), and it can cause others to
feel ashamed for their lack of performance. I keep a presence on Slack and do
some of the usual fun stuff, but have taken the steps I outlined after I
continued to discover just how much of a penalty gets imposed on the brain
when it has to frequently switch contexts.

> Also, there is a bit of a technological bias here. If you were to ask
> someone what is the worst possible kind of work meeting, they would tell you
> that it's the meeting that has no clear agenda, no one seems to be in
> charge, everyone is piping in with whatever's on their mind, and there is no
> well-defined stop period so the meeting goes on until no one has anything
> left to chime in about. Basically, Slack.

What you said here is a very astute observation. I'm tempted to print it out
and post it on my wall.

To be fair, people hate those sorts of physical meetings because they usually
don't serve to bolster the social proof of most of the individuals involved.
Even when Slack is a distraction, there is a perceived redeeming value to the
lack of productivity because posting a meme or a poignant joke can make one
appear to be more funny in general. True, a person's Slack persona can affect
how others perceive that person in real life, but then you have to wonder just
what you're getting for impressing these particular people. TLDR; people
actually hate formality.

As I stated before, coworkers are not your friends. I say this as someone who
works with an unusually friendly team. We pay Mario Kart after work every few
weeks, and we sometimes hang on Saturdays to chill and play Civ V. In fantasy
land, these people are my friends. In reality, that friendship would sublimate
instantly if I ever left the company. I've never experienced otherwise. It's
friendship in the most superficial sense, which isn't a bad thing, but people
with similarly _friendly_ coworkers shouldn't sacrifice energy they'd be
devoting to their craft for the sake of cultivating fake friendships.

~~~
rsj_hn
_I 'm tempted to print it out and post it on my wall._

That's kind of you! Now I wish I'd cleaned it up a bit.

 _they usually don 't serve to bolster the social proof of most of the
individuals involved._

Yes, that's true. Online interactions have this extra layer of karma
collection (whether explicit or implicit).

------
frandroid
> It’s a bit like the way everyone gravitates towards the kitchen at a house
> party.

I've solved this problem by dimming or turning off the lights in all the rooms
I don't want people to hang out in and having brighter lighting in the room I
want people to stay in. It works wonders.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Do people not turn them back on?

~~~
eat_veggies
People gravitate toward other people at parties, and if the light's off and
nobody's in the room, there's not much incentive to go in.

------
pyzon
I don't disagree with the article's premise that Slack hijacks your brain, but
as someone who worked for a far-flung company that didn't have Slack, and
instead relied on email/phone/web meetings, I NEVER want to go back to that.

~~~
ravitation
Even less extreme, I worked at an all remote company that primarily used Skype
(pre-Slack). I don't want to go back to that.

~~~
r00fus
Skype had one benefit: it was easier to add folks to your DM. Other than that,
Slack is better. It's essentially Skype++ for us. Bots ... well they never
really did much.

~~~
romwell
More like IRC++, but I read you.

------
ravitation
When does a conversation stop being about a tool or a platform and become
about how it's used?

Slack is not perfectly opinionated. It does not enforce a single way of
working on everyone that uses it. One of the weakest areas I have found on HN
has been discussion around organizations and how they function. New tools,
like Slack, open new doors, but they are not silver bullets. Switching to
Slack doesn't solve inherent organizational problems, bad organizational
habits, poor management practices, or unrealistic (or misaligned)
expectations.

We don't blame email for the emails your boss sends you at 2 in the morning.

~~~
jshakes
OP here. I think the problem is that when tools like Slack are engineered in
such a way as to make people dependent on their product, it's unfair to expect
users to accept all the responsibility of mitigating against that. Software
companies aren't using organizational productivity as a benchmark for their
success, just usage statistics. So no, Slack doesn't enforce a single way of
working, but it is engineered to consume as much of people's time as possible,
for better or worse.

Jason Fried wrote his in his (much more comprehensive) post about group chat
pros/cons:

"It’s common in the software industry to blame the users. It’s the user’s
fault. They don’t know how to use it. They’re using it wrong. They need to do
this or do that. But the reality is that tools encourage specific behaviors. A
product is a series of design decisions with a specific outcome in mind. Yes,
you can use tools as they weren’t intended, but most people follow the
patterns suggested by the design. And so in the end, if people are exhausted
and feeling unable to keep up, it’s the tool’s fault, not the user’s fault. If
the design leads to stress, it’s a bad design."

([https://m.signalvnoise.com/is-group-chat-making-you-
sweat-74...](https://m.signalvnoise.com/is-group-chat-making-you-
sweat-744659addf7d))

~~~
icc97
> I think the problem is that when tools like Slack are engineered in such a
> way as to make people dependent on their product

It's a chat client. It's an addictive medium. It sounds to me like you're
shooting the messenger.

Skype, Hangouts, or any IM client wants your attention. Slack is just a better
version of all the other IM clients I've used (for work).

If you don't want to be disturbed you close Slack.

I suspect that if you've got problems with Slack, it means that there's a
problem in the culture of where you work.

Where I work, individual @ mentions are barely used, maybe 0-5 per day. But
there's nothing that's written in stone, or ever been discussed, it's just
that colleagues respect each other's focus. Then the rest is less important
that all can be ignored unless you're not concentrating on something.

~~~
acranox
It can be a little of both.

> I suspect that if you've got problems with Slack, it means that there's a
> problem in the culture of where you work.

One can work somewhere that has a problem in the culture, and Slack can make
that worse. It's been interesting to me to observe when my company changed
from hipchat to slack, my productivity went down until I recognized how slack
was messing me up (because of the default UI patterns it came with) and I've
had to unwind that by changing a bunch of settings and patterns.

It's been a similar change when I moved from a company that used email and
tickets for team communication, to one that uses chat.

Yes, the culture if the heart of the problems, but the tools can amplify those
problems.

It's like if you can't cut a piece of wood effectively with a handsaw, but I
give you a power saw, you may soon have much bigger problems on your hands.
(or hand, if you really mess it up)

------
dwb
I'm very distractible, and I get on fine with Slack. I genuinely feel work is
easier with it, you just have to aggressively filter the attention-grabbing.
My strategy is: notifications for mentions and ultra-important channels only,
mute any channel I don't want to definitely read all of (joining a channel and
immediately muting is common for me), disable the unread dot completely for
non-primary teams, and unsubscribe from threads as soon as I'm done in them.

As mentioned elsewhere, if I don't want to do something straight away, I star
it for the next morning's run through my starred list, or if it's more
particular than that set a reminder or something. It's really not too bad.

~~~
jshakes
OP here. Iit's telling that so many people are commenting in this thread about
how Slack isn't that bad because you can customize it to be less attention-
grabbing. The fact remains that Slack is engineered to be attention-grabbing
out of the box. Sure you can tweak it to make it less shouty, but Slack is
still a product that is sold for money by a company. It's not in their
interests to make it align with your existing workflow if they can upend that
workflow entirely. No one's making money from you having a meeting or sending
a well thought out email, so I think it's worth being cynical when considering
paid alternatives.

I think it's also worth remembering that for hacker type folks like us,
customizing software is the norm. But default settings are default for a
reason, and they will inevitably end up being the most commonly used. When
everyone else in your company expects you to use Slack they way do, i.e. for 8
hours a day with instantaneous reply times, then it becomes hard to push
against that and eventually it becomes the status quo

~~~
Can_Not
> The fact remains that Slack is engineered to be attention-grabbing out of
> the box. Sure you can tweak it to make it less shouty

But this is kind of an absurd critism. Who wants a real-time business-oriented
operations chat system where you don't know about incoming messages by
default? Can you imagine people complaining about not knowing about new
messages for minutes and support staff having to inform people that you have
to turn those on manually? Slack wasn't engineered to suck you in, it's acting
in the only rational and useful default for what it is, a standard established
by every chat client I've ever heard of before it. It would have been a
product that didn't work by default. If slack was missing a seeing you wanted,
I could understand, but at some point you're just blaming a chat tool for
being optimal for chats because your organization wants you to respond
unreasonably quickly or because you're not muting channels or snoozing or not
using the settings to the fullest.

------
prophesi
Sadly, artificial urgency is the status quo of modern application design and
development. A successful app often takes several cues from gambling, wherein
the user gets a dopamine hit with a new notification, and is encouraged to
check periodically for the possibility of another hit.

------
jgh
Slack for work mostly sucks. It's OK for communities where urgency is
obviously not there -- basically as an alternative IRC. I have worked at a
couple companies that used IRC. They beauty of IRC is no offline notifications
(unless you're using a cloud service, I guess) -- so it was only used during
the workday.

I'm not sure if this is the case with other teams, but I've been noticing my
team has been using public channels less and less lately, and I guess most
slack-based communication must happen in private messages. We could probably
change to a traditional IM client and not have to deal with Slack anymore.

~~~
j4ship
no offline notifications ... just filter it out.

If slack is only used during the work day then you would have the exact same
application without the nice CI/file sharing and all the other bots slack has

How would you change the IM client??? Make it like slack. Just use slack.

"Slack for work mostly sucks." ... Whats your point? People use it after work
hours?

Slack is not basically an alternative to IRC it IS an alternative, a better
more feature rich one.

Slack has more features than IRC so slack sucks ... this typical tradition
speak, fearful of new things. Many techies dont need slack but for those that
have yet to take on the message app craze Slack is catalyzing a lot of new non
techies.

~~~
jgh
I guess I hit a nerve. FWIW I've been using Slack since 2014, so it's not like
I'm unfamiliar with it or have been shunning new technologies. I do like it
for communities. I just don't like it for work.

------
chiefalchemist
> "What lures people to Slack in the first place is its ability to manufacture
> an artificial sense of urgency..."

I think it would be far more accurate to say that it's due to a lack of other
products that as easy to use for so many.

I've considered putting my internet savvy parents on Slack, and they are well
into their retirement years.

I don't think Slack is addicting as much as most humans enjoy contact with
other humans. We are wired to be social. It helped us survive and thrive.
Slack et al is simply a symptom of that wiring.

~~~
j4ship
i agree but even a nice thing and a more innovative application of slack is
making the anti social become social.

If you dont like seeing people face to face and you still need to communicate
with team members slack has the ability to be flexible enough to communicate
many different ideas very accurately. With bots and file sharing slack is the
one stop collaboration board (along with google docs for co file editing)

and for people that are social or non technical slack has that friendly
feeling ... its has taken exactly what we have been hoping from the internet ,
efficient communication and sharing and made it be homey instead of cold.

Slack is just another message board for tech guys but to the rest of the
people tech guys have to communicate with (and would want to make this
communication as fast and accurate as possible) slack is a world of difference
from other chat services.

They took good tech and added the human touch.

------
nicodjimenez
While I agree with this article in general, I do believe the distractiveness
of Slack can be mitigated by disabling notifications on certain channels while
keeping them open on others.

~~~
notyourwork
It the same reason I close email and chat apps during periods of work to get
stuff done.

You have to create and control your own context switches. I also disable email
notifications on my cell. This let’s me check email outside of work but
doesn’t force it into my view every moment.

------
dreamfactored
The killer feature of slack is that alerts are highly configurable and work
properly across devices - it lets you eliminate unnecessary and duplicated
alerts

~~~
MatekCopatek
Sure, but there are still two major problems IMHO. Firstly, there's no
practical and intentional workflow to postpone things (an equivalent of "mark
as unread"). Secondly, because a majority of people responds to notifications
immediately, it becomes socially unacceptable to not do it in a timely manner.

~~~
j4ship
that last one is a feature , that last one is what the company was hoping for
when deploying it in your org. Its that feature that makes it actually useful

What good is a messaging app that keeps you from communicating with me. The
whole reason we have this app is for us to communicate, quicker and easier.

"Socially unacceptable" ... maybe you are neglecting some important
communication? If your answer is no then you should discuss your availability
with your team about your slack hours. Its fine to trun off the email and
slack. When when you are one work time slack/email make communication
better/easier. You should not blame or allow slack to employ a standard you
would not be comfortable with even if slack was not invented (ex: your boss
calls you at on the phone at 7pm, if thats not ok then you should also tell
your boss you dont answer slack after 7pm)

------
MatekCopatek
I never really understood the hype around Slack. I keep reading articles like
this one, I constantly hear people saying "zomg we transitioned to Slack and
are having such an awesome time, it's way better then [insert messaging
app]!".

I'm probably getting old, but I've been using it for about 3-4 years now
(because work) and it seems just like a polished IRC client tied to a
proprietary service to me.

~~~
dclowd9901
You say "IRC" to your marketing or sales cohorts and enjoy the contorted face
they make.

It's not just a dancey, polished IRC. It _is_ a dancey, polished IRC that
invites people from all backgrounds to use it and enjoy it. As a
communications glue for a company, I find it to be very valuable in talking
not just with other developers, but other departments.

------
matchagaucho
I love the bot integration with Slack... the ability to follow git commits,
build errors, new user signups in an aggregate event view.

Plus, having the ability to comment in response to system events.

But I've worked with some Slack teams that spend hours attempting to
communicate via animated GIFs. #InstantMute

------
mlazos
I feel like the premise of this article is wrong because does slack really
care how much you use it? Don’t they just get $$$ per seat. They just want
businesses to keep buying. This is opposed to Facebook where their business is
keeping users engaged.

------
ivan_ah
I think personal comms + general channel announcements are OK. Just close
slack and when you come back check any specific communications for you
asynchronously, or if you want to catch up on "what's been up" you can browse
message threads.

On the other hand @here/@channel messages are terrible! Now these are terrible
because they confuse the "broadcast" nature messages with personal messages.

~~~
icc97
Then surely agree with the people at your work to never use @channel. It's
basically the same as 'Reply All', it's a waste of everyone's time.

~~~
ivan_ah
Yeah, I've started to persecute the offenders individually by telling them
privately how disruptive their @here messages are.

It's weird though, because sometimes I want to announce things to everyone,
e.g., to bring to everyone's attention something that I've done, but I have to
follow my own do-not-spam everyone rule.

I guess comms is hard no matter what tools you use. O(n^2) hard, for a team of
n people.

------
andyidsinga
>> I have probably spent thousands of hours of my life using it. And yet I
have absolutely nothing tangible to show for this.

It seems we should have at least as much to show as other forms of group comms
tools.

Re urgency : same applies. a group should set standards for urgency based on
various human and project needs. Point is these should be set my people not
the tool.

------
rodionos
You also have to take into account is that chatting is how the younger
colleagues want to collaborate. Just like email replaced phone calls, chat
apps are supplanting email. What's next? Bots.

