
Ask HN: Would you use slack if you started a new startup? - elbasti
Hating on slack&#x2F;always-on communication is a bit in-vogue these days. I&#x27;ve also seen an org suffer a bit from notification overload, but I don&#x27;t know what the alternative is.<p>If you were starting a new venture from scratch today, would you use slack? At what headcount scale would you layer it in, if ever? If you wouldn&#x27;t use slack, what would you do?
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duiker101
I missed a beat, is slack hated now? And how does it relate to always-on? You
can log off, even better, not have it on your phone but only on your work
machine.

Anyhow, even if somehow Slack is taking the blame for always-on, I think it's
definitely not the culprit. The problem is a toxic company culture. Even if
you were to use only email it wouldn't fix a culture where people are not
allowed time off.

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elbasti
For me the issue with slack isn't that it's always-on (because as you said,
you can log off, or turn notifications off), it's that it's an unstructured
forum for ideas. I think it foments shallow commenting/debating over deeper
conversations and planning.

Of course all these problems can be fixed with "culture" but I think the tool
itself rewards instant-replies, since conversations quickly move into the
past, where "out of sight is out of mind".

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gcb0
slack sells itself as a psychological replacement for the constant
communicating feedback people are used to thanks to our shift to always-on
social networking apps. companies realized that trying to block this employee
behavior is impossible, so they try to harvest it into internal interactions
at least. slack is a last ditch effort to try to squeeze productivity, but not
in the way you think.

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mindcrime
I wouldn't use Slack, because it's a proprietary / closed source application
that creates another walled garden. So no.

