At least for our company, Slack has been a net positive. Most issues around notifications are resolved by customizing your notification preferences per channel.
Now try this in Slack. Remember, it’s one of 10 issues you’ll have in a day, so you start with creating a group chat instead of a dedicated channel.
Stop. All of the problems that follow this statement are a result of creating a group chat instead of a channel. If you're creating a group chat, you're most likely doing it wrong. You should have long-running specialized channels by topic that includes the relevant people. For example, if you're discussing a bug in XYZ analytics, post in #xyz-analytics. If you're discussing something specialized and short-lived, create a channel anyway. For example, #xyz-1.1-release. This helps in allowing engineers to focus on channels that are relevant to them.
Go through all the channels with notifications showing, reading through each channel. Realise most of the content wasn’t relevant to me. Sometimes miss content that was that had shot too far up the page overnight.
Unless that communication simply wasn't happening (in which case, Slack is a making a positive impact), that communication existed in some form elsewhere. It might have been email or in person, but either way, if the volume increased for you it's probably because you are simply privy to it now where you weren't before. Perhaps it's not relevant for you. That's fine, because at some point it will be, whereas you would have been excluded before. That means being able to head off bad decisions before they've had much time to gestate.
I've established a guideline for my group that all (non-sensitive) communication should happen in public, and that means on Slack. That alone has made a big difference in making sure people are in the loop and that bad decisions are visible to everyone. Slack isn't my ideal vehicle for this (I'd prefer something behind a firewall), but if it gets people talking out loud, then sure.
> I've established a guideline for my group that all (non-sensitive) communication should happen in public, and that means on Slack. That alone has made a big difference in making sure people are in the loop and that bad decisions are visible to everyone.
This is one of the main challenges I'm seeing. Getting people off DM's and into public chats. I explained several times that DMs should only be for sensitive, personal conversation. Everything else should go into channels. But people seem to drift into DMs to "not disturb" others, or because it's only a question to one person etc. Our stats show around 40% public chat vs. 60% in DM (sometimes even 30/70).
I some times wish I could block DMs completely, but I don't think it's possible. Any tips?
Blocking DMs wouldn't solve the core issue and is counterproductive. You still want them for coordinating things like one-on-one meetings, for starters.
Instead, tie concrete problems for the individuals who prefer DM to a lack of visibility. Hold them accountable for future problems that occur.
Oh, that release went poorly? Who needed to be in the loop who wasn't? What can you do differently next time? Yes, getting them all in a group chat would be an improvement, but if you really want it to go smoothly next time, make it visible and public so everyone who has something to contribute can and you personally don't have to run around making sure everyone is in the loop. It's easier for you and it's a better practice.
The next time there's a problem that can be attributed to lack of public communication, reference the first conversation and ask why they didn't make it public. Then ask what steps they can take after this conversation to make sure they do it next time. After this it becomes a standard coaching/performance issue.
Whenever someone sends me a DM, I usually reply with a "please use #tech" or whatever the relevant channel is.
Our company onboarding guide includes the line: "All communication on slack _must_ be in public channels. All emails must be cc'ed to a mailing list." Of course there are sane exceptions to this, but everyone follows this generally, and we get >90% public communication over slack every month.
Our current stats are:
>95% public channels, 0% private channels, 4% DMs (>1M messages)
You probably know this, but any public channel a user is in can be relayed to a 3rd party (entirely) if that user subscribes to an app that was approved. All of those messages are also available for any of your admins to pull on demand. All of this said, I'm sure your org is ultra careful what things you talk about in Slack. I am just saying this in the event someone doesn't know.
I think the main takeaway here when I encounter these complaints about Slack all boil down to "you're doing it wrong".
If you set good guidelines on usage and make sure you actually police them Slack is in an incredibly useful tool. Especially if you have offices in different geographic locations or a large number of remote employees.
You can't hold the hammer by the head, try to pound nails with the handle, then complain that the hammer is no good for pounding nails.
Good policies, and a good use case for Slack. My own Slack experience has been like others - bad usage patterns aka "Slack abuse" that makes works more difficult. The problem is not the platform, but how people use the platform. 90% of email is spam. That fact doesn't detract from the utility of email.
Better to have many narrow channels that update infrequently than a few firehose channels that are impossible to keep up with. Of those channels, there are usually only a couple that an engineer really needs to follow on any given day, so it's easier to go heads-down. In the firehose channels things get missed unless people are very good about using @ mentions for the correct people, which most aren't.
Also, if so many people are "doing it wrong", isn't that a sign that something is lacking in the UX?
People use email poorly, too. You have to make your communication work for your organization.
Just out of curiosity: do you have a manager role in your company? Are you the one who creates the most channels on slack, and do you invite the most users on slack?
Because I suspect that people in different roles may feel differently about slack.
Yes. I don't create any channels. Team members create and invite users as necessary. The multiple narrow channels request in particular came from engineers.
- If you need a way to discuss specific topics with specific people over time, you make a new mailing list.
- If you want to have one single conversation within a specific group and topic, and follow it logically, just reply to the thread. You can forward the thread and the conversation remains, and can continue.
- You can ignore all conversations that aren't addressed to you, or go back and read them, one thread at a time.
- You can archive all of this, hierarchically, per mailing list, and search or browse it later.
Now - if you want to have a LIVE conversation, nothing's going to beat a chat room. It really does not matter what kind of chat room. But sometimes you join the chat late - it's good to see the old conversation and catch up. And after the conversation, you might want a log of it later. Somehow, most chat services in the world seem to miss this.
IRC has kludges that support this. Jabber was supposed to fix this (I think?), in a platform-independent way. Yet nobody wants to use Jabber. (Probably because most implementations suck or are incomplete)
Here's my question:
If an entire ecosystem of software has thrived for a generation using existing tools (IRC, mailing lists, and now Jabber), why the hell is every corporation in the world dead-set on running away from them screaming? THEY'VE WORKED FOR 20+ YEARS! edit answering my own question: they don't have support contracts.
I've found that slack takes up way more time for me too.
I'm usually in 50 IRC channels at once. My workflow when I open irc is to check my hilight window for pings, and then glance at the channel list for backscroll chatter in channels I follow closely (if bored, also look at chatter in other channels). I then respond to things, and switch back to the hilight window. I occasionally glance at this window to check for more pings and chatter in said channels. Each check is a quick glance, and can be done without context-switching.
I am in a bunch of slack teams, but I only really care about one channel in each. It takes much longer to handle these, since I need to open a tab for each, and if I've been pinged go look for the ping.
IRC sucks, but at least everything is in one place. I'd be far more productive with slack if there was a unified app for all teams with a dedicated notifications panel.
Have you tried the slack desktop app? It is much better than having to keep a bunch of different tabs open. I find it easier to handle multiple teams that way.
We (founders of ConferenceBadge.com) never enjoyed Slack nor other chat apps because they encourage immediate attention, or you just end up missing out. And we are a team of 4… can’t imagine using it in larger organizations.
We never found any tool that would completely satisfy our collaboration needs, so we created Missive: https://missiveapp.com
It’s built on the idea that conversations should be scoped and archivable, just like emails. It’s both a full-featured email client and chat app. We can share emails and comment within threads, as well as create new chats from scratch and invite only the right people to discuss specific matters. When a topic is over, we just archive or snooze it like emails.
"It’s kinda like having 10 Facebooks to simultaneously look through, then make sense of. Actually, no, its worse. Facebook isn’t about returning back to, its about relaxed consumption of content. Slack on the other hand is meant to be about getting things done and being there to respond."
Slack and the other various IRC-reinventions start with the assumption that more communication is always better. I think it's time we challenged that assumption in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary.
The author makes a good point that the reliability of Slack on intermittent connections is indeed pretty horrible. It's nearly impossible to send or receive messages, as I experienced while in foreign countries.
I just set myself as "away" when I'm on vacation. @channel won't send you a notification when you're away, it'll by default only notify you when somebody directly messages or tags you.
If you're focusing on something you can put slack in "Do Not Disturb" mode for a desired amount of time.
This is surprisingly common with any chat app. I'm sure Whatsapp users are familiar with groups (with family, friends or coworkers) where everyone just sits and blabs on and on and it becomes a nuisance (especially with large group sizes).
Also because chat is so informal, everyone posts needlessly (shoot from the hip with no consideration for whether you're wasting someones' time)
One solution is the judicious use of @ (in Hipchat at least). People should also consider chat to be informal mail rather than chat when you're in the office.
@mention which generates an email is the only way to pull me in a thread. Meaning that my email client is still the main source of communication.
Slack is good for non-work related threads with my co-workers. We have a channel dedicated just to miscellaneous non-sense which can be rather entertaining. What is nice about the channel is that it isn't a long running email thread that needs to be muted and I only check it out when I want to. However, it could just as well be an IRC channel...
I see similar criticisms of Slack a lot, and I think a solid portion of these are general gripes with using one chat system instead of Email + other solutions.
My biggest gripe with using Slack is that teams are managed individually. I can't have one Slack account from which I can view all of my teams and interact with them. Rather, I have to create separate accounts for each one, as if each team is using a completely different service. Then I have to remember a multitude of emails, usernames, and passwords.
I work remotely, and I use Slack to keep an open dialog with my team. I used HipChat before that. They both have their upsides for this use case, but I think that it's basically a great tool for what I'm doing. I can easily see how wide use of Slack at a large company could get overwhelming quickly, but that's not so much Slack's fault (HipChat would do the same thing) as much as a general probelm of communication.
Torn on this one. I'm sympathetic because of how the OP complains that he's been pulled into Slack because of its popularity. I don't think being virally popular is a demerit -- sometimes popular things are popular because they are good -- but the trade off comes when bystanders are forced into the hivemind if they want to do things that previously didn't require that hot-app-du-jour. And I've only used Slack as a social outlet, not in the workplace, so I can't comment how it compares to Hipchat or good old fashioned Gchat in overall trade offs in the workplace.
But this is where the OP totally lost me:
> In the olden days, you’d send around a group email. As things progressed, relevant people would be added to the email chain and irrelevant people removed. It wasn’t on trend and it might have been clunky but it served its purpose. If a person needed information from one specific person, they could contact them individually in the chain. Everyone could input ideas and get the issue solved. When the issue was out of the way, the whole thing could be shut down with a press of the delete key.
Those are some seriously rose-tinted lenses. Again, I haven't used Slack for work, but unless Slack is significantly clunkier than HipChat/Gchat, and the Slack client sends an electrical shock upon each message sent/received, I'm having a hard time believing that Slack is overall less pleasant than the email-chain-discussions of the past.
Ignoring the fact that the OP describes the most idyllic discussion-by-email-chain situation in this history of the universe when arguing why Slack chat is so inferior, the main flaw in his argument is that maybe his company has cultural communication problems overall that are exacerbated by features of Slack that are helpful to others?
Here's his main complaint:
Now try this in Slack. Remember, it’s one of 10 issues you’ll have in a day, so you start with creating a group chat instead of a dedicated channel. Now add someone. Yup. You’ve now just started an entirely different group chat. All the context of the conversation has gone and you’ve found yourself starting over, having to re-explain the whole situation for each new person added. You’ve also suddenly got a shitload of group chat windows open. Oh, and they aren’t named like channels, so which one of those four group chat windows you’ve now got open was it again? Oh shit. You got it right, but someone else didn’t. They’ve responded in the chat you were all using previously before you realised someone needed adding.
Sure, it's annoying to have to bring someone up to speed when inviting them into an ongoing conversation. Has the OP considered how fucking annoying it is to the person you've just forcefully invited into your conversation to read through several paragraphs/pages of pre-existing chatter to get themselves up to speed? It sounds like there are issues in Slack's interface that could be cleaned up, but the problem of new people being added into a group chat without being able to see the history is a feature that compels a few good practices:
1. Don't start a group chat for something that could be sussed out in a channel.
2. Don't start an important group chat without thinking of all the relevant stakeholders who might have input on the issue. Is it possible in Slack to invite someone into a group chat even if they're AFAIK (which would allow them to see the history of the conversation without having had to actively participate)?
3. For those situations in which you need to invite someone ad-hoc, make sure you can sum up the issue in a couple of sentences (e.g. "Hey Jane, Bob tells me you know about this [URL to Github issue]"). For situations in which the new person needs to know all of what you've discussed before and behind her back before you decided to rudely invite her to your chat, see Point 2.
For me the first part that you agree with as well is the kicker. Slack has started eating the world, but the fact that it has only partially succeeded makes it feel way more painful. My gaming groups are on slack. Various (discontinuous) work groups are on slack. Various open source groups are on slack. But not _everything_; meaning either I have to have yet another desktop app (call me a curmudgeon but I really like to minimize how many moving parts I have going) or constantly click through alert emails to the online slack tabs. As you say there's a use case for that, but when I find it eating use cases that I otherwise would have perfectly functional, lower friction tooling for (email alerts, dl's, etc) I start to get frustrated; especially when it makes it far harder to organize the content between multiple distinct slacks + other silod communication channels when compared to e.g. mail filters.
I'm surprised your gaming groups are on Slack, given that Discord is basically a Slack clone that's geared specifically for gaming and seems to be really popular.
I don't particularly like Discord (which I assume you meant) because I don't see a monetization plan for them that doesn't screw over their users. With Slack, I know that they have enterprise customers that essentially pay for the free users. Discord has nothing like that, and I can only foresee two outcomes: running out of money or selling out their users. Charging for their service won't really work, either, because gamers are a pretty price-sensitive group in my experience and Slack is still free.
Yeah I meant Discord. Not sure why I typed Discourse there.
You have a great point about monetization. My understanding is that their monetization plan is to start selling things like sticker packs (e.g. how other messenger services get monetized), but I don't know how likely that is to succeed.
Wonderful case in point; one of my groups is on slack, whereas my serious raid group is on Discord (which I assume you meant :) ) and a third group is on TeamSpeak; up until recently Mumble was in the mix as well. It's really a portmanteau of silly apps to keep track of.
Having a mixture of groups is hard. When I was playing Destiny, my group there was actually using GroupMe (which is pretty awful for a variety of reasons). I actually created a Slack and wrote a GroupMe<->Slack gateway, though it kept breaking because GroupMe's API stopped sending messages until I cycled the connection, and I eventually had to shut that down when Heroku changed their free tier (which coincided nicely with me losing interest in Destiny).
My current WoW guild (of which I'm a casual, not raiding, member) uses TeamSpeak, and I don't know why they're not on Discord. It's annoying enough that I don't usually bother to join it.
Agreed. E-mail chains are one of the worst forms of communication that I've been involved in, second only maybe to voicemail.
> 1. Don't start a group chat for something that could be sussed out in a channel.
I've made a point to direct folks who direct message me with a lot of side discussion to try and keep in in the channels, if at all possible. The capture of side-bar conversations in an easily sharable form is the main reason that we adopted Slack.
I think what turned me off was the headline. If it had been more well-scoped, e.g. "Slack sucks balls when it comes to doing real work", I'd be less complainy. I've enjoyed Slack for conversation in medium-ish interest groups/clubs (100 <= x < 500), in which the channels aren't overwhelming and there's almost never a need to do private chat with more than one other person.
Everything in the context of work loses its allure, such as "unlimited" vacation time.
What do you use? We are about to switch to Slack from Skype for messaging (that's all we use Skype for). Right now we are running both but I prefer Slack.
Slack is so buggy - why is that not an issue. The android app is just the pits.
I prefer https://flock.co (disclosure: was once part of the team that built it) it is fast, not buggy and makes different choices than slack for almost all the same problems.
Shameless plug regarding Slack being distraction source:
I am trying to scratch my own itch here so I'm working on a Slack app that should help with that, www.collabq.com.
Would love to hear your opinions!
Now try this in Slack. Remember, it’s one of 10 issues you’ll have in a day, so you start with creating a group chat instead of a dedicated channel.
Stop. All of the problems that follow this statement are a result of creating a group chat instead of a channel. If you're creating a group chat, you're most likely doing it wrong. You should have long-running specialized channels by topic that includes the relevant people. For example, if you're discussing a bug in XYZ analytics, post in #xyz-analytics. If you're discussing something specialized and short-lived, create a channel anyway. For example, #xyz-1.1-release. This helps in allowing engineers to focus on channels that are relevant to them.
Go through all the channels with notifications showing, reading through each channel. Realise most of the content wasn’t relevant to me. Sometimes miss content that was that had shot too far up the page overnight.
Unless that communication simply wasn't happening (in which case, Slack is a making a positive impact), that communication existed in some form elsewhere. It might have been email or in person, but either way, if the volume increased for you it's probably because you are simply privy to it now where you weren't before. Perhaps it's not relevant for you. That's fine, because at some point it will be, whereas you would have been excluded before. That means being able to head off bad decisions before they've had much time to gestate.
I've established a guideline for my group that all (non-sensitive) communication should happen in public, and that means on Slack. That alone has made a big difference in making sure people are in the loop and that bad decisions are visible to everyone. Slack isn't my ideal vehicle for this (I'd prefer something behind a firewall), but if it gets people talking out loud, then sure.