Ask HN: Why do people love Slack? I use Slack on a daily basis and view it as just another chat app. I don't understand why people love it. Can someone please explain this to me? Not looking to smear it but want to understand to see if I am missing any functionality. |
With slack the world becomes one big long meeting. Lol
Also as a consultant it is a problem. With email I have paper trails of conversations. But with slack when engagement is ending I lose all that discussion & history. It forces me to double up my note taking (more lost time) and try to hack a backup of some of that stuff as an engagement ends.
Yes I get the advantages but those have long since been buried by all it’s problems
If you are currently on-call, I would expect that you check for slack messages on a regular basis.
BTW I don’t have any notifications turned on for Slack. I periodically check for new message flags. For most channels, I keep them on mute unless it is a channel that I am personally active in.
I treat email the same way. Not notifications. It drives me crazed when I’m talking to someone at their desk and they are constantly getting pop ups telling that they got an email or a slack message. Stop that shit! Get it under control. Push back.
When I quit Slack I still feel the expectation of others at work for me to respond to messages in a timely manner and thus feel I have to check Slack periodically. This then enforces the implied importance of Slack in the workplace. Considering this, perhaps people do not love Slack but rather feel subject to it.
I wish Slack would have the option on a slack to make UI changes to make it a bit harder to post, and encourage full thoughts over quick one liners. In the meantime, we can try and reject writing quick responses ourselves.
In another Slack with a group of friends, there is no expectation to respond and therefore there is not the anxiety.
I have all notification pop-ups disabled across all of my devices, with the sole exception of an incoming phone call (unless the caller is not in my contacts list, in which case it goes straight to voicemail without ringing my phone).
Beyond notifications, all badges are also disabled across all devices, with the sole exception of text messages (if I unlock my phone and go to the home screen, I can see that I have unread text messages).
This enables me to live largely in a pull fashion, without every communication channel constantly breaking my flow.
Slack also almost never falls down. Its remarkably fast, the search is fast and faceted, and they manage cross-device notification state better than... well Apple for one. That truly 'instant' messaging experience across devices is why they are superior to IRC and decentralized alternatives. 'Instant' editing and deleting your malformed message is a killer app.
Its a safe social network. I'd much rather post memes in Slack than on Facebook or Twitter, which is a persistent battlefield. If I slip up in front of my colleagues, it happens in context and can be sorted out among the tribe, but if I do so on a public social network, it could invite angry mobs or end my career, now or years into the future.
That said, I don't love Slack. I hate how it dominates my day. I hate how I find myself checking it in the car. I hate how I get into it while I'm running a build, post something funny and suck everybody's attention. I truly despise how their DM and notification read system means that have to check everything at all times to feel up to date. I'm in a half dozen public channels, and the blue alert in my tray shows that I have something to look at.
I want control of the UI. Its my workplace, but Slack can change it to their liking, not me to mine. Sometimes if we're lucky we'll get a feature flag, otherwise, its all up to them. There are a million Hacker News clients, but only one for Slack.
I want more nuanced prioritization.
I want my life back.
That being said, their notification logic. I remember seeing this insane flowchart demonstrating how complicated slack's logic was when determining whether to do a push notification. I wonder why it never occurred to them that one of the primary considerations should be that if you've sent me over 3 notifications in the past 5 minutes, and I haven't checked, please fucking stop.
Because sometimes reading the notification is enough to get the information I need, and I want to keep watching the notifications, but I don't need to respond to any of them.
You need to define better first, for many a-synchronous tasks or less-time-critical email is superior to Slack
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...
Imagine how many people never used a chat app in a business context before. Maybe this is hard, as you can’t imagine who they could be — or you don’t remember a time _before_ the ubiquity of chat apps in the workplace. But trust me those people are a majority of the workforce.
Now imagine you are an enterprise user who has no control over how they work, and they’re told to use “something new to increase productivity”. They sigh because it is probably bullshit and they’re being forced to use it by the “decision maker”.
But lo and behold, Slack is actually useful and usable! Because in large part the value of any chat app is how well it is adopted by one’s (relatively non techy) teammates!
Slack is a masterclass in commercializing enterprise software through ease of adoption and use. The core tech is completely undifferentiated, but the understanding of enterprise environments and workplace psychology is second to maybe only Microsoft.
It is a great tool for non-doers to slack off with though. You can pretend like you are working by posting funny pics, random thoughts, etc.
If your company works with customers directly (a project for example or sales support), it’s easy to create a new channel, create a share link, and send it to an admin on the other side. Now you’ve connected two Slack instances of invited users to a channel. Cuts down on email threads and phone calls. Life saver for where I work.
I haven't looked, but is it possible to change your online status on a room by room basis?
I write this comment as a response to your inquiry about the reasons for why people like slack.
Now personally I mostly use Teams, but the system is similar.
The reason I like to use Teams as opposed to e-mail is mostly just the expected process around it.
Please note that I’ve cc’ed your manager, as I talked to him just before and he told me to add him. I’m not trying to seem passive aggressive or cause issues in communication.
Anyways, please come by my desk so we can repeat this entire discussion once again since you likely tuned out after the first paragraph anyway.
And yes IRC does the same, but trying to get an organization to use IRC is like trying to replace word with vim.
Kind regards and all the best, Boublepop
There are things we don't like about it but it does the job well enough that the opportunity cost of trying to replace it too high for us at the moment. So we keep going with it.
Can you edit a message once sent in Facebook messenger?
Once you understand why that's important, you'll start to get it.
Slack actually cared what the users wanted. Not what managers or IT teams cargo culting current message apps thought workers should have.
This is upside down .
People secretly installed Slack at workplaces (there are old articles on this) and the managers had to get it. The rest is history.
Last month Signal got a Thumbs up and Thumbs down icons, after how many years.... The IT teams are partly to blame here on top of the managers.
Seriously, though, I don't love any chat app that much. They're useful in some circumstances, but they can easily devolve into a horrific time-suck. People use them for important info that ought to go in emails, for example. Or hammer channels with loads of chaff and the occasional critical wheat kernel, so that you have to waste time on them looking for the latter.
These days, I check mine once a day. I guess that's equivalent to having someone xerox a website for me, but I get a lot more done that way.
That scans. I hate chat apps, personally, but we are required to use Teams at my workplace. Teams is truly horrendous. I would strongly prefer that we used Slack.
I've used a lot of chat apps over decades. Teams might be the first one that manages to be _confusing_ - a feat I'd never seen in a chat app - because of the way it rearranges new threads, yet hides the recent part of the thread. Plus various other half-implemented features. The wiki and sharepoint/file integration doesn't work very well. There's no wiki search. It's super easy to delete an entire wiki. I've lost notifications on entire channels for > 1 month without realizing it. Just a ton of little stuff like that; my team will never go back.
Slack is "fine" - it mostly works, and has a lot of app integrations.
It is not for everyone in my opinion. Very small companies will waste time (under 20 employees) or very large companies will waste resources instead of using project management systems.
It has a very niche use, I don't think everyone is using it the right way.
That said slack and the like are better mostly because of integration which is smoother than custom IRC bots and clients by contrast... Some obsess over security, groups, etc... other features are just that features.
On the flip side, they all suck... MS Teams' wikis aren't in markdown and can't be edited outside of the teams client, other sharing is actually integrated into Sharepoint, and those integrations with system syncing breaks a lot and sucks worse.
I haven't used slack but very little for one project I'm on in a few years... it now has a lot of the features I was missing before. I think Google's Hangouts had a lot of potential before they shifted gears into their client of the month and started breaking the UX.
In the end, what will be around in 5+ years, who knows. Things shift around and change... Things get re-invented in better and worse ways.
Room topic with link support, private rooms, the ability to add more people to that room, direct messaging, phone notifications (and proper sync and the ability to set do-not-disturb), and emoji/gifs. I know some folks don't like those, but I think they are fun and help convey emotion that is otherwise lost in text.
Nice to haves: Search, pinned items, api for bot integration. Color themes. Limited markdown support.
What I never want: link expander: seriously, I don't like it - it takes up space for no value. WYSIWYG editor: I don't think rich text beyond simple markdown is useful.
Hipchat was ok. Slack is ok. I think Slack is a bit better as Hipchat had regular outages.
https://abe-winter.github.io/plea's/help/2018/02/11/slack.ht...
At the end of the day it probably makes you lose more productivity than you gain but that's difficult to measure.
It's pretty useful to have a ubiquitous comms tool that integrates with most saas infra out the box...I do loathe its shoddy audio/video/screenshare
BUT the plethora of integrations is what really makes it almost worth it to me personally, and i suspect very much so for my workplace as well
I recently deployed workplace chat for ~100 people using XMPP. People use whatever clients they want (but we have a list of recommended clients, and in practice everyone is using one of those). With the modern extensions (SMACKS, carbons, MAM, push service integration) cross-device notifications are totally seamless. A bunch of the users are non-technical and they have had no trouble.
Slack has a lot of advantages over the likes of XMPP but I don't think technical superiority is one of them.
There’s also emacs-slack, which is exactly what it says on the tin. It means that I control my Slack experience.
Facebook has private groups, too. (I assume Twitter has something similar.) At worst, this is a great demonstration that defaults matter. I often hear people speak as though Facebook/Twitter/Slack/IRC/etc are only usable in their default mode, even though most people I know don't actually use them that way.
> Slack also almost never falls down. Its remarkably fast
I feel like the chat software I used to use called "Slack" was completely different than what I hear other people talk about by that name.
What could possibly go wrong.
I respond to e-mails 2-4 times a day during task transitions. The sender does not anticipate an immediate response so the 1-2 hours delay is OK.
Compare this to Slack which requires constant monitoring where senders anticipate an immediate response. Not to mention the increase in casual "water cooler" conversations.
The find the same people that recommend Slack are the same people that recommend 3-hour meetings. It's procrastination veiled as productivity.
Water cooler conversations are a kind of stress dissipation response for some people. It's great for some, bad for others. Slack means that it stays in a channel instead of at the water cooler when all you want is a drink, not a chat.
The first few weeks before and after a major go live, especially if there is new functionality, management will expect their team leads/single responsible individuals to respond immediately. Even if they don’t say it. The CxO’s, sales, and implementations folks will send you an email then immediately send you a Teams message asking you did you get the email and if they don’t hear from you, call you on Teams.
On the other hand, most days if it isn’t a major client issue, it’s mostly like you said, there isn’t a real expectation of an immediate response.
The only exception are meetings and escalations when something is on fire.
The reason email is stuffy is that it allows you too granular an ability to choose and modify who gets to see it as a conversation goes on. A simpler concept of a channel goes some way to solve that.
That said, be forewarned: I’m biased, I make a tool that makes email work like Slack. (https://aether.app)
If anything, one thing we’ve noticed using Aether is that it makes people drop ‘Hi Jane’ style heading and signatures at the bottom after a while, naturally.
The annoying thing with Slack is that it's impossible to mute individuals who use it disruptively so I either get all or none of these notifications. It's easy to change people's behaviour in smaller companies but when there are hundreds of people in the workspace it gets tricky.
are you around
can you explain to me how this comm style isn't also annoying pls
?
dropped VOIP call
@channel can anyone else help me with this
In an ideal world, you ask someone to do something, they ask you for details, you give them details, it's done.
In a less ideal world, you have busy people, lazy people, and people who have been given unreasonable schedules.
They drop emails, overlook, glance it over. They dread the back and forth long email threads, so they sit and think and procrastinate for an hour before sending a short email like the above.
And what let's say there's three teams involved. One person drops the ball or ignores an email. What next?
That's why you have to cc them. I once had an issue with this guy who I just kept giving him instructions, having meetings, and he still did the wrong things. I brought it up to the boss and he yelled at me and told me I don't know how to work in a team -- I never cc'ed him in these emails.
And I quickly learned that whenever an email cc-ed the boss, things moved, and when it didn't, they'll say okay, but the work would disappear.
Then the obvious solution is to cc every time right? But because of this, every time you cc someone, it implies that you don't trust them to get it done.
Something like Slack just automates this process. You post something in a team channel, it gives a slight-but-not-passive-aggressive pressure. You can send a document and it doesn't get lost (and you can't blame someone for not sending you the documents).
I heard from others that the native app didn't.
I had a chance to talk to one of the Hipchat PMs. Atlassian didn't seem too attached to operating it for some reason.
How?? How did they fuck it up this badly?
It's the only program I've ever used ever where I have difficulty finding the options menu. I still have trouble finding it. Like it's not something I figure out once and I'm like, "huh, that's weird" and then I know where it is. I have to relearn where it is every time, clicking and right clicking on random UI elements until the menu bar pops up.
Why can't I turn off the highlights for "random user 10000 has joined the channel"? I don't fucking care.
Why is the notification configuration so confusing? What the shit is a "banner"? What is a "feed"? Why is it that I don't know what half of the events even mean?
I don't understand how everything about it can be so bad.
There are a few things I do like better with teams. I haven't used slack much since before it had its' own voice conf/chat, used to use the hangouts integration for that.
In the end, there's parts about them all that suck... I think the biggest mistake with Teams is actually using wiki and files in more than the main channel on very few team groups. Also, creating more team groups is a big issue. I see the same happen with slack, but it's less intrusive.
With slack, I hate that multi-org logins are a pain, if you're in multiple communities.
So you end up reading memes, news, answering same question 100th time, and you realize you are just glorified assembly worker. You are not solving real problems, just making another distraction for your primate family. You are a monkey!
With Slack you've got the added irritation of an expectation of real time responses, especially when someone's @mentioning the boss or everyone else in the division a minute after you haven't responded...