How to make Slack less bad for you

http://robertheaton.com/2016/08/23/how-make-slack-slightly-less-bad-for-you/

by hardmath123 • 10 years ago

171 138 10 years ago

notJim• 10 years ago

Honestly I find the gripey-ness of this pretty off-putting. We get it, you hate Slack, congratulations.

untog2• 10 years ago

While the tone of the article is maybe a little hyperbolic, I agree with a lot of it. The default setting to be alerted when absolutely anything happens is crazy. And whenever I see someone talking about Slack replacing e-mail as if it's a good thing, I recoil in horror. You can answer e-mails at your own pace, while Slack prioritises instant replies.

edgan• 10 years ago

I have to disagree. The problem with email is the signal to noise ratio is too high, because it is globally accessible. Where as Slack is company only. Some things need to be addressed now. With email that would be turning on notifications, but then you get notifications for spam. Slack doesn't have the spam problem. The closest it gets is messages from computers. Those can be controlled or segregated to certain channels.

ryukafalz• 10 years ago

I think this really just speaks to a need for better email clients - or just better email client configurations.

A good email client for a business might filter all messages from other members of your company into a given folder, and then only notify for messages in that folder. Notifications for any other messages would just be blocked. Heck, don't even show them in the unread count until the user looks for them in particular.

jomamaxx2• 10 years ago

" Where as Slack is company only. "

This problem is easily solved with a filter, no?

TeMPOraL8• 10 years ago

Slack doesn't have the spam problem. The closest it gets is messages from computers. Those can be controlled or segregated to certain channels.

And that's why Slack will not be a replacement for e-mail.

Your life doesn't turn around the company you're currently employed in. Or, at least mine doesn't. Company messages are only a small fraction of important messages I get daily.

(Not to mention that Slack killing e-mail would be a pretty dystopian future, with some single profit-seeking company controlling your primary means of communication.)

untog2• 10 years ago

The problem with email is the signal to noise ratio is too high, because it is globally accessible.

If your inbox is deluged with spam from outside the company, you need to filter your e-mail by domain.

matwood• 10 years ago

Turn off alerts unless you are specifically mentioned or something happens in a channel you deem important.

r00fus• 10 years ago

I dunno.

What I do is simply mute the chatty channels, and go in when I need answers or get invited/DM'd.

Mute is pretty powerful.

traviscj• 10 years ago

You can't mute "@here" notifications though, which is really annoying. We have a slack bot that proxies "@team" to relevant "channel owners" , but the @here is more discoverable/more uniformly usable, so people still use that.

mmjjss• 10 years ago

Less can certainly be more. However I feel like Slack's usefulness:distraction ratio change greatly depending on the type of team or company using it. These suggestions are good ones but every situation is different. Is your team disciplined, focused, and/or collaborative and to what degree? The answer will tell you how Slack may get used or abused.

sotojuan3• 10 years ago

Agreed. My Slack experiences have been fine: just a few channels, notifications off, mostly relevant work chats, etc.

a300600st• 10 years ago

Yeah before Slack I was constantly getting interrupted with questions that could have been answered any time and random co-workers just wanting to chat. However, I agree with the analysis that Slack is good for immediate communication and communication that doesn't really matter too much. Before Slack we didn't really have a tool that fit that and so every communication was a co-worker walking over and interrupting whatever you were doing.

AlexandrB• 10 years ago

Before Slack we didn't really have a tool that fit that and so every communication was a co-worker walking over and interrupting whatever you were doing.

I don't get it. Doesn't any popular chat client fit the bill? The thing Slack adds is big persistent chat groups which doesn't help with the problem you're describing.

empath75• 10 years ago

I dunno. I'm in like 3 slack teams and dozens of channels and I maybe spend an hour in the morning catching up with everything, then I glance at it a few times a day during builds and such. Every once in a while it'll suck up half my day, but I rarely think of it as wasted time.

I learn a lot in slack and we have a big company, so I feel like helping people out with stuff during the day raises your profile. I'm kind of a python dabbler, but now I have people asking me directly about stuff because I'm 'the python expert' since I answer questions in the python channel a few times a week.

Doing my own work is obviously important, but I think helping other people get work done is important as well.

Just this week I introduced a guy on a totally different team to cloudformation, and in the process learned quite a bit about how they were using elastic map reduce, something we've never touched on our side of the company. He learned something, I learned something and I think the company as a whole benefits (even though I probably delayed my own work by a little bit)

It's really good at blowing up silos if you're a large-ish company. The difference in how connected I feel to the rest of the company is night and day since we switched to slack.

firewalkwithme• 10 years ago

I am probably getting old. Having used irc as main communication channel for 8 years in a previous company, we now added slack on top of the mail and direct messenger methods at my new workplace. I can not get used to it, at all. It is nothing but a distraction of half wit and delayed misunderstandings. I even dislike the ui. May be the staff is not ready, maybe just give it a little time. Maybe I just got too used to email

tormeh• 10 years ago

If you dislike Slack, have you seen Skype for Business? Its text chat function disproves the existence of Cthulhu, since something so mind-bendingly horrible would surely have awoken Him, if He existed. Imagine sending your colleagues single-line Word documents and you're basically there.

fiveoak• 10 years ago

Using Slack is like a dream compared to Skype for Business. Sure Slack may have some dumb default settings but Skype for Business finds a way to somehow sabotage 5-10 mins of most meetings with some sort of technology issue.

fumplethumb2• 10 years ago

Couldn't agree more. We use Skype for Business and its lack of obvious features is amazing. To give people an example, you cannot even send a link!

adzm2• 10 years ago

Skype for Business was bad enough I had to create Serious Business Cats in order to embed images...

https://github.com/adzm/BusinessCats

rekoros• 10 years ago

By the way: we make a Skype for Business [Server] <> Slack bridge, if anyone is interested (see https://cdn.sameroom.io/enterprise-admins.pdf).

The current solution requires persistent rooms to be enabled, a new AD account, and a VM running our proxy.

Once set up though, you can do 2-way, real-time sync between Slack channels and SfB rooms (https://vimeo.com/174265102).

sotojuan3• 10 years ago

You're not old! I'm 22 and still love IRC. I don't mind Slack for work but I do strongly dislike when open source organizations use it. It's really awkward to have to get invited and sign in to everything when you just need some quick help. Also, Slacks with a sizable amount of users are super slow for me.

Even when running IRC in the browser with IRCCloud it's snappy.

ultramancool• 10 years ago

I really dislike Slack for work too. A workplace shouldn't be using "cloud" services with company chat which is likely to include private details, financial, server ops, etc. It's just asking to get it plastered all over the internet. A private XMPP or IRC server is a much better option.

Mattermost is trivial to self-host so that's probably not a bad option if you're looking for something closer to slack (I think?).

This way all the private stuff can stay inside the network and behind VPN if needed. Security 101 really.

titanomachy• 10 years ago

Have you tried using your IRC client to access Slack? I've heard it's supported, but I don't know anyone who uses it.

benjiweber• 10 years ago

I use it with irssi. I wouldn't use the official slack client, it's terrible at so many things - notifications, switching windows, multiple accounts. But as a hosted IRC it works really well.

stealthascope• 10 years ago

I use it with an IRC client. There are some things I take issue with (mainly stripping out IRC color control characters), but it works really nicely as a client. I use Irssi so if I need to ignore it, I can tuck it nicely away in a screen session somewhere and put my focus elsewhere.

nicksergeant• 10 years ago

If you used WeeChat as your IRC client, I have been using this wee-slack script (authored by a Slack employee) and it has been phenomenally good: https://github.com/rawdigits/wee-slack.

Florin_Andrei• 10 years ago

I'm also an older IRC user.

I think of Slack as "IRC for yuppies". Seen this way, it makes sense. It doesn't have the low-level features of IRC, but it follows you around easily, when juggling multiple clients. For that, it's pretty good.

I don't love it, I don't hate it. It works, kinda. It's loud and attention-grabby, for sure.

chris11• 10 years ago

Out of curiosity, why do you think the content is worse than IRC. Slack seems to me to be the same type of instantaneous communication as IRC.

taytus• 10 years ago

I can't be the only one who think Slack is another super hyped company...

nilved• 10 years ago

Nope, that's what everything thinks. Some people even think it's over-hyped.

lojack• 10 years ago

You would be correct. You can't mention slack anywhere on the Internet without someone saying how over hyped it is.

Stratoscope6• 10 years ago

He didn't mention one of my pet peeves: the "stratoscope, robertheaton, and dang are typing" messages below the input window. They draw you in to watching... nothing! I sit there slack-jawed (pun unintended, but I'll take credit for it anyway) waiting to see what - if anything - will eventually show up.

Even on #random. It seemed like such a good idea at the time - keep "water cooler" chat out of the main channels. But what really happens is that all the fun stuff goes on in #random, so you pay as much or more attention to it as anything else. Who wants to be late for the party?

And there's the uncapitalized, unpunctuated, line-by-line stream of consciousness writing style I ranted about some time ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11239614

dang• 10 years ago

Another is that they just started putting light-grey text "Message @channel" by default in the text area. I am surprisingly stressed out by this. It feels like a command or a nudge that insinuates itself into my thinking space, like a half-finished message which a corporate entity 'helpfully' began for me, and now it's my job to finish it, and as soon as I finish that one another will begin. There's a bad dream in there somewhere...

I think the OP is right that a UI needs to be sensitive to the user's psyche and not push them all the time toward using the product.

Stratoscope6• 10 years ago

Oh my, I was doing my best to not see that new message. I thought it was just a glitch that would go away soon enough. But now you've done it, I can't unsee it any more!

Update: I'm curious why you're getting downvoted for your comment. Maybe people didn't like the creative way you put it? For me that made it all the better. Instead of some dry analysis, I like hearing what's going on in someone's head.

Drama aside, for me the problem with that message is that it's just distracting.

JasonSage3• 10 years ago

I'm actually more at ease with this change than if there was no default text. There's that flicker of recognition when I look at the input area before I start typing—"I'm messaging @channel." Call me paranoid, but I often flick over to the sidebar to see which channel I'm in before I dive into some conversations, just to make sure I'm not saying something in a public channel I shouldn't—like scanning over the recipients before you send an email. This proactively reassures me so I don't have to flit about making sure I'm doing the right thing.

dilap• 10 years ago

Your linked comment was really fun, but I've gotta say, I found the slack-style top half to do a perfectly fine job of communicating!

I agree the 'so-and-so is typing' is an anti-feature.

wereHamster• 10 years ago

I find it helpful, because it tells me whether I can expect an answer/contribution from the other party right away, and therefore I should stick around, so we can have a almost direct conversation, or whether they will answer later so I can go and work on other things in the meantime.

peff• 10 years ago

Err...isn't the "... is typing" message configurable and can be disabled if you don't like it?

someotheruser1• 10 years ago

I just checked - it is! Nice.

Preferences -> Messages & Media -> Display Options -> "Display information about who is currently typing a message"

AngrySkillzz• 10 years ago

In gaming, they call this "humane design," techniques like giving players an obvious place to take a break. By contrast, things like the infinitely-scrolling news feed and the autoplay video queue are grossly inhumane; they serve to obfuscate the fact that there's a decision point there, subtly trying to make the choice for you even if you might have wanted to do something else if you had thought about it. And of course it works, that's why everyone does it.

enraged_camel2• 10 years ago

Same here.

I actually hate that Chrome's little status bar at the bottom blocks the "bob is typing" message if you happen to be mouse-overing a link!

seangrogg• 10 years ago

I just liked the pun.

GrinningFool5• 10 years ago

They draw you in to watching... nothing

I'm curious why you feel this way, particularly if it's not a conversation you're actively participating in?

Stratoscope6• 10 years ago

Thanks for asking. I hadn't really thought about it, but the problem seems to be when it's a conversation I am actively participating in. I'll see "GrinningFool is typing", and then the message goes away for a while. Then comes back again. And disappears again. And back once more!

Then I realize someone may be doing like I do: typing an incomplete response, then going off to check some docs or to think about it, then come back to type some more, and pausing to think some more.

By the time all this happens, I've spent several minutes watching the "... is typing" messages, when I could have used those few minutes to take a stretch break, or pick up the mess on the desk, or just about anything but watching the "... is typing" messages.

After all, I'll get notified anyway when someone hits the Enter key.

imglorp• 10 years ago

An issue with the android client showed up at a big tech conference last week that had a slack for attendees. With scores of people joining the main channel per minute, the "XX has joined" messages scrolling past dominated the discussion and made it useless. There's no option to disable joins.

To their credit, I filed a feedback and they acknowledged the issue.

erickhill• 10 years ago

This doesn't justify anything, but doesn't every single IM client do the whole "so-and-so" is typing thing?

TeMPOraL8• 10 years ago

I remember the times when they didn't, and I liked it better that way.

ihuman• 10 years ago

I don't understand the part about "permanent do not disturb". Can't you just turn off all notifications, or quit the app?

daenney• 10 years ago

You can set Do Not Disturb for a team too from the same start to end time.

feistyGrub• 10 years ago

Slack is of utmost importance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius#Conspi...

Get it while you can.

Hail Eris

adzm2• 10 years ago

Eris be praised.

mtraven• 10 years ago

Somebody awhile back pointed out that Slack the app is about the most anti-Slack thing ever produced.

welder• 10 years ago

If you have more than a few teams, Slack becomes unusable. This alternative client doesn't freeze up like Slack:

http://meetfranz.com/

esseti3• 10 years ago

This isn't very fair. If i've many team in slack, and slack app becomes unstable, you don't solve the problem, don't you?

raesene9• 10 years ago

One thing that's not mentioned in the article that I see as one of the main drawbacks of slack is lack of threading, which makes it much harder to have an async. conversation (especially across timezones).

The very very weird part to me about this is that slack say they've been working on threading for at least 18 months now (https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/535121236452732928) and still can't provide a timeline for when it'll go live, which seems really odd for such a well funded development team, given it's such an oft-requested piece of functionality (there's even a twitter account dedicated to it https://twitter.com/slackThreadsYet )

ktamura• 10 years ago

I cannot recommend using Slack via a browser enough. It achieves several goals:

1. It sandboxes resource usage, preventing Slack from being a permanent resource hog. Is your Slack tab running hot on Chrome? Just kill it for now. There are many browser extensions for managing resource usage per tab.

2. Closing the Slack browser tab means no disruptive notifications. Sure, you can snooze Slack @-mentions, etc., but that's too much of "working hard to make the tool work."

3. Better workflow (seriously) Perhaps this is just me (or my function as a marketing person at a startup), but I work almost entirely inside the browser (GMail, Google Docs, various sites for research, SaaS apps). Using Slack as a standalone desktop app means I have to focus away from the browser. Using Slack as a browser tab means I can treat it just one of several web apps I use regularly.

4. Bonus point: No need to update your Slack client =)

enraged_camel2• 10 years ago

Besides, isn't the desktop app mostly just the browser app itself running inside the Electron framework? I haven't noticed any critical features it offers on top of the web app.

JasonSage3• 10 years ago

I think as of at least half a year ago, they were still using MacGap on OS X.

Browser notification support is still evolving.

The native apps also have more awareness of when a user is active since they can read into activity outside the window frame.

maw• 10 years ago

There are many browser extensions for managing resource usage per tab.

Any clues on what to google for? I've tried the Great Suspender and wasn't very impressed.

Enzime• 10 years ago

Most extensions are similar to that, but you could always run NoScript or uMatrix to have more finegrained control on specific scripts/domains that are running.

joelthelion• 10 years ago

Unfortunately they actively block browser usage on mobile (you can't post).

erelde• 10 years ago

But on mobile you can entirely deny an application the rights to show notifications ? If you use the app.

PhasmaFelis• 10 years ago

It just baffles me how many apps that would have been fundamentally doable on a 486 with Windows 3.1 and 14.4 dial-up somehow manage to gulp resources on modern machines.

(Although, for 1 and 2, it seems like temporarily closing the Slack app would work just as well.)

antod• 10 years ago

At my first job, a machine of that spec was a typical AutoCAD workstation (although some still ran DOS). The really grunty DX50s even had 16MB of RAM (whoa).

_asummers• 10 years ago

No part of me wishes computers were limited like they were then, I just wish software in general didn't assume it was the only thing running on someone's machine and was not so cavalier with resource usage.

shinymark• 10 years ago

If Slack's desktop client was written in efficient C++ using platform specific UI framworks it would likely be one to two orders of magnitude more efficient across all important metrics. Unfortunately the desktop app is basically an entire web browser instance running JavaScript code.

I can see the appeal, however. Write once run anywhere is a hell of a drug.

mikekchar• 10 years ago

I use slack in irssi. I think I actually get better benefits.

1. irssi is ridiculously low resource usage. It never melts down.

2. No notifications by default. I actually have a script that gives me notifications. It's quite cool because I filter the messages by regexp so that I only see what I want to see. Also, it uses my normal desktop notifications which means that they show up where I want them to, with the right font, in the right colour, lasting for the time I want them to. One tip: my default notifications do not stay up long enough to read them. It just gives me an indication that people are talking. I can notice a word or two and if it strikes my interest I can go to irssi and see what they are talking about.

3. I'm a programmer, so I'm always in my console. Same sauce, different flavour ;-)

I occasionally use slack from the browser because it has some features which are useful (like showing images), but I do that only on demand.

One of the things that is useful is that the people who like using slack on my team also have a lot of experience with IRC. They have good etiquette. Chatter is kept in the right channels so that it can be ignored easily. Work channels are about work and have a really high signal to noise ratio. Some teams are so good at it that if I want to get an overview of what's going on in their project I can simply subscribe to their slack channel. It's great for me since I work remote.

edibleEnergy• 10 years ago

Another couple great things about slack over irc (I use irssi as well):

1. Text logs that you can grep. I've probably grepped dozens of times for ip addresses, conversations where I know i mentioned someone or they mentioned me, etc.

2. No deletes or edits, once it's been sent to your client there is no mechanism to retract it like there is in the browser or native client.

esseti3• 10 years ago

Since slack people will pass by here. Please, if i set not disturb then don't disturb me: no notification, no badge icon (!!), nothing! (maybe just when the people, after been warned that they may disturb still send the notification). then when i remove the not disturb your nice slackbot can tell me what i missed.

Why am I asking so? beacuse I use pomodoro and i've a script that sets slack to "do not disturb" when i'm in the pomodoro and switch it off (to the pls bother me mood) when i'm done.

GrinningFool5• 10 years ago

If you send it via /feedback you'll at least get a friendly, appreciative reply.

The feature may never get implemented but the response is always nice... :slightly_smiling_face:

esseti3• 10 years ago

i did, i got a friendly reminde but that's it. The not-disturb feature is still disturbing :)

iza• 10 years ago

Surprised this doesn't mention the mute feature. I just mute the noisy channels (#random, etc).

https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204411433-Muting-a-...

ilyanep• 10 years ago

Muting a channel doesn't prevent it from showing unread message indicators when your coworkers use @here and @channel indiscriminately. This is probably my current biggest pet peeve with Slack, an app that I otherwise love (at least more than some other alternatives we've tried).

ozten• 10 years ago

It sounds like the cultural norm for how their team is using Slack is synchronous.

I'd strongly suggest building a culture that Email and Slack are Asynchronous.

If something is time sensitive, take it to a synchronous channel which has cultural expectations that it is okay to interrupt the other person.

RBerenguel• 10 years ago

Our unwritten but seems to be more or less the rule at work is that unless you get an @ (either in a general channel or in a 1-1 chat) anything that goes into slack is as async as email. Maybe a little bit less, but the expectation is that you will get to it at some point and that's it.

I don't find it specially disruptive this way. Way less than shouting from one side of the office "hey, check the deploy!"

Bartweiss3• 10 years ago

This is exactly how we've handled Slack. It's sync (to within a minute or two) for @ messages, which are used sparingly. It's async for everything else, and it's faster than email only in that it's a bit more conversational.

Within that norm, all of the "Slack is an evil attention vampire" complaints feel deeply unfamiliar to me. I find it less distracting than email because @ makes message priority clear at a glance.

Bartweiss3• 10 years ago

Using Slack asynchronously (or rather, using only private messages synchronously), these complaints are totally alien to me. Seeing Slack called "Facebook for work" doesn't feel inflammatory, it feels bizarre. I suspect synchronous culture would change things quite a bit. I've certainly never had the sense that "hey, do this when you can, no rush" meant anything but what it says.

Of course, some of this seems to be about configuration approaches. I had forgotten that Slack's dock icon embeds notifications, because my dock minimizes when not in use.

oxguy3• 10 years ago

Honestly, this is not my experience using Slack at all. Maybe it's because I'm on such a small team, but I find that the amount of chatter on Slack isn't overwhelming at all -- #random is pretty dead most of the time. And if someone sends me a message and I'm busy, then I'll maybe glance at the notification but probably just ignore it until I'm free.

My team uses Slack very asynchronously -- whenever you have something that needs feedback or whatever, you just post it in the appropriate channel, and expect responses to trickle in over maybe the next 24 hours. If someone sends "hey no rush but", then I legitimately do not rush to answer it -- just a different company culture I guess.

perseusprime11• 10 years ago

Is everyone forgetting the biggest benefit of Slack? It's the transparency part. Important details are no longer privy to 1 or 2 individuals on the team in their inboxes instead the whole team can see what's going on and can chime in if they disagree

GrinningFool5• 10 years ago

If you're in the right channel.

If someone didn't make a new channel to discuss the idea more , and you missed the single line of text that mentioned it two hours ago.

If you happen to be looking at the right channel at the right time.

If the pertinent bits aren't lost in back scroll.

I think your statement is true for a sufficiently small company with a limited number of channels. Less so for larger companies, or even small ones with dozens or hundreds of them.

ec109685• 10 years ago

Slack search is really good and can let you recover missed bits of information.

dingaling• 10 years ago

Important details are no longer privy to 1 or 2 individuals on the team

Sure they are, they just split-off into direct messages between themselves and return to the main channel to present the result of their discussion. Or don't even do that.

Information-hoarding needs a cultural fix, not a technical solution. In my experience it usually occurs in companies with a blame-culture, so people confide between themselves and keep some information undisclosed as 'insurance'.

Hexigonz• 10 years ago

I'm on a small team (14-15) and honestly I love Slack. Have never had any issues with it and I think it's an awesome team messaging system. We use growbot to give props and get a kick out of it. We just switched from skype to slack calls and it was a gamechanger. I have been on teams that used GroupMe in the past and it was terrible. I don't read group me messages because they're off topic and annoying. Slack's channel system changed that for me.

jomamaxx2• 10 years ago

Folks, I suggest that while Slack may have some mechanical advantages over e-mail, the 'problem of too many emails' will absolutely not be solved by Slack, or almost anything else.

'Communication discipline' is the key issue, and it's a social issue regarding how organizations work. Some people, in some jobs, are simply rewarded for broadcasting BS. It's their job to do that. Sadly.

It's funny how much time we waste communication, and how, most often, there is very little guidance on how we should do that. Very few 'rules'.

Like typing, or 'interviewing' - there should be some effort to control this.

If you think about it - isn't it absurd that someone from some group can do something that possibly interrupts dozens of other people?

Would you allow them to shout loudly in a room?

In the Army they call it 'radio discipline'. There are specific ways to communicate. Entirely inappropriate for corporate life, at the same time, we also don't want to quash the serendipitous opportunity that sometimes arises from great chats ...

But still.

Perversely ... because Email clients usually offer finer control ... maybe email with tight discipline is the way.

I feel dirty for saying that :)

apatters3• 10 years ago

Slack is good, notifications are bad, and this is a rant.

This post reads to me as another snowflake in the very justified avalanche of "Internet is drowning me in pointless chatter" complaints that define our time.

I use Slack this way with my team and it works wonderfully for me:

- I disable all notifications

- I tell people to PM me if they need me to act

- I tell people to carry on discussion in the relevant project/topic channel if they need to chat about said project/topic

These points are ordered by importance. The first is vastly more important than the others and extends beyond Slack. I aggressively disable notifications of all kinds from all things. If I can't disable them I at least disable their ability to make sound or vibrate. I have one way to be immediately "notified" and that is to call my mobile. I can count the people who know and use that number on one hand. They're so close to me that they know if I truly need to be informed of something now - in their respective sphere of family, friends, or work - and they call me and I pick up.

The PMs I read and act on when it's my Slacking time. I open up Slack and crank through them. Slacking time happens one or more times a day depending on my bandwidth.

The other channels I read if and only if I have a justified need to know what's going on with that project/topic. Or if I have downtime and am curious about something. Grazing on info about what my team is up to in project X is a nicer distraction than watching TV.

I am also that crazy guy who actually uninstalled Facebook from his phone and just goes to the website when he feels like catching up with friends. So I'm not subject to that megacorp's constant interruptions either. I don't feel like my life has lost anything at all by doing this.

The problem isn't Slack, it isn't Facebook, it's notifications, turn them off and tell the world that if they want your attention they have to call you and they can't have your number unless you love them.

sotojuan3• 10 years ago

Couldn't have said it better myself. Disabling notifications (sometimes I go as far as disabling the red "1" bubble on messaging services) has been the best productivity boost.

greggman2• 10 years ago

Turnig off notificwtions wouldn't solve it for me. With email I read through what others thought was important enough to include me. Even on mailing lists I can mute threads I'm not interested in

With slack I have to read everything. It's like having to read through not just my inbox but also everyone else's inbox and on top of that no way to mute threads period. Sure I can not follow a channel. That equivalent to a unsubscribing from a mailing list. But, like I said above, a mailing list has threads so I can mute or ignore any threads I'm not interested in. With slack I have to read it all

solipsism7• 10 years ago

No. You don't have to read it all. Treat Slack like a hallway conversation. Do you insist on being there for every hallway conversation? Of course not. If you miss one that's okay because people know to put anything important in an email or on a wiki, after the hallway conversation is done. Treat Slack the same way. If it's the only place any important conversation lives you're doing it wrong.

swampthinker• 10 years ago

Honestly, I uninstalled the Facebook app because it was chewing my battery life. Otherwise would have kept the app.

Brajeshwar2• 10 years ago

Totally agree of disabling notifications. About 2 years back, I wrote few steps to help my friends be more productive, by disabling notifications, and I believe it is valid today too - http://brajeshwar.com/2014/missing-step-productivity-activit...

soberhoff• 10 years ago

Doesn't disabling notifications invite the tendency to poll for updates? That would seem worse to me.

Ntrails• 10 years ago

The PMs I read and act on when it's my Slacking time. I open up Slack and crank through them. Slacking time happens one or more times a day depending on my bandwidth.

At this point it sounds like slack is now just email at which point I question the value it is adding. Assuming everyone else does the same things in the same way you'll never have a responsive conversation over slack like this and may as well skip it entirely.

apatters3• 10 years ago

The merits of a Slack PM over email are few and debatable, I agree. However only a member of my team can PM me on Slack and anyone can email me, so my Slack messages have a better signal to noise ratio.

Slack adds much more value in the area of project-oriented channels which do get a lot of real-time conversation happening in them during business hours, and also retain an email-like record for anyone who logs in later on and wants to catch up.

kavbojka• 10 years ago

Totally relate. I deleted Twitter from my phone and just use it either through the browser on my phone or whenever I have a moment to open Tweetdeck. My issue was notifications and the ENDLESS scroll - https://medium.com/@kavbojka/how-i-made-twitter-manageable-f...

bhuga• 10 years ago

I wrote an electron app to inject javascript and CSS into slack in an attempt to turn off a lot of distraction and, more importantly, easily differentiate between bots and people. I feel the author's pain, but the great part about being a programmer is that if it's bad enough to write about, it's bad enough to fix.

It allows per-team customizations, and if anyone cares to mess with it, there's a link at https://github.com/bhuga/hackable-slack-client. OSX only, but it's electron, so porting it would probably be easy.

Changing other people's applications' behavior is challenging but rewarding. The hacks required make great stories for certain kinds of parties. I always point people to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11805380 for a better introduction than I could give.

chubs• 10 years ago

I see a common theme here is resource usage by Slack on the desktop. I also share this concern, and proposed a Kickstarter to build a native app: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2137936555/taut-the-fas...

Unfortunately it didn't get the traction that I wanted. This is OK, the main purpose of the kickstarter was 'market/idea validation' to see if enough people were dissatisfied with Slack's resource usage/performance to justify building it.

If enough people here are interested though, i'd be willing to resurrect the project - please let me know.

nkantar• 10 years ago

My main issue with Slack is that with sane-ish notification defaults (only for my name), group direct messages default to that as well.

They're fundamentally perceived by everyone (in my experience) as an extension of individual direct messages, which do trigger notifications, and yet I find myself missing these for minutes/hours at a time, sometimes when it's important, all because I've finally trained myself to ignore the non-numeric notification badge.

I've contacted the support about this and was basically told to go away. :/

z6• 10 years ago

I'm not a fan of Slack. I think it's way more distracting than useful. The biggest problem I think is that it doesn't really allow for async communication. If I have a question that I want to ask someone, but it's not urgent, there isn't really a way to do it. With the typical gmail setup, I have 2 options. Send an email for non-urgent. Or send a hangout message for urgent. Slack really needs something like this, a sort of silent direct message that doesn't disrupt the recipient.

Also, I hate the <person> joined / left messages. There are team-related channels that are so disruptive and useless that I'd like to silently leave without being judged, but I can't.

Lastly, I've yet to be in a channel that isn't overrun by giphy spam. I know this isn't directly Slack's fault and more a company culture issue, but Slack sure makes it easy to use distracting features, whether that's integrations like giphy, or reactions to messages, etc. I think the focus needs to be less on making Slack 'fun' to use, and more on improving communication.

Falkon1313• 10 years ago

Slack has a powerful Do Not Disturb feature - that little X in the upper corner of the window. Same as any other program, close it when you don't want it running, open it when you do. Why go to such great lengths to complicate that?

ycombinatorMan• 10 years ago

Honestly, this is not a problem at all.

bitL2• 10 years ago

Is there any way to turn off those "motivational" start up messages such as "we like you"? It always irritates me; I want to use Slack for work not for getting the feel I am in a kindergarten and "special".

jordanrobinson• 10 years ago

You can replace them, so assumedly you could replace the "motivational" messages with things such as "Work harder" or "You are not special" or "You are an easily replaceable cog".

bitL2• 10 years ago

"" would work perfectly, by default.

mverwijs• 10 years ago

To reduce noise, I always get the admins to turn on XMPP and IRC support. That way I can pick my client of choice, and limit notifications that way.

How to make Slack less bad for you

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