[mstade]

We use workplace too and this mirrors my experience precisely, especially the bit about notifications. It seems you can't control it either, you can turn off individual workspaces or whatever they call them, but new ones are added by default it seems so it's a cat and mouse game.

Given it's so noisy, and full of the same dark patterns as regular Facebook, it's all but useless in sending out comms across the wider organization, let alone for communicating with other team members.

There was a big push last year to get everyone on Workplace, which was kind of ironic since the internal firewall blocked facebook so you had to use an external network (e.g. phone.) They fixed that, but despite the big push, most truly important notices are still sent via email distribution lists and published on internal web properties. It really feels like something forced on the org, and I wouldn't be surprised if I'm a year they backtrack and say it's too expensive and doesn't provide any value beyond what email and internal sites already did.

What we really need is a good chat solution with solid search functionality. Slack would do, but I'd prefer something more like IRC with all chats archived and fully searchable. Slack is too meme friendly...

[pbalau]

> We use workplace too and this mirrors my experience precisely, especially the bit about notifications.

I have a solution for you: https://imgur.com/a/QnIsBUw Even better, if you go to https://my.workplace.com/groups/ you will see a list with all groups you are part of with options, for each group, to control the notifications, follow settings and leave the group. On the same page there is a button to bulk manage groups.

Both my personal fb feed and the workplace feeds and notifications (both when I used to work for fb and now at the current startup), are fairly clean, with only things I care about. Yours is noisy because you let it be noisy.

At fb, our team had a public group for support requests, a main internal group for team wide comms (release notes for each service we provided, on-call reports, welcome messages for new peeps, social stuff) and a number of groups for each individual team, or service, or even inter team projects. The noise on my feed was minimal.

[n0rbwah]

The fact that some (supposedly) technical users on HN are annoyed by this noisiness should be enough to tell you that the system's badly designed and that you can't expect most users to configure their feeds the way they'd ideally want it, even if the tool allows for it.

[mstade]

> Yours is noisy because you let it be noisy.

I never "let" it be noisy, it's noisy by default since I have to opt-out to groups rather than opt-in. I've intentionally subscribed to exactly zero groups in workplace, but auto-subscribed to all. This makes notifications entirely useless to me, since it's all just noise and I don't have the time or energy to go through and change settings every time someone adds a group.

[pbalau]

You don't get automatically added to all groups (or any), some other human, that works with you, does that.

[mstade]

Oh, I didn't know that. Still, since everyone seems to add everyone to all of the things in our workplace then, the effect is the same – just a bunch of noise and an endless turning off of notifications. I just logged in and again had 100+ notifications from groups I've never heard of before, nor subscribed to. My feed is full of stuff that's of no meaning to me, and so the whole thing becomes useless. Maybe it's useful elsewhere in other organizations, but I wouldn't know.

[pbalau]

But you can't blame the product for this, can you? You wont blame email because people you work with are adding you to all the mailing lists, are you?

Yes, fb could do a better job at explaining how to use their product, but maybe there is an opportunity here...

[mstade]

I honestly can't tell if you're being facetious; comparing Workplace to e-mail seems disingenuous, but I'll bite. E-mail, being a decentralized protocol, gives me – the consumer – control of how I shape the incoming feed of data. I can, and do, ignore any e-mails not directly addressed to me, either via the To: or Cc: headers. Anything else goes into a different folder, which sometimes I check for relevant details. Sometimes I'll notice what is essentially corporate spam, and so I make a rule to just delete those messages. I have a very clean inbox, and I've never missed an important piece of communication using these simple rules. Ultimately the only algorithm that controls my feed, is the one I design.

By contrast, the feed on Workplace has never been useful to me, since it's just noise. The only way for me to have it not be noisy, seems to be constantly tweaking subscriptions, or just ignore it entirely – the latter option has proven the most effective. Maybe it works for some people, but it doesn't work for me, nor my immediate colleagues who also gave up on using it for anything of consequence.

[mjburgess]

"let it be noisy"

So you think it's the user's responsibility to manage ?

They disagree.