[npunt]

Rather than just tell / hope people follow some etiquette, I'd love Slack to build more etiquette enforcing features that operators could enable.

This isn't the 19th century where the best we can do is tell people to read a book on etiquette and hope for the best. Slack is in a unique position in the history of interpersonal communication where they have complete insight into (and design of) user's and organization's preferences as well as the messages themselves. And the medium is text, which is the easiest to analyze and provide feedback on.

Some examples of what they could do, broadly captured in a 'Etiquette Features' preference set by the organization:

1. Never say 'hey' - if a user writes this, explain the etiquette and rationale for it and suggest they write a whole ass message instead, but optionally let the user just send it.

2. Make long messages scan easily - not too difficult for a computer to tell a long block of unformatted text. Great time to introduce the etiquette scaffold.

3. Use threads - a trickier one to suggest when people are typing, but likely some obvious response patterns (who & when messages are sent) that could trigger a etiquette scaffold asking to put this message in the thread if messages are similar enough to the thread's contents.

4. Short followups as emojis - orgs should be able to define clear meaning of response emojis that are visualized to everyone in the UI when selecting them (check means complete, question mark means need more info, etc). Short responses also likely have a pattern that could trigger a 'do you mean 'this is done'?' kind of scaffold, which would fill in emoji instead

6. Channel response expectations - a tiny text label is insufficient to set expectations, as are pinned messages. At the very least visualize timezones of participants, and when writing an @message to someone in a channel, if they're off-hours let the sender know that up front.

All our communications tools favor low friction to send and devalue the recipients time (the phenomenon mentioned in Cal Newport's Deep Work), and Slack is a serious offender. There's a need for a higher friction, higher awareness path to send messages that better accounts for the full cost of such messages. Not every org would want/need this but it should absolutely be something a service like Slack offers.

[thecosas]

It would be great to see Slack put some work in here, but could someone make an app (or Slackbot) to enforce/offer guidance?

I know Slack culture can be hugely variable over time, especially for high-growth companies so there definitely needs to be some flexibility.

[npunt]

Part of the reason Slack culture is hugely variable as organizations change is precisely because there are few easily available, broadly understood default tools to reduce that variability.

One could say the same for code style - it's hugely variable as more people come onto the team, but with linters a particular standardization of style can be followed.

My post is basically asking: what if we had etiquette linters?

[Mandatum]

I've seen a few orgs build their own etiquette-enforcement bots for things like channel naming conventions, as well as minimum "guidelines listed" in the channel description (like periodically going through all channels and checking to see if channel description has SLAs etc). But it's all organisation or team-specific.

And for about 98% of orgs, building a bot to enforce conventions is definitely not getting prioritised above BAU or project work.

[paxys]

All of this is possible to do via custom bots. Ultimately there's no single standard Slack can enforce that will work for all of their users, so it's best to stay as lightweight as possible when it comes to stuff like etiquette.

[npunt]

Alternately, defaults really really matter. Of 100 teams that adopt Slack, only a fraction will know about, let alone enable, let alone write custom bots.

If you're in a position like Slack where you have control over defaults, small changes like the introduction of some default etiquette options that orgs can adopt can have massive leverage in improving comms, which ultimately would benefit the product and users.