[slg]

>Slack is based on IRC and is a messaging client. It was built for synchronous communication and not for collaboration. As a result, the way to scale Slack for a large company is to create more and more channels. This increases the amount of information generated in a company. Whilst this can be a good thing, Slack users don’t have the ability to filter high-quality information from low-quality. [emphasis mine]

This is the crux of the issue for me personally. The way Slack handles notifications and badges creates basically only three levels of importance: read this immediately, read this relatively quickly, or never read this. That works for small teams in which the gap between the second and third option is rather small. However as companies grow they generate more data and a huge gulf starts to form between the second and third option. There is now a wealth of information that necessitates a "you might want to read this eventually" category. Yet Slack provides no native way to handle this and the end result is that either you subject yourself to frequent interruptions for messages that aren't relevant to you or you ignore messages that are.

[1123581321]

Reminders are the 2.5 option. Scan and postpone until a better time to read.

[slg]

How do you identify if a message is of the 2.5 variety without first reading it to confirm it is not a 2? You still need to be interrupted to read the message. In my experience reminders have always been a way to manage work and not a way to manage notifications.

[1123581321]

I misunderstood and thought you were talking about making sure you didn’t forget to fully deal with the message. I think it’s worth being notified about important messages, even if you have to deal with them later. If you’re truly too busy to triage Slack, the unread status keeps the message for you while you do non-chat work, or work out of an urgent channels synchronously and ignore the others.

The other suggestion to save is a good one, too.

[slg]

>I think it’s worth being notified about important messages, even if you have to deal with them later

You are still misunderstanding. This isn't the problem. The issue is how to keep yourself from being interrupted from non-important messages. Slack provides support for messages that are not time sensitive. It encourages us to treat every channel as either worthy of some urgency to read or completely irrelevant and worthy of muting.

[1123581321]

I guess I don’t see the problem if a channel notifies you and you either read/action immediately, or triage for later. Why is it a problem if your sender expects you to decide if you have time to deal with an important message now? If the message is long but unimportant, I’d file it in the “read quickly and move on” category. I think I’m disagreeing and not misunderstanding.

[Karrot_Kream]

By default I turn all of my channels to Mention only. Other than that I have a few channels with low posting frequency which require urgent attention that I always have on notify. This gives me all 3 message types. I use the same pattern on Matrix and IRC as well.

[epivosism]

"Save" is the solution. It's a toplevel option, way better than "read now" and "remind me in X hours".