[FullyFunctional]

We adopted Slack and I hate it but use daily. What I find so frustrating with Slack is that it's

1. Super terrible at threading. Threads are clearly discouraged and don't nest. This appears to be by design, but even Usenet handled threading better.

2. Slack is an information wastebasket - at least in my experience it's really hard to find information once there's a significant traffic in a deployment.

3. Too Much Notification! I have to mute channels that has a high rate of addressing the channel.

However there's no denying that it's popular. Seems like every place I go is using Slack. At least slack allows me to edit my typos.

[onion2k]

Slack is a tool, and like all tools it can be used badly. You work at a company that uses it badly.

- No one should be using Slack for deep, branching conversations that require nested threads. Those would be lost and hard to refer back to in any system. Learn to separate and focus on things better.

- Slack is not a documentation system or a knowledge base, and shouldn't be treated like one. Pull salient points out of Slack chats and into a better place for holding information you'll go back to. I genuinely believe that Slack's crappy search tool is a feature. It discourages using Slack history as documentation.

- No one should be using channel wide messaging to the point where people are annoyed enough to mute notifications. Those people should be regulating what they broadcast, and use email instead when things need to be seen by lots of people.

Slack is a great tool for short form conversations, checkins, and automated notifications. But that's all. Using it for something that it's not fit for won't work, but that's not Slack's fault.

[2muchcoffeeman]

Your argument is just another “you’re holding it wrong”

People are using these chat systems for such things so maybe Slack as a company should build in the smarts extract the data into a more permanent format.

[mdaniel]

I get the _strong_ impression that Slack considers information that leaves Slack as a threat to the business. Thus, I don't think it's a lack of smarts, it's a lack of will

Contrast that to https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option which is one of the major "what the hell" for me when any big open source community picks Slack for their "chat" solution: unless the community has deep pockets, messages both age out and are not indexed by search engines

[dijonman2]

> I get the _strong_ impression that Slack considers information that leaves Slack as a threat to the business.

Double that since Salesforce bought them.

[gorgoiler]

Slack-the-company’s mission was for Slack to be a searchable knowledge base.

[onion2k]

Company mission statements are marketing, not actual missions. If you want to see the mission of the company look at what it actually does rather than what it says it aims to do.

[gorgoiler]

Did you notice we are saying the same thing?: Slack’s mission was to be a knowledge base but, to date, they have failed to execute.

It’s not because mission statements are marketing bullshit that distract outsiders from an alternate nefarious goal. It’s simpler than that: your mission is where you want to go, but in many cases a business just can’t complete that mission.

[michaelt]

> You work at a company that uses it badly [...] Learn to separate and focus on things better.

Maybe, but it's not within my power to change the behaviour of dozens or hundreds of other people, none of whom report to me.

So if I join a company where Slack is a shitty experience, I'm going to have a shitty experience with it - even if the company is "holding it wrong"

[onion2k]

I work in an organisation that has 9000 employees. I'm working on changing the way we document things. It's hard, but it can be done.

[droopyEyelids]

Is part of your thesis that if the company didn't have slack, they'd use their other tools properly?

[pydry]

I've noticed that a lot of tools, ecosystems and companies that have died out in tech have done so because they tried to adapt the users to their way of thinking rather than vice versa.

Frankly, I think if slack doesnt adapt to some of these use cases it'll die off and be replaced by something that does.

That said, I hate usenet style multi threading in any context. Im not sure why some people like it so much.

[kranke155]

The UX of an application defines behaviour.

[anotherhue]

Unfortunately, Slack's interval growth metrics don't want us to do any of those things.

[pjmlp]

I used to hate Slack, then I got involved with some projects that require Teams,....

[diarrhea]

It's baffling the degree to which Teams doesn't work on a purely technical basis, before UI and UX even come into play.

Half an hour ago I accepted an invitation to join a Team. Logged into MS in the browser, checked remember me, and then... a naked JSON response. It had a field "result", value "Success". Good! What now? Nothing else happened.

I firmly believe Teams is only usable if you're a Microsoft shop (don't even think about Firefox and friends) and is managed by a central IT (I somehow have two MS accounts under the same [work] email and no idea which is which). Don't get me started on being on Teams as an external employee.

Things like Slack just work much more and are much less surprising in their behaviour.

[pjmlp]

Microsoft shops are one of our customer bases, and that doesn't make me like Teams any better.

I cannot understand how the Teams team does their product management.

[LilBytes]

I'm fairly certain this feeling is ubiquitous across anyone and everyone who's had to transition from Slack to Teams.

[mattwad]

We moved to Discord and I really miss the threads in Slack. (for example threads can last one week max). They definitely could be a lot worse.

[icelancer]

All communication tools are bad. It's about what you will tolerate. And Slack is pretty decent there.