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FullyFunctional
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
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.
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.
cyberpunk
I mean, good luck…
Getting into enterprise IM in 2022 is complete idiocy, but… Good luck.
We already have the solution, it’s zulip, yet no one uses it or cares.
> Slack is based on IRC
Not true any more, maybe in ancient history.
> It was built for synchronous communication.
Also wrong.
dvt
Totally agree with this, not to mention that chat apps are some of the most boring, uninteresting, and braindead "problems" to solve and they have been basically completely "solved" over and over again since bulletin boards.
hericium
It's different with Google products. Every new iteration of Hangouts/Chat (or whatever it's called this week) is a bit more "unsolved" than what they're killing to introduce it.
It's less boring when your tools are getting shittier over time.
jamesfinlayson
And yet Atlassian managed to not solve it with HipChat and not solve it again with Stride.
glotzerhotze
What does that tell about Atlassian?
antifa
A zulip clone written in end to end rust sounds interesting, with reasonable allowances for non-rust code on android/iOS. So maybe just end to end swift would also be fine.
But instead, probably instead we're going to get something like kernels written in electron forced onto us by our IT departments out of nowhere just because it's included in our Microsoft or Atlassian plan at no additional cost.
jamesfinlayson
I remember at a previous company there were discussions on what to go with (HipChat/Stride had just been killed by Atlassian) and Zulip seemed to be the best free solution. But ultimately we went with Slack.
FateOfNations
>> Slack is based on IRC
> Not true any more, maybe in ancient history.
I see that comparison more in the conceptual sense, rather than using the actual IRC protocol.
fulafel
The word "enterprise" is notable in its absence in the article. Framing your problem as "enterprise xxx" would evoke Teams and HipChat, not improved Slack.
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.
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".
synicalx
One thing I think Teams does well in this space, and where I feel Slack falls short, is the organisation of channels.
With Teams you can put people in... well teams, and each team has channels and other data associated with it. This hierarchy makes it easy for people to keep a multitude of channels and data organised without actually having to do it themselves.
Another thing I have to (begrudgingly) concede to Teams is that it's essentially "free" and from the perspective of an exec it does the same thing as Slack + has better video conferencing. Even simple things like meeting with 3rd parties is very easy to do on Teams - just send an invite. Whether or not the A/V actually works during the call or peoples PC's don't run out of memory mid-meeting is another matter, but on paper it looks good.
veb
Teams also has the BEST accessibility (at least for live captioning).
I have not used Google Meet or anything, but I'm constantly surprised by the level of sophistication from Teams live captioning and transcripts. You can be watching it "type" in real time. It'll write the wrong word, but several seconds later (as the person has added more context) you see the word, or even sentence completely change to be more on point! It's wonderful.
I hope they continue to improve that. '
kybernetikos
Google meet has a very similar feature. The missing piece is it seems to only work during the meeting when obviously it'd be great to get a downloadable and searchable transcript afterwards.
disillusioned
They announced this is coming later this year, today.
fulafel
Teams makes it hard to form opinions about its potential good ideas because the totality of the user experience is so abysmal, a bit like it's hard to appreciate a details of craftmanship of a torture device from the victim POV.
happymellon
Teams gets really confusing with its channel based "click here to start a new thread which will bury all other existing conversations".
Not sure why, but I find it to be the worst way of communicating anything.
SMAAART
We use Slack at work, and I hate it. The ratio of Signal to Noise is brutal, and there's no accountability.
But the issue is not Slack per se, Slack does what Slack does: synchronous, instant, INFORMAL communication.
If we want better processes we don't need a better Slack, we need better processes and enforcing better habits.
If we want traceability of information, we need data-rich communications and structured communications, and we have other tools to do that, from emails to databases to actual systems that reside outside Slack.
So now the problem is enforceability and not the tool per se.
My favorite solution is an Agile organization with Agile team. Vertically integrated where each lead has 4-5 reports, each responsible for projects, processes and documentation.
The problem to adoption is that the C-suite doesn't understand processes, and leads don't want to be bothered.
So the broken information system enterprise continue its crippled path, akin to walking in the dark.
The enterprise needs process innovation, not technical innovation.
rtpg
I think Twist is the right answer. It's basically a forum, which is nice because:
- people have to write "real messages", with a beginning, middle, and end. Subject line.
- Doesn't suffer from e-mail's "I wasn't on the original to/cc" problem where information is completely silo'd by default
- Messages by default need to be categorized and a bit organized. Less of a firehose
E-mail gets a lot of shit, but from my experience the biggest issue is just the transmission issue. Forums/stuff like Twist solve this nicely, in my opinion.
I think Twist is totally undersold as the future. If only they would put custom emoji (this is, I swear, a blocker for moving to it at $JOB. In a full/mostly remote world, we want ways of expressing at least a bit of company culture!)
Really you want a mix of tools, of course. You want stuff for synchronous discussions, you want recorded minutes/"serious discussions", you want a place where you write up big documentation (Confluence/xWiki etc).... there's not gonna be a single tool that solves it all. And if you have shitty communication culture, all tools are going to be miserable. But there are interesting tools that go beyond "messaging" out there!
ngrilly
I think Zulip has the potential to become a dominant solution in this space if they find way to make the UI as appealing as Slack. Zulip offers a new approach on how to structure discussions by threads while still being a chat application with a “linear” flow.
molsongolden
I switched companies which meant moving from Zulip to Slack. I don’t understand why people like Slack or what they like about the UI.
Threading is terrible, async catchup is difficult, gif links don’t convert cleanly, group DMs are limited to 8 users then Slack suggests creating a new channel…?!
epivosism
I've never used Zulip, and prefer slack threads to discord's attempt. Could you explain how they work in Zulip?
kibwen
Zulip requires all conversations to happen inside of topics; think of it like an extremely lightweight and synchronous email, where the topic is the subject line. You can view a channel to see all its messages chronologically, and in the sidebar you can narrow to a single topic.
Zulip is great, I highly recommend it. On projects where I have to use Slack or Slack clones, I end up closing them when it's time to get work done because they're terrible at being productive and hopeless at preserving information for more than a few seconds. With Zulip I have successfully searched for information sent months ago/thousands of messages ago and still found it, thanks to the powerful search and mandatory topics.
ngrilly
I agree with view from a functional point of view. But I think that Slack looks “nicer”, more polished, more structured from an aesthetic perspective.
jimkleiber
Yes I want to use Zulip but very often feel disoriented when opening up, borderline dizzy. I'm not sure why, what about the UI causes that for me.
Are there any specific UI recommendations you'd give?
Dave3of5
I'm actually really interesting in this. What are the top 3 things you could change in slack / teams that would make you switch. I'll go first:
* Notifications settings are annoying I'm either swamped with notifications or miss them. I want to be able to switch of notifications for short periods
* I want to group discussions about certain things. I.e. if we are discussing a JIRA issue I can select the message and group them into something that I can attach to the issue we are discussing
* Too many private chats - I'd like to ban private chats as I find there's some great info in these which are often not shared to the group
another-dave
Notifications need to be more intelligent — if Mary rarely posts in a channel (or joined the channel just to post) it might be worth more attention than John who keeps pressing enter mid stream of consciousness.
If you've a long running channel like a "developers channel" it probably has some bot integrations — "the last PR failed linting". It should be possible to mute these without muting the whole channel.
A lot of problems come down to company culture though. I think the hard work of fostering good practices is something outside of a tool's remit.
Maybe it should be a point on people's annual review if you want to get people to use it as less of a rubbish bin. "Sorry Peter, you won't get a pay rise this year as you sent an at-channel message to the team every day in Feb even when we told you that was really disruptive"(!) Most places don't care about these efficiencies enough though (yet). E.g. if people were as wasteful with company expense accounts as they are with other people's attention it would definitely get sorted out.
Dave3of5
Yeah a lot of orgs and employees are pretty toxic and Slack and teams makes it very easy to be like that. I wonder if there is a tech solution to this or if it's something that has to be handled outside of the tool.
fulafel
I'd add security to the list of things to address.
Aggregating all of the institutional knowledge of the company to one perpetually searchable global workspace hosted in a US company's shared cloud vulnerable to being downloaded and abused by a global breakin or any compromised employee account is bad.
calvano915
I thought much the same. Controlling the custody and flow of information is impossible with tens of thousands of users and pretty much no policies or significant monitoring in place.
fulafel
I think centralised control by company IT admins would be more catering to Teams customers than to Slack customers. To keep the attraction and user satisfaction of Slack it needs to be user / team centric. Maybe something federated or sharded like Mastodon or Discord. Might even be possible to distrust the servers and have end2end crypto.
peterbonney
It’s wild that Google, despite being the leader in startup email/business software and literally giving their Slack competitor to everyone for free as part of their Google Business subscription, STILL has such low mindshare in this space that it didn’t even merit a mention in the blog post.
(Full disclosure: my company used Google Chat, and I find the integration ecosystem so pitiful that I’m constantly thinking about paying up for Slack. I don’t know how Google is screwing this market up so badly.)
norman784
I think the issue (read on HN a lot of comments about the subject) is that there is no unified vision/goal inside Google, there are a lot of teams with different goals and visions, but it seems that the most common goal for their employees is to get enough merits to get promoted, forget about the old project and jump into a new one (because new things give you merits to continue climbing).
I could be wrong, with no insight information this was my conclusion after reading comments and also seen too many products killed by Google, even releasing new worst products to replace old ones that were better.
schimmy_changa
Especially because they came so close so early with Google Wave! That was it, I think, but Google didn't have the confidence at the time to stick with it, and it was just too unpolished to keep out in the public at a time when everyone thought that whatever Google did was gold.
Seriously, I think the Wave ideas were the ones that hit the perfect feature-set for informal electronic business communication.
mattwad
For personal use, GChat has really been hurt ever since they merged it into Mail. It's much harder to share files and access now. Also they took away video for some reason
renewiltord
I literally have no idea which of Google’s numerous chat apps you’re talking about
antifa
Eh, but you remember the first one that around when AIM was around, and pretty much nothing used today performs as good as it or AIM did on the average computer 20 years ago.
grandinj
The original Google Chat (with the little Windows client that sat in your taskbar) was surpringly good.
And then, of course they killed it and made it a web UI thing and made it majorly worse at the same time
Manheim
I have used Slack, Teams and Discord. If I should choose one I would go for Discord. Discord is much better in the collaboration department for distributed teams, and I love their open audio channels. It just works. Teams is good when it comes to integration with office and onedrive (of course). Slack is, in my opinion, just another chat service. A hugely successful one with a big user base and a strong brand, but not superior when it comes to collaboration.
robertlagrant
> Teams is extremely well integrated with the rest of the Microsoft suite.
Erm. Not sure someone who's used it would say that :-)
LilBytes
He's not wrong, it's well integrated, but they're all shit just easily connected. E.g, SharePoint is absolutely awful.
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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.