Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?

This doesn&#x27;t really sound like a problem with Slack, but rather a personal or cultural problem with a lack of setting or respecting boundaries.<p>Slack has options to communicate:<p>- that you&#x27;re away<p>- that you&#x27;re on a call or in a meeting etc.<p>- to pause notifications for an hour or whatever<p>- to star the most relevant channels<p>- to mute less-relevant channels<p>- to leave irrelevant channels<p>- to sideline conversations into threads<p>All of that is just Slack itself, in addition to things like putting meetings and vacations and other appointments on the shared team calendar. Some people where I work book meetings with themselves to guarantee focused distraction-free time. That&#x27;s completely valid.<p>Part of being a professional is setting boundaries, communicating them, setting the expectations that the rest of your team will do the same, and of course, respecting those boundaries.<p>That includes not calling or pestering people that are on vacation. Which also requires that you don&#x27;t &quot;check in&quot; while you&#x27;re on vacation, because if you do, then other people will feel like they&#x27;re expected to as well.<p>Set and communicate your boundaries, and in a team that respects each other, it shouldn&#x27;t be a problem.

I&#x27;m tired of constant chatting.<p>Slack encourages quick, stream-of-consciousness, short responses. Plus, it&#x27;s hard to find past discussion, and it&#x27;s hard to jump in after being gone for a few days (or, even a few hours).<p>Threads are absolutely the answer. But, the defaults matter - Slack isn&#x27;t encouraging threaded, long-form messages. Instead, it makes all messages feel urgent - and it makes the cost of sending a message way too cheap.<p>I&#x27;m on a mission to bring back forums, where threading is the default. Inspired by YC&#x27;s Bookface software, I&#x27;m working on a project to make forums as slick as Slack or Notion [1]. I think that long-form discussions and slow notifications are the key to bringing sanity back to discussions. And, I think the key is one amazing email summary per day - and few (if any) other notifications.<p>If you&#x27;re interested in this problem - please reach out!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;booklet.group" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;booklet.group</a>

&gt; For the next five years I operated in “Slack culture”, the communication paradigm that I suspect is in use by many companies these days. Email inboxes were more or less reserved for broadcasts from exec and HR along with JIRA spam. Everything else happens on Slack.<p>This is the real problem, IMO.<p>Slack shouldn&#x27;t be replacing e-mail or meetings or phone calls. It&#x27;s great for impromptu discussions with a lot of back-and-forth, but once it becomes a serious conversation with multiple parties you need to escalate to a call or meeting or e-mail. Casual, asynchronous chat is great for low-importance conversations that aren&#x27;t time sensitive. It&#x27;s terrible for coordinating and making important decisions in a timely manner, though. Don&#x27;t be afraid to schedule a synchronous communication session in whatever flavor you prefer.<p>Once you start making Slack the center of communication, you stop making deliberate decisions about who is included in e-mails&#x2F;meetings. Now everyone in the channel has to skim everything to make sure they&#x27;re not missing out on anything important. Busybodies love it because they can be a fly on the wall for everything. Heads-down workers hate it because they have to choose between focusing on their work or checking into Slack all of the time. It optimizes for the wrong kind of engagement.<p>Trying to enforce a lot of rules around threading is a band-aid, IMO. The real solution should be to create a culture where people aren&#x27;t trying to force every interaction into Slack or avoid meetings at all costs. Excessive meetings are a problem, but going out of your way to avoid all meetings will waste more time than it frees up.

In the main article Slack communication is assumed to be synchronous. I find life to be a little happier when it&#x27;s assumed to be asynchronous. That means turning off some channel notifications.<p>When I really want effective synchronous communication I tend to escalate from Slack to audio or video a screen share -- it seems like there&#x27;s an extra layer of collaboration that you can have with a bit higher bandwidth.<p>For meetings I like to have audio plus a screen share of a shared document -- usually not a Slack document, because it&#x27;s valuable to have more than one person be able to make edits.

One of the things I miss working at Facebook is the internal FB (called Workplace). It basically replaced email for the whole company, and worked really well for long form posts where maybe you would write some proposal up or make an announcement and get a bunch of comments. I now work at a slack centric company, and it just doesn&#x27;t compare - there is no &#x27;newsfeed&#x27;, so unless you remember to check all the channels, you end up missing stuff. You can send out a group email, but people are reluctant to reply-all, so this doesn&#x27;t get good discussion either.

At my company we have a “thoughtful communication” guide[1] that addresses Slack and other communication tools. The simple rule for Slack is it’s for ephemeral or urgent communication only. All “conversation” material essentially routes through email and it works great. Takes some getting used to but our Slack instance is very, very relaxed. Most employees silence all Slack notifications and are encouraged to do so to (try our best to) preserve focus.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ashbyhq.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;company&#x2F;thoughtful-communication" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ashbyhq.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;company&#x2F;thoughtful-communicatio...</a>

Microsoft has a solution to that problem: Teams. It is so painful to use and to do anything in it that it encourages people to actually use the bug tracker or other venues to discuss any serious topic.

To me, it is incredible that Slack is used WITHOUT threads. There is no way that information and discussions can be effective without a threaded conversation - it would just be pure cause otherwise.<p>Also, I find feature-specific channels to be such a pleasure. It&#x27;s easy to have everyone focused on the same topic in a given channel, without any confusion or missing information between different channels or private messages.<p>Moreover, I have also considered Slack to be asynchronous - meetings are necessary for sync work, but I find Slack to be working perfectly if no one expects that you reply within minutes, but within a few days (if you are not actively working on a project - in that case a lot of times is just easier to schedule very fast meetings during no-focus times)

My main gripe with so much of the communication moving to Slack is that a lot of highly technical discussion moves into synchronous chat, and that removes the expectation which email often carried that the author spends time organizing their thoughts into clear linear writing.<p>Of course emails don&#x27;t always come out coherently either, but my personal experience has been that moving into the streamed sentences model overall reduces the amount of effort put into organizing thoughts before communicating.

I think the answer here is pretty straightforward: run a Discourse board alongside your Slack, and nudge conversations out of the Slack and onto the board. The board works for long-form stuff, and for stuff you need to reference in the future; Slack works for interactivity <i>when you want the interactivity</i>.<p>We&#x27;ve been doing this for over a year at Fly.io and it&#x27;s worked out great; I wish every other place I&#x27;ve worked that did a Slack or Slack-like thing did a dual chat&#x2F;board strat, instead of pretending that chat&#x2F;email is a serious alternative.

You don&#x27;t have to talk sync with chat, you don&#x27;t have to do one line back and forths on chat, you can take hours or days to reply if you so choose on chat like email, you can easily do rich paragraphs. Slack is not synchronous communication, video &#x2F; voice calls are.<p>Slack wins over discourse forms, stack overflow and email because it adds too much friction to do essentially the same thing. Slack wins because it&#x27;s the least friction interface that gives you form and email equivalents, plus it organizes a bit better naturally . If you want to beat slack and change the communication defaults, you need to make a UI that works with less friction than slack.<p>You can change your chat culture with changing your behaviors and encouraging changes like nohello.net and threading like this post is doing and setting boundaries with how you will communicate.<p>Also, different people work better with different communication mediums, the slack hate that you see on HN is not universal, there is a quiet majority that works well with slack, otherwise you wouldn&#x27;t see it naturally adopted so much like the author encountered themselves. There will always be a set that hates whatever the default is. Now WFH is default in the industry, there is a subset that hates it greatly and wish we had offices again. Go back to offices with private rooms or open offices, there will be a set that doesn&#x27;t like it too.

No, Slack-mania can&#x27;t be cured with systemized discipline.<p>Slack is a pox. It&#x27;s not just about endless notifications that kill your ability to focus, it&#x27;s an environment that actively encourages organizational anti-patterns. If you have a question, first you ask your manager. If Slack makes it easy to reach out to someone directly, your manager will tell you to Slack them. If you don&#x27;t have Slack, and you don&#x27;t have people&#x27;s phone numbers, instead you get directed to documentation &#x2F; wiki &#x2F; support ticketing.<p>Organizational choice architecture <i>matters</i>. Slack makes bad choices easy and good choices difficult. That&#x27;s enough reason to ditch it.

If you want to be ahead of other engineers and have a meaningful impact, then you’ll want to maximize the number of uninterrupted deep work sessions. The more you can fit in a week the more you’ll achieve (rfcs, implementations, reviews).<p>This is one of the biggest contributor for high performing profiles.<p>To manage this when using Slack you can:<p>- set your status as “deep work” and decide to pause notifications for x hours<p>- use “mark as unread”. when you want to peek something but not act on it yet<p>- use “remind me” on messages you want to deal later on through the week<p>- avoid DMs has much as possible, so not just one person can help you, but anyone from your team<p>- avoid Slack on the phone<p>Then deal with notifications in bulk.<p>Slack isn’t killing our productivity, HN and twitter are not killing it either.<p>Our addictions to notifications is, but we can manage this with discipline and training.

For me Slack did not replace email, it replaced Instant Messenger. It replaced standing up from my desk and walking into another office to ask a question that I ether needed the answer to now, or never.<p>EDIT: I hate how all these code projects have their own Slack though, it&#x27;s super annoying and has been a horrible way to engage with the community and get answers to questions. (Discord too)

<i>&gt; A practice that was already in place was one of diligent threading – not only was threading encouraged, but by strong convention, every topic goes into one. We thread like our lives depend on it.</i><p>This is describing Zulip. And indeed, Zulip is excellent. The only downside is that the mandatory-thread paradigm makes it difficult to find the appropriate place to deliberately fuck around, which is also a valid mode of human socialization. But if you want to get work done, use Zulip, not Slack.

I wish Slack had a feature to &quot;threadify&quot; comments that have already been made. I wouldn&#x27;t even mind if Slack channels could designate certain users as &quot;thread czars&quot; that had the ability to move other users comments into a thread.

Our experiences don&#x27;t match regarding threading, and I don&#x27;t think the author&#x27;s are necessarily representative. Slack&#x27;s threading implementation is an afterthought, a bandaid solution. With it, conversations usually end up as a mix of some replies in a thread and some in the default clutterspace. In this regard even Teams has a better approach, it&#x27;s really obvious if you&#x27;re in a topic thread or not.

I love chat software like Slack and Discord. But I gotta say, those products really nailed their product names.<p>Slack. Almost nothing to do with work.<p>Discord. Almost nothing to do with communication.

Highly recommend World Without Email by Cal Newport on this exact topic: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.calnewport.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;a-world-without-email&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.calnewport.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;a-world-without-email&#x2F;</a>

If you&#x27;re in the US, be careful with what you write on a company channel&#x2F;email. Both Slack and email can legally be read by management.<p>Know someone who works at a well known digital radio company. Prior to joining management they were in a coworkers channel where people vented about management, with the exception being them. Upon joining management they were asked why they didn&#x27;t report on the gossip&#x2F;venting earlier even though they never partook and it was explained that management was tracking all channels on the company&#x27;s Slack. Those that were gossiping&#x2F;venting all got let go

Has anyone used P2 (by Wordpress) as a replacement for Slack?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wordpress.com&#x2F;p2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wordpress.com&#x2F;p2&#x2F;</a><p>It seems most similar to FB Workplace from what I’m reading.

I (and somehow the rest of our company) has been spared the constant slack problem but I still don’t know if this is the nature of our work (we work on hardware) or the culture this company has somehow cultivated. Or both.<p>First, we use Teams. And we have set up Teams to be messenger&#x2F;chat oriented first, and group chat second. In fact, the group chat feature is heavily controlled and limited to posting domain&#x2F;company-wide updates. I don’t know if this was intentional, but so it goes.<p>Result: people use Teams as a substitute for walking across campus to ask a quick question. Or to bounce off an idea. Or to quickly check status. Or to send gifs in meetings.<p>Second, as a hardware focused company, traceability is super important. You don’t want to be leaving technical decisions on ephemeral chat. You don’t want drawings, schematics, and instructions lost to people just chatting in Slack&#x2F;Teams.<p>Result: email&#x2F;Jira&#x2F;wiki it is.<p>Third: as a hardware focused company, the personnel is divided into technicians and engineers. And the technicians do not actively look at their phones&#x2F;computers. It can be hours sometimes before one of them responds. Last thing you want is a tech looking at their phone every 10 minutes while wielding a rivet gun.<p>Don’t expect a design engineer to be so quick on their response time either. They’re either deep into a CAD design, in a design meeting, or on the floor with a tech. Don’t Ask to Ask is not specifically taught but most everyone learns to Just Ask because who knows when you’re “Hey I have a question” is getting answered.<p>Result: most online communication is asynchronous anyways. Urgent matters will result in a call or someone running across campus.<p>I’m sure Slack plagues many a hardware company. But somehow we have cultivated a culture that discourages spending too much time in chat or storing important info there. If a question becomes too long or complicated, we ask each other to email. If a question is asked too frequently, it is logged in the wiki. If a question becomes rather convoluted, we call each other to quickly resolve the matter.<p>Messaging doesn’t need to be the enemy. It can be a powerful tool to keep in touch with others flung across the campus&#x2F;globe.

Did they just re-invent Zulip? :P

I agree with the author that threading is quite critical to maintaining sanity.<p>In my experience, it&#x27;s insufficient by itself. I would recommend coupling with some naming conventions around channels and discouraging group DMs for anything substantial.<p>I wrote up some of my thoughts on this in a post: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rushabhdoshi.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;2021-08-02-taming-slack&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rushabhdoshi.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;2021-08-02-taming-slack&#x2F;</a>

I have two tabs of slack open, each taking up closr to 4GB ram. I miss IRC.

&gt; It was rare to open Slack in the morning and not already be immediately underwater by 3 to 5 mentions representing conversations that needed to be waded into.<p>The &quot;Remind me later&quot; feature is a good way to avoid morning-overload syndrome. Just snooze the ones requiring a reply for 1 hour, 3 hours, tomorrow. Feels great.<p>Then turn off notifications, and go get stuff done.

To everyone frustrated at this, I would highly recommend checking out Twist. It is &quot;threads-only&quot;, and async-by-default. Interface is pretty nice too.<p>The biggest issue with email is that by default it only goes to the people in the To&#x2F;CC&#x2F;BCC list, so information is silod. But so much else about it is _very good_, and I think that Twist gets to most of that.<p>The main issue with Twist preventing professional adoption for me is lack of custom emoji support. Especially in full-remote land, custom emojis help with building a fun internal corp. culture, and serve as a way to ad-hoc workflows as well. Twist, add custom emoji you cowards!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twist.com&#x2F;slack-alternative" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twist.com&#x2F;slack-alternative</a><p>(EDIT: to those who roll their eyes at &quot;fun corp culture&quot;, not talking about dancing parrots, just like stuff like our own corp logo or little stamps to say something is done and the like)

What if you had culture where Slack messages don’t warrant immediate replies?<p>I set aside time to do “deep work” where I quit Slack and Outlook. If there is something urgent someone could text me (it never happens). If it is an “emergency”, I would get a page through my paging app that has a special entitlement to allow it to bypass silent and DND.

Or you could use Zulip, where everything is organized into first-class topics for exactly the reasons described.

I introduced a similar thing at my work place and it works (there&#x27;s a few points where people forget or sometimes there&#x27;s cross over) we added some state to it to so in the context of triaging bugs.<p>we reacted to the original message with:<p>ticks - to indicate the bug or issue was accepted and we had enough information to raise the problem&#x2F;issue into our tracking system<p>cross - to indicate not a bug<p>jiraicon - to indicate a ticket had been raised (and linked into the thread) all the information so far would be in the ticket and further comms hence forth would be in the ticket system.<p>in the channels we did this in, messages would be pinned till they were given the tick&#x2F;cross so people knew what needed triage and what didn&#x27;t (treated triage as a team sport, whomever got to it first saved the rest from having to dive into it, unless they so wished)

My team just launched a product on Tuesday designed to solve this exact problem.<p>Email has a better threading model than Slack, but email clients lack the realtime features needed for synchronous collaboration. So we&#x27;re trying to fix. The idea is to let you do long-form, async and short-form, synchronous communications using the same tool, and to do it over email so you can still talk to anyone.<p>Our product is Shortwave (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.shortwave.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.shortwave.com&#x2F;</a>) -- we had a Show HN on Tuesday. We have a video here that walks through our team collaboration features: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Ex_o2d1GXf4&amp;t=5s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Ex_o2d1GXf4&amp;t=5s</a>

I&#x27;m new to Slack (just leaving a FAANG for a startup) and all the inbox management skills I&#x27;ve built up over the years seem to be useless now.<p>Is there a good way to create an async task list from Slack? Right now if I get a message on Slack that I want to handle later I can:<p>a) Ignore it, so I keep the unread &quot;red dot&quot;<p>b) Use the &quot;remind me&quot; feature to make it synchronous but later<p>c) Just ... handle it now (sigh)<p>What I want is a list of threads I am meaning to get back to, but without having to actually use a separate list-making app. Is there a Slack app or workflow for this?

One thing I have not seen mentioned here is the “slack status”. I find that it has a subtle stress inducing effect:<p>* if it’s green are people expecting me to reply right away? And if I don’t respond do they feel anxious? * do employees feel pressure to keep it green to show they are working?<p>I told my team that I will keep my status to AWAY always, and they can feel free to do the same. Just because slack provides a surveillance method doesn’t mean you have to use it. This also reduces expectations of immediate replies and keeps it more async

I always felt like the ultimate flow with Slack was to make focused channels for a given topic; threads are too generic and hard to track and I generally get the impression that they&#x27;re meant to be ephemeral, whereas a focused channel will of course ensure all participants know the intent of the channel, and the content is not lost. Essentially, a channel should be treated as an e-mail thread. Once the topic has finished, you can close the channel and archive it for future reference.

no. Slack sucks and I don&#x27;t think companies realize just how much time and energy it wastes. I am lucky if I can get one day of focused programming in anymore. Most days I am exhausted from constant interrupts and when I finally do get time at the end of the day I am completely spent.<p>Everyone needs a personal guide through AWS&#x2F;K8s&#x2F;Infra Tool when about 50% of the time we have internal documentation answering the questions that are linked to at the top of the channel. Another 40% of questions could be figured out with light googling and 5 minutes of reading. The last 10% are legit questions around issues we have in our environment or require a deep knowledge of how the systems work together.<p>But hey. If companies want to pay me to babysit lazy developers I&#x27;ll do it for a good price. I&#x27;m fairly close to leaving the company at this point but this seems to happen at every company I have been at once you get to a few hundred developers and my motivation has been completely sapped.<p>Slack is for leeches.

interesting article because Stripe had quite a couple of &quot;culture &amp; hiring&quot; issues the past months. This is just another example that the company is toxic and they rather focus on existing process&#x2F;tools than people.<p>Working in shops that used slack (usually it means it&#x27;s used heavily) has taught me to avoid any shop that uses that tool because knowledge isn&#x27;t captured properly. There was a critical thread here accusing the same of Discord (for good reason). But Slack doesn&#x27;t get the same fire from the HN crowd and it makes me wonder.<p>I guess you can create the same mess with Teams, but in the end it&#x27;s the company culture that decides where to have discussions and at what point that value generated by those should be captured via which means. I certainly will not scroll up more than 2 pages in a chat so if info is lost better write an email.

Maybe instead of Slack we should use more collaborative editing tools (like Google Docs or Miro).<p>I haven’t really tried that, but it might be interesting if for example during troubleshooting session everybody was putting the facts to same document.<p>At least the end result could be easier to consume than a very long chat log.

Are any Mozzers reading HN?<p>I worked with the Moz team on a project as a consultant, and their slack thread discipline was very strong, much like what OP described in his post.<p>It was equal parts confusing and refreshing at the same time.

Slack encourages a fast but irregular communication habit. For example, if you could document something that you discussed with someone for half an hour, maybe many people would benefit from it.

We&#x27;re a very small company which makes this all easier, but we&#x27;ve ended up with a similar Slack convention of everything being in threads and it makes Slack a lot more managable.

Precisely why I’ve come to like Twist app, from the maker’s of Todoist. It needs some refinement and better thread management, but it’s asynchronous from the start.

I work at a company that has taken Slack-mania to the absolute extreme, and it&#x27;s one of the reasons why I daydream about leaving on a weekly basis.

Work at a pretty big place and we very frequently use threads it works well and people picked up on it fairly fast.

Slack was supposed to cure email. Instead it created a new &quot;mania&quot;?

The solution to Slack is Twist.