Slack, I’m Breaking Up with You

I haven't really used Slack, but I had an immediate, negative, and surprisingly-visceral reaction when I saw one of their animal-ads on Youtube... Can you spot the moment it all goes horribly horribly wrong?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6sSa5NpqUI

The lion-manager is gazing out a window, has a passing thought about "flying umbrellas". Naturally, he instantly sends a mass-broadcast, interrupting and disrupting the work of the entire office. (Who all, of course, leap joyously to implement his brilliant vision.)

Now, this makes a lot of sense if you want to sell copies of Slack, since it appeals to the managers with the power to approve-purchases and mandate-adoption... But it implies Slack is going to either become the latest tool-of-oppression at a dysfunctional company, or that managers are going to buy Slack with the idea that they can use it to micromanage everybody.

Further on, as the Slack team adds features, guess what kinds of features are going to get priority? The ones that sell. Which ones are those? The ones that lion-managers love and other-employees hate.

The problem with communication tools is that the meta-conversations necessary to set and adjust expectations around them don't happen as low-level and as often as they ought to. So they blow up into things like the medium post.

I would suggest at a bare minimum making part of the topic of your slack channels "Everyone must read everything posted here within 30 minutes," "everyone must read everything posted here on a daily basis," "don't read the history. If you didn't see it, it didn't happen" and also carefully consider everyone else's time before posting anything.

I would suggest that, but I'm done getting called autistic for discussing the facets of social protocol that social protocol discourages discussing. It feels better for people to be able to speak in one of those contexts without explicitly declaring how much they want to impose on someone elses time, and nobody wants to perform out-of-band signalling as a conversation casually slips between the different contexts. The way Slack tends to get used is just a rude ways to waste other people's time.

I wrote my 2 cents about this article, in a follow-up Medium post - https://medium.com/@preslavrachev/slack-isn-t-the-problem-we...). Here is a just a relevant comment to this discussion:

"[none of the arguments], has to do with the tools themselves, as much as it does with our way of using them. We have come to a point in our development, in which 24/7 availability is perceived as normal and expected behavior. Yet, to blame it on the tools we use, is like blaming it on the hammer for accidentally hitting your finger while trying to hang a picture. Indeed, the tools we use, have certainly made it easier for us to reach this point, but ultimately, it is us who pulled the trigger, not the tools."

Zulip (https://zulip.org/), a recently open-sourced Slack alternative, has a clever solution for this. They have a light-weight threading model which ensure that discussions stay within context. That way, you can just ignore discussions about topics you're not concerned with without missing anything else. It's great.

> Sometimes, important things get discussed when you’re not around. Unfortunately, so do a lot of unimportant things.

> Zulip makes it easy to review the conversations you missed, so you can focus on that important project without having to catch up on how Jim’s guitar lessons are going.

Someone on HN described it very well:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10281065

I still prefer email as my communication tool of choice. Sure it may take some self discipline to ignore it and treat it as asynchronous when you need to be doing something else, but at least there's a lot less pressure to respond that there is in chat apps where instant reply is more likely to be expected and the person on the other side can often see that you're there.

Sounds way too familiar. I am generally amazed that people refer to Slack as chat AND asynchronous communication tools. The two are kind of opposite for me.

I too miss times when email was for longer async communication and chat/gtalk/irc was for ad-hoc brief chats or production incident triage.

great similar post on the Economist talking about the broader issue of distraction and over collaboration.

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21688872-fashion-maki...

I don't really understand how this is software problem. This being said - I never found myself distracted by either Slack or email. Or Skype. Or Telegram. Or twitter. etc. Despite using all of them.