How Slack hooks users through artificial urgency
jshakespeare.com
jshakespeare.com
Coworkers aren't your friends. Don't have FOMO on their Slack postings.
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead. Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods; For nothing now can ever come to any good.
W.H. Auden
Also, people swear they can multi-task just fine, when in fact they can't. Just like people swear they only need 4 hours of sleep. It's strange, but very few people say "Hey, I eat 300g of sugar each day, and my body loves it! That's just the way I am. Whatever works for you, right?" But when it comes to cognitive performance, it's as if the human brain is so diverse that there are no behaviors that objectively impede cognitive functioning in all cases. Multi-tasking always makes everyone less productive. It lowers your (effective) IQ. It makes you slow and dumb. It is also an objective fact that those who multi-task are generally unaware about their drop in cognitive performance. [ * ]
Also, there is a bit of a technological bias here. If you were to ask someone what is the worst possible kind of work meeting, they would tell you that it's the meeting that has no clear agenda, no one seems to be in charge, everyone is piping in with whatever's on their mind, and there is no well-defined stop period so the meeting goes on until no one has anything left to chime in about. Basically, Slack.
I wouldn't volunteer to attend a meeting just for fun, nor would I sign up for an open office floorplan, so why spend half the day in a virtual chat when I have work to do.
Once I'm done working, then I can meet with friends at a restaurant or bar, or be on social media.
> Also, there is a bit of a technological bias here. If you were to ask someone what is the worst possible kind of work meeting, they would tell you that it's the meeting that has no clear agenda, no one seems to be in charge, everyone is piping in with whatever's on their mind, and there is no well-defined stop period so the meeting goes on until no one has anything left to chime in about. Basically, Slack.
What you said here is a very astute observation. I'm tempted to print it out and post it on my wall.
To be fair, people hate those sorts of physical meetings because they usually don't serve to bolster the social proof of most of the individuals involved. Even when Slack is a distraction, there is a perceived redeeming value to the lack of productivity because posting a meme or a poignant joke can make one appear to be more funny in general. True, a person's Slack persona can affect how others perceive that person in real life, but then you have to wonder just what you're getting for impressing these particular people. TLDR; people actually hate formality.
As I stated before, coworkers are not your friends. I say this as someone who works with an unusually friendly team. We pay Mario Kart after work every few weeks, and we sometimes hang on Saturdays to chill and play Civ V. In fantasy land, these people are my friends. In reality, that friendship would sublimate instantly if I ever left the company. I've never experienced otherwise. It's friendship in the most superficial sense, which isn't a bad thing, but people with similarly friendly coworkers shouldn't sacrifice energy they'd be devoting to their craft for the sake of cultivating fake friendships.
That's kind of you! Now I wish I'd cleaned it up a bit.
they usually don't serve to bolster the social proof of most of the individuals involved.
Yes, that's true. Online interactions have this extra layer of karma collection (whether explicit or implicit).
I've solved this problem by dimming or turning off the lights in all the rooms I don't want people to hang out in and having brighter lighting in the room I want people to stay in. It works wonders.
Slack is not perfectly opinionated. It does not enforce a single way of working on everyone that uses it. One of the weakest areas I have found on HN has been discussion around organizations and how they function. New tools, like Slack, open new doors, but they are not silver bullets. Switching to Slack doesn't solve inherent organizational problems, bad organizational habits, poor management practices, or unrealistic (or misaligned) expectations.
We don't blame email for the emails your boss sends you at 2 in the morning.
Jason Fried wrote his in his (much more comprehensive) post about group chat pros/cons:
"It’s common in the software industry to blame the users. It’s the user’s fault. They don’t know how to use it. They’re using it wrong. They need to do this or do that. But the reality is that tools encourage specific behaviors. A product is a series of design decisions with a specific outcome in mind. Yes, you can use tools as they weren’t intended, but most people follow the patterns suggested by the design. And so in the end, if people are exhausted and feeling unable to keep up, it’s the tool’s fault, not the user’s fault. If the design leads to stress, it’s a bad design."
(https://m.signalvnoise.com/is-group-chat-making-you-sweat-74...)
You write this as if it's a given. I never said anything about mitigating against dependency... I'm talking about mitigating against a dysfunctional organization, which are far more common than I think most people realize, or (especially) care to admit.
> Software companies aren't using organizational productivity as a benchmark for their success, just usage statistics.
Again, I'll accept that software companies care about the number of active users even over productivity, but it's not a given that Slack cares (at all) about how much time I actually spend on Slack (as opposed to, for example, Facebook).
> So no, Slack doesn't enforce a single way of working, but it is engineered to consume as much of people's time as possible, for better or worse.
If you show me that Slack is trying to monopolize people's time (something that, quite honestly, would be bad for its business and product) then we can talk about how much responsibility a user has to mitigate a product's designed purpose. Otherwise, I'm speaking about how much accountability a user is willing to assign to his or her organization because, quite frequently, people are unwilling to point out things they find wrong within an organization.
> Jason Fried wrote his in his (much more comprehensive) post about group chat pros/cons:
I find a lot wrong with Jason Fried's writing in general, and this post isn't different. That quote specifically falls into one of his common issues, oversimplification to the point of absurdity.
If a design leads to stress it's bad design? Well what if communicating one-on-one with your boss about things you're accountable for stresses you out (something that is fairly common)? And since Slack is designed to make that pretty easy, is it Slack's fault you're stressed? Is Slack poorly designed because you are? No. That's an organizational issue.
It's a chat client. It's an addictive medium. It sounds to me like you're shooting the messenger.
Skype, Hangouts, or any IM client wants your attention. Slack is just a better version of all the other IM clients I've used (for work).
If you don't want to be disturbed you close Slack.
I suspect that if you've got problems with Slack, it means that there's a problem in the culture of where you work.
Where I work, individual @ mentions are barely used, maybe 0-5 per day. But there's nothing that's written in stone, or ever been discussed, it's just that colleagues respect each other's focus. Then the rest is less important that all can be ignored unless you're not concentrating on something.
Does that strike you as low, or about the normal expected amount?
> I suspect that if you've got problems with Slack, it means that there's a problem in the culture of where you work.
One can work somewhere that has a problem in the culture, and Slack can make that worse. It's been interesting to me to observe when my company changed from hipchat to slack, my productivity went down until I recognized how slack was messing me up (because of the default UI patterns it came with) and I've had to unwind that by changing a bunch of settings and patterns.
It's been a similar change when I moved from a company that used email and tickets for team communication, to one that uses chat.
Yes, the culture if the heart of the problems, but the tools can amplify those problems.
It's like if you can't cut a piece of wood effectively with a handsaw, but I give you a power saw, you may soon have much bigger problems on your hands. (or hand, if you really mess it up)
As mentioned elsewhere, if I don't want to do something straight away, I star it for the next morning's run through my starred list, or if it's more particular than that set a reminder or something. It's really not too bad.
I think it's also worth remembering that for hacker type folks like us, customizing software is the norm. But default settings are default for a reason, and they will inevitably end up being the most commonly used. When everyone else in your company expects you to use Slack they way do, i.e. for 8 hours a day with instantaneous reply times, then it becomes hard to push against that and eventually it becomes the status quo
I certainly find it much easier to follow than massive chain emails.
But this is kind of an absurd critism. Who wants a real-time business-oriented operations chat system where you don't know about incoming messages by default? Can you imagine people complaining about not knowing about new messages for minutes and support staff having to inform people that you have to turn those on manually? Slack wasn't engineered to suck you in, it's acting in the only rational and useful default for what it is, a standard established by every chat client I've ever heard of before it. It would have been a product that didn't work by default. If slack was missing a seeing you wanted, I could understand, but at some point you're just blaming a chat tool for being optimal for chats because your organization wants you to respond unreasonably quickly or because you're not muting channels or snoozing or not using the settings to the fullest.
(In an ideal world of course we'd be using a chat system that has a great user experience, is based on open standards, _and_ is somehow easy to deploy... but within our current economic system that is clearly a tricky one.)
I'm not sure if this is the case with other teams, but I've been noticing my team has been using public channels less and less lately, and I guess most slack-based communication must happen in private messages. We could probably change to a traditional IM client and not have to deal with Slack anymore.
If slack is only used during the work day then you would have the exact same application without the nice CI/file sharing and all the other bots slack has
How would you change the IM client??? Make it like slack. Just use slack.
"Slack for work mostly sucks." ... Whats your point? People use it after work hours?
Slack is not basically an alternative to IRC it IS an alternative, a better more feature rich one.
Slack has more features than IRC so slack sucks ... this typical tradition speak, fearful of new things. Many techies dont need slack but for those that have yet to take on the message app craze Slack is catalyzing a lot of new non techies.
I think it would be far more accurate to say that it's due to a lack of other products that as easy to use for so many.
I've considered putting my internet savvy parents on Slack, and they are well into their retirement years.
I don't think Slack is addicting as much as most humans enjoy contact with other humans. We are wired to be social. It helped us survive and thrive. Slack et al is simply a symptom of that wiring.
If you dont like seeing people face to face and you still need to communicate with team members slack has the ability to be flexible enough to communicate many different ideas very accurately. With bots and file sharing slack is the one stop collaboration board (along with google docs for co file editing)
and for people that are social or non technical slack has that friendly feeling ... its has taken exactly what we have been hoping from the internet , efficient communication and sharing and made it be homey instead of cold.
Slack is just another message board for tech guys but to the rest of the people tech guys have to communicate with (and would want to make this communication as fast and accurate as possible) slack is a world of difference from other chat services.
They took good tech and added the human touch.
You have to create and control your own context switches. I also disable email notifications on my cell. This let’s me check email outside of work but doesn’t force it into my view every moment.
What good is a messaging app that keeps you from communicating with me. The whole reason we have this app is for us to communicate, quicker and easier.
"Socially unacceptable" ... maybe you are neglecting some important communication? If your answer is no then you should discuss your availability with your team about your slack hours. Its fine to trun off the email and slack. When when you are one work time slack/email make communication better/easier. You should not blame or allow slack to employ a standard you would not be comfortable with even if slack was not invented (ex: your boss calls you at on the phone at 7pm, if thats not ok then you should also tell your boss you dont answer slack after 7pm)
If you've read a message, why aren't you responding? It's likely not a problem with Slack that you cannot tell one of your coworkers that you will look at something or do something later.
The postpone workflow is to switch alerts off, can be done on schedule for when you are not at work and manually for meetings etc. And it allows you to fine tune these between channels and people etc. There are a number of statuses that show to your co-workers (on holiday, sleeping, in meeting, dnd etc). Those messages are there unread for you to come back to when you are ready.
Still, I've gotten duplicate messages, delayed messages, and even out of order messages.
I'm probably getting old, but I've been using it for about 3-4 years now (because work) and it seems just like a polished IRC client tied to a proprietary service to me.
It's not just a dancey, polished IRC. It _is_ a dancey, polished IRC that invites people from all backgrounds to use it and enjoy it. As a communications glue for a company, I find it to be very valuable in talking not just with other developers, but other departments.
This is precisely the point. Most companies just needed something that worked. It doesn't really matter if it's proprietary, if it gets the work done.
Paying a little money to slack is much more convenient that getting you entire company to setup and use IRC.
Out side the HN bubble, people choose convenience over open and free.
The only problem is that it's not IRC, it's another closed source data gathering operation.
Plus, having the ability to comment in response to system events.
But I've worked with some Slack teams that spend hours attempting to communicate via animated GIFs. #InstantMute
On the other hand @here/@channel messages are terrible! Now these are terrible because they confuse the "broadcast" nature messages with personal messages.
It's weird though, because sometimes I want to announce things to everyone, e.g., to bring to everyone's attention something that I've done, but I have to follow my own do-not-spam everyone rule.
I guess comms is hard no matter what tools you use. O(n^2) hard, for a team of n people.
It seems we should have at least as much to show as other forms of group comms tools.
Re urgency : same applies. a group should set standards for urgency based on various human and project needs. Point is these should be set my people not the tool.