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Comment by dwb | Hacker News Reader

I'm very distractible, and I get on fine with Slack. I genuinely feel work is easier with it, you just have to aggressively filter the attention-grabbing. My strategy is: notifications for mentions and ultra-important channels only, mute any channel I don't want to definitely read all of (joining a channel and immediately muting is common for me), disable the unread dot completely for non-primary teams, and unsubscribe from threads as soon as I'm done in them.

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.

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OP here. Iit's telling that so many people are commenting in this thread about how Slack isn't that bad because you can customize it to be less attention-grabbing. The fact remains that Slack is engineered to be attention-grabbing out of the box. Sure you can tweak it to make it less shouty, but Slack is still a product that is sold for money by a company. It's not in their interests to make it align with your existing workflow if they can upend that workflow entirely. No one's making money from you having a meeting or sending a well thought out email, so I think it's worth being cynical when considering paid alternatives.

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 think it depends on the company. I don't find it attention grabbing at all and I have it running on the default settings.

I certainly find it much easier to follow than massive chain emails.

> The fact remains that Slack is engineered to be attention-grabbing out of the box. Sure you can tweak it to make it less shouty

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.

I'm very sympathetic to that line of argument, I'm no fan of capitalism, but choosing the default settings for something like Slack (whether you are selling it in order to make a profit or not) appears to me to be a tradeoff between making it immediately useful, and obvious to non-nerds why it is useful, and being less attention-grabbing when your team gets a bit more unwieldy. I've no doubt there's more they could do and more care they could take, but Slack do publicise the customisations you can make.

(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.)

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