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Comment by jayjaybinks | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly why we switched to Twist. Slack is fun but toxic. Working in an open office is bad enough but at least you can use noise canceling headphones. No such remedy for Slack.

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This is a cultural problem. You can close Slack. You can check it every couple hours and catch up. You can turn off notifications. If your management has problems with this, that is a problem with their culture, not the tool.

We have channels where discussions will spread over multiple days because there simply is no expectation that Slack is real-time.

Nah, it's just a bad product that demands too much attention by design.

What do you mean by "demands"? You can react to a notification or not. You can reduce the notifications. Slack itself doesn't force you to do anything.

Indeed. There are 80+ channels in my workplace of 20 people. Most people are subscribed to just a few relevant to their current projects and there is zero expectation that a non direct message will be read by subscribers until they are next focused on the project. It serves a semi public record of what’s going on and a place for questions, notifications of important updates. It makes it easier for me to focus on work not harder since I can drop out for hours or days and trust that I can come back and be well informed.

We have around 6k channels for our 1500 employees. I have around 60 I'm in that I need to pay some level of attention to or that I'll get Facebook defriend shamed for leaving. Conversations happen instantly and at odd hours and decisions are made and then scrolled past. Each team I work with has at least 3 channels, public, private, oncall/cr. Often an additional one per micro service. It's a mess.

I think the equivalent is snoozing notifications. If it is important people can "notify anyway" -- however, your world culture needs to be OK with that.

Wish we could as well, but I don't see our management giving up Slack any time soon. "So connected! So collaborative!" Ugh.

I’d rather close Slack, or snooze notifications, than wear headphones all day.

Isn't Twist just threaded email?

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