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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

Confession time: I was never a real big fan of Slack's UI before. All channels and conversations being in the same pane just made everything so noisy.

But now it's pretty atrocious. The Activity tab is uselessly cluttered. If someone is trying to get my attention in a thread and it's not a DM, I rarely ever see or notice it.

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Maybe we just use Slack differently, but I find just staying in Home largely mimics the old interface. Enough so that I don't really mind this redesign. Anything that pops me out of Home is jarring and unwelcome.

Before Slack I was a big "Inbox Zero" kind of guy. But Slack is such a noisy product that it has essentially trained me to ignore alerts.

I like that DMs are pulled out from channel activity. But "Home" for me is such a hot mess of hundreds of channels with no easy way to discern important things from noise.

The activity tab not defaulting to unread-only is the most perplexing design in history. Given that the setting is per workspace, you end up switching so many times to avoid a persistent white dot that you just start hating that tab. Ignoring it is an option but "Inbox Zero" type of guys like us just can't I think.

It really feels like the intended usage is to ignore white dots and focus on red, but then we really need a setting to remove all white dots who really can't proceed to real work until they're gone.

Ah, yeah I can see that. I suspect your company and mine use it differently. To fight the noise, people get @'d almost all the time, as a way to elevate the notification. So at our company, unless someone is @'d, they pretty much always ignore the message. Which does work. But being constantly @'d has its own plethora of problems.

Not just you - if you never leave Home then basically works exactly the same as it ever has. I don't mind it at all, and can understand how for massive companies it makes things a little more manageable.

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