Slack does a good job overall, but I'm glad to see articles like this one challenging the enthusiasm that they've seen of late. I'm starting to share the article's opinion that Slack encourages unthoughtful communication. I do wish the author had spent a little time pointing out some specific product decisions that lead to the kinds of problematic communication they were seeing.
For example, basic product choices like "every message highlights a room for attention" creates, for me, a feeling of "farmville for corporate communications." There's always another channel to click, another few sentences to read. This makes Slack very engaging at first, and makes it highly successful at lodging itself into organizations. And that's great, because Slack's a far sight better than email. But this rapid-fire feel encourages synchronous communications, and everyone quickly learns that @-mentions and DMs get quicker responses. That in turn leads to communicating with individuals instead of teams (or instead of searching issues, or Jira, or a wiki, or whatever). I don't think chat has to be this way; product decisions can encourage a more thoughtful question and answer flow.
I think that Chat may be like product management: the product opinions matter quite a bit, and teams have varying styles, so there's room in the market for several different products. Slack does a great job for a certain communication style, but it's not the only style out there. I hope some competing products with different opinions gain enough traction to keep them honest.
I have a hard time agreeing that "Slack's a far sight better than email."
The lack of threading and context (mentioned in AB's writeup) means you have to maintain a lot of state (and keep up to date) in order to get any value. That defeats the point of having automation!
For good or ill, the 40+ year history of mail means there are various tools and conventions that allow your computer to do part of the work for you.
I recently disabled threading in my email as I have an unfortunate number of people who regularly : send mail using identical subject lines, reply to whatever my previous email to them was rather than come up with a new subject line or send multiple versions of important documents under the same subject/RE the same message over the course of months. This results in a hideous nightmare of thread spaghetti where I can't find stuff, or worse, I'm looking at the wrong iteration of something. Oh, and did I mention all the people who have MIME attachment email footers so that figuring out which email contains the document they sent means looking through every single mail? [0]
So I flattened it back down to chronological order and it feels like that restored a lot of sanity.
[0] Obviously a lot of this chaos can be tamed with a more aggressive process for inbox management, but that kind of plays into my point, that's all out of process manual work that a better communication tool should help me with.
If you use a quality mail client (such as Thunderbird) it doesn't rely on subject for threading and fixes these problems. As well as displaying the replies in a proper tree rather then as a giant list.
Also, email is an open standard, with plenty of choices in both client and server software. Slack is a proprietary system. Why are we actively axing solid, widely distributed, open ecosystems for proprietary ones? It'd be like if everyone woke up one day and decide "eh, Linux is just not animated-giphy enough, let's all switch to this startup OS with a crippled free version."
Because Slack doesn't have to write up an RFC and wait months/years for feedback before getting features implemented. People care about features, not interoperability (until they want out, at which point they feel the lock-in burn).
I disagree with this. Other than the place-keeping, search, and notifications, I (and my team) don't want other features from Slack. In fact, the constant additions of features is aggravating as hell. The addition of an enabled-by-default DND feature was a real PITA for our team to try and work around.
In fact, Slack users have reported an average of 50% reduction of internal email (source: https://slack.com/results). But you're right, Slack is a closed system, and thus it cannot really replace email when used for external communications.
This is where Fleep comes in - a messenger that works with email, too. You can include anyone in a conversation with their email address, and if they're not a Fleep user yet, they can participate in the conversation via email. Fleep: https://fleep.io/
(Disclaimer: I do work at Fleep, and I love it :) )
Hadn't heard of Fleep before, but thought immediately that it might solve one use case for me.
After checking the pricing (good), if there was a self-hosted version (no, but maybe not a deal breaker) I looked for the Android app installer. Only available from Google Play Store. Unfortunately, that kills Fleep for me.
Please consider making your app directly downloadable and not reliant on Google Play Services.
I don't have Goggle Play Services installed on my phone and am not going to do so.
I understand why companies want their apps in the "Store" for discovery purposes. However, I don't understand why they won't provide an alternative direct download.
I do have F-Droid installed, but I appreciate companies may not want to open source their app. No problem, but I also won't be forced to install Google Play just to obtain it.
The Google Play store is also not accessible in China, an no doubt a few other countries, so it's just sensible to provide an alternative download anyway...
My previous team used Slack to coordinate releases (deploys). (Automation? What's that?)
The devops lead would post the release notes, whatifs and whatnots, then pin them, hoping for easy recall when the chat activity scrolls them offscreen. Great idea. I never got the hang of Slack's implementation.
I agree. What I'd like to see is to batch room highlights when you're not mentioned. For example, allow me to batch highlights every 30 mins, and then the temptation to read everything goes away.
Better copy/paste (like most IM apps) would also make it easier to copy/paste some discussion into your bug tracker of choice.
For example, basic product choices like "every message highlights a room for attention" creates, for me, a feeling of "farmville for corporate communications." There's always another channel to click, another few sentences to read. This makes Slack very engaging at first, and makes it highly successful at lodging itself into organizations. And that's great, because Slack's a far sight better than email. But this rapid-fire feel encourages synchronous communications, and everyone quickly learns that @-mentions and DMs get quicker responses. That in turn leads to communicating with individuals instead of teams (or instead of searching issues, or Jira, or a wiki, or whatever). I don't think chat has to be this way; product decisions can encourage a more thoughtful question and answer flow.
I think that Chat may be like product management: the product opinions matter quite a bit, and teams have varying styles, so there's room in the market for several different products. Slack does a great job for a certain communication style, but it's not the only style out there. I hope some competing products with different opinions gain enough traction to keep them honest.