...aren't these all problems that emails have too, in more-or-less equal measure?
Of course, Slack needs to be better than email, or there's no point—but I'd posit that it already is, despite being unable to address these problems. The overall interface of a "chatroom" just works better for quick conversations compared to long email chains. Maybe not much better, but better.
As I see it, the problems pointed out in this article are the eternal problems of all communication within a large group—including face-to-face. It's why small companies can be more nimble despite less resources, and why managing the size of a team is so important.
And while the author's suggestions are great in theory, I can't imagine how you'd even go about implementing them. At least, not until AI gets much, much better than it is today.
I think I'm officially bored of the "Slack is a problem" threads.
Just spent time in a dev org where 500+ members of a technical team used email, Teams & Slack. However you want to slice it, there are organizational habits of a department that large, and nothing deep in a licensed product stack is likely to fix/influence how a big dept runs itself.
They superficially used all the enterprise tools at their disposal, because relying on implementations complicated enough to need documentation wouldn't live long in a big org that had lots of turnover (how's your Sharepoint doing?).
Said team had people at all levels who were unreachable in any way, except when you slacked them. You disrupted them, told them they'd ignored an email that you really needed a response to, and they gave you what you needed. Slack fixed the "I'm ignoring my inbox and I have 40K unread emails in there" problem that feels typical in enterprises.
Teams worked to connect tech and non-tech business units. It helped to keep business teams off Slack.
Slack was noisy for the ops team.
How Slack is supposed to "fix" disorganized, i-don't-care-about-management principles of big departments is beyond me.
The flip side: the business thrived, everyone worked pretty sane house, and the paychecks arrived every other week without fail.
There was a lot to complain about, but no one ever complained about Slack (or even Teams).
You're saying that email was overloaded so people turned to slack instead?
People can change how notifications are handled for email too, so that is not at all new and I think that changing communications to a proprietary protocol instead of configuring an email client is stupid.
I disabled notifications for both email and slack. If it's important, send me a text or give me a call, except between the hours of 11 PM and 8 AM when the phone is on silent mode. I honestly don't know how people exist with all these interruptions. Turn them off.
Yeah, sure. And I usually build up a set of filters and rules so that my inbox is manageable, but I think the compassionate point of view is that email is loaded with more disposable and management heavy communications than slack tends to be.
I have seen plenty of bad practices in slack. In particular, there is more and more of a tendency to treat slack as "publication of record" as opposed to "ephemeral missives".
Configuring is stupid. People need to be able to work in different environments, so software needs to do the right thing by default.
Email doesn't distinguish between messages that can be actioned by any one of a group and messages that need to be actioned by you specifically (there are a bunch of unreliable hacks that sort of work most of the time). So you're never going to be able to get the right notification behaviour in a reliable way.
You're treating two different forms of communication as if they were the same. Slack is organised by person and topic, while email is just a large sack of messages, possibly ranked and divided in a few folders. I find Slack's model much more efficient.
The problem I have with Slack’s model is that it’s inflexible and I’m unable to organize things in a way that makes sense to me. With email the only constant is messages and threads. I’m free to organize or tag these artifacts however I want
> At least, not until AI gets much, much better than it is today.
One could extend LDA (a common topic model) to include people, by modeling topics as mixtures of people (which they kinda are), and any given comment is generated by a mixture of topics. If anyone is missing, pull them in; if it's the wrong topic channel, move the thread over etc.
I'm not saying it'd be compelling but it's possible
Slack just need to fix threads. The UI right now is crazy if you are in more than one thread, I don’t understand why you have to click “x more replies” to see new messages - I don’t think they fixed this in the new update either. Right now it makes me (and others) avoid threads which clutters up channels for everyone.
Flowdock did threads really well. It also did crashing several times a day really well too. Today, Twist https://twist.com seems to do everything right.
I asked them about this on Twitter, they did have a rationale that "We do want to be careful that folks don't miss threaded replies if they're looking at All Threads and then replies come through and they click into another channel, which is why that exists now."
They did say they were looking to tackle it but this was around a year ago :/
Yet I still constantly miss threaded replies. If I have click "threads" when I have multiple new replies, I often only see the top one, the ones below it are still marked as read if I don't scroll down.
I don't want an algorithm helpfully randomly deciding that someone trying to ping me is "noise". AI is not robust enough for this yet, and never will be.
Even Facebook has enough restraint to not include AI in their messaging app.
Why not? They could use an algorithm that checks if the message looks important, and if it doesn't, asks the sender if it's urgent. They already do it for messages that are out of hours anyway.
Some users prefer simple predictability (with the ability to customise) over 'smart' functions with inscrutable behaviour.
Just look at how often people complain about Facebook/Twitter/Youtube making it hard to see a chronological list of all posts from everyone you've followed.
> It's the Slack server generating a realtime stream of things you probably should be involved in.
I think Slack should copy an idea from email - show a simple timeline of messages related to the user in a single place. Sometimes I see a message came in and can't tell who sent it if I already have multiple unanswered messages waiting.
I think Slack's lack of emphasis on feed-style interfaces is because the company thinks it's a communication tool, but its core value source is as an unstructured store and feed of business communication data. Being a highly used communication tool is table stakes for getting the latter.
Email never evolved because legacy.
IRC never cared about enterprise.
Everything Microsoft ever put out (Lync, SharePoint, Lync-Skype, Teams) has been corrupted by their spineless kowtowing to HR's assinine audit and control requirements, above usability.
Slack's progression should be the same as Facebook's: (1) build a tool people like and use (success!), (2) store everything, (3) continuously reverse engineer structure (organizational, expertise, and process) from everything, & (4) build and sell products that require (2) & (3) (and therefore that they have no competition for).
Unfortunately, it remains to be seen if they really understand the difference in value between (2) and (3).
I appreciate both feed-style interfaces and seeing the people-list with unread message counts. Slack could be improved with time-based feeds and email would benefit from adding people centred view. One advantage of Slack is that it provides a model of the team and topics (channels), while mail is mostly unstructured.
I much prefer Zulip to Slack because it forces you to split your convos into topics, making it more like a forum than a realtime chat system. It also intentionally eschews push notifications in favor of keeping everything asynchronous (unless you're specifically @mentioned).
I haven't seen any chat system other than Zulip quite nail this yet, but I'm optimistic that others will eventually catch on. I'm not convinced that human-provided topic labels could ever be replaced by an AI deciding which things should be clustered, but maybe I'm wrong...
What I miss in Zulip is Slack-like threads. In Slack, when you don't care about a thread, you just don't open it, it doesn't clutter your view. But Slack also misses Zulip's model.
These are topics in Zulip. Async usage for me looks like:
1) Skim list of Streams in the org, streams show
the number of new messages in a bubble next to the name
2) Click on the Streams relevant to me to expand
the list of Topics with new messages
3) Skim the active Topics to see which are relevant
to me and click into each of those to skim new
messages and reply if necessary
4) Feel good knowing I've caught up on everything
relevant to me without needing to see the thousands
of other messages in the org
5) Click the dropdown for each Stream and select "mark
all messages as read" so I'm back to the equivalent of
inbox zero and can repeat the process later.
You can mute topics in Zulip, which should keep it out of the way unless you decide to open it specifically. You can't really have topics if no one sees when they get created.
Streams (similar to slack Channels) are not automatically joined. If you find there is too much noise, you may need to split the stream to have multiple more focused streams.
Everyone I work with is part of at least a dozen Slack workspaces with disparate notification settings. I get loads of notifications at times when I can't reply immediately, but there is no system comparable to _not archiving an email_ so I remember to come back to it. I get the convenience of semi-synchronous conversations and being able to engage and catch people up better than forwarding an email chain, but Slack and its ilk are very, very far from replacing email.
I've always wished that Gmail (or some other email client) would add support for creating arbitrary "folders" each with an "inbox" and an "archive" section.
The Gmail inbox -> archive flow works really well, but I'd like to have multiple such inboxes for different mailing lists.
A prime example is pull request notification emails: I want them to skip my inbox and go into a "folder", but I want to keep track of which ones I still need to review so the archiving model would be great.
I could hack such a workflow together using multiple labels, but it wouldn't have the convenience of a universal "archive" keyboard shortcut / button.
Slack workspaces aren’t good. I hate switching between them. I can get to “inbox” zero in my email and one slack workspace. Switching between them is too
much friction.
> Having AI in your DNA isn’t just a buzzword anymore
I haven't read or seen anything that suggests this, including in this article. If this article is suggesting that all companies have to use AI/ML to survive then that's wrong IMO.
AI/ML is great for a certain subset of problems but I don't think textual inter-human communication is one of them and there are a lot others where AI/ML will not be a silver bullet.
I’m short on real time chat mattering as much in 5 years.
My company is sick of the nuisance, and is working towards real time communication via git & CI/CD, PD alerts, and self guided copy paste of boilerplate framework manifests, without the constant forced check ins to sooth attitudes seeking conformity and compliance in behavior of people who are generally non-hostile.
Traditional office life is falling down just as much because the people that built it are dying off as it is tech.
The masses commuting to offices on the far edges of our towns is a generational thing that the future isn’t obligated to give a shit about.
People like slack because using it feels like "working".
It's not. Everyone who has described to me how their "productivity" went up because of slack I am able to explain away. It's not work, it's keeping up with slow chats and a mess of interlaced conversations. That's not work.
Test: In a popular channel wait until someone asks a question. Immediately then post another question. This should be ok behavior (it is with email). See what happens. The previous one quickly goes away as other people type. What a mess.
Chat isn't how work gets done, it's how people trick themselves into thinking they are "working".
A big part of most jobs is communication. Any tool that improves that is a win. For me Slack has replaced email in a good way (can set up reminders, bots, have sub-threads, among others). This doesn't mean that it will work for everybody...
> The previous one quickly goes away as other people type
I don't even like Slack, but that complaint seems petty and easy to avoid using threads...
It's easy to nitpick anything if you put your mind to it, but at the end of the day most people find chat pretty intuitive and useful for communicating, which is actually part of "working" for most people.
I think that Slack has economic problem as well. They are just chat, no matter what they say. And Slack is pricey, too. Once the coronavirus pandemic is over, but the recession/depression hits hard, many IT heads will look for ways to cut costs. Many organizations will dump Slack in favor of other solutions.
slack requires some priorities (better platform support for drawing on screen, less lag on connections like 50mbit down/ 5 mbit up) and for that, they need more programmers who know what they are doing and less product managers who want to "renovate the UI".
The solution isn’t AI. The solution does however require some intelligence to skim over the content and re-label it.
Humans are the engine here. And Slack is already starting to show some promise with things like threads, reminders and actions.
However to be truly beneficial, this has to be baked into the core of Slack’s being; it must support labelling of historical activity, it must treat threads differently, and reminders and actions need to be customisable based on your intended level of interaction with the underlying conversations.
Until Slack gets on top of that, shifting the UI around won’t help.
Yeah, they need to make it possible for users to clean up/label things after the fact (including changing things posted by others - like stack overflow’s edits), and perhaps they can have some AI reminders to encourage this behavior (“hey, looks like this conversation is over, would you like to summarize and archive it?”)
Recently, in the middle of an important team discussion where we had a brief lull waiting for senior people to respond, one coworker decided to ask me some off-topic questions. It would have made 10x more sense to send them as DM, or at least start a single thread. But converting messages to a thread or moving to another channel is hard so there was nothing I could do (aside from asking them to delete all the messages)
As an OpenSource developer, I am fine with paying the one time $25 fee for Android, but not the $1500 computer and $100/year to make my app available on the app store
You can develop for iOS without actually owning Apple hardware.
I develop an app and use MacinCloud[1] to build the iOS version. Costs $1/hour on demand. The hardest part was getting a two-factor enabled apple id. I actually had to borrow a physical iPhone just to activate the two-factor authentication. Once it is activated, you can get away without an iPhone again.
Just saying that it is possible without the $1500 hardware. It still sucks that Apple makes one jump through all these hoops...
2) you still have to pay $100 a year to do push notifications and the effect is almost no one maintains the push severs for open source apps because the people running the actual servers aren’t allowed to.
On Slack, I just mute all the channels, unless I'm active on a project related channel. But having to jump through each workspace to clear out messages is a pain.
One view to see all or every workspace unreads would be great... I'm jumping through hoops just to find the damn unread messages sometimes.
The thing I like most about Slack is the ability to add custom emoji – absolutely ingenious. We got a couple of different checkbox ones for status updates, with a question mark inside the box, an exclamation mark, crossed out, checked, which makes it really easy to convey different nuances of "done" and "not done". We have lots of product icons (AWS, GCP etc.) as emoji, so alerts can have the appropriate service logo in them, so people can scan and filter them much easier, plus consistent emoji for different urgency levels. And a lot of fun ones, too, which add some lightheartedness to overly serious conversations. There's a kind of meta-level communication and inside jokes going on in our team via Emoji reactions that otherwise would only work in person. Might not be for everyone, but it works tremendously well for us. Custom emoji give us a really neat way of making such a clean virtual space ours, of making it a bit more human; something that feels sorely needed in a world of cleanly UXed platforms and tools and walled gardens where people get data-driven into funnels.
Human-ness is also something that I feel state-of-the-art AI routinely takes away from things and spaces where it is a dominant feature. What AI we have is quite useful to blur the background of a video call; after all, that requires an understanding of what a human form looks like on video and not much more. After herculean efforts and gazillions of metric tons of training data, that works quite well nowadays. But getting human communication to a degree that would allow for any meaningful assistance in a chat app? Color me very sceptic. If my social ads are any measure for this, there's still a long way to go, and that should be orders of magnitude easier – I interact with a lot of content that isn't that hard to categorize, just show me photography equipment ads already! You don't even necessarily need to deep-mine my natural language content for that. And yet I get shown all those smart toilet ads, no idea why. That's not just unhelpful – it ensures the whole social media experience won't ever feel human and welcoming in the way random threads on low-tech PHP forums did back in the day, or the way a Slack convo can feel nowadays. Not while that stupid robot ant-brain is constantly breathing down my neck and interjecting smart toilet content; it's weird and uncanny, please stop.
I really don't understand why AI would be required to make people convert to premium in an app like Slack, or stay beyond the lockdown. Whatever happened to just making a great tool that's helpful and useful and a joy to use? If anything, it might be the opposite: Annoying, unhelpful, obnoxious AI assistance would drive people off quickly – think Clippy, but in a product that isn't remotely as entrenched and without alternative as MS Office back in the day. The way modern software tends to replace user choice with data-driven fits-for-most defaults, there might not even be a proper "off" setting for such a thing. Please don't, thank you very much.
Here's a great review that questions its dubious assumptions about human nature and plot inconsistencies (click the "more" button at the end of "User reviews: LibraryThing member StormRaven"):
>[...] Eventually, the alien is revealed as is the alien's plot concerning Duncan and the machine used to make him smarter. This is more or less merely a vehicle for Coville to work into the book his argument that humanity is fundamentally inhumane. Duncan's previous behavior, bullying and crude, is contrasted with his nicer, more thoughtful behavior after he has been made smarter. Duncan is also alerted to the fact that the Interplanetary Council (an organization all the alien races of the galaxy belong to) is concerned by the violence and nastiness of humans and is considering what steps to take to neutralize the threat humans pose.
>Coville's thesis may be true, but I have some serious problems with some of the elements of the book. The most glaring is the idea that when Duncan becomes smarter, he also becomes nicer and more humane. One only has to think back on human history to realize that being more intelligent does not seem to correlate in any significant way with being nice. I also think that the way the alien treats Duncan - performing experiments on him without his knowledge, kidnapping and then imprisoning him to use his brain as a communications device - seems to pretty much destroy any claim the Interplanetary Council may have to the moral high ground. Coville's theme, that humans are bad and the aliens are more moral and kind, seems to depend on the idea that whatever bad things the aliens do is justified by circumstance (this is not the first time in the series that an ostensibly non-evil alien has kidnapped and imprisoned an innocent human to further their goals). This sort of moral inconsistency simply saps away some of the message that the books are trying to convey.
>In the end, some dubious assumptions about human nature and some plot inconsistencies regarding the moral nature of the aliens mar an otherwise fun little book about kids dealing with alien teachers. While My Teacher Fried My Brains has flaws that undermine the message of the story, it remains at the very least a decent book for younger readers.
I understand this perspective, but I think it fails to take into account the bigger issues here. While programmers and other knowledge economy workers can work remotely and keep getting paid in relative comfort and safety, millions of people have jobs that cannot be remote and have no savings or stocks to fall back on. My point is that the article is out of touch with the meaning of the crisis for 90% of the population, and the issue with the wealthy being the only ones able to come out ahead in times of crisis is troubling.
I’m not sure. I think that the issue is systematic for a country with the kind of economic inequalities that we have; the wealthy will always be able to rebound from crises like this as long as these inequalities exist. I think the best thing to do would be to suspend rent payments/evictions and provide more expansive unemployment benefits so that people who can’t work are able to continue to buy food and supplies until the crisis is over. Taking the advice of health experts and making orders like shelter-in-place run federally instead of by each governor would also be a good idea.
Just-in-time manufacturing, increased global trade and offshoring of manufacturing capabilities, incentive to downplay the severity of outbreaks to avoid scaring the stock market. All of these things have played a role on making responses harder.
This is rather No True Scotsman. A lot of people say the same thing about every failed socialist state from the 20th century too. China is primarily a planned economy, and means of production are primarily controlled “by the people” (really by the central authority which claims to represent them). It has allowed a restricted level of market activity, and a restricted level of private property (though the party retains a significant level of control over said activity). The same could be said for every socialist state in history. If you follow this line of reasoning, either every nation in the history of the world is socialist, or there has never been a true socialist country. Neither of those conclusions are reasonable, obviously.
I was going to point out that there's a common phrase "Chinese capitalism" but there was never a common phrase "Soviet capitalism", but Google proved me wrong. I guess I'll defer to the judgement of people with actual economic knowledge.
If you consider the abolition of private property, and the central planning of the economy to be the core aspects of a socialist society (which is a rather uncontroversial, though incomplete definition), and the exact opposite of that to be full property rights, and full free market, then you won’t find a single organised society that fits into either of those buckets. All socialist societies throughout history have allowed for some level of property rights, and all have had some level of market economy. Conversely, any society that could be described as capitalist has had restrictions on private property (at a minimum, through taxation, though there’s lot of other ways too), and have had restrictions on free market activity (again at a minimum, through regulation). To say that any of the socialist governments that emerged in the 20th century are not truly socialist is a quintessential No True Scotsman fallacy, and the same reasoning would be equally valid for making the (equally fallacious) argument that there are no true capitalist or free market societies.
I’m not really sure what you’re getting at. If what you’re saying is that capitalism is a failed, dysfunctional, self-harming system like that of the late USSR, then I would agree with you.
It is true that other systems can be bad. This does not make our current economic system less bad and the blood sacrifices to the stock market less insane.
Maybe the issue is that any system can collapse and become dysfunctional, and that we should admit when ours has become one. Other nations have openly and honestly dealt with this as a national health crisis from the beginning. Better things are possible; more systems exist besides the late USSR and our current system.
Isn't much of this simply ... logical choices in business and / or human nature?
I'm not convinced that people panic buying toilet paper is solved because some other non capitalism like system was selected ... and someone randomly chose to storing mass quantities of TP in a warehouse for decades because someones might one day panic buy TP.
As for downplaying things ... we've already seen that done for a variety of reasons across the board in many nations.
In a country with a functioning government and economy, the entire nation would mobilize and respond to the health crisis intelligently and with the advice of health experts. The U.S. government delayed doing so for fear of making the stock market go down, and in fact several U.S. senators used their briefings to reallocate their investments in remote work companies, much like the advice in the article, rather than preparing a response to help their constituents.
Would people not panic buy toilet paper in a functioning economy? They probably still would, but the response wouldn’t be “how can we get the Dow Jones average up” it would be “how can we save people’s lives.” This is the moral and necessary thing a functioning society would try to do.
> The U.S. government delayed doing so for fear of making the stock market go down
I suspect it is more that the leadership in the White House is simply incompetent. If they believed the threat was real it doesn't take more than a few days to dump your stocks and then take action, not months.
I don't really buy that narrative.
As for mobilizing to produce a thing, I'm not sure that's a thing anyone is automatically good at. The history of nations trying to mobilize to do a thing that isn't their core competency is one of high efficiency and costs.
>In a country with a functioning government and economy, the entire nation would mobilize and respond to the health crisis intelligently and with the advice of health experts.
That's got little to do with government or economy but rather with culture. South Korea and Japan reacted decently well due to a collectivist culture. Countries with more independence driven cultures did less well as everyone went out for themselves.
> storing mass quantities of TP in a warehouse for decades because someones might one day panic buy TP.
Except that sort of thing is actually something the government did and does and should be responsible for. The Strategic National Stockpile [0] is a warehouse of "stuff" that would be needed in an emergency. It's not random either, the government has a team of people who's job it is, is to think about what would happen if there was a pandemic, and then fill that warehouse with ventilators and surgical masks.
"Run the government like a business" is at fault. Trimming out as much fat as possible that the government has. Unfortunately, pandemic response teams don't work for free and it turns out we could have used one back in January. The narrow worldview that the government is taking my money out of my paycheck, and must be wasting it. Capitalism exists outside of that narrow worldview, but it encourages it to a dangerous degree.
HEB had contingency plans for a pandemic[1]. It should also be noted that they're privately owned which means they don't have to focus on short-term profits nearly as much as a publicly traded company.
Think of how much faster and deadlier the spread of the Plague would have been with modern air travel and modern levels of travel and shipping. Think of how much worse the Plague would have been if food and supplies were even more dependent on international trade and if communities were much less self-sufficient. International commerce now is in an entirely different scale than during the Plague.
> Hundreds of thousands of people are gonna be dead in the next few months.
How many people will die as a result of economic and supply chain disruption? How many will kill themselves after losing their life’s work? How much human suffering will all this economic disruption cause? Getting the economy back online is obviously a very serious concern.
> Global capitalism is the reason why we are so vulnerable to outbreaks like this.
Capitalism has nothing to do with it. There is no economic model that responds well to being temporarily turned off.
Of course, Slack needs to be better than email, or there's no point—but I'd posit that it already is, despite being unable to address these problems. The overall interface of a "chatroom" just works better for quick conversations compared to long email chains. Maybe not much better, but better.
As I see it, the problems pointed out in this article are the eternal problems of all communication within a large group—including face-to-face. It's why small companies can be more nimble despite less resources, and why managing the size of a team is so important.
And while the author's suggestions are great in theory, I can't imagine how you'd even go about implementing them. At least, not until AI gets much, much better than it is today.