Why do people love Slack?

Slack is a huge time waster. It is a constant distraction. As as it becomes standardized it’s assumed you will be on it all the tome. Through the workday and even after. The only time can get work done without distractions is after hours.

With slack the world becomes one big long meeting. Lol

Also as a consultant it is a problem. With email I have paper trails of conversations. But with slack when engagement is ending I lose all that discussion & history. It forces me to double up my note taking (more lost time) and try to hack a backup of some of that stuff as an engagement ends.

Yes I get the advantages but those have long since been buried by all it’s problems

Slack is hard to leave. I work on a 100% remote team- it is our office. Few of us have met in person, there just isn't budget for travel. Therefore all of our emotional connections with each, all of our work-life are built atop the Slack (and Zoom) UI. That's a hard thing to replatform.

Slack also almost never falls down. Its remarkably fast, the search is fast and faceted, and they manage cross-device notification state better than... well Apple for one. That truly 'instant' messaging experience across devices is why they are superior to IRC and decentralized alternatives. 'Instant' editing and deleting your malformed message is a killer app.

Its a safe social network. I'd much rather post memes in Slack than on Facebook or Twitter, which is a persistent battlefield. If I slip up in front of my colleagues, it happens in context and can be sorted out among the tribe, but if I do so on a public social network, it could invite angry mobs or end my career, now or years into the future.

That said, I don't love Slack. I hate how it dominates my day. I hate how I find myself checking it in the car. I hate how I get into it while I'm running a build, post something funny and suck everybody's attention. I truly despise how their DM and notification read system means that have to check everything at all times to feel up to date. I'm in a half dozen public channels, and the blue alert in my tray shows that I have something to look at.

I want control of the UI. Its my workplace, but Slack can change it to their liking, not me to mine. Sometimes if we're lucky we'll get a feature flag, otherwise, its all up to them. There are a million Hacker News clients, but only one for Slack.

I want more nuanced prioritization.

I want my life back.

Because it's good enough, has nice integrations, and is better than email. Convincing non-technical parts of my team to use a chat application is impossible if it can't go on their phones and is basically one single step to get going. Slack fits that criteria.

That being said, their notification logic. I remember seeing this insane flowchart demonstrating how complicated slack's logic was when determining whether to do a push notification. I wonder why it never occurred to them that one of the primary considerations should be that if you've sent me over 3 notifications in the past 5 minutes, and I haven't checked, please fucking stop.

Every time someone ask this question I think people are forgetting that Slack was the first of these SaaS chat programs to find major success. Discord, Teams, and everything else came riding on the heels of Slack's success. While it might just be "another chat app" now, at the time Slack was an easy to setup tool with tons of integrations.

If you don’t understand why people love Slack, then you don’t understand what usable enterprise software means or why people love it.

Imagine how many people never used a chat app in a business context before. Maybe this is hard, as you can’t imagine who they could be — or you don’t remember a time _before_ the ubiquity of chat apps in the workplace. But trust me those people are a majority of the workforce.

Now imagine you are an enterprise user who has no control over how they work, and they’re told to use “something new to increase productivity”. They sigh because it is probably bullshit and they’re being forced to use it by the “decision maker”.

But lo and behold, Slack is actually useful and usable! Because in large part the value of any chat app is how well it is adopted by one’s (relatively non techy) teammates!

Slack is a masterclass in commercializing enterprise software through ease of adoption and use. The core tech is completely undifferentiated, but the understanding of enterprise environments and workplace psychology is second to maybe only Microsoft.

Hey look at me, I am communicating, I am being seen to communicate. As I am being seen to communicate, people who matter will notice my industry and reward me; never mind that I am actually a net loss to the productivity of the organization. That's slack, that is.

I like the shared workspaces feature.

If your company works with customers directly (a project for example or sales support), it’s easy to create a new channel, create a share link, and send it to an admin on the other side. Now you’ve connected two Slack instances of invited users to a channel. Cuts down on email threads and phone calls. Life saver for where I work.

I suspect much of the hate for slack is from two types of people. Those who are too young to know the tyranny of email and those who used to ignore their email. As to why it’s so popular, it was the first good business chat solution that went mainstream. And I still haven’t seen another that matches it’s quality

Dear gruglife,

I write this comment as a response to your inquiry about the reasons for why people like slack.

Now personally I mostly use Teams, but the system is similar.

The reason I like to use Teams as opposed to e-mail is mostly just the expected process around it.

Please note that I’ve cc’ed your manager, as I talked to him just before and he told me to add him. I’m not trying to seem passive aggressive or cause issues in communication.

Anyways, please come by my desk so we can repeat this entire discussion once again since you likely tuned out after the first paragraph anyway.

And yes IRC does the same, but trying to get an organization to use IRC is like trying to replace word with vim.

Kind regards and all the best, Boublepop

My CTO asks me this everyday. I guess the answer is they marketed it well as a comprehensive tool for teams/companies. Everyone knows about it. A lot of ppl use it. It has integrations built in. No need to install anything. Does the job.

There are things we don't like about it but it does the job well enough that the opportunity cost of trying to replace it too high for us at the moment. So we keep going with it.

I don't love it. On my time being forced to use it I hated pretty much every aspect of it that wasn't its text features (threads, custom emojis) or ready made integrations. Everything else, from the technical aspects to their API gave me nothing but headaches. And even then it's still better than Discord.

> I use Slack on a daily basis and view it as just another chat app.

Can you edit a message once sent in Facebook messenger?

Once you understand why that's important, you'll start to get it.

Slack actually cared what the users wanted. Not what managers or IT teams cargo culting current message apps thought workers should have.

This is upside down .

People secretly installed Slack at workplaces (there are old articles on this) and the managers had to get it. The rest is history.

Last month Signal got a Thumbs up and Thumbs down icons, after how many years.... The IT teams are partly to blame here on top of the managers.

Because we've tried Teams?

Seriously, though, I don't love any chat app that much. They're useful in some circumstances, but they can easily devolve into a horrific time-suck. People use them for important info that ought to go in emails, for example. Or hammer channels with loads of chaff and the occasional critical wheat kernel, so that you have to waste time on them looking for the latter.

These days, I check mine once a day. I guess that's equivalent to having someone xerox a website for me, but I get a lot more done that way.

Service providers such as IT or Marketing companies, for long projects slack is amazing. Every company has its own workplace. We don't email or call. They drop us a message, we add the task to asana if needed, if not, answer briefly and move on.

It is not for everyone in my opinion. Very small companies will waste time (under 20 employees) or very large companies will waste resources instead of using project management systems.

It has a very niche use, I don't think everyone is using it the right way.

There are positives and negatives to them all. I'm relatively partial to MS Teams (now that it works well in Linux), since it has decent integration with Outlook and group chat/meetings, integrations are on par.

That said slack and the like are better mostly because of integration which is smoother than custom IRC bots and clients by contrast... Some obsess over security, groups, etc... other features are just that features.

On the flip side, they all suck... MS Teams' wikis aren't in markdown and can't be edited outside of the teams client, other sharing is actually integrated into Sharepoint, and those integrations with system syncing breaks a lot and sucks worse.

I haven't used slack but very little for one project I'm on in a few years... it now has a lot of the features I was missing before. I think Google's Hangouts had a lot of potential before they shifted gears into their client of the month and started breaking the UX.

In the end, what will be around in 5+ years, who knows. Things shift around and change... Things get re-invented in better and worse ways.

People love Slack because IRC is loveable. People use Slack because its advantages over IRC are in areas that favour it being installed in corporate environments, while benefits of IRC (such as being free and open, simple and extensible, running in a shell) are neutral or even negatives for that environment.

I have a few features I want in a work chat app:

Room topic with link support, private rooms, the ability to add more people to that room, direct messaging, phone notifications (and proper sync and the ability to set do-not-disturb), and emoji/gifs. I know some folks don't like those, but I think they are fun and help convey emotion that is otherwise lost in text.

Nice to haves: Search, pinned items, api for bot integration. Color themes. Limited markdown support.

What I never want: link expander: seriously, I don't like it - it takes up space for no value. WYSIWYG editor: I don't think rich text beyond simple markdown is useful.

Hipchat was ok. Slack is ok. I think Slack is a bit better as Hipchat had regular outages.

I don't love it at all, haven't used it since the last Web 1.9 SaaS company I worked in, and hopefully never will again. I found the SNR to be too low, but perhaps that reflects more on that particular company than Slack itself.

What inevitably happens with laws that create such a drastic power imbalance between your average citizen and the governing entity is that those with power and status are exempt.

Related: "Slack is the opposite of organizational memory"

https://abe-winter.github.io/plea's/help/2018/02/11/slack.ht...

In a lot of places being busy is a proxy of being productive and Slack allows you to display how busy you are by constantly chatting in channels. They also added some dopamine based notifications.

At the end of the day it probably makes you lose more productivity than you gain but that's difficult to measure.

Personally I'd say it's a combination of traction and API for me.

It's pretty useful to have a ubiquitous comms tool that integrates with most saas infra out the box...I do loathe its shoddy audio/video/screenshare

I hate Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp and all of this new shit. I was very happy with just my email and Pidgin ;) Slack is just business, making money with stupid people, it's the new/old mode.

I don't, it was imposed on me as part of my daily job tooling.

I like that I don't have to stand up and ask my colleague something.

don't feel bad - i don't get it either - doesn't add material value over email or texts, or skype, or any of the other tools we have - i think it may just be a millenial thang...

I suspect it has to do also with the culture of places that use it well.

This post reminded me to check Slack :^)

because everyone and their mom is on it so its a readymade community.