How do you feel about Slack?

Question

Slack (and its contemporaries) have dominated the last 5+ years of my professional life. I also see it becoming pervasive in open-source projects.I am not a fan, I think it has reshaped our communication to our detriment -- repackaging our availability as a feature.What has been your experience? I'm particularly intereted in hearing from people who value it.

Mandatum · Accepted Answer

I prefer Slack to emails and whatever godawful comms our teams had to use in the past.
There's nowhere to hide with Slack. If you say something, you have to commit to it. Too often in the past I've been working on a project and someone may commit to something on a call, but end up changing tune later on. If we didn't send out actions/decisions and get agreement from them - these decisions or opinions are never logged.
Also the previous "this could have been an email" meeting responses we used to have has been massively curtailed because we're all happy to chat in a Slack room. Slack has made chat usable by more than just engineers.
I feel bad for the Open Source community, however I believe there's plenty of tooling available to rip Slack data out of the platform and put it into something else. It just needs to be easier and more commonly used by admins. Similar to what we see on those IRC history websites.

josephcsible · Answer

I hate it. We used to have open standard, decentralized communication protocols with FOSS clients and servers, and now we have proprietary clients all talking to someone else's centralized server.

theamk · Answer

Every commercial place I worked in used some sort of messenger, which was pretty useful because it is much less distracting than walking to someone's desk, and also allowed one to easily share code snippets, error messages, and so on.
Before Slack I've used XMPP, and Slack is much better because it supports mobile, does not lose messages when you go offline, and has archives with functioning search (yes, it is not great, but at least it exists...)
Cannot say anything about open source, but for commercial it is sure better than alternatives.

atlasunshrugged · Answer

I also don't love it. I'm now active in 5 slack groups between various projects and it's fine, but definitely sets weird expectations about availability and that noise from notifs kills me when I'm trying to do deep work (or just on a call with someone)

Juliate · Answer

I use it (and loathe it) at work.As for open source projects I might rely on, having a slack but no active mailing-list/forum/async-channel is a sure red flag.