Is Slack actually good?

Recently I’ve started to use Slack for actual business purposes - its original design intent - and I continue to be mystified by people’s love of it. Previously I only used it in the decidedly sub-optimal context of public communities, mostly for software projects like Roam, and it didn’t surprise me so much that it worked poorly there. After all, it was designed for smaller and more internal discussions where some of its features or limitations probably made more sense. But as I’ve been using it now more in its intended role, I just keep running into things that seem really unintuitive or poorly thought out to me. It’s quite possible - even likely - that I’m just a person who won’t “get” Slack, just like I still haven’t “gotten” why people love Twitter. I use Twitter, sure, but I still kind of hate it. :smile:

Anyway, Rob Haisfield over on Twitter (an excellent follow btw!) asked me what I disliked about Slack’s threading implementation recently, and after I grumbled about that for a while, it turned into a general critique of Slack’s UI and UX. I figured it would be great content for the get-off-my-lawn section of this digital garden. :rofl: So the following is, at least initially, drawn directly from this Twitter thread (I’ll clean this up soon…):
https://twitter.com/RobertHaisfield/status/1413235494670921728

Preface: I have a couple decades of exp. in both real time and async, from un/threaded forums to AOL IM, ICQ, Skype, Hangouts, & now Slack & Discord (+ Discourse). I’ve used a lot of systems, these are my personal preferences, but at least informed by a lot of experience FWIW.

For me, the thread indicator is just surprisingly small & indistinct. It’s not easy to see when skimming a Slack channel that you’re catching up on. They’re easy to miss stuck as they are with tiny icons just below the reacts. Info presented (replies, date) is good, just small.

Threads don’t show up in any other place AFAIK, unless you participate, then they’re in your threads view. Other systems e.g. show a list of recent threads within a channel. This helps surface them and their activity.

Threads are also, AFAIK, anchored to the time of their original creation, so unless you’re following a thread, you won’t really notice that it’s been updated/had new messages. In essence they break the time line of the conversation in an opaque and inaccessible way.

With no other ability to reply to a specific part of a message, you either lose context (i.e. “I’m replying to this specific part of text”) or you maintain it but force a branch. Threads “silo” the conversation and feel “heavy” for that reason and I’m reluctant to use them.

Also I should mention, they lack a “subject” or “topic”, and that’s something that is helpful in forums. Arguably you could do something similar in Slack. If you could give a thread a topic and there was a topic list showing them, I think I’d like it better…

Anyway, there may be other particulars of it that some further contemplation would surface. But the bottom line is threads in Slack viscerally feel:

  • Obscured
  • “Heavy”, high friction to initiate
  • Difficult to find
    (unless you know what you’re looking for)

All that said, I think these limitations (or design/feature choices) might make more sense in a smaller business environment. So far I have only ever used slack in the decidedly out-of-scope context of software communities, where I think it’s a bad choice.

I’m also not a Slack expert, so may be missing things that would address some of my concerns. But if that’s the case I’d say those things are not as discoverable as might be ideal…

I’ll just keep this thread going then, I guess. Next-up: why the heck does it not "mark-as-read: when I reply to the only new message in a channel (creating a new thread in the process)? I’m in “All Unreads”, and it’s still asking me to Esc/press “Mark as Read”.

Is Slack really this dumb, or have they been chastised for trying to be too clever with automatic “read marking” in the past? I looked around in options, but I don’t see a way to adjust this.

Ironically I actually dislike the available “mark as read” options for channels, too. I want something like “Start me where I left off & don’t mark the channel read”. The default does leave unseen messages unread, but marks the channel read, which seems inconsistent. The option “Start at latest but leave unseen messages unread” actually does leave the channel unread, which is a weird choice to me, since it is otherwise no different than the default “start where I left off”, except that the unread messages are above rather than below.

Also, can it really be that unread Threads don’t show up in “All Unreads” view!? I need to verify this, but if so, that’s just absurdly stupid in my view. Yes, the Threads link is highlighted to show unreads, but still All Unreads should be ALL, right? :roll_eyes:

I can expand a collapsed thread, but I can’t re-collapse it in Threads view?

I can mark messages “read” in “All Unread” & they disappear, but threads don’t show up in All Unreads & I can’t mark them as “read” & have them disappear in Threads view? WTF? Wouldn’t be so bad if threads just showed unreads in their parent channels!

lol this is quite the rant on Slack! Im aware I am partially (if not wholely) the source of this :wink:

When a channel for Unsolicited Feedback gets launched, you are first in line as this 100% fits the bill! :grin:

While I don’t know if you are interested in investing more time on this, I’d love to watch a screencast pointing out all of the above (I admittedly couldn’t visualize everything & it might be a function of using up my fill of brainpower sorting new ideas how collaboration might work in this garden & feeling lazy! grin)

you’ll be happy to hear that I’m starting to realize that after creating a series of planning discussions for next quarter w a colleague - Slack “kinda” does the job w threads but it really doesn’t - I can easily see how a private Discourse might organize topics much better (esp those that may span an entire 3 month quarter!)

I could easily see a Rant space here tool by tool… :laughing:

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Ah, you are actually not! This predated our Slack adventures, for the most part, or if it didn’t, it was more about having to use Slack when I was consulting with Anytype. I found many things about it mystifying, including actual UI/UX bugs and limitations, etc.

Hah! I only have so much time in the day. If Slack wants to hire me for usability testing I’m happy to do that. But honestly I feel pretty clear that Slack, while good in some respects, ultimately is not actually a very forward-thinking or user-centric company or platform. It is focused on Enterprise and focused on integration and making it a Swiss army knife “all in one tool”. This leaves behind important, core UI/UX considerations. I know they’ve written whole articles about how much thought and testing they put into various things like the threading feature. But either they’re no longer doing that depth of consideration for ongoing feature implementation/improvement (perhaps since Salesforce bought them?), or they’re just not doing it well, or… maybe it’s just me. :man_shrugging:

But the more I talk and read about Slack, the more I get the feeling that on the surface, at first, people love and praise it, but if you dig in a little and ask them about their actual day-to-day experience, you start to understand there are lots of problems and frustrations that people seem to just more or less accept, perhaps on the belief that Slack is “the best thing out there so if this thing sucks, it must just have to be that way”, or maybe because “My company uses Slack, I don’t really have another choice”. Or maybe it’s still just carried along based on reputation and initial benefits.

Slack, especially early on, was touted as doing all kinds of things like “making work fun” and bringing lots of tools together in one place. I remember tons of people being into it seemingly in large part just because you could post funny GIFs and use /slash commands to do things from one UI. Perhaps it filled a need of trying to replicate in-person work-fun-bonding culture without being in-person, and simultaneously pulled together many disparate tools in one place. And maybe it did an OK job of that for a while. But it’s no longer doing something unique and better than all other options, IMO. There are better discussion platforms, especially for actually getting organized work done and creating new understandings between people. And there are arguably better ways of integrating tools and getting data into one place.

:tada: That’s music to my ears, of course. :grin: To be clear, every tool’s benefits come out, in part, from how you use it. Discourse can be a complete mess if you don’t use it with a clear organizational structure and with a good understanding of the features it offers (for example if you don’t know about or use quoting, it definitely loses some benefit over Slack as far as having organized discussion). I’m sure you can figure out ways to mitigate Slack’s limitations. But for me the fact that in its free incarnation it has some serious limitations, and its per-user fee is non-trivial, just makes me want to either use Discord for the same purpose, or Zulip, or yeah, Discourse. Once Discourse Chat becomes more mature it will be a much more obvious replacement, too…

Hah! Isn’t that basically what this place already is? OK well, maybe not quite. But yes, I have plenty of other rants-on-tools I could (and probably will, at some point) write. :grin:

ok - this is all starting to make sense. Now that I need more robust thread management, I’m just about ready to kick the bucket and stop using Slack for one of my teams. I never got much momentum, so perhaps it’s time to play with Discourse on this team for the next 3 months…

whoa - I’ve been in a cave! I had no idea: Salesforce completes acquisition of Slack | Slack

I admittedly have mixed feelings about salesforce (conversation for another time on a variety of fronts, not just their tech platform!)

have a favorite showcase Discourse instance online that exhibits this behavior? love to see what a mess looks like :slight_smile:

Share more about this? I don’t see any reference to “comparing” plans or editions:

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Ooo, exciting! I assume you don’t pay for Slack though? Do you have budget for Discourse hosting? I’m happy to help you get started and point you in the right direction(s).

Hah! Just by virtue of them being messy they’re not my favorites. :wink: I honestly can’t think of a good example to show you right now, but there are a few scenarios that I think tend to exhibit this “messiness” most often, in my view:

  1. When there are just a ton of categories/sub-categories and no use of tags, etc. It makes it hard to know where to post something, harder to “explore”, etc. Lots of going in and out of hierarchy.
  2. When there are tons of tags and/or everyone is allowed to create new tags, so there is little/no standardization and e.g. you might have a tag for “Tool”, “Types of Tool”, “Tools”, etc. all intending to refer to the same thing.
  3. This may be more of a personal preference, but when categories are minimized or not used at all, and the front page view is just the “Latest” or “Top” posts, I find this to feel quite messy at times, mainly on busy forums. Basically it mixes all discussion from all categories together.

Actually, here’s sort of an example of #3 on that list, the Figma forum:

It does show the categories reasonably well (colored text below the topic title), but I find this view a little overwhelming as a newcomer. Fortunately it is easy to switch views.

I think you misunderstood, I was referring to Slack’s free vs. pay limitations:

The main Slack free version limitation is the 10k message search/view limit. For some purposes that’s not a huge issue, but I think that along with the other issues with Slack (e.g. around divergent vs. convergent discussion, lack of easy quoting and over-reliance on threads, and the bugs/issues mentioned above), it just makes sense to avoid Slack unless you actually need something it’s uniquely good at (mainly the integrations are what make it still stand out, IMO).

There is also this take, maybe Slack is fine (I still don’t think so :smile:), but it is predicated on a broken model of work:

It’s an older article, but still seems quite relevant and interesting.