Slack and the Idol God of “Fun”

UGH!!! I read some articles about how Slack’s design is about FUN and I can’t help but think... I don’t want that. I’m probably the most typical Type 4 Person ever. A type 1 or 3, probably would roll their eyes so hard. However, weirdly enough Murphy is perhaps the most on my side person so far. Perhaps just because he likes using new things, and he’s flexible and wants me to be happy. IDK. One way or another it’s super hard being one of the few Slack haters in the world. Like 10% level. It sucks.

I want to hate it, yet I can’t help but constantly feel like, “Why should I care? Why should I fight this fight any longer?” It’s exhausting. It literally keeps me up at night. The dumb thing is that I feel like I can’t even really justify my hate for it. It works fine at the size of company we have right now... right? The main thing I hate is not how distracting it is, because in reality there’s so little chatter going on it’s really not bad, so much as the fact that it sucks people into it more than any app.

People have limited attention and Slack sucks people's time and leaves little for the actual work they should be doing. Especially based on Johnathan Blow on deep work. Not only that but I get tired of people constantly chopping away at complex conversations with the dull ax of chat/zoom (Also see Basecamp Guide to Internal Communication).

It’s exhausting to be having a conversation weeks later about @ V.S. when I know that an Async thread about it would really make things actually happen.

A topic can span days in Slack only by sheer force of will, by swimming against the current. Nobody’s going to do that unless the absolutely have to. People are lazy.

I’m running into that right now, I’ve created this system in Obsidian that’s a really cool way to create a Handbook/Wiki but I feel very confident that it would take years of effort by myself before it really start to show it’s worth enough to be compelling. It’ll be no time before it falls by the wayside. I’ve even started to get a little tired of writing in it and I’m the person who loves documentation the most probably.

Basecamp would solve this problem by not forcing people to write documentation, it would just automatically happen as people had conversations under tightly scoped topics. It’s like what Slack was trying to do, provide a searchable log of all communication, yet they sacrificed it at the idol gods of fun.