Slack is A Black Hole of Information

What is a "black hole"? Basically I mean:

Slack destroys good information and encourages bad documentation habits
- Slack presents messages in a Infinite Scrolling Newsfeed in Reverse Chronological Order which prioritizes new information over old.
  - This buries all learning from the past, which leads us to re-make the same mistakes.
  - This discourages having an informed opinion before you offer yours.
  - This also encourages jumping into a conversation and asking "what's going on". Which wastes people's time.
- Slack's channels has a property of being a "small amount of categories that are infinitely deep" which has a number of ill effects:
  1. Too few categories makes topic fragmentation happen, which means - there's no Single Source of Truth of any conversation which means - instead of investing in your knowlege base you're constantly repeating yourself and asking, "Where did ___ go?".
  2. Having categories get too deep means information is harder to find, which leads Organizations to rely on Tribal Knowlege a information death spiral. - Making more channels doesn't help either because Slack's channels live forever which ends up causing Slack's sidebar to fill up, and therefore making even the channels hard to find. You could constantly create new ones and Archive them but this goes against Slack's Design which means nobody will.
1. Slack wants you addicted, so it'll never fix these problems.
  - Posting constantly measured as "engagement", which looks good to their investors and themselves
  - Slack Addiction, while a Dark Pattern, is "good for business" because it makes it crazy hard quit. People like quick fixes, and Slack provides that.
  - As such, Slack is optimized for the writer and Slack is hostile for the reader.
    - This is backwards because a message is read more than it's written! It's just so they can look like they are being used constantly, when in reality if they were trying to make us effective, they would be trying to lower how much communication is going on.
2. Slack encourages dumping, which is to say - People put information anywhere and everywhere. Slack channels all look the same and they seem to be about equally random. - Threads help? Not really because There's no good way to use Slack threads, they are designed to allow a side conversation to happen, but are never viable as a long term solution of information organization due to their lack of a titles and also because they are traversed by Infinite Scrolling.
Because Slack has no public, yet secluded space, people often are shy of public channels. This leads to a lack of transparency and Trust.
- This means that we're back to email days, meaning that the only way to get information is to ask people for Context.
- This means that Information Discoverability and Information Availability are hindered.
Slack prioritizes things like GIFs over important discussions
- While fun is needed, group chat allows "fun", in the same way that social media allows "connection". It trades quick Dopamine hits for real conversation.
As such the only way to keep up is to force the user to read everything, or go through unread bankruptcy. Which causes a lot of Slack Burnout and "Slacklash".

Pasted image 20201020083053 https://twitter.com/rogersaner/status/980912469395890178

This is an interesting one because the CEO of Ghost realized that the slack team was just falling apart. Similar to what happened to Dgraph - Ripping off the slack bandaid

Pasted image 20201020091518 https://twitter.com/allenholub/status/1236091444517048321

Slack is a black hole where critical information goes to die. Do not use it as a data store. It is not a replacement for a wiki. It doesn't remember anything.

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https://knovigator.com/quest/Slack-is-a-black-hole-of-information-3gv621jm

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Slack is A Black Hole of Information

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