Source--An Oral History of Our Week Without Slack
ref: https://www.vice.com/en/article/gv5jpy/an-oral-history-of-our-week-without-slack
Kate Lunau, Canada editor So, I felt waaaaaay less frantic on Monday and Tuesday, ie the early days of no Slack. Like, there wasn't a constant buzzing and humming behind me that needed my attention. But Jordan and I definitely felt sort of cut off from the rest of Motherboard.
It's hard to not use Slack
Adrianne Jeffries: Do you think you will use Slack differently now?
Kate Lunau: I feel like… no? Because, you know, whenever you do a "detox" you make resolutions but they never actually work.
This seems like Slack Addiction.
Team #NeverSlack
I think enabling do not disturb is a false question, it's kind of like encryption. You can't trust the user to enable it. If something is happening in Slack i want to know what's happening because I care about the site, so I read every message in Slack regardless of where it's put or who says it. The longest I can go without checking it even if I'm incredibly busy is probably 10-15 minutes, which may be a personal attention problem but by design that's how the service is made to work.
This is an interesting quote.
Something is ALWAYS going on in Slack and often I'll like, come in and see that I missed some discussion and will disagree with where we left it or have something to add and it's too late. Really I probably don't NEED to weigh in but that's kind of what chat apps train you to do, is to say things to the people who are saying things to the group.
Reminds me of [[Source--Is Group Chat Making You Sweat#7 Pile-ons and devolving conversations]]
Slack masks bad Org hierarchies
Stopping Slack has been a chance to reverse out of the cul-de-sac and say, hey, how does this system actually work? I think that's probably the biggest allure of Slack and the reason people hate it so much. It makes limping along with a terrible hierarchy and structure possible, so you don't have to solve inherent problems to your staff model. And then everyone has to pay attention to everything and they all go insane.
In summary Slack masks real problems by:
- Making conversations happen faster Source--Sustainability over speed, adopting asynchronous communication
- Not worry about getting the right information to the right people but rather just tell everything to everyone. (See Slack is hostile for the reader/Slack is optimized for the writer)
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