Less than 34% of projects are completed on time and one budget, Dresser claimed, saying that users having to switch between tasks in applications was a significant drain on time and productivity. “We have millions of people working in Slack; why leave Slack?”
Yes, context switching is expensive. I don't see how never leaving Slack changes that, there is enough going on there to make it hard to stay on task. Plenty of windows, DMs, channels, integrations pinging you, meetings about to happen.
I can only imagine they are starting to dream of SlackOS where everything is AI powered and you never leave Slack but you are still wasting the same amount of time, just in their product.
Three customers of mine use Slack all the time, only one is paying. The other two accept that old messages go away.
About features:
Calls and screen sharing work well.
Threads are horrible, it's where messages go to hide and die because nobody notices them.
Search is poorly implemented: for some reason it's difficult to find stuff.
A customer of mine would like a mix between a chat and a forum software, to give threads a name and persist them in a menu and reference them later on.
> Threads are horrible, it's where messages go to hide and die because nobody notices them.
Threads are kinda horses-for-courses.
If you've got a 3000+ person organisation, they're useful because all-to-all messaging channels don't scale very well. If you've got a 500-member #linux-users channel you can have multiple discussions going on in different threads without them getting mixed up, and when someone posts about wifi issues some people can jump in to help without every single message alerting all 500 members.
On the other hand, if your organisation only has 30 people? Channels alone are probably all you need.
If people noticed the top message and they care they can subscribe and get notifications and it won't bother anyone else.
If something is sufficiently important people post the reply in the channel in one go. People can also tag people or groups.
Anyone who isn't using threads fundamentally misunderstands slack and is using it as WhatsApp/Facebook.
You can pin conversations and I agree that giving stuff names would be good but within slack, it would probably be too unwieldy. There's different patterns of communication and slightly ephemeral chat, which is often disorganised shouldn't be your long form. If you want, just copy and paste it but the forum/ticket thread probably deserves better quality.
I don't know, as an user I find Slack's thread badly designed. A much better model is Discord's thread as other poster have said. Slack threads are very hard to search and not seems to be designed for 100+ to 1000s messages.
My AGPL app Jonline does what your customer wants. Every conversation has “discussion” (most recent at top) or “chat” mode, and you can star any reply at any depth to have it accessible from a menu. (TODO: push notifications, but when they’re done, starred posts/replies will also support them.)
> somehow both the two slack-paying jobs had automatic, age-based message deletion. Not sure why
Excessive record-keeping makes it hard to perform cover-ups, and can lead to regulators having evidence of your crimes - that's the last thing a big corporation wants.
Consider, for example, the case of Boeing where there are a bunch of instant messages from test pilots revealing they knew about the lethal problems with the 737 MAX's MCAS system. Test pilots telling engineers "it’s running rampant in the sim on me" and in other messages saying "so I basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly)" - very embarrassing stuff.
From Boeing's perspective, it would be very nice if those messages had been automatically deleted a few weeks after they were sent.
Or let's say people removed some bolts from a door, forgot to refit them, and didn't track it through the official system because they wanted to get defect numbers down, then the door fell out mid-flight.
Except someone took timestamped photos showing the door with the bolts missing, so the regulators could figure out what was going on. If Boeing had a process in place to erase those unsanctioned extra records, they could have just shrugged and said there was no evidence the bolts were missing.
Many corporations like time-based message deletion, because although it reduces employee productivity, that's an acceptable trade-off to facilitate cover-ups.
> Excessive record-keeping makes it hard to perform cover-ups, and can lead to regulators having evidence of your crimes - that's the last thing a big corporation wants.
You are right, I wanted to subtly imply that.
I forgot to mention that both jobs were in fields with stringent or very stringent legislation.
So... I guess I'm going to assume/hope that was preventive ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Maybe I'm just old but I find the UX of Discord pretty bad. Not just aesthetics, but the entire information hierarchy doesn't really work for me. Perhaps it's because it started as a gaming thing (IIRC?) before branching out to more general use cases.
People don't use Slack in this way though. I've worked at several organizations where the freshest documentation we had was in Slack. The truest FAQ is when someone actually asks a dev a question in a Slack channel, and not the questions they anticipated being asked when writing documentation. Capturing this in a meaningful way would be highly valuable, and maybe all that takes is feeding it to a RAG based LLM
Didn't they just announce they'll delete messages older than a year for unpaid users? This is a huge red flag. You don't want a company with a business model that requires them to pull the rug on critical data if you unsubscribe. A business model of continuous threat. I'll find an alternative free self hosted platform with e2e and no AI snooping through our private issues to build profiles on the group.
An AI-infused search for hard to find discussions between team members that happened somewhere in the past is nice, I guess.
What I find slack enables though, is technical documentation being stored in such chats instead of something more formal, like an API or an up to date README.
Even more horrible is technical know-how being shared in video calls, as video-calls are easy to make, are interactive, you can draw, you can have fun, "it is easier and takes less time this way".
> Even more horrible is technical know-how being shared in video calls, as video-calls are easy to make, are interactive, you can draw, you can have fun, "it is easier and takes less time this way".
Hah - yes. Or the I'm-a-human gambit: "Why can't we just have a conversation?"
The ideal AI flow here would be people jumping on a video call, someone hitting record because they know it would be pertinent, AI transcribing and summarising the steps and finding then suggesting edits to wherever documentation should be stored then updating a changelog, which are the main hurdles to someone who just learned something sharing it with the organisation
This is part of the reason I actually like the free slack tier. People know that shit is going away.
If slack wants to integrate AI, it should focus on auto-updating other services that people actually want to use to store information like google drive, notion, git, etc based on chats. That would be useful. Trying to lock people into slack harder is not.
I wish Slack would focus on end-user experience rather than extra org-level features. It’s like being offered a meal when you complain of being tired. Sure, it’s great, but I’d rather have what I ask for.
How about code highlighting in markdown-style triple-backtick blocks instead of requiring snippets? Or the ability to have a separate window per workspace in the native app? Or maybe marking thread responses that echo to the channel marked as read when I see them in the channel, rather than requiring an explicit click into the Threads section? Or a huddle video feed that isn’t blurry at 4K so I can actually read the text getting shared?
I do like Slack, but some of these missing features just feel like missed table-stakes, and their focus seems elsewhere.
Well... Having an diggable history is a nice to have thing, but "long term" and "commercial service" are an oxymoron... The only long term is owning anything on their own iron and possibly with a little-to-no-deps sw stack and data in easy to master formats, regularly changes as the tech change (converting formats as needed, to preserve old data in new, currently usable, form).
Aside for the Slack users I see in action... Get something useful for the long term is well... Less valuable then the cost 99% of the time... It's not version control for a software project, the signal/noise ration of information is so terrible to the point of being just garbage.
10+ years of usage of Slack and I noticed that the written communication style today is better than before but I wonder about how folks in MSTeams are doing.
When I was working with Slack I felt that most of the communication had more depth and broadnesses and after transition to MSTeams I personally feel that the whole chatter decreased significantly and folks are more prone to start a call than to “Create a Post” with title and write down.
I received an email from Slack this morning that they will be deleting any history over 90 days in their free tier plan. It doesn't seem like this is conducive to long term memory if you’re capping history to 90 days.
Been thinking about knowledge management a bit lately, and maybe doing it well is just impossible and you should let the AIs embrace the chaos for you. But I still have this lingering question: what number employee should your CIO be (if any)?
The company I work for very specifically turned on message auto deletion after 90 days after a discussion with Compliance. Want to store something for a long time? Use the official wiki.
Yes, organisations that use this free service get exactly what they’re paying for. I don’t think they they’re looking to be long-term memory for free plan users. We’re all adults here that know how freemium models work.
Turns out a product doesn't have to be "perfect" to work well for many people, I'm using Slack every day for at least 8 years and while these are maybe things that can be improved they are really not things that negatively impact my day.
My enterprise employer instituted retention policies on slack, so it couldn't be long term storage. I imagine any other large companies would be the same.
Of course then we switched to teams which isnt as useful for finding anything, so that problem is solved /s.
> Slack AI – which is our generative AI experience natively built in Slack – is a separately purchased add-on that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) but does not train those LLMs on customer data. Because Slack AI hosts the models on its own infrastructure, your data remains in your control and exclusively for your organization’s use. It never leaves Slack’s trust boundary and no third parties, including the model vendor, will have access to it.
Less than 34% of projects are completed on time and one budget, Dresser claimed, saying that users having to switch between tasks in applications was a significant drain on time and productivity. “We have millions of people working in Slack; why leave Slack?”
Yes, context switching is expensive. I don't see how never leaving Slack changes that, there is enough going on there to make it hard to stay on task. Plenty of windows, DMs, channels, integrations pinging you, meetings about to happen.
I can only imagine they are starting to dream of SlackOS where everything is AI powered and you never leave Slack but you are still wasting the same amount of time, just in their product.
I would take it as just marketing. One has something to sell so one now finds some good angle of why that product is better or desirable.
SlackOS in a VM is Slack.
Three customers of mine use Slack all the time, only one is paying. The other two accept that old messages go away.
About features:
Calls and screen sharing work well.
Threads are horrible, it's where messages go to hide and die because nobody notices them.
Search is poorly implemented: for some reason it's difficult to find stuff.
A customer of mine would like a mix between a chat and a forum software, to give threads a name and persist them in a menu and reference them later on.
> Threads are horrible, it's where messages go to hide and die because nobody notices them.
Threads are kinda horses-for-courses.
If you've got a 3000+ person organisation, they're useful because all-to-all messaging channels don't scale very well. If you've got a 500-member #linux-users channel you can have multiple discussions going on in different threads without them getting mixed up, and when someone posts about wifi issues some people can jump in to help without every single message alerting all 500 members.
On the other hand, if your organisation only has 30 people? Channels alone are probably all you need.
I think Discord found the sweet spot with Discussions. It's the right mix of chat + forum for me:
https://i.imgur.com/XxV5b2Q.png
Programming discord servers usually have chat rooms like #general and then forum channels (like threads but organized).
Threads are fantastic.
If people noticed the top message and they care they can subscribe and get notifications and it won't bother anyone else.
If something is sufficiently important people post the reply in the channel in one go. People can also tag people or groups.
Anyone who isn't using threads fundamentally misunderstands slack and is using it as WhatsApp/Facebook.
You can pin conversations and I agree that giving stuff names would be good but within slack, it would probably be too unwieldy. There's different patterns of communication and slightly ephemeral chat, which is often disorganised shouldn't be your long form. If you want, just copy and paste it but the forum/ticket thread probably deserves better quality.
I don't know, as an user I find Slack's thread badly designed. A much better model is Discord's thread as other poster have said. Slack threads are very hard to search and not seems to be designed for 100+ to 1000s messages.
> A customer of mine would like a mix between a chat and a forum software
Zulip is closer to that I think
https://zulip.com/
My AGPL app Jonline does what your customer wants. Every conversation has “discussion” (most recent at top) or “chat” mode, and you can star any reply at any depth to have it accessible from a menu. (TODO: push notifications, but when they’re done, starred posts/replies will also support them.)
Here’s a sample convo where you can try out the functionality: https://jonline.io/post/4zHQSj
> A customer of mine would like a mix between a chat and a forum software
How much of that was like google wave?
I've used Slack across three jobs/companies. Two paid, one did not (and switched to teams).
So slack is mostly great for chatting. For audio/video calls it's sub-par (and somehow it messes up with microphone input levels on my work macbook).
But the most important thing: somehow both the two slack-paying jobs had automatic, age-based message deletion.
Not sure why
> somehow both the two slack-paying jobs had automatic, age-based message deletion. Not sure why
Excessive record-keeping makes it hard to perform cover-ups, and can lead to regulators having evidence of your crimes - that's the last thing a big corporation wants.
Consider, for example, the case of Boeing where there are a bunch of instant messages from test pilots revealing they knew about the lethal problems with the 737 MAX's MCAS system. Test pilots telling engineers "it’s running rampant in the sim on me" and in other messages saying "so I basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly)" - very embarrassing stuff.
From Boeing's perspective, it would be very nice if those messages had been automatically deleted a few weeks after they were sent.
Or let's say people removed some bolts from a door, forgot to refit them, and didn't track it through the official system because they wanted to get defect numbers down, then the door fell out mid-flight.
Except someone took timestamped photos showing the door with the bolts missing, so the regulators could figure out what was going on. If Boeing had a process in place to erase those unsanctioned extra records, they could have just shrugged and said there was no evidence the bolts were missing.
Many corporations like time-based message deletion, because although it reduces employee productivity, that's an acceptable trade-off to facilitate cover-ups.
> Excessive record-keeping makes it hard to perform cover-ups, and can lead to regulators having evidence of your crimes - that's the last thing a big corporation wants.
You are right, I wanted to subtly imply that.
I forgot to mention that both jobs were in fields with stringent or very stringent legislation.
So... I guess I'm going to assume/hope that was preventive ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Deleted messages are harder to subpoena.
Check out https://www.booklet.group/ (my friend is working on it)!
That's called Discord.
Maybe I'm just old but I find the UX of Discord pretty bad. Not just aesthetics, but the entire information hierarchy doesn't really work for me. Perhaps it's because it started as a gaming thing (IIRC?) before branching out to more general use cases.
I'd host a private IRC server before I contributed to their success.
Slack is great but there's no chance I'd make my business dependent on it in that way. I keep chat content ephemeral and store knowledge in git.
I think they got it the wrong way round. Slack is for ephemeral communication only. Add an option that deletes messages after 7 days instead.
Not much money in that though.
People don't use Slack in this way though. I've worked at several organizations where the freshest documentation we had was in Slack. The truest FAQ is when someone actually asks a dev a question in a Slack channel, and not the questions they anticipated being asked when writing documentation. Capturing this in a meaningful way would be highly valuable, and maybe all that takes is feeding it to a RAG based LLM
Perfect for planning illegal anti-competitive actions, Google would love it
Good job DLP tools and legal holds exist then
Didn't they just announce they'll delete messages older than a year for unpaid users? This is a huge red flag. You don't want a company with a business model that requires them to pull the rug on critical data if you unsubscribe. A business model of continuous threat. I'll find an alternative free self hosted platform with e2e and no AI snooping through our private issues to build profiles on the group.
An AI-infused search for hard to find discussions between team members that happened somewhere in the past is nice, I guess.
What I find slack enables though, is technical documentation being stored in such chats instead of something more formal, like an API or an up to date README.
Even more horrible is technical know-how being shared in video calls, as video-calls are easy to make, are interactive, you can draw, you can have fun, "it is easier and takes less time this way".
> Even more horrible is technical know-how being shared in video calls, as video-calls are easy to make, are interactive, you can draw, you can have fun, "it is easier and takes less time this way".
Hah - yes. Or the I'm-a-human gambit: "Why can't we just have a conversation?"
The ideal AI flow here would be people jumping on a video call, someone hitting record because they know it would be pertinent, AI transcribing and summarising the steps and finding then suggesting edits to wherever documentation should be stored then updating a changelog, which are the main hurdles to someone who just learned something sharing it with the organisation
This is part of the reason I actually like the free slack tier. People know that shit is going away.
If slack wants to integrate AI, it should focus on auto-updating other services that people actually want to use to store information like google drive, notion, git, etc based on chats. That would be useful. Trying to lock people into slack harder is not.
I wish Slack would focus on end-user experience rather than extra org-level features. It’s like being offered a meal when you complain of being tired. Sure, it’s great, but I’d rather have what I ask for.
How about code highlighting in markdown-style triple-backtick blocks instead of requiring snippets? Or the ability to have a separate window per workspace in the native app? Or maybe marking thread responses that echo to the channel marked as read when I see them in the channel, rather than requiring an explicit click into the Threads section? Or a huddle video feed that isn’t blurry at 4K so I can actually read the text getting shared?
I do like Slack, but some of these missing features just feel like missed table-stakes, and their focus seems elsewhere.
Well... Having an diggable history is a nice to have thing, but "long term" and "commercial service" are an oxymoron... The only long term is owning anything on their own iron and possibly with a little-to-no-deps sw stack and data in easy to master formats, regularly changes as the tech change (converting formats as needed, to preserve old data in new, currently usable, form).
Aside for the Slack users I see in action... Get something useful for the long term is well... Less valuable then the cost 99% of the time... It's not version control for a software project, the signal/noise ration of information is so terrible to the point of being just garbage.
10+ years of usage of Slack and I noticed that the written communication style today is better than before but I wonder about how folks in MSTeams are doing.
When I was working with Slack I felt that most of the communication had more depth and broadnesses and after transition to MSTeams I personally feel that the whole chatter decreased significantly and folks are more prone to start a call than to “Create a Post” with title and write down.
I received an email from Slack this morning that they will be deleting any history over 90 days in their free tier plan. It doesn't seem like this is conducive to long term memory if you’re capping history to 90 days.
Been thinking about knowledge management a bit lately, and maybe doing it well is just impossible and you should let the AIs embrace the chaos for you. But I still have this lingering question: what number employee should your CIO be (if any)?
Ironic headline when the free version stops you seeing messages after a short time.
"for organizations"
But their query times for search is suboptimal — so that needs to be fixed first..
Their search UX is also terrrible.
The company I work for very specifically turned on message auto deletion after 90 days after a discussion with Compliance. Want to store something for a long time? Use the official wiki.
Great place to document your crimes :)
Amazon?
A competitor of Instagram, Twitter and TikTok for short videos does that also
Slack wants to become the long-term memory for organizations that pay, and the anterograde amnesia of those that don't.
I can't see how they win here. Most orgs buy Office 365, and get Teams as a result.
Teams is...fine.
That’s smells like one hell of a lock-in
And yet:
https://slack.com/help/articles/29414264463635-Updates-to-me...
Yes, organisations that use this free service get exactly what they’re paying for. I don’t think they they’re looking to be long-term memory for free plan users. We’re all adults here that know how freemium models work.
Additionally, it’s nowhere perfect as a product to expect such a reliance on a daily basis.
For instance, query times for search is not optimal, file upload times, especially on mobile, are slower than my internet connection speed.
Turns out a product doesn't have to be "perfect" to work well for many people, I'm using Slack every day for at least 8 years and while these are maybe things that can be improved they are really not things that negatively impact my day.
They probably still keep the data to sell to LLM training organizations
My enterprise employer instituted retention policies on slack, so it couldn't be long term storage. I imagine any other large companies would be the same.
Of course then we switched to teams which isnt as useful for finding anything, so that problem is solved /s.
slack was a great product already, no one asked for their org's data to be slurped up by the sleazy opt-in-by-default data harvesting program. gross
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40383978
You miss-understood a critical part:
https://slack.engineering/how-we-built-slack-ai-to-be-secure...
Short summary on Twitter:
> Slack AI – which is our generative AI experience natively built in Slack – is a separately purchased add-on that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) but does not train those LLMs on customer data. Because Slack AI hosts the models on its own infrastructure, your data remains in your control and exclusively for your organization’s use. It never leaves Slack’s trust boundary and no third parties, including the model vendor, will have access to it.
https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1791276788212998503
Which parts of their policy allow data harvesting? I can’t seem to find them, could you help?
The part where the software runs on their server and you send all your messages to them. It's not a policy thing.