Ditching Google for a week - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/05/google_vs_bing_i_switched_to_microsoft_s_search_engine_for_a_week_here_s_what_happened_.html

<comment><USER2> This is the most important part of the article ...

 _For one thing, despite Bing's better design, Google is unquestionably the better search engine. Of the hundreds of searches I conducted in the last week, there were a handful of times that Bing just didn't seem to be giving me the answer I was looking for._

<comment><USER3> Indeed, it's peculiar how bad Bing is at times. With a Windows Phone in family, I occasionally hit the dedicated Bing-button to quickly search for something only to realize that I'd find the thing I was looking for much faster if I just used browser, typed google.com and then searched. That always reminds me how bad web search was before Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I pretty much use duckduckgo as my main search site now. Though I still use google for some queries each day, I don't feel as reliant on google as before.

</comment><comment><USER5> "The great thing about Chrome is that it remembers your preferences across all your computers—I only needed to switch to Bing on my desktop, and there it was on my laptop, too. (Thank you, Google!)"

Did the OP get it at all? That's one of the reasons to ditch Google. Collecting data, no privacy, down to the tiniest details....

<comment><USER6> Aren't sync items encrypted at the browser level? I thought they were...

<comment><USER7> They are, with your Google Account password by default, and if you want to be extra cautious, with a different passphrase.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I contemplated ditching Google search for a week (or two). So many people here seem to think it is getting worse and I wanted to try and understand that perspective.

Unfortunately, I quickly ran into a deal-breaker for me: no search plugin for my default mobile browser (Firefox on Android). I found that strange given that Firefox and Bing have been quite friendly at times, but there it is.

I did try the Bing search app on Android before giving up. I wasn't impressed with the app (it tried too hard to be your browser/environment rather than just a search utility) or with its search capabilities (it seemed to do a pretty bad job of using my location information with my search, for example).

</comment><comment><USER9> Someone who sees Google Instant as a feature. Interesting, I can't disable it quickly enough.

<comment><USER10> I find Instant useful. But sometimes I want to track back to the Google search page with my exact used word search to try another search result, but, Alas!, it is not in the browser history. Because I clicked an instant link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "If you're never really going to escape Google—and if Bing is pretty much exactly like Google—what's the point?"

From my perspective, there still is a point doing so - enhance privacy by feeding less personal data to Google. I still use Google search when necessary, but I also use DDG, Bing and startpage.com.

I also use some of the Google services, like for example Reader, which is a superior product far ahead of any competition, but I stopped using some of their other services like Gmail, G+, Bookmarks, etc.

So while ditching Google completely is currently inpractical, reducing its usage is still justifiable thing to do.

</comment><comment><USER12> I ditched Google for DDG a few months ago. Haven't looked back!

<comment><USER5> Me too. Good bye Google!

<comment><USER13> !g yeah, goodbye and hello google.

<comment><USER14> My experience exactly. I switch completely over to DDG, and ended up switching back after I realised I was starting so many queries with !g it made no sense at all.

<comment><USER5> You don't get the same "quality" of answers from DDG. That's by design. Since Google tracks your searches, you always get what Google thinks you prefer, or what Google knows makes most benefit for them. If you use DDG this is different. Thats the whole point about it IMHO.

With DDG, if I am not sloppy and really try to find the best search string, I usually get my answers on page one. Not as the first item though. This only shows that the net is much more diverse than big G makes it look like.

<comment><USER12> On the contrary, I consider "personalised" search results to be of lower quality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> * The great thing about Chrome is that it remembers your preferences across all your computers—I only needed to switch to Bing on my desktop, and there it was on my laptop, too. (Thank you, Google!)*

Which is done by storing your preferences on ... Google

</comment><comment><USER16> Try duckduckgo.com

It was created by one of our own here in hacker news.

</comment><comment><USER17> One could also consider using a Google scraper like startpage.com.

<comment><USER11> I don't know why you was downmoded; I also use startpage, along with DDG, Bing and Google. Actually, it is technicaly not Google scraper, their results are different than Google's. I use them when I don't want to reveal my search string in the URL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's worth noting that slate.com use to be owned by Microsoft.

<comment><USER19> Spqr - very few people can read your comments. You've been hellbanned. In fact, I don't think your posts have ever been seen!</comment></comment>


YouTube Map Explorer - <AUTHOR> https://youtubemapexplorer.herokuapp.com/ <comment><USER2> Also on reddit ([http://www.reddit.com/domain/youtubemapexplorer.herokuapp.co...](http://www.reddit.com/domain/youtubemapexplorer.herokuapp.com/)), dev's there for questions. but it looks like youtube tags the location by its uploaders ip, except someone turns the feature off or overrides the location, by adding meta

</comment><comment><USER3> I clicked on a german town (frankfurt) and got a video blocked in germany ;)

<comment><USER4> damn GEMA...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is actually a really cool way to explore an area via videos. Some of the videos aren't really related, but keep clicking and you'll get one. Great tool!

</comment><comment><USER4> Would be awesome if you could switch videos (like tv channels) with your arrow keys once a location has been clicked. Other than that, GREAT mashup!

</comment><comment><USER6> I live too near Washington DC to get anything but global politics out of this.

EDIT: actually, it's been videos from Russia Today 3 times out of 4.

</comment><comment><USER7> I clicked on Boston and got videos from Harvard or MIT.. and zoom out to see multiple world maps :)

</comment><comment><USER5> I clicked on Wakefield and got a video about Wakefield.

</comment><comment><USER8> I clicked on London and got a video about Las Vegas...

<comment><USER9> I believe it's showing you videos created by someone at the location you click, not showing you videos with content based on where you click.</comment></comment>


Top Podcasts for Technology Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://thenextbigtechthing.com/top-podcasts-for-technology-entrepreneurs/

<comment><AUTHOR> Feel free to send over any comments or suggestions of more podcasts to add.

I would like to get an inclusive list going for the community.</comment>


Making a web app within 2days without code - <AUTHOR> I am not a programmer but I use product solution tools to create something that is functional and marketable. I remember the feeling of finding and searching for a car instructor then finding car insurance then looking for a car dealership, it was really time-consuming. I thought, why couldn't I use a web app that makes the process faster, I can call this service provider, find their location, price, and website without jumping from site to site. I created drive4ever.net, which focuses on the UK market currently. I assumed that created the product would the hardest thing, but I was wrong. What will differentiate my product and the value I will give to my users kept me thinking really hard. Without proper marketing, no one will know about my product!
This week I reached a small milestones. I got myself to post on indie hacker which is a platform for individual creators. Also, I bought the domain drive4ever.net Used the tool Carrd for the first time which is a tool to create one page sites.
http://drive4ever.carrd.co
Signed up for typeform to create questionnaires for the service provider, driving instructors. Bought a logo from looka which uses ai to generate a logo really quickly and with really good quality. <comment><USER2> Could you elaborate on how you built this without code please :)</comment>


Ask HN: How to determine when to give up? - <AUTHOR> Boring life story omitted!
Some people say "never give up", but there are situations where not giving up is just foolish stubbornness.
How do you draw the line? <comment><USER2> I've gotten some good advice about quitting from the book "The Dip" by writer Seth Godin. #nopromo [http://hubpages.com/business/theDipBook](http://hubpages.com/business/theDipBook)

<comment><USER3> This is _the_ resource on giving up - I just re-read it like a month ago because I had some doubt about giving up on my current project or keeping on.

(I keep on)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is basically impossible. The best I can add is give up when you can live with yourself for giving up. If you can in hindsight say you gave your all and it didn't work then that is the time to give up.

</comment><comment><USER5> When the downside risk will become unacceptable if you continue.</comment>


Ask YC: Is hacking question for all founders? - <AUTHOR>

On the app, there's a question: Please tell us about the time you, (name), most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.<p>Is that for all founders or only the person submitting the app? <comment><USER2> As it says, we're asking about the person submitting the application. If anyone wants to mention hacks by other founders too, that's ok.

</comment><comment><USER3> I believe it is for everyone. They are investing in both people and ideas and want to know how all founders function.</comment>


Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One - <AUTHOR> http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/ <comment><USER2> This is more the architecture that the W3C TAG would like the Web to have rather than the one that it has in reality. (There are substantial differences of the "no piece of software would actually do it that way because it wouldn't be able to handle the content on the Web" sort.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Hmm, somewhat heavy reading for a morning's news gathering!</comment>


Apply HN: Simitless: Custom business apps for intelligence, no code - <AUTHOR> Hi, we are Simitless [www.simitless.com]. We are building an online platform to enable every expert to contribute their part to organizing and structuring the human information of the world.
So, what is it exactly we are doing? Our prototype-platform allows creating data apps for Market and Business Intelligence. For example, an expert in any domain, be it industry, research, journalism… has lots of data. These data are scattered on different spreadsheets, etc. Difficult to have an overview, to search, to track. Unstructured = difficult to use. Using our platform, they can create their own data app fast and with minimal effort. Plus we enable real-time collaboration for any app that requires multiple users.
What is a data app and why would one need one? A data app is a kind of software that is made up of three main domains:

  • data structuring, collection, and consolidation (a database),
  • data analysis (graphs, dashboards, reports),
  • data exploitation (resale, landing page, marketplace).
 These are the processes that any data analyst and any expert are very familiar with. Heck, we are all very familiar with these steps, as we all run our own projects.

  • Create a database with its own structure.
  • Input data.
  • Visualize data with the graphs and dashboards.
  • Put the app up onto our marketplace and sell accesses to charts, dashboards,
    database, etc. We provide our expert with a landing page (customizable),
    take care of billing, invoicing...
 Our vision is to consolidate the world's information. We aim at enabling the expert in each of us to capitalize on their knowledge and experience. Everybody will finally be able to contribute their part to organizing and structuring the human information of the world. And we would like to contribute our part to making the world a better place by providing ways of being better informed by means of structured, concrete, visible data. <comment><USER2> The landing page is very confusing.

I highly recommend taking a close look at apps like mulesoft and zapier to benchmark your landing page copy.

It sounds exciting, but I got confused as I viewed the page.

Godspeed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks for the pointers! Is there anything, in particular, that you find confusing? We have had that comment before but we're having a hard time pinpointing what confuses people!</comment></comment>


VALE, a Virtual Local Ethernet - <AUTHOR> http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/vale/ <comment><USER2> I fail to see how this is different than virtual bridges (ie: br _n_ interfaces in linux). Such interfaces exist within the host OS in a virtualized environment, support 802.1q trunks, and exhibit quite a lot of flexibility. They're also fast (they're faster than I've ever had need for, though I don't know exact numbers offhand). Am I missing something, or hasn't this been done before?

<comment><AUTHOR> Among other things, the difference is speed: VALE can do 18 Mpps versus the 0.8 Mpps of a Linux bridge. And sometimes you do need speed, maybe not for virtual machines but e.g. if you want to stress test your network monitors, routers, IDS etc. For instance, using VALE we found out a missing event notification in QEMU/KVM which limited the receive speed to 50 Kpps, and a one-line fix brought it up to 1 Mpps.

<comment><USER3> Solaris 11 also has virtual networking and it doesn't suffer from those same performance issues:

      http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/technologies/networkvirtualization-312278.html

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It looks a lot as VDE (virtual distributed ethernet) [0] (quickly referenced in the paper).

Qemu used to support VDE natively for a while, then the development stopped and its support has been removed from mainline. It was cool while it lasted.

The main differences with VDE seem to be that VALE uses a kernel backend instead of being 100% in user space and that VALE is limited to local ethernet while VDE provided also remote "plugs" and "cables".

[0] <http://vde.sourceforge.net/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone know if the related netmap project[1] is being consider for inclusion into mainline linux? I haven't seen much discussion of the project apart from a few HN and proggit threads. It looks like effort was made to make netmap compatible with existing systems, although according to the author, small portions of network drivers need to be rewritten.

[1] <http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/>

<comment><USER6> It'll be mainlined if the authors follow the process, which they won't because they're academics.

<comment><AUTHOR> (I'll take this chance to give a clarification on the topic but otherwise would like to stop this thread here).

Your comment is unfair. I have contributed tons of things to the FreeBSD kernel, and to the Asterisk project, following the process that each organization uses. Some of my code (the qfq scheduler) has also been integrated in Linux by third parties who were motivated enough to carry on the work. The problem is not us being academics, but rather that there are only so many hours in a day. Some help from people more involved in "the process" would certainly be welcome.

Note that the netmap code is fairly small and self contained. It is meant to run on multiple platforms though, and I'd rather have it this ways than have to maintain two separate version. It is only thanks to this feature that i could develop VALE on FreeBSD and have it running on Linux in a matter of minutes.</comment></comment></comment>


Curing Our Slack Addiction - <AUTHOR> https://blog.agilebits.com/2016/04/19/curing-our-slack-addiction/ <comment><USER2> Slack does a good job overall, but I'm glad to see articles like this one challenging the enthusiasm that they've seen of late. I'm starting to share the article's opinion that Slack encourages unthoughtful communication. I do wish the author had spent a little time pointing out some specific product decisions that lead to the kinds of problematic communication they were seeing.

For example, basic product choices like "every message highlights a room for attention" creates, for me, a feeling of "farmville for corporate communications." There's always another channel to click, another few sentences to read. This makes Slack very engaging at first, and makes it highly successful at lodging itself into organizations. And that's great, because Slack's a far sight better than email. But this rapid-fire feel encourages synchronous communications, and everyone quickly learns that @-mentions and DMs get quicker responses. That in turn leads to communicating with individuals instead of teams (or instead of searching issues, or Jira, or a wiki, or whatever). I don't think chat has to be this way; product decisions can encourage a more thoughtful question and answer flow.

I think that Chat may be like product management: the product opinions matter quite a bit, and teams have varying styles, so there's room in the market for several different products. Slack does a great job for a certain communication style, but it's not the only style out there. I hope some competing products with different opinions gain enough traction to keep them honest.

<comment><USER3> I have a hard time agreeing that "Slack's a far sight better than email."

The lack of threading and context (mentioned in AB's writeup) means you have to maintain a lot of state (and keep up to date) in order to get any value. That defeats the point of having automation!

For good or ill, the 40+ year history of mail means there are various tools and conventions that allow your computer to do part of the work _for_ you.

<comment><USER4> I recently disabled threading in my email as I have an unfortunate number of people who regularly : send mail using identical subject lines, reply to whatever my previous email to them was rather than come up with a new subject line or send multiple versions of important documents under the same subject/RE the same message over the course of months. This results in a hideous nightmare of thread spaghetti where I can't find stuff, or worse, I'm looking at the wrong iteration of something. Oh, and did I mention all the people who have MIME attachment email footers so that figuring out which email contains the document they sent means looking through every single mail? [0]

So I flattened it back down to chronological order and it feels like that restored a lot of sanity.

[0] Obviously a lot of this chaos can be tamed with a more aggressive process for inbox management, but that kind of plays into my point, that's all out of process manual work that a better communication tool should help me with.

<comment><USER5> I have seen this among all my friends that aren't that computer knowledgeable.

They just search for an email with the same set of people that they want to sent an email to, choose reply all and change the content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's my best practices list:

1\. The best use of slack is the free edition which has limited history. Once this lack of history is made clear, people use it simply for online pings. Since notes, files and everything will disappear, people will automatically put the effort to put those things in the right tools (wiki, bug tracker etc).

2\. Don't expect people to be online. It's the same as irc. If people are there, they are expecting to be interrupted / they are feeling helpful at that moment.

3\. Integrations.. are a gimmick. There is really no value in knowing someone commented on some github issue _instantly_. Or someone committed something. Use integrations only for firefighting. But because of 2) use this carefull because you shouldn't expect anyone to be around. Paging/sms/email is best for this. After all, these are already used and it's not slack makes these obsolete.

<comment><USER7> I disagree. Twitter integration is great because it gives us a way to have tweets about our brand appear and we can discuss each one if needed.

Munin integration via our bot just alerted us to the Linode DDoS today.

We've created our own bot which recognizes bug ID's and expands the bug with title, description and status and a link. Same with support tickets.

Also our bot can draw cows on demand. Very important that.

<comment><USER8> Twitter-wise, even better is to respond from Slack to tweets in real time with this integration — [https://sameroom.io/integrations/respond-to-twitter-from- sla...](https://sameroom.io/integrations/respond-to-twitter-from-slack) [0]

[0] shameless

<comment><USER7> Thanks for sharing. A channel for every tweet would create a lot of channels for us. We've had a few hundred tweets today. [https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=wordf...](https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=wordfence&src=typd)

In general our workflow is to have 2 people in the org able to reply to tweets. And the rest of us are the peanut gallery just expressing what we think in the channel. So it works better to have it read-only in a single channel - at least for our purposes.

Right now we just see name, username, link and tweet. So it might be useful to unfurl that a little and show number of followers/following and give permissions to specific usernames to reply in-channel. Also create @channel or @username alerts when a twitter user has more than X followers - although I really hate that idea because I've seen people who (I'm pretty sure) buy followers bullying companies on twitter to get VIP treatment - but I guess that could be useful too.

<comment><USER8> It's a channel for every "conversation", not tweet. The benefit here is that you can keep talking to someone without asking them to email email@example.com.

There is usually a window of open channels -- 15 or 40, say, that remain active in parallel. Oldest channels outside the window get auto-archived. You can also favorite directly from Slack with "-sameroom <3".

Only those people who are "on call" will actually see the channels (for details, see [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Cg7LQOVZbkm8tmUyc_yJsp8e...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Cg7LQOVZbkm8tmUyc_yJsp8eKHimWBS3XbaejQL3GCU/edit#))

<comment><USER9> This seems terrible. If much rather people used proper support software like desk for support

<comment><USER10> That is one way of thinking about the world. Another way is to consider _all_ software as support software. The machines are supposed to be there to help us.

There are countless players offering _transactional_ support systems, and just like every other Big Software Vertical, the industry is still re-aligning around "Web 2.0". Desk's primary market distinction is that Salesforce owns them. (That's a huge selling point in the enterprise, but not necessarily interesting to the HN crowd.)

The grandparent post is describing a workflow for more conversational customer interactions. The industry term-of-art for this is something like multi- channel support, but Slack's Big Philosophy is to just be more playful. The "proper software" to use is the software that gets stuff done.

If you get more than two people defining what "proper support software" is, you end up with something like this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMC_Remedy_Action_Request_Syst...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMC_Remedy_Action_Request_System#Applications_using_Action_Request_System)

People just have different workflows. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Off-topic, but: AgileBits is one of my favorite companies ever.

\- Fantastic product

\- … which genuinely helps people

\- … which has evolved and matured in an impeccable manner

\- … which has, as far as I'm aware, never failed critically (no data loss or security breaches – hell, they are so proactive that 1Password saves multiple DB backups for you just in case they eventually mess up)

\- … which sports good and native apps for all major platforms, including icky ones I'm sure the founders don't prefer. (They have this in common with WhatsApp!)

\- Helpful, knowledgeable, and quick support

\- Didn't shut the company down after 2, 3, 4, or 10 years just because they weren't on track to be a billion dollar company in the next few quarters

Whatever culture these guys have? Copy that.

<comment><USER12> On the other hand they've been moving to a subscription model, starting a slow deprecation of the standalone product. Towards this end they've introduced the $5 / month family plan and killed the Mac-only option, while raising the price of the Mac+Windows option. At this point it's worth noting that the Windows client is old and buggy. They did this, as I said, to raise attractiveness of the $5 / month family plan, being the oldest trick in the book: setting an anchor for comparisons.

First of all I find $5 / month to be expensive. Yes, that may be the price of 2 coffees, but if you pay that kind of money for any service/app used, pretty soon you're talking about real money. I also like to own things and I hate renting things, being a terrible tenant. I cannot justify a rent of $60 per year for services/apps unless they are investments producing money. Something like 1Password keeps me safe, but it doesn't make me more productive when programming and it's not helping me with sales either. I can justify subscriptions for Dropbox or IntelliJ IDEA or for keeping my domain active, but not for password storage.

I guess what really bothers me is that 1Password is moving away from the things that made me pick it in the first place: standalone app, Dropbox/Wifi sync, Everywhere interface. I expected them to build the Everywhere interface for opvault, to introduce GDrive/OneDrive sync as an option, to fix their Windows client and maybe to introduce a Linux client. Their new Windows client that's the successor to the old one is a "modern Windows" app distributed through the Windows store, which means I won't even be able to keep running 1Password through Wine.

But there's another reason I prefer standalone apps. With the family/business plans they promise a web interface and they promise that after you are dead your wife or children will be able to access your vault. Of course, if I'm dead, the subscription would end because nobody would realize that they need to renew it in time, so that's an odd point to make. But skipping over that, this means that the vault is now stored on their servers and they have access to it and to your one password whenever you login. If you thought the Dropbox sync was insecure, think again.

So unfortunately they took the bait and decided to spend resources on a subscription model, which is exactly what makes me run away. In the grand scheme of things I guess it makes sense and I hope it works out for them. But along with DRM, trusted computing and the overall trend of bait and switch, I find it to be quite treacherous.

<comment><USER13> > I expected them to build the Everywhere interface for opvault

I realize this may only partially help you, but onepasswordpy ([https://github.com/Roguelazer/onepasswordpy](https://github.com/Roguelazer/onepasswordpy)) has support for both Agilekeychain and the OpVault, if you find yourself on a system that isn't Mac or Windows, or otherwise is a PitA to get to your keychain/vault.

In fairness(?) to Agilebits, the 1Password Anywhere really was just the most bare-bones possible, as it didn't support any of the encrypted items except Login; so no Passwords, Secure Notes, no attachments on anything. Maybe they just figured it wasn't worth the hassle to flesh it out, and then with opvault it became a lower priority than it was before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > We all knew how great it would be to have a repository of knowledge for > people to find their answers, but Slack was simply too good at providing the > quick fix we all needed.

I'm seeing this across numerous open source project communities, and it's really infuriating. B/c these communities are not paying Slack, they don't have access to archives, and of course it's all invisible to Google. So a valuable Q&A that might help thousands of people over many years were in on a public forum winds up helping...the handful of people who were in the channel on the day it happened.

<comment><USER15> Information dropping into a black hole happens in IRC on Freenode all day, every day. The issue isn't just Slack.

<comment><USER16> Many IRC channels are archived and the archives are searchable, so the information is not necessarily lost.

<comment><USER17> Archives are a start, but the problem is most channels are not indexed. There is no "google for irc" of sorts.

Even if the archives are searchable (the searches generally suck in the first place), who's going to know to go into this specific archive, for this specific channel, and search for this particular query?

As someone who was interested in this a few years ago: This is still an open problem for someone to solve. The solution isn't particularly _hard_ , it's just nobody has really gotten to it yet.

(And yes, you may come across the odd irc conversation in your google searches once in a while - but it is not to scale with the immense amount of information that comes _out_ of irc).

<comment><USER18> Every single open source project's IRC channel I've seen is logged and searchable, with a link in the topic.

<comment><USER17> Please re-read my post. Searchable doesn't mean indexed and mass-searchable.

Are you going to know that the problem you are encountering with your bluetooth connection was solved in freenode's #pulseaudio 3 years ago?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have no idea why the answer to this problem is "using Basecamp!" \- That doesn't make sense to me at all. For me the answer has been to turn off notifications and shut Slack when I need to go heads down, but review it multiple times a day and chime in where needed. It's still such a vast improvement over an email or email+issues based workflow.

<comment><USER20> The CEO of a flat company probably has a need to see everything, JIC. Not all use cases are equal.

<comment><USER21> > The CEO of a flat company probably has a need to see everything

And Slack does an excellent job at demonstrating why that is idealistic nonsense and simply bad management that doesn't work, simply by making it possible to actually see almost _everything_.

It's one of the great things about Slack, it's much like Scrum in that respect: it may not be the answer, but it sure as hell will confront you with what the actual questions are.

Unfortunately, people who don't want to face their problems will immediately turn around and blame the tool/method. So very typical.

<comment><USER22> This is exactly the issue. Slack will expose more issues than it will create. If people misuse a tool because of some underlying problems, switching tools will just hide the problems, not solve them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Reading this article was honestly sickening. As I went on I got a growing sense of something horribly wrong with the author/culture of the company. And then these paragraphs all out confirmed my suspicions:

> Slack forced me to evaluate things very fast and respond quickly, otherwise > I would miss my opportunity to join a conversation before it moved onto > something else.

> Then there was the fact that we had so many channels and direct messages and > group chats. It multiplexed my brain and left me in a constant state of > anxiety, feeling that I needed to always be on guard.

> And I had to read everything. I felt that I had no choice as often decisions > would be made in Slack that I needed to know. And in other ways it was > simply an addiction that needed to be fed.

Blaming the tool for this kind of behavior would be comical but for the fact that it's actually scary scary to see someone with this little self awareness. At least he got the "addiction" part right.

Reality check. My company of ~80 people uses Slack (sparingly) as a slightly better alternative to gchat/Skype. We have jira for issues and a wiki for persistent knowledge. No one here likes being interrupted or always being on guard for the next chance to participate in a conversation. So we just don't do it and Slack has yet to force us to.

<comment><USER24> I think I'll stick with email from now on.

<comment><USER25> For what it's worth, last week I asked for help with user testing a couple new features on a startup in three different Slack groups I'm a member of, and also via around 150 cold emails. Response rates were 21x better to the same ask in a cold email versus a Slack message.

And this isn't just a one-off either, I've seen other people report the same thing consistently, where 'conversion' rates in response to even the most basic questions or asks are pretty much zero.

<comment><USER26> Like IRC vs email. #shocker

<comment><USER25> The difference is that with Slack you usually have some sort of common bond with the other people there, in terms of being either members of the same organization or else mutual alumni of some organization.

Because of that it's not immediately obvious that Slack should be no different than just asking a Linux question in some random FreeNode channel or whatever. That's actually a pretty big issue that doesn't bode well for the longterm viability of Slack, if (for example) it turns out that it leads to significantly worse organizational decision-making than email due to lower participation rates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Recently I've seen a lot of anti-Slack articles.

Not once have I heard a colleague criticising Slack. Every startup I know is using it and praising it.

When I work with some people who still use email to coordinate in situations where I usually use Slack, I find it to be maddeningly time-wasting. Email is terrible for group conversation.

It strikes me that there must be some more general for the Slack criticism. Perhaps the hype cycle effect? Or the inevitable fact that at least some companies will use a tool ineffectively, given enough adoption?

To anyone who hasn't already used Slack - I'd recommend a trial, especially if your organisation has a culture of group discussion via email. I've found it to be an excellent tool, particularly when coordinating remotely.

<comment><USER28> I think you don't get the article at all.

Slack is heroin (is the point), it is great to start, and seems great for a while, but for many people it gets worse and worse as time goes by.

You have not answered the point at all.

Obviously many people spend their lives enjoying heroin (with no bad affects)

But for many it's toxic, why are you not just an addict selling something you yet don't understand?

<comment><USER29> [Disclaimer: I work for AgileBits. I also started the #slack-murderer hashtag inside :slack: before we switched over. My opinions are my own. Just ask anyone at AG!]

"Slack is heroin" is pretty accurate. Instant communication (and video games, and Facebook, and Y-Combinator ...) feeds the gratification / pleasure parts of the brain. That's great if one is working on their own time and can enjoy the inevitable crash when everyone else has finally gone to sleep, but when you've got a company full of people flitting around like crazy, because their neurochemistry says they have to "keep up", because "keeping up" is what keeps the brain in a happy mood -- that's a bad thing.

Changing collaboration software won't do a damned thing until teams have a chance to attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The article inspired me, next time I'm on a product team, to pair Slack with the discipline of the Pomodoro technique. If a notification comes in and I need to take a "soft interruption" to check it in the midst of a pomodoro, I'll respond like I would IRL: ask "I'm in the middle of a pomodoro; can I get back to you in 12 minutes?" If yes, write down a task on my to do list and return to it at the end. If no, cancel the pomodoro and reflect on how to improve our process in the future to avoid such costly interruptions.

If enough Slack interruptions happen, it will hopefully become clear that I just need to close the app in the midst of the pomodoro, only opening it on breaks, and even then only to triage to do items for future pomodoros. If not, then simply continue down that path.

The trick would be to get everyone to buy in to protecting their own time to focus. That requires a very disciplined culture indeed. One that values balancing people's ability to create with clearing other people's obstacles and above all else encourages every person to participate fully in the governance of their team.

</comment><comment><USER31> While I understand the motivation to move away from Slack, Basecamp, to me, seems like a worse alternative.

Most of my Basecamp interactions come from the emails that are sent on every thread change. It almost seems to be a proxy between conversation and email, which is counterproductive to its goal.

The key issue in this article is about the lacking of separation of concerns in Slack. I may be missing something, but it seems to be diametrically opposed to Slack's "always-on" structure. I would argue that Basecamp tends to devalue workplace communication through impersonal Basecamp-templated emails which often hide the original sender and thus any sense of urgency that would otherwise be generated. We have so many fantastic tools, but often email seems to be the unsung, yet essential, hopper for all of our notifications. For workplace communication and general project discussion, just email (under the right direction and guidelines - along with supplemental direct chat) strikes the perfect balance between urgency (or lack thereof), the ability to compartmentalize, and personal touch, without interfering directly with work by breaking concentration.

<comment><USER32> The new version of Basecamp is pretty smart about notifications. If you have the site open, it doesn't send you a ton of email. It also has something to disable notifications during certain times of the day and catch you up later (probably in one longer email.)

Sadly, some people need those emails to keep using the tool everyone else is using directly. I wish it wasn't like that.

</comment></comment><comment> awinter-py Chat is toxic to productivity. Teams need to get questions answered 'eventually' (exactly when depends on the team) without interrupting each other.

<comment><USER33> Except sometimes you're blocked on something and need to know the answer _now_ to finish a task. If you switch to something else while waiting for a 2 minute answer, you end up wasting a lot of your time.

<comment> awinter-py Interruptions are sometimes time-savers for the interruptor but they're costly to the interuptee.

Some problems are important and merit an interruption, yes. But if you build a culture around instant communication, your worst people will drag down your best people.

The default should be digest mode (and god help me because my 50 year-old desk-neighbor said that to me 2 years ago and at the time I thought 'man this is an old human being').

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> You have to think of slack channels as coworking place and meeting rooms.

You need to live mainly in one channel (the equivalent of the physical open office), and go to the other channels when called in, or when you have a bit of down time to check what's going on there. Like the buildings where we used to work, you do not need to visit every room.

<comment><USER35> I guess the hard part is the self policing the author mentioned.

At my employer we are having the same situation. Some ppl are at the point they check Slack 3 times a day, come in, lunch, before end of day.

<comment><USER36> Self policing doesn't help if other people are making decisions in Slack when you're not online.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I really do not get this hype around Slack.

Chat, group chat, video conferencing are nothing special. These applications are commodities and included with so many other apps. Eg. if you use Google Apps/Mail you get the fantastic Hangout for free, working on all devices.

Moreover, every time I login Slack it feels so crowded. If you want to change something you have to navigate through a forest of settings here and there.

Finally, chatting and being messaged is the best thing to get out of flow and to get ADD. Messaging is great, group messaging too but use it rather for important stuff.

<comment><USER38> Slack is IRC with history. That's it. If IRC had history built in, Slack would never exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> The lack of threading is what really kills the usefulness of Slack. This is why we settled on Flowdock in our company.

If you don't have threading, you lose the one best feature of those new chat solutions, the single advantage they have over decades-old IRC: conversations at least slightly detached from time. On Slack, you have to _be there_ all the time in order not to miss things or to participate in just about any conversation. If you aren't, soon it will be too late and no one will know what you're replying to.

As for other advantages, I noticed that one of the biggest uses is file exchange. If there was another simple way to just drag&drop a file somewhere and have people access it, those chat apps would see less use. But there isn't.

I haven't seen the bad effects in our company. Perhaps they occur at larger company sizes.

<comment><USER40> Am I the only one who regrest the demise of nntp and good news readers? Threading was great, and I found it very efficient to get through a lot of stuff.

With the switch to html based forums, my personal efficiency plummeted. But I went where the good conversations were.

Strikes me that the reported issues with Slack are just the next generation...

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I can imagine this same article being written many years ago when email first became ubiquitous in the workplace.

I worked at a large company where seemingly every day we would get several "someone has left the lights on in their blue Honda" type emails sent to everyone in the company.

Thankfully now I work in a small one without a carpark.

<comment><USER42> I appreciate the idea of resolving a communication issue by removing a parking structure and, if that doesn't work, removing the rest of the company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I agree with many of the problems, but quite a few are actually advantages! The biggest misconception I see here is that you try to change other's behaviour instead of your own.

E.g. if there are decisions made without you, let them. Offline there are also many conversations and decisions you are not a part of just because you were so unlucky that you haven't been there at the time. But in an offline or private-chat conversation you can't look up afterwards what each person said exactly, you have to rely on hear-say. So in fact if you accept that decisions are made without your participation (it's called "trust in your team") then using a good chat tool is an advantage.

E.g. 2: People don't use your QnA software or wiki and instead use chat. Maybe instead of convincing them to use the other tools you can learn and teach others how to use the search function of the chat efficiently. You may find that you don't need a QnA software when all the questions and answers are searchable in the chat software. Here you can safe the cost (money, admin, learning time for new guys) of one software.

E.g.3: You want tickets and tickets are really important to link activity like commits. I'm not sure but I would assume that it's possible to find a chatbot which creates tickets for you from your chattool, writes comments to them and gives you back the ticket-id to use it in your commits. Then you also have a kind of log for how a discussion and the creation of a ticket where interlinked with each other, because you see the 'hubot create ticket "debug problem"' in the middle of a conversation happening. More context for free.

To change others the first thing we need to do is change us, and that is admittedly even harder.

</comment><comment><USER44> > And the notifications are to die for. They are simply amazing and fun to > receive.

This is where the article lost me. How are Slack notifications different from those in other services? I'm just not getting it.

To me, this is an example of somebody wanting to love something.

<comment><USER45> In my experience comparing Slack vs HipChat (limited experience, but still), Slack's notifications were more reliable. As in, Slack was smarter about figuring out when I'd locked my laptop, or the screensaver had activated, and then it would re-route notifications to my phone. It does this pretty flawlessly, compared to HipChat that would mess it up sometimes (and so we were never quite sure whether to trust it).

<comment><USER44> OK, that clears things up a bit. I don't use Slack on mobile, only the desktop app on Mac.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It sounds like a signal to noise ratio problem. The problem is that there wasn't a sound way to filter noise (multiple channels failed) so they were forced to deal with all the noise to make sure they didn't miss anything relevant.

The constant policing they mention at the end was probably enough overhead for them to consider alternatives, though I don't understand what they mean with this quote: "Furthermore, Slack was not designed for the deep, meaningful conversations that are needed to move 1Password forward."

On the surface, it sounds like a people/culture problem, but I'm sure there were other factors at AgileBits that contributed.

</comment><comment><USER47> I think the key takeaway is this:

 _And even if we had been successful in changing people's behaviour, the lack of threading made it very difficult to have meaningful, deep conversations about complex subjects anyway. Before you could even fully understand the problem being discussed (let alone find a solution), someone would invariably start a new conversation or reply to a previous discussion that happened earlier in the channel._

Threaded, asynchronous discussions with notifications when someone actually replied to _your_ message are much more useful.

And they can also be freaking decentralized and end-to-end encrypted! Woot!

I am building something like this. Anything like that exist?

<comment><USER48> What you're describing is called email. Seriously - it is exactly this, right?

<comment><USER49> I've always wondered about the viability of an email client that behaves like a chat client. Instant send with the enter key, messages in bubbles, etc. You get all the fun of IM without additional infrastructure or services, and in a standard way too. No walled gardens of different apps.

<comment><USER50> Could be a pretty cool UI solution to have a chat client that uses PGP encrypted e-mail in the background, but Gmail SMTP has a send limit of 100 e-mails per day. You would run into that rather quickly with a chat UI.

I guess the chat client could do all the e-mail sending from some of their maintainer e-mail servers and not from under the chat participant e-mail. Then we would start losing comaptibility with other e-mail clients though. Although not completely, as we could set Reply-To headers and when another e-mail client replies to firstname.lastname@example.com, we could just forward it to the correct e-mail.

An interesting concept indeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Our private xmpp server logs everything into static HTML pages. This is useful for compliance with legal things, but also for turning q&a sessions into wiki documents -- cut, paste, a little editing and you're done.

It's also, you know, private.

</comment><comment><USER52> Wow really surprised to hear they broke up with Slack. It seemed like a very good long explanation of the problem, basically no mention of any attempt to fix the problem, and then dropping the tool. We are deep into Slack and still liking it, but seeing some strain. This really rings true: "some of the most positive and uplifting individuals I know come off as curt and stressed and pissed off in Slack conversations."

<comment><USER53> tht makes no sense, every1 i kno is rlly good at xpressing their emotions in txt

For real though, it's amazing what core parts of human interaction people will try to replace with an app. People need to understand what they're really giving up with face-to-face or verbal communication.. thousands of years of highly developed body language, tone, etc.

<comment><USER54> It depends a lot on the person for me. Some people are very good at conveying (and understanding) nuanced emotion in text, especially if they're people you've conversed with a lot in text already. Others are better in person, in videochat, or even on the phone (though some, like me, are particularly bad at phone). A few people I know are significantly better to converse with in text chat than in person, because they're much more fluent, confident, and open in text, and comparatively not as good at expressing themselves in face-to-face chats, stumbling over words and being more stressed and self-conscious.

In personal life, I find the people I'm closest to are people I talk to quite a bit through both modalities. We have different types of conversation in text chat compared to irl chat, which end up being complementary in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I think for a team work effectively you need differentt tools - Slack for instant communication, Basecamp for tracking project status, Trello for organising work flow and etc. It is impossible to have a tool that fits all your needs.

</comment><comment><USER56> I was previously working in a company that used Flowdock[0]. Current place uses Slack and I've noticed that there are multiple things bothering me.

Biggest complain for me is that the Slack UI gives too much weight on the fact that someone has talked on a channel. This makes me feel like I should be reading that, even though it might not have anything to do with me. This creates a whack-a-mole situation where I end up constantly jumping between all channels so that I wont miss anything.

Another thing that I really liked on Flowdock was that discussions had separate threads. Especially on channels that weren't your main focus but instead you were invited to in order to discuss some specific thing you could follow just the discussion about that thing and everything else can be filtered away. This also makes it easy to know what any comment is about, since you can easily read the whole discussion thread without having to skim through the whole channel. This works great even if the messages have days or weeks between them. (Instead of having just the direct mention as a point of interest you end up following the thread that you were mentioned on and you might keep following it for longer time, even after the highlight is weeks old)

There was a major annoyance with Flowdock as well. At least when I was using it there wasn't a search that covered all channels. You had to either know what channel the thing you were searching on had happened or you had to one by one go through all channels and do a search on each one of them separately.

Main point here is that Slack fails to keep my attention on the things that are relevant to me and instead seems to suggest that everything is critical to me. This makes it feel like addiction instead of a tool that would be useful all the time.

[0] [https://www.flowdock.com/](https://www.flowdock.com/)

<comment><USER57> I also like that Flowdock splits into two panes, with one pane for notifications about things like Pivotal Tracker, Github commits, etc. It was a better way to separate noisy but occasionally useful notifications from the more important conversations than having separate channels. I wish Slack would implement something like this (separate pane for "Bot" users).

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> > For many months myself and a few others have been trying to make Slack work > for us. We would be the bad cops and point out people's bad behaviour and > suggest alternatives.

> When someone would report an issue in Slack, we'd point out the appropriate > JIRA or GitHub project where that should be reported.

This got me thinking: Part of the problem is that the attention of others is a commons -- a vast wealth that we each have an interest in extracting from, but which takes a toll collectively.

Perhaps there's a way to internalize for a "consumer of attention" their attention-cost externality. So if certain people are extracting too much from the commons in the form of "@person" and "@everyone/@channel" messages, perhaps a bot could randomly ping them with noise messages in proportion to their attention-grabbing actions, to make them feel some of that pain and adjust accordingly without policing :)

</comment><comment><USER52> I'm wondering if Slack will ever implement something like Sococo or teamspeak's always-on voice chat. If you have not seen these it's quite a weird idea. If you are in the channel your speakers are always-on. Someone can speak to you without dialing and without you answering. They can simply say "Hey Fred..." and start talking.

I have not worked with these, but did try Sococo briefly. The way this would work in slack is you could opt-in to voice on a certain channel for collaboration intensive work. Might be a horrible idea I'm not sure.

I guess you could use /call this way? Hmmm... didn't think of that.

<comment><USER59> Discord is a bit like Slack but focused on voice chat for the gaming community. It has voice rooms that work as you describe. [https://discordapp.com/](https://discordapp.com/)

<comment><USER60> > a bit like Slack

The UX and general usage is so similar (in my eyes), I actually assumed it was a spinoff from the same company for a good while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> My last 2 companies used slack. I thought it was amazing. After being at a company that doesn't use slack, I realized how terrible it was for productivity and also gossip.

</comment><comment><USER62> I love electronic communication and Slack in particular. For a distributed team, it's an absolute must that every important chat happen on Slack. Stuff spoken in person is imprecise, secretive and easily forgotten. Slack is clear, persistent, and public. Everyone is on the same page. I too feel the need to read every conversation, but compare that to having those conversations just happening without my knowledge.

The solution to this guy's problems are to chill out.

<comment><USER49> >Stuff spoken in person is imprecise, secretive and easily forgotten. Slack is clear, persistent, and public.

I don't get how verbal stuff is imprecise but slack is clear. I find it to be the opposite. It's much better to have a face-to-face chat or a voice chat than converse in writing. It's more clear and you can get more feedback from the other person. Also, if you need to be more precise, you can just write stuff on a board/notepad/chat while talking.

<comment><USER63> When you talk to people, they're more likely to support their assertions by citing sources with precision than when they write? Really? When I talk to people, I get a lot of "I read somewhere that X is true" and "I heard from someone that Y is true". And when I request sources, they say they'll get back to me, but they rarely do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I'm confused, I never used basecamp. Are slack and basecamp direct competitors? Isn't basecamp primarily a project management software like Jira/Redmine?!

<comment><USER65> Basecamp includes chat, plus message boards for conversations on a specific topic and pings for 1 on 1 private communications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> "Slack as the new email" is spot on. And the article identifies it too.

The problem isn't the tool. The problem is people. Giving people more and better ways to communicate creates more noise, not necessarily more signal.

Constraining communication to channels that only allow signal feels bureaucratic (complete form 31/b to request new business cards and send to purchasing no later than the second week of the month).

There's a happy medium (pun intended) somewhere between the two.

<comment><USER67> Slack is the new telephone but it's treated like email. Conversations are ephemeral, synchronous and the worst of all they can easily interrupt you.

<comment><USER66> Good point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Slack is planning to release threaded conversations later this year [1], so maybe this will answer some of the criticism on this post.

[1] [http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11418594/slack-threaded- me...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11418594/slack-threaded-messaging- chat-app-feature)

</comment><comment><USER69> Email communication, slow, initiator feels ignored.

Slack/chat communication, instant, receiver feels overwhelmed.

The problem is not email or slack, it's the method in which we communicate. We need to make sure we use the right tools, as the author mentioned, knowledge bases, email, chat etc at the appropriate times.

The problem is not Slack per say, it's using Slack for all communications.

<comment><USER70> Yep, a lot of these issues the OP reports can be resolved by, as a team, discussing how you communicate and what is a priority. That team seems to be lacking clear expectations. Oddly enough, that is a failure to communicate.

If someone does an @here or @channel or even an @person notify for a simple question that is not urgent, that is rude. Non-urgent issues should go in the channels and the person can respond when they get time, or e-mail it to indicate it's not a priority.

I really like Slack, but I do agree that it's easy to get carried away with notifications and integrations and it becomes a lot of noise. But most of these issues can be resolved by talking as a team about how the tools should be used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Interesting read, will have to see how it turned out (in case you guys move back to Slack :D). Although, I'm not sure changing tools is the right answer, it sounds like you guys had everything you wanted and more. Why not modify Slack to your liking and not change tools entirely, this eliminates the need to learn a whole new set of tools to do the same work.

<comment><USER72> I think the point is to completely go cold turkey with the tool they know is good and tackle the problem with something they are unfamiliar with, disrupting existing habits. It sounds like they reached the point where modifying Slack (or more importantly, their communication habits) would just result in sliding back to the old ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> one day in our office slack was down from like 11:50am to 1:10 pm and it was perfect. It was like a big sign lit up in the office that said "TALK TO PEOPLE". Everyone took a much needed slack break and got lunch. Maybe the admin of a slack network should be able to enable that timeframe to be off everyday.

<comment><USER74> Slack admin can set a team wide do not disturb period. Users can override if they wish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> We use jabber in my office, and it's definitely higher friction than slack; this made me think of it as at least slightly a positive for the first time. We also have a wiki, and a searchable database for topical mailing lists, and those get used a lot.

If someone has to send me an IM to get an answer to something about our product, and I can't link the answer to them by just searching our wiki (or documentation if it's user-visible), then I file a note to add it.

I haven't ever felt the need to berate someone for asking me about easy to find information, because someone who isn't at least slightly embarrassed to have their question answered by a link to a resource they could have found on their own in under 30 seconds is probably going to have enough problems in other areas.

</comment><comment><USER76> Why has SMTP evolved in all those years?

Email could handle much more automation, and be friendlier to on-demand inclusion in discussion threads, but AFAIK, it doesn't support a standard way to provide:

1\. End-user controlled behaviour.

2\. Whole-thread forwarding initiated by the end-user.

#1 would require a way to allow stantard plugins to be written, either by sysadmin or end-users. (Obviously, the capability and authorization of each would be different. End-user ones would only be allowed to touch end-user own emails.)

#2 would allow easier evolution of email threads.

I'm not talking about proprietary extensions to a particular SMTP implementation. I'm talking a standardized protocol addition to support these scenarios.

Am I missing something? Were changes to SMTP ever attempted?

<comment><USER77> > Why hasn't SMTP evolved in all those years?

Real answer: A duopoly in the email space give two-three companies too much power over SMTP and email in general (and they have no interest in changing it, IE 6 style).

These companies? Microsoft (Exchange, Hotmail/Outlook.com), Google (Gmail, Google Apps, Google Apps for Education), and Yahoo! (Yahoo! Mail).

If these "big three" don't want to support something then it doesn't exist. If they do want to support something then you're adding it to your SMTP/mail server stack regardless of how much you wish to.

Now, I know what you're going to say "what about Sendmail, Postfix, and other SMTP daemons?" But these open source email daemons are very beholden to what the "big three" do. If your SMTP daemon doesn't work with their servers then it is effectively broken and nobody will run it.

The reality is that the SOURCE of almost all non-automated email on the internet comes from these big three (Exchange shouldn't be under-estimated in this context).

So that's why, we're in an IE 6 situation all over again, but this time Google and Yahoo! are also playing gatekeeper in addition to Microsoft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is incredibly timely for me. We have grown from a team of 2 to a team of 18 in the past year, we're all remote and we literally huddle around Slack and warm ourselves to it's glow from morning till night. It's the core of our company culture and our comms.

I think Dave (the author and founder of 1password) is feeling the same thing I'm feeling as a CEO. It's a kind of weird anxiety that creeps up on you as the company scales and you feel like you're always-on from the moment you open your eyes to the moment you close them at night. I think it's a symptom of a virtual office and team. A real office on the other hand would provide that very real sense of driving home in the evening that gives you a very solid separation from work, the team, the opportunities and the issues.

To be clear: I'll never go back to a physical office, both for my own benefit and that of my team's.

I became aware of this problem with being always-on recently. I also started giving rather short unvarnished answers to questions on Slack and I realized something had changed. I've put it down to having no sense of quiet time. I don't mean not having any 'quiet time' but having no 'sense of quiet time' because someone might have messaged me. So even if I set myself to away, I'm still checking in just in case I dropped the ball because someone is waiting for a reply.

I've changed two things so far to try and fix this:

\- Taking long walks (in addition to my regular bike rides) with Slack off. \- I still code, so I turn Slack off and set my alarm for 1.5 hours from now or whenever I need to be back on. Then turn Slack off.

Things I'm considering:

\- Banning Slack after a certain time at night (for me personally). Perhaps 8pm. \- Banning Slack for myself until I'm "on" in the mornings.

Being a remote team I see Slack as absolutely essential and I don't think we could do without it. We are very productive via slack and we share music, jokes, news, ideas for blog posts and many other things via Slack. We also do our voice calls via Slack and we don't use video on purpose because it's distracting. So for us, Slack won't go away any time soon. I think if you can manage it, it's an amazing team platform.

On a broader note: I think digital addiction is a real problem. I think it's subtle and it involves checking the same thing more than 20 times a day in a non-productive obsessive way. Think Facebook, Reddit, Hacker News, hitting refresh on a SaaS thing that gives you a quick endorphin or adrenaline rush and of course Slack. I think the symptoms are subtle, the behavior is widely accepted as normal and it's destructive in several ways.

So I think it's important to develop a discipline that allows us to exist online safely, productively and in good health. I think what this discipline is is just beginning to emerge in our culture because the problem of digital addiction and being always-on is only beginning to be recognized.

~mark.

<comment><USER7> Posting an update on this for anyone else in a growing org using Slack: Our team chatted today and decided to keep using Slack because it's awesome for remote teams and our needs. It works well for us. What we are doing now though is to us the 'Snooze' function which lets you set it on a timer. Then when someone msgs you they are told that you're in snooze mode and given the option to 'break through' the snooze and alert you anyway. We've agreed we'll only do that if it's urgent.

I think this will work well and probably scale well too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Completely agree with @mmaunder comment on setting time for checking slack and not using it other times. No matter what tool be it outlook or blackberry, you need to set timing for the communication and collaboration. For the people who have collaboration/communication as not a primary job like developers/designer/engineer etc..

Also it is completely unacceptable to call this checking a tool beyond your shift/work a culture and it is indeed a bad practice setup by lead/ceo to keep everyone working all the time. The companies pay you for your time, so unless u get paid extra allowance to check these tools after hours please do not do it. For emergencies situation let people SMS and if no response in 15 minutes then call and that too have roaster who will be on call in which week or month.

It is a job of the leader/manager to ensure people have work life balance and they should setup internal polices and procedure to ensure people don't get to appreciate the one who is always on rather the ones who contribute with in the work hours. The management should make a culture of people talking about it so that it does not become forceful as people start doing this always on and others fear that they would be considered contributing less if they don't be online hence everyone stays on line for no reason.

For a company like 1Password there is absolutely no reason to be online all the time except for the support folks(and they too with in thier shift and have enough people to cover 24/7) and dev's can be engaged on call as required. All they need is setup couple of core hours every body is online to communicate and status update. Even geo diverse teams you can have core hours that ensure everyone is online for about 1 hour or 2 at the same for each team , if it is absolutely necessary.

I wish startup ceo's understand this and account that 8 hours a day is what person can reasonably put in work and if you need more hours it is going to cost business and that is part of the budgeting process. If you can't afford that then you are not yet ready to start the startup or do it it yourself. For god sake it is 21st century and if you are going to change the world first change your mindset and change the your company and make it a first class and make it 22nd century company where employees are not exploited because they can be(in the name passion, happiness, blah blah blah).

</comment><comment><USER79> I still try to understand what Slack is that IRC isn't. At the moment I'm in the "someone managed to make money out of copying IRC"-phase including copying all the problems/pain points of IRC according to this article and comments here so far (highlighting, channel inflation, multiple conversations in one channel at the same time overlap ..) - what do I miss?

<comment><USER80> I don't use Slack, but perhaps people prefer its UX?

<comment><USER81> IRC is a protocol, it has nothing to do with UX... You can tack IRC on top of a pretty client and you can get pretty similar results I'd assume.

DISCLAIMER: I never used Slack.

<comment><USER82> UX != UI

Simple example: with Slack (or another hosted, web-based chat app), I can invite the non-technical head of sales to join it via e-mail, and they can. They literally cannot install an IRC client.

I can get similar results, but "I" isn't enough for a communication tool to be useful.

<comment><USER81> Why can't you do it through the web interface of a company-backed IRC network? There's literally no difference there, IRC is just a protocol, you can still wrap around your own local stack with registration, email notification, fancy UI (I know UI != UX) and auto-invite system or whatnot.

I just don't get it...

<comment><USER83> "you can still wrap around your own local stack with registration, email notification, fancy UI (I know UI != UX) and auto-invite system or whatnot"

Or pay someone to do that and maintain it for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> This article was much more focused than the "Slack, I'm breaking up with you" artucke posted to HN a few weeks ago: [https://medium.com/better-people/slack- i-m-breaking-up-with-...](https://medium.com/better-people/slack-i-m-breaking- up-with-you-54600ace03ea#.p9r9cj57s)

</comment><comment><USER85> I've seen teams rely only on Slack for communication, including technical discussions.

I don't get it, and I'm concerned about the following:

1\. proprietary service with no interoperability and high potential for loss of records

2\. important technical details/arguments hidden in a chat log and not made part of a ticket/commit/comment

3\. removal of async communication leading to more interruptions and less async emails one has thought about before responding

4\. teams boasting the use of 10 or more channels

There are other issues with relying solely on Slack and killing off email, but these are the most important ones that always come up when I'm confronted with a Slack-only team.

I've had the same issue with IRC, so it's not my kind of communication medium to monitor 24/7, whereas I love bulk responding to emails and often ponder about a response for a while.

If there's something urgent, one picks up the phone, and usually one thinks twice before calling (interrupting) someone.

Using proper email threads, ticket discussions, etc. give you an electronic trail of the technical decision, and that's also why Fossil's inclusion of a distributed ticket system is such a great idea. Two years later, you can easily inspect how the code evolved and why it did in a certain way.

How do dev teams cope with Slack? I couldn't work without async email and use real time communications (text or voice) only on demand, in order to limit interruptions.

</comment><comment><USER86> Why not IRC, Jitsi, Jira and a wiki.

IRC for chitchat / asking questions (PMs and highlights so there's no immediate need to respond)

Jitsi / IRC for meetings or small team collaboration.

Jira for bugs

Wiki for documenting design decisions and future work

<comment><USER87> IRC for chitchat and a issue tracker are great. I agree.

I prefer Etherpad for meetings, especially for virtual meetings. It includes a simple chat, but I never used that. [http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/meeting.html](http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/meeting.html)

A wiki is ok for meetings minutes, but I prefer documents now. Wikis always seem to deteriorate to the point of uselessness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> Why can't you just search your Slack for answers to old questions? Isn't that supposed to be part of the point? I've heard that's one of the main selling points.

</comment><comment><USER89> Makes me think that something like Discourse should be used for all non- ephemeral communication.

<comment><USER90> Have the same thought as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> Imagine all of these comments in a flat, linear wall of text. Threads++

<comment><USER92> Slack != commenting system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> tldr: a better hammer is a better hammer, not a replacement for your whole tool chest.

</comment><comment><USER94> My understanding: free CI runners for everybody, 10 USD promo code to new users. Considering that DigitalOcean has always been giving away 10 USD coupons to non-users, the promo code is quite irrelevant. But the free CI runners are great!

<comment><USER95> Wrong article.

<comment><USER94> Woops. I thought I was on the DigitalOcean / GitLab one. Sorry.</comment></comment></comment>


Canadian Man Arrested After Flying Lawn Chair with Helium Balloons - <AUTHOR> http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/canadian-man-arrested-flying-lawn-chair-helium-balloons/story?id=32257507

<comment><USER2> Zee Captain is not going to be amused.

(-> [http://rom.ac/](http://rom.ac/) \- I do not remember which episode it was, though. It's worth reading end to end, anyway.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Noooo! All that wasted helium!</comment>


Techies can help line up low-cost tickets (TicketStumbler - YC summer 08) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bostonherald.com/business/technology/general/view/2008_08_26_Techies_can_help_line_up_low-cost_tickets

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure why they gave Tom lipstick. Maybe it was drag night at the Herald office or maybe it was his desktop background or maybe they didn't like my fail whale t-shirt or Reddit Alien bobble head that we tried to have in the background.

If you have a chance, please leave a comment (you have to sign up, but it's super quick). Thanks guys!

<comment><USER2> nice job on this!

any intention of supporting music events, or will this site remain strictly sporting? would love to find an ACL ticket for cheap. :)

<comment><USER3> Adding concerts to TicketStumbler will be huge. I have always hated trying to find concert tickets on Ticketmaster.

Another problems I've always found with concert tickets is that as soon as you get away from the mainstream, tickets are difficult to find. Sometimes you have to purchase them in person at some obscure shop, which is very inconvenient, especially if you're coming from out of town.

<comment><USER4> Hey Omakase, if you've had trouble finding tickets check out Songkick. We've built the largest database (over 20 ticket vendors now) of ticketed concerts in the world so hopefully can help.

<comment><USER3> Hey Ian -- I've used Songkick before, the itunes plugin is a brilliant idea and I like seeing your widget on all the music blogs I read.

Unfortunately, most of the time the shows I'm interested in only show up on very niche forums -- but services like Songkick are definitely making things easier than they were four years ago.

<comment><USER4> hey man i'm sorry to hear we've missed some of the stuff you go to. it's a big priority for us to go right to the very end of the tail.

we have though got pretty much every ticketed concert in the UK and US listed so would love to see examples of stuff we're missing when you come across them (ian at our domain).

<comment><USER5> Keep at it & get down under. We like music too & we can't find it ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> He looks like he's offering a ticket for some lovin'! How kissable he looks...

<comment><AUTHOR> You should have seen him with the Irish girls last night.

<comment><USER7> pics or it didn't happen.

</reddit></comment></comment></comment>