Slac‪k‬ 4+

Using slack is easy, it’s convenient and I recommend it. The ONE thing that I wish were different is the DMs. I’m in THREE separate workspaces with overlapping members in the group. Sending a DM to one person in one workspace means not seeing the private message thread when sending a DM to the SAME person in another workspace. We have a workspace for the village in which our Burning Man camp lives to communicate with the village leads. We have a camp message to chat amongst us as camp members. Some of us in that camp are involved in an art project that includes other people. There’s no good way to keep up the DMs with the people who also are in my same workspaces across all the workspace. As you can imagine, DMs are usually OT and all over. This is the one thing that could use a tweek, IMO.

Look, I love/d Slack. I’ve been using it as my internal business communication tool for the past five years. I’ve also noticed in those past five years, Slack has barely innovated and as of recently, especially during 2020 when most applications like zoom, Google meet, and Microsoft teams have been booming with innovation in new ways of interacting in this new work from home work life. Now with the acquisition from salesforce, I truly feel like Slack is going to go down the drain and what was once the industry leader in communication has sat back on the couch, slacking, watching everybody else move forward. As of today, we are looking into other platforms outside of Slack due to the lack of innovation and buy out from sales force. An example of what I think is easy innovative feedback, we’ve been asking for voice clips to send both privately and in channels up to 2 to 5 minutes long so managers can leave a status update or important message or daily briefing first thing in the morning without having to type it all out and can do it on the go; nothing. It was nice while it lasted, slack. 👋

Overall the app works quite well. Some things are big misses for me though, especially notifications. Putting a lot of detail in hopes it is read by developers as I do want to love the app.

Searching for users when trying to start a DM doesn’t prioritize users you’ve talked to before. I work at a company with thousands of employees, so if I search for someone with a common first name and I don’t know their last name, I have to go through a list of 30 people when I’ve talked to them before and I’d expect them to just come up first.

Messages you read on web or on the app don’t dismiss notifications. I have to go dismiss them all one at a time even though the app should know I’ve read them. Big failing for me compared to something like FB messenger which will know to clear them.

There are no different snooze settings for different days of the week. I don’t work 7 days a week. Why would I want the same snooze settings?

There is no granularity on getting alerts for channels besides give me everything all the time, and give me nothing. If a conversation is happening I want to know about it, but I also don’t want my phone to completely blow up with 50 notifications beeping at me in 10 minutes. It would be much less distracting / annoying to group the messages and notify on configurable intervals

Lastly, if I get a message while snoozed I am not told about it once the snooze ends. This can lead to me not noticing a message for days