Fully agree. And this is actually a well known fact. People following the rules perfectly as seen as losers in business. You are expected to break the ice with a more personal non textbook approach and therefore showing you are "street smart".
I really believe that books should be mostly free and people should//would pay based on usefulness. I will gladly donate 200$ for a book that helped me. I would also never have bought that same book if it was 10$ to start with.
I'm able to hold any book online so as soon as I hear about a book I place a hold on it. They have most books even new ones and if not I can request it for free through all libraries in North California.
I stop by the library once a week and pick up all the holds of that week (typically 3-4). I love to have the physical medium around.
I typically renew my loans 2 or 3 times and as such I keep the books close to 3 months. It allows me to fully read the ones I find interesting and just go over quickly the ones I don't care about.
Once a month I bring back all the books I got.
And all of this is completely free. I love my local libraries and cannot believe it took me that long to find out about this wonderful service.
From now on I go out of my way to never buy a single book again and avoid all DRM and other nonsensical digital medias like that.
I'm crossing my fingers that this pseudo crypto money never takes off. Having Facebook control this would be so terrible and the proof that we didn't learn anything over the last couple months. Don't fool yourself even though they released a white paper and some pseudo decentralized schemes this is no different than a casino chip.
Unfortunately I feel like it might pick up and become a thing.
That's the way they marketed it. They know they had to do this little concession in order to get Libra to pick up so that people would repeat tirelessly that it's not controller by Facebook and therefore it's good.
But it's controlled by Facebook and friends and the influence they would get over any decision is absolutely huge
Do you have any citations that contradict the article?
The Validators
Who, then, are the validators? Well, Facebook is one, but only one: currently there are 28 “Founding Members”, including merchants, venture capitalists, and payment networks, that meet two of the following three criteria:
More than $1 billion USD in market value or more than $500 million USD in customer cash flow
Reach more than 20 million people a year
Recognition as a top-100 industry leader by a third-party association such as Fortune or S&P
These “Founding Members” are required to make a minimum investment of $10 million and provide computing power to the network. In addition, there are separate requirements for non-profit organizations and academic institutions that rely on a mixture of budget, track record, and rankings; a minimum investment may not be necessary. Libra intends to have 100 Founding Members by the time it launches next year.
They are the ones selecting the "members" and they will have a huge influence on any updates or any controversial topic or potential fork.
Don't fool yourself, this whole thing has been carefully orchestrated to look like if it was an open community but it is very tightly controlled by Facebook and friends.
Again, that’s not what the article says. They have clear list for what the membership requirements are and all of those requirements are administered by a third party.
I've dabbled out of morbid curiosity in the space previously—but I'm in the same boat.
Out of all of the good-will projects they could spearhead if they want to turn the tides of FB's reputation, they decide to try and supplant money. To me it just screams that it's one more domain they want to assert some control in.
Local police departments very often have social media presence
After that you have people you know will be available to come to where you are, email or im
After that you have people you know will answer like your manager, the front desk at work, even filing a support ticket at work, the whole goal being getting the attention of someone who knows you
Congratulation to them. I think what they did is absolutely amazing and will be seen retrospectively as one of the biggest fads of history.
- They managed to disturb millions of worker to an attention-driven work culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate.
- They managed to change chat from a set of open protocols to a single closed app terribly written in JS.
- They managed to make a lot of people absolute convinced advocate of Slack so that a lot of hyped startups have now to use Slack de facto or risk mutiny and have people create Slack channels on behalf of the company without any oversight.
So yeah I don't blame them but I blame every company that falls for this. I'm convinced that we will see Slack retrospectively as something that destroyed productivity.
I will agree that Slack can be useful when used correctly but I never saw a place that used it without it becoming that "attention driven" growing monster.
I see this complaint a lot, and I'm very sensitive to dopamine addiction myself so perhaps a few of my tips can help someone else make Slack less frustrating:
1. use /mute judiciously. especially on the main chats. only unmute important "#500" style channels. People immediately learn to @you when relevant.
2. disable notifications for everything on mobile: DMs, @here, @channel, @yourname, anything. No notifications whatsoever.
3. Put "Notifications disabled -- in case of emergency, please call me: <phone nr here>" in your status. I've had one person call me ever and it was completely justified. He saw the status, called me and said, "sorry I'm calling but it's an emergency and your status said to call." Great.
4. Disable all notifications on your desktop app, as well. On Mac OS X, don't even have the red app button show up for unread messages. Just check Slack once an hour (or what you want) and deal with any DMs / @mentions / outstanding chat. In reality, you'll automatically check whenever you have mental downtime, or during a conversation. This just allows you to stay in the zone when you are.
This has significantly reduced my Slack-stress. I enjoy it far better now, on my terms.
Most importantly: if someone is frustrated by your poor response time, explain! "I'm very bad with distractions, I need this to cope. If it's an emergency, please call :)". People are good people, they understand.
> They managed to disturb millions of worker to an "attention driven" work culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate.
I see where you're coming from. But anecdote time.
The immediate communication fixed something for us which would previously be a more disruptive tap on the shoulder, or alternatively an only once a day processed e-mail.
Slack gave our devs time to finish their thought, write out that line of code, before tabbing to Slack to see what's up.
Because you see, I love my team, but they're not perfect. Just like the vast majority of people they're imperfect beings working with imperfect information.
And in order to get them to output quality code (as in, does what it needs to do, bug free, without incorrect assumptions about data) they need to communicate to each other and me.
We can't wait until a PR to catch they didn't fully understand these data models setup by another guy.
Nor can we wait until a PR to realize someone took the wrong approach trying to fix a problem.
Someone getting disrupted might mean someone else can progress with their task.
What I'm trying to get at, I need my team to communicate and communicate often.
We have plenty of issues, just like any team, but most of them come from the lack of communication.
Slack, or any other similar platform allowed to strike somewhat of a happy medium where the barrier to communicate isn't too high nor too low.
It's less formal and faster than an email. And keeps a better log than an in-person conversation would.
Added bonus, it also helps us to have a more liberal 'work from home' policy.
What previously was a tap on the shoulder is now a message and a tap on the shoulder after three minutes if there is no reply.
Slack has become the worst possible amalgamation of email and telephone. When previously minor things were discussed asynchronously over mail, only major and immediate issues warranted a phone call. Now all kinds of noncritical correspondence gets pushed to an instant messenger application, where every issue has to be paid attention to immediately.
It's not just productivity. It can also damage quality of relationships and introduce unnecessary conflict - as any written communications tool does - because people also fall for using Slack to discuss tough issues. It doesn't replace actual in-person conversation, but especially younger workers and managers don't know that and suffer a lot due to lack of emotional fidelity of actually using their bodies to talk.
Communication tools don't create this issue, they only bring it closer to the surface. You have to learn to manage your emotions. If you don't then it's always going to something which holds you back. If it affects younger workers more than others, then that's because they haven't learned this skill yet. It's one of many things which people new to the workplace have to manage.
Some of the other more obvious emotional issues include procrastination and imposter syndrome. Everyone experiences these emotional swings. Experienced workers learn how to manage them. The earlier the better.
There are lots of things broken in the space of "work." Teaching younger workers how to deal with emotions is one of them.
>Communication tools don't create this issue, they only bring it closer to the surface. You have to learn to manage your emotions. If you don't then it's always going to something which holds you back.
That's close to saying "bullets don't kill people, the hole in their vital organs does".
The thing is, text-based communication tools are problematic compared to face-to-face communication, even in people who know how to "manage their emotions", because they hide non-verbal clues and make statements easier to misconstrue.
In a professional setting, you can fall back on the rules of the workplace. My boss might be angry, but I don't need to read that he's angry. I just need to keep doing my job. Or I get fired. I'll survive either way (losing a job and finding a new one is part of the game.)
I don't need to care about the emotional states of the people I work with. There's base-lines of professional conduct and courtesy. If I reasonably follow those, then I'm good.
And what if your boss is just an asshole? What if the reading you take of the person on the other line isn't just a misunderstanding? This person really is being a jerk, then what? You be a professional. You don't have to take excessive abuse, you can quit. You can warn the customer that you will end the call (and you can carry through with the threat.) Being a jerk isn't necessarily abuse though.
Don't take things personally. Do your job. Work the process. Quit if things aren't working for you. This requires an orienting yourself to an environment which works differently from your home. It requires managing your emotions so that you aren't taking an existential threat level analysis with every non face to face conversation.
It's a different situation if I'm talking to my wife or children. Those are personal relationships.
Unlike being poked in a vital organ, communication is a repeatable exercise, so reasonable people can keep communicating over the lower-fidelity medium until problem is resolved.
Face-to-face communication may be ideal, but it has huge overhead and limits. Compared to the scale of communication text (especially one over the wire) enabled, I think the world is much better off with the tech than it would be without it.
Yes? I mean, I don't have issues communicating over text on HN, or the subreddits I frequent, or the Slacks, IRC channels and the mailing lists I'm on, ...
What the empirical evidence shows me is that there's a (possibly very large) chunk of population which I would call unreasonable on a good day, that I only get to observe on the Internet, but can't ever find in meatspace. I know what's going on over at YouTube comments, or /r/all, but such people are all mysteriously absent from my meatspace circles, with no effort on my end to specifically identify and avoid them. I sometimes see them speaking unreasonable things when I pass them by on the street, but that's the limit of my exposure [0].
It's kind of similar to what Scott identified[1] as "dark matter people", except they seem to be inhabiting all the non-niche Internet forums.
Point being, if you exclude unreasonable people, text-based communications are fine. If you include unreasonable people, I wouldn't trust face to face communications either; if someone wants to abuse you with words, they can do that just as well in physical proximity.
--
[0] - Actually, the closest I've ever been to talking with such people was the couple of times during my university years when I ended up on some completely random party with people I didn't know. This suggests to me that there's a strong but barely noticeable filtering/selection effect in meatspace social networks. School selection, or workplace selection, aren't random enough to break out from it.
>What the empirical evidence shows me is that there's a (possibly very large) chunk of population which I would call unreasonable on a good day, that I only get to observe on the Internet, but can't ever find in meatspace.
And it doesn't occur to you that it's the nature of the communication (online vs face to face) that might be a factor in this?
- Chat apps have been around for a while but now that Slack has been so widely adopted working remote has become a lot easier.
- Screen sharing for pair programming where everyone has the client installed and we don’t have to convince anyone to pay for it is great. (I’m very sad Slack is shuttering this service though)
- When I’m in the office I find that people who used to interrupt me by walking up to my desk and completely detailing my work are more polite with a Slack message now. That is much easier to delay even if only for a few minutes when needed.
- large meetings where it is tempting to completely tune out can still be productive if I can interact on slack.
Your points are all valid for some but it’s only one side of the coin.
> They managed to disturb millions of worker to an attention-driven work culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate.
I experience quite the opposite. With in-person communication, people barge in, demand you drop what you're doing now and answer their question/conversation.
With slack, you can answer them when you need a break or have finished something up.
No, on Slack (or any other similar chat) I can jump in and answer a co-worker that had a question when I'm available, if they are also available they reply and we have a short convo that takes much less time than e-mailing back and forth which usually ends with a "let's talk this in person".
Having realtime chat has saved me countless hours of participating in e-mail threads that end nowhere, at the same time as helping me be less interrupted as I tell people to send me a message first and if it's really urgent to interrupt me.
I don't care about Slack as a company but I'm happy that a IRC-like chat ended up in the mainstream and is useful for my day-to-day.
Not when I have to keep sorting my mailing lists into its own "label/category/folder/whatever your e-mail client calls it" on a sidebar so I can keep track of activity happening in which mailing list.
In Slack or any IRC-like chat I can keep track of the channels that interest me, I keep track of live operations, my team's public channel to see if there are stakeholders having issues with our systems, our private channel for internal team discussions (even more when I'm working from home). The engineering announcement channel to keep track in realtime of changes being performed to other systems or our infrastructure and getting quick status updates.
Yes, e-mail could be used for all of that, it would also make my inbox completely useless.
> Not when I have to keep sorting my mailing lists into its own
There's a field on emails called subject.
Linux kernel is still developed using mailing list, I can imagine only a few things harder than that, still the kernel team manages to work on it just fine, without being in the same physical space.
Channels are just another way of labeling stuff...
> (even more when I'm working from home)
emails have been distributed, async and remote-aware since the 60s.
I'm really genuinely curious to understand why people keep making this point, while that's one of the most irrelevant feature of Slack.
I'm not saying email is perfect, just saying that your points are not a unique feature of slack, anyone of them have existed for decades.
> Yes, e-mail could be used for all of that, it would also make my inbox completely useless.
Just like channels on Slack after a while.
BTW https://www.mattermost.org/ offers the same features Slack offers, but I guess people are not switching because mattermost is not a recognized brand.
Just like people don't buy Nike shoes to ditch them for equally comfortbale but brandless flea market shoes.
Like I have previously said: I have no personal investment in Slack, I couldn't care less if it was Mattermost or whatever.
Unfortunately for us, tech people, business decisions are taken on ease-of-use and other features that we don't tackle when we focus on the technical aspects of products, companies don't want to invest to roll out their own infrastructure, for anything, that is why the cloud is a thing. It's the same with a chat app, if a company can pay another company and offload all of the liability and responsibility to an easy-to-use product, they will do.
I don't know why you are ranting with me. I have used mailing lists before, I have used IRC before and I know what kind of workflows each can improve on my 15 years of career.
E-mails don't cut it, it's not the same ease of use, I don't care if technically I can achieve the same results, the interface and interaction is different and this is enough of an improvement for a product to have its place over another.
Good for the Linux Kernel to keep being developed on a mailing list, the rest of the world doesn't and is better if another tool can improve communication, be it IRC, Mattermost or Slack.
Create a product better than Slack and push it around to solve this problem, don't try to preach this to me, a mere cog in the system that is trying to be productive.
We're working on getting more awareness around Mattermost as an open source Slack-alternative.
We just raised another $50M to invest in our product, on top of $20M we announced 4 months ago. Compared to the $1.2B Slack's raised, it's not that much--but we think dollars in open source can do more.
Our market is enterprise, particularly enterprise DevOps, so there's not as much brand marketing going on.
If Slack were Nike, I think Mattermost would be like the manufacturer of business-style shoes people wear into banks, governmental agencies, manufacturing companies, etc. where sneakers don't typically go.
We want to be just as comfortable and functional as Nikes, but our priority is to make our users and customers look good, and make them successful and build their brand, not promote our brand.
Yes and no, but the problem with (and benefit of) email is that it's a bit more formal. It's like writing a letter vs calling people.
Email threads tend to become illegible messes too, at least in the circles I'm in. Different formatting, different quote styles, and there's one email chain nowadays where the background color turned black so I can't read it without highlighting the text. There's also the thing where it's far too easy to CC people, which, granted, is a thing in Slack as well possibly but it's not yet ingrained in Slack culture in most places to make big group chats with all kinds of managers and only tangentially involved people. A lot of email is written in cover-your-ass mode with excessive formality and CCing a lot of people.
I'll take a direct message anyday when it comes to day to day stuff. I prefer important announcements, events, etc to still be in email though.
> So yeah I don't blame them but I blame every company that falls for this.
While I understand where your complaints are coming from, I encourage you to think about the fact that so many companies are "falling" for them.
You and I might care about disturbances, "attention driven" work culture, open protocols, etc., but not everyone is a software engineer. The world is bigger than that. Clearly, some people quite enjoy Slack. I'm not saying it's the most optimal product, but perhaps being optimal is not as important as it seems.
Many people enjoy candy too, doesn't mean it's good for you. Not everyone is a software engineer, but everyone has limited attention.
Slack's chat nature as the OP points out favours instant messaging over batching up replies, which, like many bad habits, appeals to the reward portion of our brain but is genuinely unhelpful in structuring work. There's a reasonable (and increasing amount) of evidence that multitasking and context switching can lower your working IQ by 10 to 15 points. Deep Work by Cal Newport does a good job of going into the detrimental affects that distraction from workflows has on people.
you put it better than I did in my initial post. They managed to hack that reward part of the brain with immediate interaction at the expense of deep meaningful work that require long periods of reflection before producing anything.
My beef with Slack is that everyone in this comments section is pretending it's an async communication tool, but that is only true people that are used to working without context switching and acknowledge that interrupting someone has a cost. For everyone else, there is an expectation of prompt responses, or you are considered untrustworthy if you take too long to respond.
I suspect a lot of frustration fundamentally revolves around trust. If there is a lack of trust, it must get compensated with an increase in visibility. Slack just happens to be a decent tool to provide visibility.
Story time: in a company I worked for, the Most Senior Engineer requested to be exempt from participating on Slack as the only person outside management, and skip the daily stand-ups. He did get a lot more done. I envied him quite a bit - mostly because our stumbles and challenges (just normal development stuff) were very visible and prompted lots of nervouse queries from PMs and sales people via Slack about why our tests are failing and why we needed to refactor code, whereas he only needed to show the end result of his work after a few months. Even if we had both experienced the same amount of 'challenges', his way of working gave him a lot more credibility because he got to control the narrative where his solution emerged working as designed (because any development hurdles he may have had were invisible to our PMs and sales). However, he did have a lot of pre-existing trust with key people to pull this off in the first place.
I hope I get to a point in my career where I can operate like that.
We're a small team of a bit more than 10 people and slack has definitely improved our lifes. It's easy to use, has lots of integrations, looks good, is free to use without the unlimited archiving of messages and works on desktop an mobile. Everyone can use it, developers, marketeers and managers alike.
Before there was always someone moving around to talk to someone else or internal E-Mails which are bad, too.
We use slack sparingly and only have a few channels with many people. Most things happen in private channels. We always "idle-ping" other team members first and do not expect an immediate response.
The result is a much calmer office. People move around less and there is less chatter. And we still have the option to use group chat if required.
We even added a channel where new commit messages are automatically posted. A wonderful thing to keep informed about what's going on and you can take immediate action if you see something strange.
I think this all falls apart if our team size would increase. But I believe for teams with less than 25 people slack is perfectly fine. Above that size notifications probably start to be annoying.
As a long-time IRC fan (I found many important persons in my life there!), I'm also a bit salty that open protocols didn't triumph and so many people salivate about features of Slack that were already in IRC in the nineties. But I don't get the horror stories about Slack poisoning work culture, I haven't experienced them.
At my workplace, we are a team of 7 (in a research project, it's academia but I don't think our way of organizing things is too different from a small startup), we have been using Slack for like a year and we have a sane relationship with it. Yesterday I think there were like 2 or 3 messages in our Slack, no more were needed. At other points (with looming deadlines, etc.) there is more activity, but it's always activity related to work that needs to be done, and my feeling is that it mostly reduces the amount of email, and sometimes also substitutes private messaging that some of us were using for work-related issues. Which is a plus for work culture, because we keep work and leisure separated. And as there are no notifications outside working hours, I think it has actually been positive for work-life balance, compared to using email or other messaging systems.
I don't know if it's a matter of team size (I can imagine that Slack may be more prone to becoming a behemoth in a huge team?), the personalities of the people using it, or that companies/teams where Slack is problematic already had a problematic work culture in the first place. Maybe it also helps that we don't have the paid plan at my team, so since logs are not stored, we use it for immediate teamwork and we instinctively shift to email or other means for important stuff that needs to be on record or consulted later. But for whatever reason, for us it hasn't become a growing monster. I'm curious about the factors that make it a blessing or a curse.
1. you don't have to reply right away
2. chat being a set of open protocols has been a pipe dream of nerds for ages, the reality is that slack is your universal protocol now and everything preceding it forgot that actual humans had to use it
3. you seem unable to comprehend that people actually...like Slack???
Probably by having a product people like to use. They never used any crazy marketing as far as I saw, so kudos to them for building something people wanted to advocate for.
This is a lot of training and committed parents. I'm doing a lot of aid climbing myself and anyone could be good at aid climbing if enough training and commitment is put inside it.
WeWork is even taking it one level further. They still have close to thousands software engineers to build... Things though.