The article’s title covers everything. Slack simply serves as a form of social media for the office that reduces employee productivity.
No it isn’t.
EDIT:
OK to explaind on this just a bit. Slack is a Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge. That’s all it is. If all you do is talk shit on there, it’s going to be a repository of shit talking and that’s not slacks fault.
Personally, slack has saved me a countless amount of time at work. Having a technical problem? Search slack, someone probably asked about it and there’s a solution for that. If there’s no answer, asking in the right channel will usually get it answered pretty quickly.
Especially as a remote company, slack or a tool like it is pretty indispensable for working with my team. And yes, we talk a lot of shit on there and those conversations happen in shit talking channels which means they don’t clutter the productive channels but I can still bond with my team a bit.
I guess like any tool, it’s about how you use it. In this case though I don’t think you can blame the tool even though slack is definitely not perfect. It’s definitely far from Facebook, I honestly think you’d win some kind of record with that stretch.
I’ve worked at companies where we had great communication policies around slack. Slack rooms were for the room topic, not for conversations.
There was an off topic room where people could be social and shit talk.
But basically due to our moderation rules, we really encourage people to keep channels on topic. Which made it more useful, less noisy. So it’s a social network and so far is social people use it. But the structure on top of it is determined by the company policy and the culture
You’re really stretching the meaning of “social network” there. May as well say the postal system is a social network.
I would never talk shit about anything at work on a medium that keeps a permanent record. Do people really have that hard a time staying professional?
Of course it’s not wise to talk shit on a company platform, but Slack is hardcore about privacy.
I’m our Slack admin. I cannot see a DM I wasn’t invited to. I cannot even see private channel names that I’m not invited to.
The only way Slack will divulge private posts, or posts in private channels, is if the account owner contacts support and makes a case for why they need to see anything private.
✅paywall ✅clickbait title
I’m sure the article makes many salient points.
Slack simply serves as a form of social media for the office that reduces employee productivity.
JFC, I have not seen such a worse take in many years. The Slack redesign was annoying and I wished Slack would stop making the UI worse each update, but it’s still the lifeblood of our communication chain.
Nah, Facebook is a lot worse in many ways. Slack is actually usable and obeys the law.
If you say so. We use it for work really heavily and it’s 99% productive.
None of that is new to Slack. They could’ve written an article to make a decent critique of the questionable UI changes Slack introduced, but instead they targeted features that were already there for years, like reactions and huddle.
The new interface just wastes space and hides the notification count of unfocused workspaces. I just wish Slack would start making interface changes like these optional.
