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Benjamin Pollack has blogged about why he hates the proprietary chat tool, Slack, which competes with IRC. He covers six points as to why you should too:
"Yeah, that’s right: there’s finally something I feel so negatively about that I’m unsatisfied hating it all by myself; I want you to hate it, too. So let’s talk about why Slack is destroying your life, piece by piece, and why you should get rid of it immediately before its trail of destruction widens any further—in other words, while you still have time to stop the deluge of mindless addiction that it’s already staple-gunned to your life."
[Ed. addition] I had troubles accessing the site, even wget failed to download anything... but lynx.exe on Windows 7 Pro worked on the first try!?! For the curious, here are the six points from the blog post alluded to above:
1. It encourages use for both time-sensitive and time-insensitive communication
2. It cannot be sanely ignored
3. It cannot be sanely organized
4. It's proprietary and encourages lock-in
5. Its version of Markdown is just broken
6. It encourages use for both business and personal applications
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 09 2017, @08:06AM (2 children)
Our new overlord has emailed all of Engineering to hit us @noc for all sorts of barely relevant info. @noc doing stuff that may set off an alert, lol. Or our hapless @dba team that ignores Slack now entirely, but @noc for snapshots. @noc doing an oil change again.
We had a sane culture where @noc was Serious Business, but now I see junk constantly interrupting Real Work with irrelevant bullshit. Slack doesn't help itself. I'm stuck all-in on a channel, or silence one completely because Slack doesn't let me set granular team settings.
Why did this replace IRC again?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 09 2017, @05:10PM (1 child)
I haven't used Slack personally, so I admit I'm not intimately familiar with its failings. It sounds like we're finding a lot of examples of companies that are implementing Slack horribly. They were probably sold Slack with some slick looking charts and graphs and the promise that it would solve all of the intra-organizational communication difficulties they were experiencing while catering to all their users' needs.
I work in a small business that's trying to grow but unfortunately has no idea how to not work like a small business where everybody knows everybody else by name. We've grown from maybe 15-30 employees to over a hundred, but that's about the limit of our growth because of some very, very human problems that management doesn't know how to confront. They're always looking to solve these human problems with technology. What it comes down to is that not only are they very poor at adhering to policy when we have one (and we don't have many because of an intractable culture of eschewing policy because "but all the customer needs is this simple thing," which is a great attitude for a small business of 30 employees, maybe 5 or 6 or so "management"-ish), we don't know how to codify the informal policies we do have, and we know even less about how to force different concerns in the business to adhere to written policy.
We have a written policy for attendance and vacation days we adhere to, and that's really it. I'm guessing this blogger works in a similar company or OU.
I could easily see my company buying up a sales pitch that all they needed was this One Platform to Rule Them All, and all their interdepartmental problems would be solved. "If only everybody could send informal messages to everybody else without needing to bother with email!" I've come to believe that (most) non-technical people are actually stupid people, and they hide their stupidity behind "computers are hard." (I hope I'm not being unclear; I've met plenty of non-technical people who are brilliant but are non-technical because they can't speak SMTP for example--could if they tried though.) If they do not understand computers, how can they hope to solve a human organizational problem with a computer? Therein lies the stupidity: the belief that the computer can solve human problems, no matter how many times the computer experts they pay to be experts (my boss and I) try to tell them that computers can't solve human problems.
So, the organization buys up this software package with a slick sales team and a completely unrealistic sales pitch. The sales team says, "The experts you're paying to be experts are wrong! Computers can solve human problems!" Lo and behold, the amazing new software doesn't solve a single one of their human communication problems.
This all leads to your question: "Why did this replace IRC again?" None of the human problems were solved. It also sounds like it introduces more confusion into the original human problems adopting Slack was supposed to solve. Now that there's a shiny new software package, nobody quite knows the boundaries and how to use it as effectively as they'd learned to use the old system over the years. It replaced IRC because somebody sold it on the promise that it could solve human problems, but since it can't, it hasn't.
tl;dr No software package no matter how wonderful can solve the human problems that prevent an organization from working as well as it could.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 10 2017, @02:18AM
Eh, I'd say slack is winning because it does what IRC does, but better. Downside? Total fucking memory and CPU hog!!