Thread for boring Slack questions

that said, replying to an email on slack - and not sending an email to give you a heads up - is ridiculous behaviour

i agree that email is not a great substitute for sticking your head into a cubicle... but no form of written communication is, imho! especially if you just want a quick answer to a quick question - "is the event on the 21st or the 22nd?" --- if you ask in writing, you MAY get an answer in the next thirty seconds, enabling you to type it in your document and move on in your work.... or you may not! and so you sit in limbo for hours or days, pondering whether or how would be best to nudge for a response, waiting on something extremely small that would be trivially easy to solve face-to-face. writing is an amazingly powerful tool but it sucks at this, absent enforcement/accountability measures to keep things from getting lost. everything i've gathered about Slack, and everything I remember about IRC and MOOs from the 90s, suggests that things *constantly* get lost in the "conveyor belt" of chatter.

IOW, people not getting back to you is a fundamental problem of written communication - you send something to someone, and they might or might not open it, read it, or respond to it. the sender has no control over this, whether the message is sent by email, telegram, Slack or carrier pigeon. but at least, versus Slack, email has the advantage that virtually everyone in this line of work is already checking it anyway. expecting people to be on top of Slack feels like expecting everyone to get a Sims Online account and start also checking their SimBox or whatever. like... you have my email address. if you need to reach me, send an.... email. and depending on its urgency i'll answer later today, tomorrow, or next week. it will never, of course, be "instantly" because i'm busy doing the actual work, and occasionally posting on ILX.

i grant that this new regime probably makes more sense in work that involves a lot of urgent inquiries. for me these only crop up when someone has ignored an email from me so long that what could have been sorted well in advance has now become a time-sensitive crisis. I believe the proper solution is for them to get better at email, not for me to adopt some new platform. in conclusion, the modern world is terrible and i'll never fit in.

"oh sorry, i sent it to your XBox Live Account, and then when you didn't answer I tried you on MySpace"

Working at any office is like “Ok we’re transitioning to Salarya, but payroll is still in Bullfrog—did you see my Noosecock post? Submit your timecard on Fireplayce then jizz me on Smackdog . Do NOT upload to Crackerz without Yammer approval

— cancela lansbury (@gossipbabies) January 28, 2022

lol

the modern world is terrible and i'll never fit in

slack is basically a persistent irc, a platform I probably used excessively in the mid 90s!

platform fragmentation is garbage, though. half my department uses teams and the other half use mattermost, which is about 1/3rd as bloated and pretty good imo

everything I remember about IRC and MOOs from the 90s, suggests that things *constantly* get lost in the "conveyor belt" of chatter

fwiw slack (and many of the others) persist messages now, and if your friends/coworkers are smart enough to actually @ you when they specifically want your direct input, you can do a threaded response to that message. direct messages also exist, and are persistent

for all the one-off platforms I don't regularly check, I just get an email notification at some point that directs me to where I was pinged

also worth noting that many of the youth again find this kind of format native for them -- discord is huge, and it's another irc derivative

^ haha love that tweet.

I was just looking at the app in bright sunlight, trying to find my direct messages. Up at the top of the sidebar I though it said "Threats". New feature potential?