A long time back I’d written about how Slack in some ways was like the old DBabble messaging and discussion group platform, except for one small difference – Slack didn’t have threaded conversations which meant that it was only possible to hold one thread of thought in a channel, significantly limiting discussion.
Since then, Slack has introduced threaded conversations, but done it in an atrocious manner. The same linear feed in each channel remains, but there’s now a way to reply to specific messages. However, even in this little implementation Slack has done worse than even WhatsApp – by default, unless you check one little checkbox, your reply will only be sent to the person who originally posted the message, and doesn’t really post the message on the group.
And if you click the checkbox, the message is displayed in the feed, but in a rather ungainly manner. And threads are only one level deep (this was one reason I used to prefer LiveJournal over blogspot back in the day – comments could be nested in the former, allowing for significantly superior discussions).
Anyway, the point of this post is not about threads. It’s about another bug/feature of Slack which makes it an extremely difficult tool to use, especially for people like me.
The problem is slack is that it nudges you towards sending shorter messages rather than longer messages. In fact, there’s no facility at all to send a long well-constructed argument unless you keep holding on to Shift+Enter everytime you need a new line. There is a “insert text snippet” feature, but that lacks richness of any kind – like bullet points, for example.
What this does is to force you to use Slack for quick messages only, or only share summaries. It’s possible that this is a design feature, intended to capture the lack of attention span of the “twitter generation”, but it makes it an incredibly hard platform to use to have real discussions.
And when Slack is the primary mode of communication in your company (some organisations have effectively done away with email for internal communications, preferring to put everything on Slack), there is no way at all to communicate nuance.
PS: It’s possible that the metric for someone at Slack is “number of messages sent”. And nudging users towards writing shorter messages can mean more messages are sent!
PS2: DBabble allowed for plenty of nuance, with plenty of space to write your messages and arguments.