[HN Gopher] Organize your Slack channels by "How Often", not "What"
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Organize your Slack channels by "How Often", not "What"
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 31 points
Date : 2025-09-30 20:04 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aggressivelyparaphrasing.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (aggressivelyparaphrasing.me)
| saltyoldman wrote:
| This kinda highlights how behind Slack is with AI. No reminders
| of questions, no agentic flows, no focus on UX and AI. At this
| point if someone asks me - when is the release? It should have a
| prompt - Answer: "It looks like the release is still waiting for
| Timothy to get his PR done. Slack AI has this status from him -
| Almost done - but it does also appear he's not at his desk and on
| the phone in a vehicle at this time."
|
| Slack is slackin
| al_borland wrote:
| Ideally, if the person asking has access to the channels with
| this information, it should show the person sending it the
| answer before sending the message interrupting you.
| Axol wrote:
| I use Teams but I usually just leave on read as a signal to get
| to it later when I have time. I have notifs muted. But I'm also
| not pinged so often that I need tactics like this article. Good
| stuff.
| kbos87 wrote:
| It definitely depends on the nature of your work, but the notion
| of having a channel I need to check hourly makes me ill. If I'm
| needed I should get a notification, and if I'm involved in an
| active discussion, I'm there. Otherwise I'll catch up on a daily
| basis.
| dogleash wrote:
| Even with OP's kind of sorting, office chat products conceal the
| priority of any given message to trick you into more
| participation. The "purpose of a system is what it does" style
| thinking can get carried away, but more than 99% of the messages
| in places I will be expected to notice things that require same
| day attention, don't. The goal is to waste my time.
|
| I rarely have >3 unscheduled conversations in a day that couldn't
| wait until tomorrow morning. They just never come from the same
| place.
|
| It's a yappers paradise. They wouldn't include me on an email
| where they deliberately have to pick participants, but think the
| serendipity will occur down the road justifies forcefeeding me
| whatever bullshit they're working on just in case.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I think this has gotten worse with time. In the early days back
| when Slack still had a barely modified standard chat UI, it
| wasn't nearly as much of a problem. Most of the UI changes made
| since then have been "solutions" to problems caused by their
| other changes.
|
| I'd love to have original the origins design back.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Huh, I never thought of it that way but we sort of have that,
| just that it's two entries instead of a whole list of
| frequencies. There's a general chat that you can read
| whenever~never (participate as much as you want), and one that
| you _are_ supposed to read (also after a holiday, you 're meant
| to read what was announced). Taking a peek every now and then
| throughout the day is fine (most days there's 0-2 messages in
| it). It's basically email whereas the other chat is 'chat'
|
| And of course, if someone needs you specifically, they'll
| @mention or PM you
|
| Not sure why you would need a four-tiered scheme of frequencies
| for this
| chatmasta wrote:
| How big is your company? We have ~800 people and after about
| two years I'm in close to 200 channels. I don't leave them
| because then I won't be able to find messages in search for the
| private channels. I just throw everything into a "stale"
| category at the bottom of the sidebar every few months.
| fluoridation wrote:
| They're _all_ private? Why are you guys doing that?
| chatmasta wrote:
| A good number of them are. I don't like it either. I make
| every new channel public.
| matsemann wrote:
| Why can't slack let me do something in between muting a channel
| or notifying me of every new message? Like, perhaps for some
| channels I want to read every message, but it's not time
| critical, so it would be nice if it only became "unread" once a
| day if it has new messages since last time.
| rectang wrote:
| Notify on start of new thread or @mention is the sweet spot.
|
| But there are always people who insist on having their entire
| conversation at the top level of the channel rather than in a
| thread, so everybody gets notified for every message (unless
| they mute the whole channel).
|
| /me shakes fist at cloud that looks like the face of a past
| team lead
| chatmasta wrote:
| That doesn't generate notifications by default. It does bold
| the channel though.
| oncallthrow wrote:
| Disable notifications for the channel and use the Unreads tab
| (or "Catch Up" I believe it is now called)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I've arrived at this organisation method on a number of
| platforms, essentially sorting contacts into a set of priority
| lists, usually just three: high, medium, low, or A/B/C, whatevs.
|
| I'll often also pin a specific search term of interest for a
| topic I'm following for the moment, but don't plan on subscribing
| to.
|
| Most of the time my streams are then the A & B lists plus a topic
| of interest. Very rarely more than that. If anything vital turns
| up I'll generally see it one way or another. Every so often (a
| few times a week/month/year) I'll glance at the lower-priority
| lists.
|
| I've also made a point of putting highly-voluble sources in their
| own channel, and then ... ignoring that. This keeps them from
| dominating other streams, their good stuff (usually infrequent)
| tends to show up elsewhere through re-shares, and my own QoL is
| generally improved.
|
| Whenever the experience starts to get too annoying, I start
| pruning from my high-priority lists. Less is more. No news is
| good news.
| sublinear wrote:
| I'm surprised people are still using work chat like this.
|
| My workplace switched to Teams about 5 years ago. The app is of
| course janky and slow, but it had the side effect of pushing all
| the important conversations to emails and scheduled meetings.
|
| Teams integrates with Outlook well enough that I never have to
| second guess my schedule and all the chatter is now just DMs,
| informal group chats that I would actually care about, and a
| bunch of broader group channels that nobody is expected to look
| at very often (not even every day).
|
| I rarely feel distracted by chat anymore unless it makes sense
| because something is actually on fire.
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