Exactly why I don’t use Slack

Maybe he isn’t as ‘sweet’ as you think. Read my remarks on my other comment. I am in his postion roughly, that age too, and believe me I know what I am doing when I refuse to use these apps, well thought out. However I don’t feign ‘silver surfer’ status, I am in a position to tell folk straight.

I thought Slack kept a record of all conversations? or it was hard to delete them. I didn’t use it for that reason among others. “informal” in my book, is often, a trap. Especially when there is a record fo chats that can be and are used as ‘gotchas’. One reason I stopped using the app along with FB and Twitter. That an organization can tie its informal talk into Facebook amazes and astounds me by the way, it now seems you can do that too!

Yes, Slack messages are only ephemeral from a UX perspective. I wouldn’t put overly sensitive data in it, but it’s a responsible enough service provider to trust with every day conversation, images we work with, and so on. And they have a ton to lose if they misbehave at even a fraction of the level of Facebook.

Good points. But you are missing my main point really I think? I ask because when I used Slack I didn’t think the messages could be deleted, or I couldn’t delete them maybe better way to put it. My own concern is not with providers of the service either, where I take your points. I have worries even then but whatever…

My concern with is not so much the misuse of data by software providers but by ‘colleagues’, bosses, subordinates or your own company in general. I have seen several instances of ‘gotchas’ and so on where screen shot and other ways of keeping messages, often out of context, were weaponized. The obvious famous FBI example springs to mind, that involved regular texting I believe. Can you, as an user, if you will, delete slack messages you have sent colleagues or that they have sent you? Easily I mean, including their copies of said messages? I won’t be able to write a screed I guess as to why I think that is a problem;… thanks for the insights though.

In my own case, if I do need to send a ‘text’ rather than an email I use Confide. Not foolproof but slows down most ‘lurkers’ in most situations I find.

I’ve been retired for almost eight years, which means my last workday was before Slack was invented, but I have used it to keep in touch with a couple of people who were on it for work. I can see it as valuable for one-to-one communication and a total time suck if group chat.

I do have a solution for one-to-one Slack issues: pick up that outdated device (telephone) and have a brief conversation, which will take far less time than typing replies back and forth. (Do office desks still even have telephones?)

1 Like

I think I understand what you are asking. You can delete messages so your coworkers can no longer see them, but they are not permanently deleted on Slack’s end and your employer (or anyone with a credit card who owns the account) can pay Slack for compliance features that would allow them to resurface deleted/archived messages. Edit: I’m not sure of the timing. It may be possible to perma-delete if you do if before your employer pays for retention features. I wouldn’t risk it, though. :slight_smile:

Also, people seem to have the habit of screenshotting chats they think are funny, weird or potentially useful/exploitable. Unfortunately, I have seen these passed around in cliques to mock people outside the group.

1 Like

Thanks. My feelings exactly, and worse in my experience. I didn’t really know how it worked, thanks for filing it out for me @cornchip I appreciate your time and insights.

When I had it to test it, I can’t remember exactly everythng I did, but I felt it provided a permanent record of every conversation for the ‘owner’ and was perversely ‘ideal’ for screenshot spite and antics: I wasn’t sure whether it was just my IT incompetence that couldn’t figure out how to do deletes.

So, as for Slack, on those conditions, I wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole. It is quite astonishing to me that such an app even gets condsidered by us. But I would have thought that about Facebook over the last couple of years. :wink:

1 Like

If people are using Slack messages as evidence against you, the problem is not the tool, it’s the user. Could also point to a company cultural problem.

2 Likes

We introduced Slack into our workplace (university IT department) because we needed a way for incident response teams to communicate in realtime group conversations when our internal communications services fail. Slack (or any service like it) works very well for that:

  1. It enables realtime group conversations that can also be asynchronous as needed.

  2. You can look back and find missed details without requiring people to repeat themselves.

  3. It allows group conversations to include things like images and snippets as a part of the conversation, and the conversational record. During an incident, this can be enormously helpful.

  4. After the incident we are left with a record of the how the response was handled, which can be analyzed during the after-incident review. We can often see very clearly where problems occurred, which as led directly to improvements in our incident response plans.

Almost immediately after deployment, use of Slack took off like wildfire among our developers and systems people. I (at 50, older than nearly everyone in my department) have been fascinated by this: It seems to occupy a niche between necessarily-synchronous phone calls and the (sometimes) unwieldy formality of email. A simple “No” in response to a query in Slack is quite conversationally acceptable, where exactly the same could seem quite rude in an email exchange.

Also, one of our people supports a site several hundred kilometres away. Slack often lets him participate in conversations on an equal footing with the rest of us. Likewise, if I feel like working off-site or I have a need to work from my home on a given day, I can still participate more or less fully in things that are going on in the office.

Slack (and like services) may not be for everyone, but we’ve found it to be a very useful addition to more traditional methods of team communication. It doesn’t replace email or phone calls, but it does eliminate the need for some of them. It also lets us quickly resolve things that may otherwise have required a (dreaded) meeting.

Yeah a ‘cultural problem’ aided and abetted by over-use of tools like Slack? Like with bugs and ‘wires’, any kind of spyware, the issue is indeed with the ‘user’ in a sense and I don’t want to end up in a cabin deep in the woods at one extreme.

The issue is whether one accepts uncritically weaknesses and unfortunate tendencies in human nature and allows things that encourages those tendencies or excercises some caution. I just read @ACautionaryTale 's counter argument really to the one I give here: well argued in fact and persuasive. Again he emphasises the permanent record of every move this technology facilitates; there are situations where that is appropriate. Highly specialized and the onus should be to demonstrate real necessity. Airplane cockpits are one example. However the participants have signed up to the fact they are under continuous and relentless scrutiny? I guess an employer could argue that?

To take your point @Shruggie, perhaps unfairly on my part, as a form of question begging; perhaps a company, squadron or institution with a good ‘culture’ might discourage the use of sneaky spyware like Slack?
That is in fact my view and my point.
I don’t argue the extreme position that any company who has not addressed or been aware of the issues here is necessarily a company with a ‘bad’ culture by the way. Clearly not the case in some small groups, some represented here. The complacency regarding this app in particular is likely to be short lived in my view.

I wish some of us had been more alert regarding text messages in general and of the potentially bad effects of permanent records in some hands but not others of casual talk and the decent of the cheerful, fun time, informal FaceBook into the cesspit it now is.

Is a kind of over simplification of the dynamics here, @cornchip already gave more realistic examples. Technology does have consequences, many unintended and it can either aid or distort the tendencies already inherent in Human Nature you might say. Anything might, in principle be misused in some sense of course.

In my view, Slack is spyware, if it works anything like @cornchip says it does anyway and that is why I believe comapanies with a ‘good culture’ might consider eschewing it.

What is the difference you might ask with ‘messages’. Well apart from Apple’s privacy positions, I am beginning to wonder, I really am. I use Confide app if I need to ‘text’. And indeed if I get anything put in front of me that is critical of a colleague or operative but ‘screenshoted’ or find cliques of mocking and inappropriate ‘sharers’, it tends to be, not immediate firing, but a notch in that direction for the person (s) concerned: the person who took the screenshot I mean, often to their dismay I have found. It is very rare that this happens though, those ‘complaints’ and ‘evidences’ are always underhand and sneaky. All of us share these weaknesses, ‘good cultures’ are ones that try to mitigate them.

IT is not the only locus of bad behavior of course and nobody is arguing that I hope. My own bug bear, and I admit that it is one and perhaps also idiosyncratic, is folk who keep schtumm, avoid dialogue and controversy, but effectively ‘lurk’ and monitor more open conversations on social media and elsewhere. “Jobbies” or “Jobsworths” we called them in my old country. Look up the ‘double meaning’ of the first of those terms :wink:
The issue is not ‘evidence’ in a straight forward sense really, we are discussing a species of the genus “Gossip”, which is never ‘straight-up evidence’ by definition? I suppose there are always ‘good guys with an iPhone’ at hand, to counterweigh some of this :smiley: I have found them thin on the ground sadly.

We are on the edge of a ‘political discussion’ one that is potentially quite heated between 'Libertarians" and others mostly, and, out of respect to the moderators and this friendly and helpful site, I will leave it here and also beg indulgence of this over long comment. I do appreciate your point of view and held it myself at one time. The issue is not totally confined to modern IT either: why do people think Nixon and Lyndon Johnson kept tapes of phone conversations for example: like nobody ever wonders about the obvious pitfalls of doing that?

I was, I will add if anybody is interested, quite affected by Jared Lanier’s work on these topics. From the ‘inside’ of the IT revolution as it were.