Thread for boring Slack questions

As in the "productivity platform."

I'm currently in a slack group that posts a lot of links to articles and I'm trying to find an easy way to organize them by topic and have them all accessible within the slack group. Is there an "app" I can connect to Slack that does this? Google Drive is a little unwieldy. The "files" tab doesn't seem like what I'm looking for either.

invite? sleeve (at) kittymail (dot) com

feel like this is an instant dq tbf

possibly boring question: What is the point of this website? I just found out this week that I'd missed some important answers to work questions that were apparently sent to me on Slack. I sent the questions via email... so why would the response be somewhere else on a thing nobody told me I had to use? And how do people incorporate it into their routine exactly? Like is the idea that you keep this thing open in another tab, at any time that you would normally just have your email open? And ........Why? I hate sounding like a Luddite, but what is wrong with email that this fixes? And if I'm going to be expected to monitor this for critical information, why couldn't they, like, get us all in a room and tell us "New policy, you're going to have to start using this other website, because somebody said so, now here's someone with a workshop and slide show to explain how you use this dumb thing"?

Related, more boring question: in my preferences, I have "Send me email notifications for mentions and direct messages" checked, but I have never gotten an email notification for a direct message. Or a mention for that matter, but I'm not sure I've ever been mentioned. Am I doing something wrong?

you should prob download the desktop client

It's like AIM for work if that helps.

We use Slack as our backchannel for real talk and deciding what to do and then send emails as a sort of public stage where we perform what we wrote in Slack

We have email, slack, whatsapp, and signal \o/ though whatsapp is mostly for birthday greetings and signal only used by some privacy obsessed team members.

It's all very strange to me. I work with a group of four other professors on this class and we exclusively communicate by email. And all my communications with the office staff are specific person-to-person questions like asking one of the advisors to help a student change their registration. I'm not sure why any of us would need or want instant-messaging ... I think I'm just bristling at what feels like an office-and-tech-world trend creeping into academia. Email is plenty "instant" enough for my pace of thinking. An ILX sub-board would be way more useful, maybe I should pitch that.

email isn’t good for back and forth question and answer type of communication. it can take hours or days to get a response. slack is like a substitute for leaning across the desk or poking your head in the door and asking a quick question

and for that reason it can dramatically reduce the number of emails you receive, which is a big plus imo

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?