Looking over the Slack side bar and realizing it is at 3/10 "buttons that are there for me" and 7/10 "buttons that are there to make a product manager happy"
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@mcc The new focus mode (🌙) is the best thing to happen in a few years IMHO. It's one-click and it doesn't only pause notifications and sets a "I'm focusing" status, it also removes lots of visual clues from the UI. I can keep a channel open in my second screen while coding, but I will just not be distracted by things happening in other channels because the unread markers are hidden. It's perfect.
@rami but… I want slack to give me notifications. Arguably this is literally the only function Slack has
@mcc For me, the only way to survive Slack is to enable focus mode and live in the activity tab, clearing out messages that I've handled. Once a day I leave focus mode to clear the rest.
@mcc The Slack UI annoys me in a dozen little ways that I can't quite put my finger on. I feel like it was made by managers in meetings and not by programmers who actually use it.
@mcc i hate that i can't hide the slackbot button
@bunnyhero @mcc I’m seriously thinking of creating a web app and using custom CSS to hide it. I guess that is a way to make people stop using the app.
(If they are as annoying as Google, they change classes and such every page load to make it unhideable.)
Do it! This is one big reason I only used Slack as a pinned tab of my browser. There's not much functionality difference.
I've used ublock origin to hide it and other things I have no need for. There are aria attributes, test ids, glyph names, and other little things to hook the cosmetic filter onto.
@mcc The Slackbot one got me — "will never click, and also resent" is exactly how I feel about it too. Mine's mostly Home and DMs as well, the rest just sits there.
@mcc Remember when the DMs side-tab and the Activity side-tab both got the notification numbers for new DMs (which are already also visible on the home side-tab!), but they didn't get incremented at exactly the same time, so it always looked like you were getting something new even when it was just the same DM surfaced a different way?
I dunno if they ever actually fixed that or not; I disabled Activity/DMs integration as soon as the feuding project managers at Slack relented and allowed this.
@mcc I did you the "Saved" button because I would do a quick pass on work slack and mark all channels read while marking specific messages to review later. Then they changed it to the "to-dos" which required me to set a 'due by' which sucked. Then mystifyingly they brought backed "Saved” but kept "to-dos" in latest update (on my work slack anyway). It's baffling.
But yeah most of it is useless cruft.
@mcc there's some control for us users over what appears there, but as usual, it tends to reset itself every so often and new shit is dumped on users
@mcc @hareldan I was gonna say, most of this stuff I'm confused what it does. I just went through and hid it. Like the activity tab was annoying. Just show me a list of people and a number of unreads. I don't need three views for the same information. I need information density and consistency.
I also feel like people moving stuff to new chats feels very disorienting. And the reply in threads thing seems ok but I don't wanna click into every thread to see it. Why does it open on the right?
@mcc I have changed your sidebar order.
Pray I do not change it further
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@mcc you are right to not click on (or care about) 'create new'
@fluffy Hmm… under some circumstances I might make a huddle, but I would probably do it with a smaller "+" inside of a channel where I wish to make a huddle.
"Canvas", assuming that's a whiteboard/pegboard feature, looks like an exciting feature that I *would* have wanted and used back before Slack started adding AI products. Now I can't trust it to not try to AI-ify my material like Canva or Miro started doing.
Is +->List redundant with the "To Do" tab?
@mcc I have never clicked on to do and have no plans to
@fluffy it's like ok slack has always been Dropbox, so I can imagine a world where slack, dropbox, trello, miro all converge on one app but… to get me to replace other services I'm happy with slack needs to start by making me trust them. Trust them more than those other companies. And "no no don't use the app the way you use it use my NEW thing" isn't reassuring. What if I start using todos and then in a year they fuck it up to try to get you to use "epics" instead
@mcc yeah I agree, to me slack is just "IRC but corporate" and it should stay that way. I'm so glad that I don't have to use it for work anymore, I'd be absolutely tearing my hair out if I did
@mcc there were a few community slacks that I was pretty active on for a while but the only one I use anymore is the songfight one since that's where we do admin chat because we're too lazy to move it to discord even though most of the actual songfight community chat is on discord now anyway
and the other community slacks I ended up leaving either due to disinterest or getting fed up with the admins and internal cultures for various reasons
@mcc and come to think of it all of my actual job-like things are all on discord now, which is kind of funny to me given as how the dichotomy used to be "Discord is Slack for gamers" and "Slack is Discord for businesses" and here I am doing business on Discord
@mcc in particular, if you open "activity", there is a "DMs" tab in there ...
@mcc I use To Do all the time to keep track of what's important. What drives me nuts is the search, which I find unusable. But then there's Jira, and Slack suddenly seems like an oasis of sanity...