There are just so few instances where synchronous group communication (like Slack) makes sense in a workplace. If you need to talk to a large group of people about a project, it'll be more efficient to (gasp) have a meeting. Recording/itemizing data in a slack channel is horrible and basically unsearchable after a few days.
The nature of slack forces people to always "watch" for pings and channel updates, lest they get labeled a slacker for not responding. It's a 24-hour long meeting with no agenda, no guidelines, no leadership, and the occasional guy who jumps into the room with a bad joke.
Slack, like all text messaging is an asynchronous messaging tool. Of course it's horrible using it synchronously the way you describe but that's not the way it's meant to be used or is used in my company. I often miss direct mentions on slack because its mobile notifications are almost non-existent or because I'm working on something else. Someone who is too stupid to understand the nature of asynchronous communication and calls out people for not responding right away is an idiot and an asshole whether it's a manager at work or a so called "friend" (no one who makes synchronous demands on one's time to text chat can be called a friend). Slack used properly is about as far from a synchronous meeting as you can imagine. A boss that demands constant synchronous slack communication is a sign to look for a new job.
If you're using Slack in a structured environment (such as a company), then you can impose structure through policy, rather than technologically.
Specifically, if you want to avoid a "24-hour long meeting", then why not just have an actual meeting, in Slack? Run it like an actual meeting, just with typing instead of voice/video chat.
If you have actual, structured meetings via Slack, then you get all the benefits of everything going through text (a canonical log anyone can reference; nobody having to repeat themselves; no having to fight to get everyone on the call; people being able to "speak" (i.e. type) at the same time without talking over one-another; etc.), while also getting all the benefits of Actual Meetings (people trying to make efficient use of their time so they can get back to doing something else; someone "running" the meeting and passing a baton for who is expected to be speaking at any moment; etc.)
If you do that, then the rest of the time, Slack is just a virtual water-cooler (and a convenient built-in IM system for talking to people who aren't in your office.)
Text is far slower and lacks all the non-verbal cues we use in person or even over video chat. There's almost no upside to having an actual meeting in Slack other than a text log.
Did you mean: text allows you to take your time and revise what you're going to say before saying it, and makes it impossible for aggressive team-members to "cut off" less confident team-members?
> lacks all the non-verbal cues
Did you mean: text is accessible to people on the autistic spectrum, people with social anxiety, people with verbal tics, and anyone else who avoids jobs entirely on the basis that they'll have to talk to people, or who might be disadvantaged by others' prejudices based on their "non-verbal cues"?
Also, to specifically highlight:
> in person
We're presumably talking about a remote-only workplace here. There is no such thing as an "in-person" meeting—or, indeed, a synchronous meeting—if your team is spread across the complete gamut of time zones.
When I worked at IBM, we were switching from IM and live video-conference meetings, to entirely Slack-based communication. It was for exactly the reasons I stated above.
The most important of all those reasons, though, in IBM's case, was that it was:
> a text log
...because now you can employ deaf people! (Or people with sensory or executive impairments that get in the way of parsing speech in realtime.)
I can assure you that passing along a quick note about a task or process in a Slack channel, which respective members can check on at their own leisure, is _far_ more efficient and time/money cost-effective than calling the 40 people (perhaps spread across multiple buildings, cities or countries) into a meeting to discuss that same minor detail.
How is that better than email? If you want people to check it at their own pace (async), then use an async method. Slack expects everyone to check it constantly. At least in my experience :(
Being able to bring someone into a discussion which they can quickly respond to (or browse back on later) is way smoother a process than having to send another "adding Bill to the thread" Reply-All every time you want to add someone.
Not to mention the integrated file attachment (inline screenshots/video, anyone?) and impromptu /call feature to trigger a voice call or screen share.. there isn't even a reasonable competition there anymore.
If you feel overt pressure from expectation to read/respond immediately, it seems you may need to establish a Slack-usage culture that works for your team (or express that the current expectation level doesn't work for you and is affecting you negatively). For me personally, I don't necessarily expect anyone to respond immediately, even if I "Direct Message" them and they are Online. While I respond to most stuff promptly, it's never a problem if I don't.
> Being able to bring someone into a discussion which they can quickly respond to (or browse back on later) is way smoother a process than having to send another "adding Bill to the thread" Reply-All every time you want to add someone.
That could be solved by using NNTP instead of email. Plus, with clients that handle proper message threading and search, you can get something far better than what Slack offers in terms of going through a discussion that has already taken place after the fact.
I agree with most of what you're saying here, but this didn't resonate with my experience:
> basically unsearchable after a few days
Recently, a coworker asked me for more context about a pull request I had authored 14 months ago. Within minutes I was able to search Slack for relevant discussions, stakeholders, and reasoning.
I left a message in a channel 20 days ago, but I didn't remember the exact content. I had to skip back in the channel (took a while, slack paginates and there was a lot of content), and then I had to mouse-drag to even highlight the text to copy. Incredibly inefficient. I need a chat bot to record our messages the same way we used irc bots!
If you're a Slack admin, you can export a dump of the chat history. Such dumps are nominally for import into another group-chat system, but—given that the dump is just a tarball of newline-delimited JSON events, one file per channel—it's very easy to parse through in pretty much any language.
And, of course, if you have a public Slack community, there's nothing stopping you from taking regular dumps and baking them into one-per-day HTML pages, and then putting the HTML files up somewhere where Google can find and index them...
> there's nothing stopping you from taking regular dumps and baking them into one-per-day HTML pages, and then putting the HTML files up somewhere where Google can find and index them...
Is there a reason why Slack doesn't just have a setting that enables logging to a local file on disk?
The nature of slack forces people to always "watch" for pings and channel updates, lest they get labeled a slacker for not responding. It's a 24-hour long meeting with no agenda, no guidelines, no leadership, and the occasional guy who jumps into the room with a bad joke.
Total mess.