No issues with the actual product per se, which is quite nice. But the experience while using Slack goes bad exponentially as the team scales if certain usage guidelines are not put in place.
Yeah, hate slack as well. I'm working on 16 core/32gb machine and it's still slow, switching between workspaces takes ages and sometimes it completely stops working. The only way then to fix it is do ps aux and kill a bunch of processes... I really wish they paid someone to rewrite their app!
Don't @channel every single time you say something would be my rule #1.
After that, it would be to set the expectation that Slack is not actually real-time. We defined a 2 hour response expectation on my team. We don't want people stopping work to check Slack every few minutes, we want to do our jobs.
I had to write a personal bot way-back-when which listened to all my DMs and mentions and let the people know that I'll get to them before the end of the day and that if I still didn't they could call me up if something urgent.
It's important to set the expectation that chat isn't meant to be synchronous.
Allow me to disable any kind of indication that someone is talking, not just to me (red dot) but anywhere (blue dot). Not everything needs my attention and having the tray icon change its state is distracting.
You can mute the channels, sure but why not make that as an option in the notifications settings?
