9 Comments

I've work with Teams for a year. It makes chat communication very painful. It has a thread model that is worse than slack. Hides channels even when they have new entries. The permission model around teams bad.

As an alternative for a chat system that does it much better check Zulip and their Streams (channels) and Topics (threads) system. Is not perfect, but works better at a bigger scale than Slack.

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May 10, 2022Liked by Lior Neu-ner

Yes. Teams' idea of threading seems to run on the idea of only one thread in a channel being _active_. When someone does the _correct_ thing of starting a new thread, previous threads are auto-hidden regardless of a user's interaction level with the newly hidden threads. Truly maddening when the subject is time sensitive such as _incident response_.

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May 10, 2022Liked by Lior Neu-ner

Where you can be in multiple Slack workspaces at the same time, Teams does not handle that in parallel. It switches between them. It's maddening.

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May 10, 2022Liked by Lior Neu-ner

Code formatting in Microsoft Teams is one of the worst problems we have. The alignment breaks, colours from Visual Studio are kept and it just looks hoaky.

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May 10, 2022Liked by Lior Neu-ner

You should incorporate Discord into your analysis. Similar to Slack but differentiated, in particular with how users join multiple different Discords, but with a consistent user profile.

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Who else uses Discord at work

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anyone who works in crypto / web3

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May 9, 2022Liked by Lior Neu-ner

It's an interesting problem space.

My personal experience with Slack aligns well with your research.

I wonder why you didn't mention anything about Workspace? I don't know how well the product is doing but I remember enjoying it while at Facebook.

Does any product in this space have The Feedᵀᴹ? It seems like an interesting idea to combine the perf, design, integrations (platform) of Slack with a personalize feed.

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author

I didn't call out Workplace since it focuses on a different market and use case. Most companies dont use it like we used it at Facebook. It's used as more top-down communication tool (e.g leadership posting announcements, hosting Live events), and not so much as a collaboration tool

Feed is a great way to consume information and it's especially good for surfacing important information that you may not necessarily have discovered on your own. I think what enables this in workplace is the clear distinction between synchronous (i.e chats) and asynchronous (posts). In Slack there isn't this distinction, so perhaps this is why there is no concept of feed in Slack

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