In a rush of hubris, Slack published a full page ad taunting Microsoft Teams in the New York Times:
That feeling when you think "we should buy a full page in the Times and publish an open letter," and then you do. 💫 pic.twitter.com/BQiEawRA6d
— Stewart Butterfield (@stewart) November 2, 2016
Part of their letter reads:
Communication is hard, yet it is the most fundamental thing we do as human beings. We've spent tens of thousands of hours talking to customers and adapting Slack to find the grooves that match all those human quirks.
Slack knows it is used in a lot of places, in a lot of different ways. Many users have been requesting the ability to mute or block other users:
@GlennF Do you know if there's a way to mute certain users in Slack?
— Brianna Wu (@Spacekatgal) August 12, 2016
@paulcbetts conrgrats on joining Slack =) Do you know if you guys are planning to allow users to mute each other in channels?
— TheCodeJunkie (@TheCodeJunkie) January 15, 2015
I have found the first huge flaw with Slack, likely inherent it its initial design goal as a work collab tool.
— br¯\_(ツ)_/¯ty (@br_tal_ty) September 15, 2016
Can't mute/ignore users.
Users have offered numerous reasons they might want this feature:
With email, phone, IM, etc., if you can't resolve a situation, you can block someone. With @SlackHQ, you can ... quit your job?
— Geoffrey Thomas (@geofft) August 28, 2016
Another case for @SlackHQ implementing a mute feature: bots that many people find useful, but a small few find distracting.
— Brian by Santana ft (@brianloveswords) September 16, 2016
@SlackHQ not everyone can leave a bad situation immediately for many reasons. you're enabling abuse by refusing to implement blocking.
— susan ☄️ (@bysusanlin) November 3, 2016
I found those tweets in a couple minutes, and you can easily find more. I'm not sure when Slack first heard users wanted blocking and muting, but they definitely did almost two years ago:
@NJDG Not at the moment, but as we continue to host different sizes and kinds of teams, this may be something we'll add.
— Slack (@SlackHQ) November 8, 2014
Despite hearing this request for two years, Slack's position now is that no one needs blocking and muting features:
@sondy No, you can't block or mute people in Slack. As a tool for teams to work together, that could make it very hard! 🌷
— Slack (@SlackHQ) August 22, 2016
That's not attentively listening to users like their ad claims.