Easy enough to make it not real-time: mark self as "away", disable notifications, let your team know the right way to contact you if they have a critical issue.

So why would you need slack then in the first place?

You don't, but have little choice when it's foisted on you.

If you're a knowledge/tech company, would you let me put a device in your worker's workspace that emitted an annoying noise randomly ever 5-15 minutes, interrupting them and causing them to spend time regaining their focus on that ask they were working on? Probably not, but orgs are handing money over hand over fist to Slack for the privilege of enabling this.

Knowledge Productivity Diagram Example: https://i.imgur.com/sAdZ63y.jpg

Because it's the standard for communication at your company. I don't mind Slack, but I have co-workers who hate it, but don't really have a choice but to use it at least occasionally.

Because you can catch up during breathers / breaks from your main task.

I actually really like slack for casual conversation, for non-blocking work comms, and for general info, I only dislike when folks expect urgent responses via slack. So I've adjusted my slack config to make it work wonderfully for the use case I prefer, and to work around the use case I don't.

or you can just close the app

Totally agree. I work for a 2000+ people company and we have over 2000 channels. Slack just doesn't work well for that size.

Why would you be connected to 2000 channels? Just use the ones that are relevant to you.

OP hasn't necessarily joined 2000+ channels, their company has 2000+ channels, it's a similar situation in most companies I think…

I work for a 200+ person company and we have approximately 800 channels, maybe 20% of them are work related, the remaining channels are noise. There's a channel wherein some people in the company pick up on grammatical and spelling errors of others in the company and post them for others to laugh at, there's another channel for the three people in the company that think they know latin to make the same Monty Python joke (Romani ite domum) over and over.

For the current project we're working on, we've put in a no robots rule into the channel (no Git/Jira/Travis notifications) and when one of the higher-up managers in the company decided to join the project channel and make two joke-like comments which added no value to the project, we had the project manager remove him from the channel.

Slack has over-casualised our company, for work it sometimes works well, for distractions it almost always works too well.

I'm obviously not in all those channels, more like 20-30. One issue is that channel discoverability is poor. Searching for the right channel is difficult or impossible, since search only looks at the actual name vs. also the description. So sometimes I just stay in channels so I don't forget about them or avoid spending extra effort trying to find them again. Also, grouping channels doesn't exist so you end up with a long list of channels, making it more difficult to navigate (only can split them between starred and non-starred but that's not sufficient). Another one is leaving `threads`, and cleaning up that all threads view is extremely cumbersome. There are many more issues but those are just some basic ones.

It's not all Slack's fault though, it's also partially the company's fault for trying to embrace Slack for everything.

Maybe most companies don't need as much channels as there are users, though.

I have found that the more channels the better, because then you can subscribe only to channels that are useful.

sounds like your company is doing something wrong

You know, you could just mute them all except one. That's what I do - only #engineering and private messages are unmuted.

I wish there were more notification customization. For example, have the icon on your browser or taskbar be changed when you receive a message but not get a pop-up notification for some chatroom. And for other chatrooms, get pop-up notification. This will help me separate from immediate response level vs "respond sometime today" level

Similarly, I want the ability to make a channel not ping the browser tab (no * next to it) but still display the channel name in bold if there are messages. I find it hard to ever remember to check some channels, but don't necessarily need to check them immediately (or even very quickly).

If you mute the channel and then configure slack to only show starred rooms and rooms with new messages, you can achieve this effect. The room will stay hidden unless someone says something, at which point it shows up in the list, unbolded. This lets you know to check on it at your convenience without triggering any of the notifications.