It’s easy to come across poorly in writing, but that issue has no easy resolution unless you’re prepared to ban Slack, email, and any other text-based communication system between employees.
Slack can sometimes be a place for people who don’t feel heard in conventional spaces to vent — but that’s an organisational problem, not a Slack problem.
Only half-kidding, but it's an application which is so repulsive it seems to discourage people from communicating at all.
Yep. Fun fact, my last workplace had a fairly nontoxic Slack... but there was a whole second Slack dedicated to bitching and shitposting where the bosses weren't invited. Humans gonna human.
A very inclusive company on paper that was very exclusionary behind the scenes.
If Slack is a cesspool, that’s because your company culture is a cesspool.
Slack is surely not the generator of toxicity but it seems obvious it could act at increasing the bandwidth.
You can't have it both ways.
The idea that the mechanism of how people communicate affects what people communicate is a pretty foundational concept in media studies (a topic which is generally met with a hostile audience on HN). Slack almost certainly does play a role, but people who work in technology are incentivized to believe that technology does not affect people's behaviors, because that belief allows people who work in technology to be free of any and all qualitative or moral judgements on any grounds; the assertion that technology does not play a role is something that technology workers cling to because it absolves them of all guilt in all situations, and makes them, above all else, innocent in every situation. On the specific concept of a medium of communication affecting what is being communicated, McLuhan took these ideas to such an extreme that it's almost ludicrous, but he still had some pretty interesting observations worth thinking on, and his writing on this topic is some of the earlier work. This is generally the place where people first look, because much of the other work assumes you've understood McLuhan's work in advance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Media
I know it would be impossible but I wish we go back to the days when we didn't have Slack (or tools alike). Our Slack is a cesspool of people complaining, talking behind other people's backs, echo chamber of negativity etc.
That probably speaks more to the overall culture of the company, but Slack certainly doesn't help.You can also say "tool is not the problem, people are" - sure, we can always explain things away, but Slack certainly plays a role here.