I disable notifications on stuff like this. I don't want to get interrupted by random notifications every few minutes/seconds. The vast majority of slack messages are not worth being interrupted for. The very few messages that are an exception to this are a small sacrifice. I got in the habit of scanning the slack UI every once in a while to see if anything needs my attention. So, I pull notifications rather than getting them pushed to me. I check less often when I'm busy.

I find that if you don't respond in real time people around you adapt to that. If you always respond instantly, it lowers the barrier for them to bother you more. So, you'll be dealing with them constantly. If you simply delay your response, they'll adapt and be less likely to interrupt you.

Notify on start of new thread or @mention is the sweet spot.

But there are always people who insist on having their entire conversation at the top level of the channel rather than in a thread, so everybody gets notified for every message (unless they mute the whole channel).

/me shakes fist at cloud that looks like the face of a past team lead

this is the sort of thing i want AI to be solving for me. i don't need it generating hyper-realistic videos, but when those two people in my office who never thread their messages start having a conversation in #general, i want slack to automatically thread it.

Now I am wondering how difficult this would be to implement. You could extend the idea to connect multiple threads (intentional or virtual) across channels. E.g: <see all 25 other discussions on this topic>.

what's the point of it being a channel if everything should be in a thread?

just make every thread a channel, and "channel" should be a folder

Threads are short lived with 2-100 messages. Like a topic or an email conversation.

In email analogy - you want dedicated mailbox for every conversation? Nonsense.

in forum analogy - I want you to make a subforum (category) instead of complaining "why people talk in topic that in no way indicates it's for creating topics"

#customer-incident-channel

Lbotos: okay @jane you are leading expert on problem y. Use this thread for your debugging until next sync

Lbotos: @phil your up for rebooting all the hosts. Ack this message and thread your work here. Please get started ASAP.

Lbotos: others, is there anything else that we need to get unblocked?

—-

By having one channel you can leave that open and can be up to speed on the overarching state easily. Otherwise, if I'm making subchannels I gotta make sure to invite everyone to the sub channel or switch to the “meta coordination channel” to get unplanned collaboration.

Threads have value.

It occurs to me that channels are just topics and it’s somewhat limiting to have a thread only belong to a single channel.

On the surface that sounds reasonable, but when you consider that subscribers and settings (notifications, security, privacy, search, archival…) have to be managed per channel rather than per “folder”, it quickly becomes unmanageable.

And if it’s as it sounds and you are one of the people who always has full conversations in the root of a channel where other people use threads, please reconsider.

That doesn’t generate notifications by default. It does bold the channel though.

Had one person who would send multiple messages in the top level

Per.

Sentence

for me the sweet spot would be toggle on / off / delay X #of minutes for mentions, replies, all the things (each thing individually)..

this way some channels I would set to notify of all the things once every 2 hours, unless @mentioned

Some channels would be once every 4 hours.

Disable notifications for the channel and use the Unreads tab (or “Catch Up” I believe it is now called)

This was a game changer for me. The Unreads tab became a bit like email. I'd check it out a few times a day and respond where needed. Greatly cut down on the amount of distraction-by-noise I suffered in a day.

I still find it utterly mind-boggling that Slack still lacks the ability to batch or "debounce" notifications.

I don't need (nor want) to react instantaneously to anything and everything that occurs in a channel, thread, or direct-message chat... and especially not for that one senior co-worker who submits each discrete sentence in their indefinitely long stream of consciousness.

"Mute" is not an answer, because I do need to be notified of activity... But I'd rather get a single minute-delayed "boop" about multiple events than a stream of instant and sporadic mad chittering.

I have literally thrown my apple watch on the floor due to slack notifications buzzing my wrist incessantly. It’s a trigger for me at this point.

Or at least give us the discord feature of "Mute channel for ..." with some fixed set of durations.

For Zoom Team Chat you can set up notifications to only notify for replies to your messages, direct messages, and explicit mentions. I agree that it would be useful to additionally batch notifications for specific channels though.

You mean like… email?

No. I mean like what I wrote. Some channels or discussions I want to partake in live and get notifications when things are happening, some I just want to know has happened and read after.

It could be useful to let an LLM create a daily digest of those channels, then you can go read the actual messages if that seems necessary.

I have channels that I ignore and read ~once a day but there's often still not a great signal to noise ratio. Something more detailed than "x new messages" would be helpful.