Slack stinks (RIP Quill)

Last month Quill shut down. Quill was a b2b chat app that, despite some rough edges, was a hidden gem. My team originally rebelled when I asked them to move from Slack to Quill. But by the time Twitter acquired Quill and decided to send it to the startup farm up in Maine, we all looked around and agreed that there was nothing quite like it out there.

After years, the time has come for me to say it: Slack stinks. Nice UI, integrations – yes, I get it. I do know what life was like before Slack. But overall, Slack is a drain, and the product team has done nothing to address this problem.

I originally wrote this post to vent. Now that I’ve finished picking up the pieces of our shutdown-induced migration, I can’t help but wonder: am I the only one that feels this way?

Why we left Slack

I’m founder/CEO of a devtools startup, and last year we abandoned Slack in favor of Quill for 2 reasons:

1. Hard to separate the wheat from chaff. Let’s say you try to focus on coding for a couple hours and come back to a Slack full ’o messages. How do you know where to start? Every message gets equal weight — messages where you’re @ mentioned, DMs and messages in any other channel you’re in. And if you drop into a channel that had multiple new messages or threads, now everything is marked as read and…poof, what was new again? Oh well!
2. Noisy. In Slack, if you get @ mentioned or DMed, you get a notification. Boom, you need to check it. How do you know if someone wanted you to see something NOW, or just wanted to make sure you didn’t miss it? Yes, you can tweak your notification settings or go on “do not disturb,” but that defeats the point of the tool, because now people who have an expectation of reaching you can’t do so.

These 2 characteristics lead to the FOMO and window-flipping anxiety that made it hard for my team and me to focus. It made it hard for us to prioritize which messages to look at closely and which ones we could skim or ignore. Also, at the time we were making this shift, I had just read about Stripe’s email transparency initiative and was pushing for us to have 90% of conversations in public channels instead of DMs, which was only going to exacerbate these issues.

If you’re reading this and thinking that we should have just adopted some tablet of cultural chat norms (e.g., “If you need a response in >1 hr, send a Slack; >3 hrs, send via email, more than that and send via Seagull”) — no, thank you. I don’t need to be making these kinds of prioritization decisions all the time and I sure don’t want my team wasting its time on that either, let alone reconciling how different people internalize those norms differently (“Did that really need to be a DM?”).

Why we moved to Quill

Then we moved to Quill. It wasn’t all roses – the UI was a bit clunky and it was buggier than Slack, for instance – but it nailed a lot of Slack’s core issues.

Organized chaos

1. Activity Feed. Perhaps my favorite feature of Quill was the Activity Feed, aka, Inbox. All new messages that for whatever reason you had elected to follow – e.g., a DM, new thread in a channel you followed, new message a thread you’d replied to — showed up in the Activity Feed, which was a bar of messages on the left of the window. (Sorry, no screenshots!) This made it easy to triage, catch up, mark as unread, etc.
2. Threaded by default. Quill let you set channels to “structured,” which meant that all new messages had to be inside a thread with a subject. This made it a lot easier to keep conversations focused to a given topic while preserving the real-time feel of chat.

Quiet.

1. Soft mentions vs. hard mentions. You could “soft mention” someone with an @ when you wanted them to get a notification in their Activity Feed but not a push notification (because it wasn’t urgent). Or you could hard mention them with a !! when it was time-sensitive to trigger a push notification.
2. Tunable notifications. In addition to the obvious options (notify for all messages vs. only @ mentions vs. nothing), you could choose to follow specific channels, or even follow/unfollow threads within channels.
3. Default quiet. Notifications and alerts were set to be less noisy by default— e.g., off, except for incoming DMs.

What Quill didn’t solve

There was one challenge we had with Slack that Quill didn’t manage to tackle in its short, if storied, existence. Anyone who’s ever had a thought and wondered, “Where we did have that conversation?” knows exactly what I’m talking about.

Search.

Yes, I know it’s a hard problem to solve. That’s why technology companies raise lots of money, charge lots of money and pay engineers lots of money. And if you tell customers that you’re giving them “one place for everyone and everything you need to get stuff done”…then it would be super to be able to find that stuff when you need it.

Slacked out

In the end, a lot of what Quill did was strike a balance between Slack and email. The real-time, social nature of Slack with all its giphiness and integrations; the structure and organization of email.

When we got word of Quill’s shutdown, we surveyed a number of alternatives. Most seemed like Slack wannabes. There was Twist, which takes an aggressively async approach — so much so that my team and I felt lonely in it. It’s effectively a nicer skin on email but without the…email.

So in the end, what did we do? We’re using Slack, trying our best to apply what we learned from the great Quill experiment of 2021, because there doesn’t seem to be any better option 🤷‍♂ 😢.

And me, I’m hoping that there’s some ambitious entrepreneur out there now who sees Slack for what it is and wants to build a long-term company to replace it. Whoever you are, if you’re out there, drop me a line and I’ll write you your first angel check.