How to be a jerk on Slack

Because of the asynchronous nature and partial anonymity of Slack — it’s really easy to be a jerk and get away with it! If you like irritating other people, here are some great ways to use Slack to do it.

1. Never use any existing channels — always have all your conversations as DM’s (“direct messages”), preferably 1-on-1 so that nobody that you are talking to knows what anyone else has said. Thereby you can horde information, and prevent people from sharing information or opinions directly.
2. Never use channels, even for topic of frequent conversations — always use group DM’s, and always invite different people so that the channel histories are totally disjointed and unsearchable.
3. Create lots of random private channels with various similar names. That way everyone else can be surprised when a notification comes in on that channel, and they will never know which channel to go to for a particular topic. Even better, people with lots of cross-project responsibilities will have to manage hundreds of channels all with similar names.
4. Post in Slack and expect people to respond immediately, especially if they are offline, DND’d, or snoozed.
5. Don’t use DND or snooze when you can’t respond, so that people think you are always online, and wonder why you don’t answer.
6. Say “I already posted that in slack a few days ago” when someone asks you for information. They will feel dumb and irritated and waste an hour scrolling through a dozen different channel history to try to find the thing that would have taken you 10 seconds to repost.
7. Post lots of images and embedded google docs. They take up a lot of space in the UI and so you can guarantee to make it that much harder to find anything in the history.
8. Ignore posts you are tagged in so that the person who needs information can wonder if you are ignoring it, and force them to ask you several times for the information.
9. Tag “@channel” on every post. Especially on big channels with lots of members so you can annoy lots of people all at once.
10. Don’t tag “@channel” on really important posts, again especially on big channels, so that you virtually guarantee that the most number of people will miss out on the info and you can say “I already posted that in slack a few days ago”, later.
11. Don’t answer a direct question on a channel, even if you know the answer, because you weren’t tagged. Also known as the “Somebody Else’s Problem” response.
12. Create a big channel, but don’t publish any usage guidelines. That way the value of the channel is diluted to the point that people ignore it.
13. Create channels with names that do not say what the channel is for, and also don’t set a channel purpose.
14. Create a channel, stop using it, and don’t archive it. That way channel search functionality is totally useless.
15. The absolute BEST way to be a Slack jerk is to ARGUE over Slack. This virtually guarantees that whatever it is will take the maximum amount of time to solve with the most possible hurt feelings.

(published with permission of David Nixon who originally wrote it for us :)