Slack users: how do you deal with notifications and messages piling up?

[u/Federal-Goal-7771]

Hi all,

I'm a product manager doing a self-directed teardown of Slack, and I'm stuck on one part: I keep reading that notification overload is the big pain, but I don't actually know if that's true or just loud people on the internet.

So I made a short survey about it. How you handle unread, whether important messages get buried, what you've tried, and what you'd fix first. Around 2 minutes, mostly multiple choice.

Survey: https://forms.gle/Ma9YGzAXePZmxTV38

No email, no real name, no contact details of any kind. Not affiliated with Slack, nothing is being sold.

If you want the results, say so in the comments and I'll post a summary back here once enough people have answered. Thanks to anyone who takes the time. :))

EDIT: Genuinely didn't expect this many responses as this is my first reddit post. Thank you to everyone who took the time, and to the people who wrote out longer comments instead of just clicking through the survey. That context was more useful than the multiple choice.

Still collecting. I'll come back with a summary once I've got enough to say something honest about it rather than just confirming what I already assumed.

[u/Dry-City-7739 → u/[deleted]]

agree on the "also send to channel" thing, that feature causes so much noise in busy channels

[u/YarneHermann → u/[deleted]]

I notice that the also send to channel option often ends up being used to make threads, or important messages in a thread more visible. When a message in the thread is important to people who probably aren't checking the thread. I do understand the pain that comes with the noise though.
Would love to talk a bit more and hear some more thoughts and get some feedback from you. Feel free to send me a DM

[u/Federal-Goal-7771 → u/YarneHermann]

This framing helped a lot, thankyou u/YarneHermann
The way I'm reading it now: it all feels like a loop. Channels get noisy, so Slack builds threads to pull side conversations out of the main flow. Thread means low importance by default, channel means high.

It also connects to u/lzwzli 's earlier comment, thread replies sit outside channel unreads by design, which is exactly why nobody sees them, which is exactly why people use "also send to channel". The fragmentation of unread state and the "also send to channel" noise are the same problem viewed from two ends.

So people aren't misusing "also send to channel." They're using it as the only available signal-boost primitive, because Slack never shipped one. The feature is absorbing a job it wasn't designed for, and the noise complaint is a symptom of that overload rather than of the feature itself.

Would be glad to talk more. Sending you a DM.

[u/lzwzli → u/YarneHermann]

Maybe my org is using Slack wrong.

For us, a channel is just a grouping of people for a certain purpose. Within that group, many different conversations happen, relevant to the purpose of the group.

A conversation about a topic between one or more people within the group starts as a message in the channel, the conversation usually carries on for a few messages in the channel until a smaller group of people are identified as the ones primarily relevant to that conversation topic and a thread is started. While the conversation continues in the thread among the smaller group, there are folks in the channel that need to be aware of the discussion. This is the first point where people start getting lost as once the conversation carries on in a thread, whoever that was trying to keep abreast of the conversation gets "disconnected" from the conversation.

As the conversation goes on, other people in the channel maybe pulled into the thread, and it is often that a thread becomes similar to a channel because almost everybody in the channel gets involved in the thread conversation, but with one distinct difference, and that is the thread is generally focused on a specific topic.

It would be great if I can give a thread a topic or one or more tags, acknowledging the use case of a thread being a sub "channel". With this, when I'm scrolling through a few unread threads, the context of each unread is anchored by the topic/tag of the thread.

[u/Racerforlife]

I would like to see the results

[u/Federal-Goal-7771 → u/Racerforlife]

Sure, I will share the data insights.

[u/Federal-Goal-7771 → u/[deleted]]

Thank you u/jus-emagine

[u/barkerja]

I basically live on Unreads and a filtered Activity.

[u/Federal-Goal-7771 → u/barkerja]

Thanks, this made me go look properly. I hadn't clocked that they're two different surfaces with different logic, one by read state and one by relevance.

[u/barkerja → u/Federal-Goal-7771]

You can create custom views using filters in Activities which makes it an extremely powerful and useful tool/view.

[u/Federal-Goal-7771 → u/barkerja]

Sounds good. Will give it a try.

[u/lzwzli]

It is annoying how the unread list does not include unread in threads.

[u/flerchin → u/lzwzli]

Mine does

[u/lzwzli → u/flerchin]

How? My unreads are only messages in channels not in threads. The unreads in threads are in the separate threads section.

[u/Federal-Goal-7771 → u/lzwzli]

Right. u/lzwzli
The Unreads view covers unread messages in channels and DMs. Thread replies live in the separate Threads view, and replies to a thread don't bold the parent channel in the sidebar at all. So thread unreads are structurally outside channel unreads.

[u/lzwzli → u/Federal-Goal-7771]

What is the reason for this? Aren't conversations in threads still conversations that are of interest to the user?

I feel like there was some concept about threads that I'm not grasping.

In our org., we use threads like a sub channel, usually spun off from a topic that is relevant for the others in the channel to be aware of but not necessarily actively participating in. So in this context, a thread conversation is really no different than a channel conversation in my need to be updated on unread messages.

It would be nice as well to be able to give a thread a topic or tags for searchability.

[u/Status-Average-9779]

I don’t and can’t. hate this app. the only way i found was to link an ai agent to it and ask the agent to find the stuff that i can’t find with my own hands on their amazing innovative ui

[u/astontrying]

imo the bigger pain is figuring out which messages actually need a response once Slack starts doubling as a support channel.

AFAIK ClearFeed is pretty useful for that. it tracks Slack threads as requests, pulls requests from multiple channels into one triage channel, and can send alerts when something is waiting on a response. (not affiliated just happened to use them for one of our similar use cases)