Is Slack Truly Unkillable? (1/3)
Thoughts about next-gen enterprise chat
When Slack launched on February 12, 2014, it revolutionized workplace communication. Over a decade later, Slack is still considered the gold standard.
Why hasn’t a true competitor emerged to dethrone Slack?
Slack has become indispensable in the modern workplace. For many startups, setting up a Slack workspace comes before even incorporating the business. And if you're working for a technology company, you will likely spend multiple hours on Slack each day.
Despite its ubiquity, Slack has become a polarizing object among founders, executives, and employees, with many vocalizing frustrations and highlighting its drawbacks.
I started using Slack during its beta phase in 2013 with my first startup. My founder network Builders became one of the larger early Slack-based communities, leading to invites to Slack’s roadmap previews. In 2018, I founded Back, which started as an AI chatbot for employee questions on Slack. So it’s fair to say that I’ve been heavily invested in the Slack ecosystem.
Still, I crave to see a serious contender to Slack.
To answer why no Slack killer emerged yet, it is crucial to understand Slack’s pain points first.
From Darling to Dread: The Slack Hate
‘Be less busy.’
Nothing less was the promise Slack launched with.
The team around Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield described their mission as making the ‘working life simpler, more pleasant and more productive.’ And people loved it, at least initially.
Slack wasn’t first to market. Work chat software has its roots in IRC, where many, including myself, grew up with. Atlassian had released the first Hipchat in 2010, and Basecamp (then 37signals) had a web-based chat called Campfire.
Yet, Slack’s bottom-up growth was unprecedented, captivating users with its user experience and some major improvements. These included:
Design: Slack featured a significantly more modern user experience and UI.
Mobile App: They were the first to have a great mobile app (at the right inflection point of usage of mobile apps).
Channel Structure: The use of channels, plus DMs and private groups, resonated well with the transparency many startups strived for.
Integration Ecosystem: Even with its initial launch, Slack pushed an integration ecosystem that resonated especially with the engineering target group.
Leave-State Synchronization: The app’s leave-state synchronization was best-in-class and worked considerably better than its competitors.
But most of all, it made messaging at work fun and made companies actually use email less. Today, I know many organizations using Slack that barely send internal emails at all (a very different pattern from MS Teams in comparison).
However, the initial enthusiasm waned over time.
By 2017, the tech community’s honeymoon with Slack was over, giving way to growing dissatisfaction and critical scrutiny in subsequent years. This shift in sentiment is evident in numerous articles published over the years, such as:
And the latest major changes to the product haven't shifted the sentiment to the positive either: "The Slack redesign has ruined my life. Sorry, I can't work today."
The criticisms are widespread and persistent. Today, it’s common to hear founders and employees expressing frustration, with some even longing for a return to email-centric communication. This begs the question: What went wrong with Slack, and why hasn’t a better alternative emerged?
The Dark Side of Slack: Distraction and Overload
Slack promised to streamline work, but has it delivered?
Three major issues stand out: (1) overwhelming distraction, (2) poor scalability for larger teams, and (3) a built-in culture of instant responses. All of them hinder thoughtful work.
First, distraction and overload: Slack was supposed to be ‘the place where work happens,’ but it often feels like the place where work gets derailed. It’s where interruptions abound, and great ideas get buried in noise. This isn’t just a coincidence—Slack’s design and UX are optimized for engagement rather than focus, suggesting a conscious choice to prioritize activity over productivity. The ease of sharing light messages steers discussions away from complex problems, as content mirrors the platform’s frictionless design (content follows form).
Second, usability in larger deployments: As companies scale, Slack becomes a labyrinth of channels, messages, and integrations that are difficult to navigate. The search function frequently fails to surface the information you need, leading to frustration and lost productivity. This complexity is especially daunting for new or less tech-savvy users, making Slack less effective as organizations grow. Moreover, the platform’s lack of robust admin tools —something tools like Discord offer— compounds these issues, leaving teams to grapple with an unwieldy system.
Third, promoting a negative culture of immediacy: While intended to enhance communication, the real-time nature of Slack can contribute to a culture of immediacy. Users feel pressured to respond instantly regardless of their current task or time zone. This contributes to a stressful work environment where it’s difficult to disconnect, especially with mobile apps constantly at hand. More critically, this culture undermines thoughtful decision-making and deep work, as quick responses regularly take precedence over meaningful discussions. Instead of facilitating better decisions, Slack can sometimes stifle them altogether.
Please Blame Slack, Not Your Colleagues
But is Slack really to blame?
Some argue that these issues are user (or organizational) problems rather than design flaws. They suggest that with proper customization, guidelines, and discipline, most of these challenges can be mitigated. Indeed, many Slack workspaces have ‘right-use’ evangelists who tirelessly remind others to post in the right channels, use threads, and follow best practices (though their advice typically falls on deaf ears, and nobody loves them).
In my last 6+ years of working on collaborative software, I’ve come to believe that developers have a responsibility to design products that work effectively at scale, relying solely on the users. Software should shape how work is done.
Ironically, it’s in the developer’s self-interest since this would increase overall customer satisfaction, but it’s often the easier decision for a product team to add customization. Most are reverting to the ‘just give me faster horses’ approach to satisfy immediate customer demands.
This usually becomes a problem for enterprise software once it becomes so flexible (“powerful”) that individual users can invent their own workflows and create chaos (h/t Julian’s explanation).
I remember the early Asana, which on the one hand was a beautifully designed productivity tool, but on the other hand, quickly became a graveyard of dead tasks because of the freedom it gave to each user. Similarly, in Slack, despite having ‘right-use’ evangelists and company-wide policies on channel naming and usage, these measures typically fall flat, proving that excessive flexibility can undermine effective usage.
Ultimately, software — especially in the consumerized B2B space — should guide and improve user behavior.
Unfortunately, Slack often influences work negatively. Given these well-known issues and the growing chorus of critics, the question remains:
Why has no one built a better Slack?
Many have actually tried… (which I’ll share in the next part).