Twist app - "My Company Tried Slack For Two Years. This Is Why We Quit."

[brotherS]

I just read https://www.fastcompany.com/40433793/my-company-tried-slack-for-two-years-this-is-whywe-quit and wanted to share the article.

Because conversations in Slack happen on a one-way conveyor belt, our team began feeling like they had to stay constantly connected to keep up. This style of communication was especially problematic for a remote-first company like ours. How do you stay in the loop when earlier topics have already been discussed and are buried by the time you even wake up?

On https://twist.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003654569 they add:

It's not just Slack. Any synchronous, real-time chat app will drain your time—that's the nature of chat.

I like the thinking behind their https://twistapp.com/ (it's from the Todoist team): to have "calmer, more organized, and more productive communication". I'll try it some day. They have a promo video that shows how it works.

[mouser]

That's an interesting post -- thanks for sharing.

I have been very impressed with Slack as a tool for active group discussions, but I can definitely see their points.  And I like the idea of an app for calmer more organized communication/coordination 

[wraith808]

On the other hand, I don't see anything new there.  It's just the same kind of app from what I see.  Especially as Slack does have threading, and I like the fact that you can put the thread on the feed, or not, depending on what you want to do, and you can control your notifications on a more granular level, but people just usually don't configure.

[Deozaan]

So, it seems to me that Slack is like a modernized IRC and Twist is like modernized email with proper group support (solving the problem of reply-to-all and forwarding, etc.). Interesting.

[wraith808]

So, it seems to me that Slack is like a modernized IRC and Twist is like modernized email with proper group support (solving the problem of reply-to-all and forwarding, etc.). Interesting.

What do you mean by proper group support?  If you've not used it recently, I can show where these features are for comparison.

[Deozaan]

So, it seems to me that Slack is like a modernized IRC and Twist is like modernized email with proper group support (solving the problem of reply-to-all and forwarding, etc.). Interesting.

What do you mean by proper group support?  If you've not used it recently, I can show where these features are for comparison.

I mean email with proper group conversations.

Trying to have an email conversation with a large group is cumbersome and messy. Lots of forwards and reply-to-alls and "didn't you see my email?" etc.

I was comparing Twist to email, not to Slack. I was not saying that Slack doesn't have group support.

[wraith808]

Ah... that makes sense.  Thanks for the clarification!

[Shades]

Here in Paraguay internet services can be "spotty" and lately (intercontinental) Skype communications are suffering because of that. Slack was presented as possible alternative. Although it looked kinda powerful, the need to "sell" the others on this one wasn't something I was looking forward to. Mainly because it looks like you need to communicate through their servers.

Anyway, I started to look at alternatives for slack, and found Mattermost. This one is powerful, allows for fine grained authorization schemes and supports even Markdown. Best of all, I can host it myself, there are Android/iOS clients and there are projects that say they can integrate email and the Jira issue tracker into it too. After setting up a test server and local test session (because Skype was failing once again), the general consensus was that we liked it. But the lack of VOIP/Video calls would still make it a hard sell.

But now I see that there is Riot, which appears to do everything that MatterMost does on web, desktop, Android and iOS, but also includes (conferencing) VOIP/Video calls.

How Slack compares with Mattermost according to the Slant website. Unfortunately there is no indication when which versions of Slack an MatterMost were compared with each other, so some of the listed Pros/Cons might not apply anymore.

Still, the 'vs.' feature on this website allows for a lot of alternatives to be pitted against each other. Unfortunately I didn't see Twist App in this 'vs.' list.