Slack isn't a good community building tool

I agree, Slack is not designed for community building.

We've been working hard on such a solution and now it's live in closed beta: https://peerboard.io

It's a fully embeddable forum/community solution that supports rich user profiles, no code integration, real-time threads, and much more.

Please let me know if you want to learn more!

100% agree. Slack is the worst community building tool to be used widely for by people who want to build communities 😂

Facebook is another one that's super bad, but people outside of technical circles default to.

The thing they have in common, though, is what I think makes them work at all and that is that is they are where people already are. New apps are suuuuuper hard to gain adoption, and people are slow to build habits. People already live in Facebook and Slack for other reasons...healthy or not.

For me, whatever the tool is, it's gotta let folks interact (both directions) via somewhere they already are. Email lists win for this reason.

I've been on Slack for about three years for my small community Unreal Collective. It's a great community, but I've had to keep it small intentionally because I have not seen Slack groups above 200 people that aren't noisy, stressful, and largely turn people away.

I've tried EVERYTHING in some degree and hate or hated it all. I even tried Tribe.so and kind of liked it but its pricing structure is silly.

I'm moving soon to Circle.so soon and am really, really excited and bullish on it.

I agree, but also people aren't willing to change their behavior much. I'd be wary of competing with slack in this area. Even people with a significant audience have failed.

Totally agree that people should change their habits if they are deciding on a community (check out PlayGroupHQ!), but be careful about it if you're thinking of building in that area.

I understand your points. Information getting lost was one of the reasons I built https://getlowdown.com to ensure key information is seen.

The problem for me is with chat-based communities you have to pay attention all the time or you run the risk missing something useful.

I came across this right when I was about to launch a community around my online course and I'm so glad I did! Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

I decided to go with Tribe because I wanted an interface that was in between that of Slack and a forum. It doesn't have realtime chat like Slack but I prefer the way it organizes content unlike a forum. Discourse and Mighty Network were other contenders.

Kinda surprised nobody mentioned Telegram. Lots of communities there, also broadcast options for news.

I think Discord is a lot better than Slack for community building.

Slack is the worst. Discord is much better and friendly. On slack channels, people only post and advertise but don't engage. They don't even look at previous messages, whereas on slack there are a lot of friendly channels with lots of great people. Slack's design is also the worst.

Some good points here @IdentityTensor. I do think Slack has some merits with regard to real time chat that I struggle to find in other community tools. Most other community platforms use forums and posts as default. It would be nice to have the ability to use a slack like real time chat with the added benefit of posts and forums all in one tool.

I put together this list of community tools last week:

Some of these may help; although not many of them are self-hosted.

I totally agree. I always find myself frustrated with slack, so I have been on the hunt looking for a new community tool. Something similar to Discord, but without the UI clutter and game vibe. I found this platform called AirSend not too long ago. I have been testing it out these past two weeks, and they are continuously updating the product, which is really cool. I hope this helps!
https://www.airsend.io/build-community

I've discussed it on this other IH Post.

I, personally, would go for Discourse. It's easy to scale, much cheaper than Slack, and is really for community building, intended in the sense of a public forum where ideas are exchanged. Slack, in my opinion, works best for chit chat.

For my particular community (weekendclub.co) it's built around Saturday working sessions, so having live chat is critical. Forum type tools like Mighty Networks or Circle aren't fit for purpose.

Telegram is like a Whatsapp group chat and feels very difficult to keep up with, which basically leaves Discord.

I haven't used Discord much and am curious - what are the benefits over Slack? I find the idea of voice channels pretty appealing, but the familiarity people have with Slack trumps it so far.

Why has no one mentioned Reddit. I see Notion uses it for their community.

@IdentityTensor Agreed! We're using Mighty Networks and, so far, totally love it. It really encourages interaction (and it has events, courses, groups, topics, etc. built in). The only place it falls short is in the creation of a repository (in our case, Knowledge Center), so we added a Notion.so component we link to from the Mighty Network.

I'm currently looking at alternatives where I can set up a "help centre" / community / chat support for my app.

Gitter: I'd love to use this but sharing screenshots is such a pain.

Discord: Easy to jump in on a one-on-one call with video / screen-sharing. The downside to me is that the whole feel of Discord is that it's meant for hardcore twitch Gamers only.

Slack: signing up is a bit of a pain and it's hard to keep track of your workspaces but i'm so familiar with Slack from my day to day job that it would be easy to setup and manage.

I wish people just went back to old fashioned forums

I completely agree Slack is a nightmare for communities. Occasionally I'll hop on a large Slack channel for a language or framework if I have an urgent question that I need to be answered. I generally find that the response rate, although usually faster, is much worse than Stackoverflow. Also, if my question is one that has a lot of value to other people (not always the case but sometimes), I feel like putting it in Slack is a disservice to people who could benefit from the answers in three months or a year.
In my opinion, forums are the best community building option, the communication can be near-real-time if you need it to be but things can also sit for a few days or weeks but the content is there forever as a permanent archive. There is a lot of good forum software out there but Discourse seems to be the de facto choice in 2020. Personally I think the greatest forum builder of all time was PHPBB circa 2007 but that's just me.

Slack originally isn't for community building, but for internal communication. Until people took it an use it for community communication.

For example, Slack used to allow people within a channel to see other member emails. It makes sense for people within a company get and send email to their colleagues. But with any community, their email would be scrape and spammed.

I agree about Slack, however between Discord and Slack they seem to be the best out of the box quick solutions available. Maybe there is an opportunity in that in itself.

But the most frustrating experience I had was with the self-hosted option of Discourse. I tried to load it once on AWS, after 4 days of unsuccessful trying I just gave. No one in their own community chat could assist with the problems I was having.

I agree and disagree with you.
I agree that slack is a great tool. And when there are few slack teams, each team is very valuable because your interactions with it have depth. When you get to a point where you have 10 different slack teams, one for each topic that gets your attention fragmented. Add to that the fact that instant messaging is ephemeral and expires fast (the opposite of your example with stack overflow): the message from last month is already out of date and you're unlikely to get much value from it as it will, as well, get deleted over time.

My point is:
Slack is very good when user attention is plenty. If you're the only game in town for a niche, that can be really good. But, seriously, who needs one more Nocode slack team? or one more digital marketing slack team?

Still, that does not remove the need that some business models DO require you to have an IM-like interface with customers to provide a sort of support/community. Regardless of the tool you use it is about the need: when you have a complex product, such as software integration, you may want to give people a high touch support option (which Instant messaging fits in perfectly)

But community building is a tricky and somewhat of an emerging field. sometimes you do need the slack for your company, but other times a facebook group is a better choice.

and it's actually funny how community building was the strategy of some great companies, but when everyone is doing it, no one can benefit (apart from the support case I pointed above).

I'd love to hear the input of people who are deeper into community building on this. I feel like the tools have evolved but it has become harder and harder to bootstrap a community

Totally agree that Slack isn’t the best fit to build a strong community. But in a way, it’s clearly the best one today.

I’d to see GitHub launching something here.

I agree. I find Slack's UI frustrating for multiple groups. I often forget to check-in with groups for long periods of time. I also find it overwhelming to keep up with multiple groups. Sites like IH and PH do a much better job.

I disagree. I think most people who run these Slack communities don’t know how to take it vantage of readily available in moderation and automation tools to make content relevant, save it and then deliver in the appropriate engaging format.

I agree with this 100%. Slack is great for interoffice communication but is terrible for a community. I like MightyNetworks as a Facebook Group alternative.

What leads you to believe content generation is the most important output of community building?

I'd check out https://www.mightynetworks.com It's what I am using for communities and I am a fan. It works like most social media, but you can create groups and courses within the community. Has some great features. I prefer over Slack for communities.

Check out https://genevachat.com/ -- just launched and I'm loving it. Was designed for this purpose of community-building.

Also might be some in here:
https://www.commsor.com/post/mapping-the-ecosystem-of-community-tools

I host a show where I speak to the creatives and entrepreneurs behind some of the most kick-ass communities today. If you wish, sign up to get alerted about the episodes and get the content as it is likely to cover this territory. You can do that here--

https://www.digitalcampfires.co/jointhenext

TX!

Spot. On!

Ephemerality. Fine for chit chat. Terrible for long-term value.

A lot of the things that distributed work teams learn (like Slack is terrible for finding answers to questions three years later) apply to digital communities.

One option that may not work for everyone given all the new options out there, but I thought I'd share anyway, is the P2 Theme for WordPress. It's a discussion board theme. WordPress.com uses P2's across their organization to do non-ephemeral communication. They use hashtags and @ to enrich the searchability.

This is why I use Spectrum for my project Mockoon https://spectrum.chat/mockoon.
It's thread based, and act more like a knowledge base.
I was acquired by GitHub a while ago. Apparently GitHub Discussions that will be released soon looks a lot like Spectrum, and would be a great addition to my project!

Sounds great and signed up! Would probably like to hear how it's different from Tribe, Zendesk (?), etc.

AirSend (https://www.airsend.io/build-community) is an another good option. In-addition to messaging it also offers wiki and built-in file management for long term knowledge sharing.

Hey would you mind drop the different slack groups you're in haha

discord.com

Hey there! I'm building my own messaging app to deal precisely with this issue. Any chance we can connect for 30 min? I'd love to hear more about your thoughts.

A bit about me: I spent the last 5 years building my company's internal platform for our 6,000+ network members. Every time somebody would ask us "Why not just use Slack?" I'd basically point them to exactly the points you make.