I have a lot to say on the Slack, but it often feels like I’m standing in an office building, shouting at the top of my lungs in the vain hope that I’ll be heard a hundred rooms away. I’m not the only one.

I see you all trying to have important conversations. But you face the same problem I do. People are in different rooms. Private channels, separate circles. People post in the wrong channel because they don’t know the right channel exists.

Under these conditions, real community is possible for individual channels, but impossible for the Slack as a whole.

Enter Slacker News. This is a place where you can publish news stories and opinion pieces. It is a way to get us all in one room, so we can finally stop shouting and be heard.

We’ll take three kinds of submissions:

  1. News - Factual content that is not opinionated and not an advertisement
  2. Opinion - Self-explanatory. Quality standards will be high. You can also submit rebuttals.
  3. Ads - Promote your project, recruit help, etc. For now, ads are free. Later I may start “charging” for them in unconventional ways, e.g. “You must also write me a news story about X” or “Help make the site look nicer”.

Submissions are not guaranteed to be published. Quality, tone, and significance all matter.

As I make changes to the Slack, I will announce them here.

Why We Need It

Slack is good at many things but productive public disagreement isn’t one of them; for that, the Slack is about as useful as a chocolate hammer. Threads move too fast for people to keep up. They get too long to reasonably be read (and too hard to scroll through) so people ignore each other. Things get derailed, or forgotten. Most harmfully, things are immediate, so people say things without stopping to reflect on them. How many times have people said something mean in a minute that they wouldn’t have said in an hour?

I also hope this will give the Slack a single shared informational baseline. #announcements and #happenings do good work–and have a commanding lead in fame–but they are inherently limited by being Slack channels. Slacker News is not a replacement for them. Its focus will be on going into greater detail, covering more subjects, and giving more voice to you.

So start drafting your submission!