I remember using Slack for the first time and how different it felt — finally, a work tool that was…fun? Yes, fun. Slack injected new energy into our daily work lives and made collaborating with co-workers feel like shooting the shit in a group chat.
Slack replaced email for many of us, turning what used to be a slow, confusing mess of threads into something easy and lightweight. It replaced the verbose and hyper-formal culture of email drafting into a group chat where chiming in is as simple as pressing enter.
But this shift came with a cost: as the friction to share fell, the quantity of shared things skyrocketed. As quantity skyrocketed, it became harder to find the signal in the noise. It gave us the tools to think out loud in front of hundreds of people, molding incomplete thoughts and ideas one push notification at a time.
If you ask anyone today what they dislike about Slack, their reply is inevitably some variation of: “It’s too damn noisy.”
Slack turned ten this week and is still as central to most people’s work lives as ever. But what used to feel like fun is now anything but: it’s a distraction machine. It’s a conveyor belt of FOMO, keeping us glued to our phones at all hours. It’s a tool that lets anyone distract everyone with each new message.
Slack fixed so many problems with email but has now made it easy to mistake motion for progress. Ah, look how much work I am getting done! you think to yourself as you bounce uncontrollably between a dozen threads and channels of varying importance.
All of this to say, I think the world is hungry for something new.
We’re hungry for a different way of working that still feels lightweight, simple, and yes, fun! But we want a tool that asks people to share complete thoughts to minimize noise and raise the floor for shared context with teammates.
We’re hungry for a tool that supports makers just as much as managers, keeps us in flow, and minimizes context switching.
We’re hungry for a tool that helps us move fluidly across communication formats and mediums — from chat, to a call, to a note, to a post. Everything should fit together and connect the dots so we don’t spend half our day copying and pasting things between apps.
Chat should be an escape hatch, a space for small ideas and quick questions. But we shouldn’t be making company announcements or sharing project updates in the same text box we use to say “good morning” to the team.
We believe that posts are the sweet spot between chat and docs, and they create a calmer, context-rich way of collaborating with people across projects and time zones.
So we’re not trying to build a new Slack at Campsite. We’re trying something different — and we might not get it right! We’re in early access for small teams and would love to show you what we’ve made. Please reach out if you’re looking for what comes after Slack that isn’t another Slack.
