Reflections on my stint as an admin of the Mac Admins Slack
Introduction
Today, I’m stepping down as an admin (moderator) of the Mac Admins Slack after three-and-a-half years. I want to send my gratitude to all the current and past admins and board members who have helped along the way, and many thanks in advance to the new admins that we have just onboarded.
Since I joined the team in February 2023, membership has increased from maybe 50,000 members to 86,000. I posted 1,372 messages in the private admins channels and another 230 answers in #ask-about-this-slack, while relocating from Switzerland to Germany, changing jobs from ETH Zurich to Jamf, presenting at the Mac Admins UK and MacSysAdmin conferences, and at several Jamf Nation Live events (twice in German!), and learning so much from members of the Mac Admins community.
Being an admin was an honour, and there have been some interesting problems to solve. I will emphasise that the overwhelming number of members of Mac Admins Slack are helpful and courteous, and understand the value of community.
What keeps the admins busy are the tiny number of members with different motivations, usually thinking more about how to help their business grow than how to build a community. Most commonly, this means dealing with spam posting and unsolicited DMs. But we’ve also seen folks using fake accounts to impersonate their own customers or to pile into heated debates. On a few occasions, investigating these issues led to many hours of work, and was mentally exhausting.
AI vs. Community
More recently, we’ve seen an increase in the use of bots to scrape data, first by recruiters, but, I think, now also by people who are determined to link Slack with AI.
The rise of artifical intelligence - and especially of large language models - is the biggest change to all our jobs over the time I’ve been an admin. Every day for about the past year or so, at least one member of the community asks to connect Slack with Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini, usually citing the reason as a desire to find answers in a hurry, no doubt impatient with the built-in search mechanisms of Slack which I guess feel clunky and inefficient compared to AI-generated summaries.
The admins and board collectively decided against adding AI to Slack. But even without AI being connected to Slack, active members are 13% down and posts are 14% down compared to this time last year. Perhaps people are getting more used to asking AI for answers instead of asking their peers. One person we caught using a bot said something that made me a little sad:
“I do completely understand the community part, [but] my main thing is efficiency. I might be in scenario where I don’t have the time to wait for a response or spend a while looking for an answer.”
Have our managers’ expectations really changed that much that we genuinely don’t have time to ask humans for help, or have we just become attuned to getting instant answers without having to think? Asking questions of humans that are likely to invoke a response requires you to think about how to phrase the question in a way that is less likely to be dismissed - that’s a useful cognitive exercise, often leading you to do more thorough tests and figure out the answer yourself. That’s efficient!
It’s easy to underestimate the importance of community, in comparison to a knowledge base. Everyone who posts useful information does so voluntarily, out of a desire both to help, and to demonstrate their knowledge. We all know that asking a question in Slack is more likely to get a faster and more useful response than contacting vendor support for whatever application or service you’re struggling with. Maybe that’s not faster than AI, but we’ll probably get a more nuanced answer based on individual experiences rather than recycled vendor documentation.
By asking questions, you also get to know who are the experts and good mentors of the community, who you may eventually meet, some may even become friends. I would count many friends, and even colleagues, that I first engaged with in the Mac Admins Slack. By answering questions, you become one of those mentors, gaining recognition in the field and doubtless improving your prospects when the time comes to change jobs.
But does it matter? I think so. If LLMs are connected to Slack, then fewer will ask any questions, and as a result, fewer will answer. The data will get stale and dry up, and the community will also be reduced.
Additionally, there is no agreement upon signing up for the Mac Admins Slack that your data can be fed into LLMs. We can ask for our posts to be removed from Slack, but that’s no good if they’ve already been ingested into a third party system. I’ve talked to folks who said they would leave (or no longer post) if LLM connectors were allowed.
Conclusion
If Mac Admins Slack remains a haven for human-written content, I think that would be a positive thing. I don’t personally enjoy reading the output of an LLM, even if it’s useful. I enjoy the creativity of people writing their own thoughts down in their own style.
A perfect example of that - if you want a weekly, human-curated summary of useful information relevant to our community, you need look no further than fellow Mac Admin Slack administrator and community champion Armin Briegel’s excellent Mac Admins News Blog - he’s doing the work so can save your AI tokens! (and the #blog-feed channel will remind you each time there’s a new post).
So, to those of you asking to connect your LLM with Slack, or already scraping the channels to do so, please instead try to engage in the community. Be a member, not just a consumer. Introduce yourself. Be willing to ask, get to know the experts, learn, have fun! And then help those yet to learn what you have. This is what has made working in the Mac Admins community special for so many of us, and long may that continue! With Mac admin jobs becoming more globally spread, conferences getting more and more expensive, and many organisations’ travel budgets getting tighter, in-person interaction is becoming a luxury many can not afford, and the online community only gets more important. Don’t let it die of AI!
Though stepping down as an admin, I’ll still be active in the Mac Admins Slack, not least supporting the members of the #eraseinstall, #jamf-uploader, and #jamf-msp channels, and hanging out in other channels, such as #autopkg, #jamf-api, and more. But also, I hope to grab a bit more time outdoors, as well as get more on top of life admin, which, living in Germany, is a gift that keeps on giving.