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None of the problems you mentioned are unique to any particular messaging product, up to and including IRC and Jabber. And with respect, you cannot speak to an

None of the problems you mentioned are unique to any particular messaging product, up to and including IRC and Jabber. And with respect, you cannot speak to any culture other than the few you've been a part of. I can say with some authority that this is not a problem at my workplace. The reason IM has proliferated is precisely because it's instant and usually targeted. Email is a pain in the ass and usually serves as a dumping ground for irrelevant messages. If your culture demands that you treat a fundamentally asynchronous tool as synchronous, that's a problem with your culture, not the tool.

ironjunkie 8y ago
I would agree with you, except that Slack promotes actively that culture of quick response and disruption. And I indeed blame that most work cultures took that in blindly without reflecting on what the impact would be. I see it as something similar to the rise of open-spaces. Now there is a backslash against it because people finally realize that it was overhyped and that open-spaces are maybe not always that good. Regarding emails, I disagree with you. It is still my go-to channel for deep technical discussions on difficult subjects on which you need to reflect. With emails, I have no pressure to respond directly. When I respond, I will write multiple well constructed paragraphs where I explain why I would do this or this technical choice. Emails are archived easily and can be reread and referenced later. Slack is a dumping ground of irrelevant messages, the opposite of your experience.
SamWhited 8y ago
Slight aside: I think one of the big problems in the IRC and XMPP communities is that we discuss them as if the protocol itself or the public federated network (in the case of Jabber) were a "messaging product", but it's really not. Someone could (and should) build a messaging product with XMPP or IRC. HipChat started out that way a bit, but then tacked on more and more proprietary bits, or abused the XMPP protocol in its own clients enough that it could hardly be called XMPP anymore, which was a real shame.

ironjunkie 8y ago

I would agree with you, except that Slack promotes actively that culture of quick response and disruption. And I indeed blame that most work cultures took that in blindly without reflecting on what the impact would be. I see it as something similar to the rise of open-spaces. Now there is a backslash against it because people finally realize that it was overhyped and that open-spaces are maybe not always that good. Regarding emails, I disagree with you. It is still my go-to channel for deep technical discussions on difficult subjects on which you need to reflect. With emails, I have no pressure to respond directly. When I respond, I will write multiple well constructed paragraphs where I explain why I would do this or this technical choice. Emails are archived easily and can be reread and referenced later. Slack is a dumping ground of irrelevant messages, the opposite of your experience.

SamWhited 8y ago

Slight aside: I think one of the big problems in the IRC and XMPP communities is that we discuss them as if the protocol itself or the public federated network (in the case of Jabber) were a "messaging product", but it's really not. Someone could (and should) build a messaging product with XMPP or IRC. HipChat started out that way a bit, but then tacked on more and more proprietary bits, or abused the XMPP protocol in its own clients enough that it could hardly be called XMPP anymore, which was a real shame.