11 ms·

There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. You fall in to the former, and I would bet that a lot of people here f

There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. You fall in to the former, and I would bet that a lot of people here fall in to the former. However, many people fall in to the latter, and Slack handily beats the competition there. There is also an element of having nice and polished features baked in that appeals to many people. Want it on your phone? There's an app. Want to search? Baked in. Want convenient chat bots? Click a button. To be sure, all these things are possible in IRC and other lo-fi chat protocols, but getting them set up is easy on Slack. I see this as similar to the argument of Linux vs. OSX. Linux can do practically anything OSX can, but it requires tweaking and setting up. It's a battle of pick-and-choose vs having it all baked in.

philwelch 8y ago
> There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp, but ever since we got the bandwidth and CPU necessary for the internet to not be a primarily text-based medium, the illiterates took over and that was the end of that.
- smt88 8y ago
  Email has a lot of problems, but the dealbreaker for my company is that it isn't secure.
  - bigiain 8y ago
    And you somehow trust Slack as a "secure alternative"?
    - smt88 8y ago
      Where did I imply that? There are tons of options for business chat. My point was only that email isn't even in the running.
  - tathougies 8y ago
    If you want secure emails use GPG. Unlike slack, GPG is both open-source and offers government-level security. I don't think slack is more secure than GPG.
    - spookthesunset 8y ago
      And how does that work for your average person using outlook / google for email?
      - tathougies 8y ago
        Then build on top of email, instead of developing yet another 'secure' proprietary system.
    - maw 8y ago
      If that were viable people would already be doing it. It's not, and so very few people are. I wish this weren't the case but it is.
    - closeparen 8y ago
      Companies are generally at more risk from failure to produce message content in a lawsuit, regulatory action, HR investigation, etc. than from eavesdropping. "Secure" in a corporate setting means subject to IT's surveillance, filtering, and archiving. If anything, security's job is to make sure employees aren't using things like PGP, personal webmail, Facebook, etc. to evade corporate retention policies. Maybe mysterious quasi-state actors will steal your secrets and outcompete you decades from now, but they could probably do that anyway. The SEC will certainly fuck you up right now if you can't demonstrate adequate controls on regulated employees' communications.
      - tathougies 8y ago
        I'm talking about personal e-mail. Still businesses can easily enforce retention policies with PGP by using a master key.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    The security model for internal email on a corporate email server is pretty similar to a corporate slack instance.
    - smt88 8y ago
      I've never seen any email system used securely. Even smart people will send sensitive info to a personal address instead of corporate, for example. Email wasn't purpose-built for controlled internal comms. Part of this is a UI problem, but it's still a problem. I didn't say Slack is the answer, either. Just that email isn't a serious competitor to Slack.
- pm90 8y ago
  That's a little too harsh. Not everyone is good at expressing themselves through an email chain; doesn't mean they're illiterate though.
  - eric_h 8y ago
    It's very much a learned skill. I was fortunate to learn it well in school (and polish it further in my professional life). People who haven't learned to express themselves clearly and concisely are indeed to the left of me in the spectrum of literacy. But again, it can be learned by everyone, it just takes time and effort.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    Not everyone is good at expressing themselves in a real time conversation, either. Any medium of conversation excludes people who aren't good at that medium. But if you have to choose a medium of conversation, are you better off choosing one that excludes introverts, non-native speakers, and people who aren't loud and obnoxious enough to command the room? Or would you rather exclude people who lack the patience or intellectual ability to read or write more than two or three lines of text at a time? Which choice allows deeper and more thoughtfully considered ideas to enter the discussion? I'm loud and obnoxious enough to thrive either way, but I really don't want important professional decisions to be made by the "rofl tl;dr" crowd.
    - lovich 8y ago
      That's kind of a false dichotomy you've got going there. Introverts and non native speakers are all slow deep thinkers who need a thinkers medium to communicate, which is slow by your definition. Everyone using a quick communication medium is a moron though right? I assume that's what you meant by people who lack intellectual ability. They are just different mediums. Long form is better for getting across new ideas that have to be explained for the first time, but a medium like emoji allows for incredibly dense communication with single glyphs once the meaning has been established
      - philwelch 8y ago
- tomnipotent 8y ago
  Email is crap for many types of workflows that Slack excels in.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    It’s too bad most of those workflows don’t apply to business use cases. Is it a chat client? A knowledge base? A conference call? A command line? Who knows!
    - tomnipotent 8y ago
      > It’s too bad most of those workflows don’t apply to business use cases. Which is totally why Slack isn't popular with businesses. /s Just because you personally haven't found it useful, doesn't mean hundreds of thousands of other business users haven't.
      - emodendroket 8y ago
        Businesses pay for a lot of stuff that doesn't work. Simply saying everyone else is doing it is not necessarily convincing.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - prlambert 8y ago
    I'm curious as to how that breaks down? Which kind of workflows are best in email, which in Slack?
    - sequoia 8y ago
      _This_ is the 64 thousand dollar question that no one seems to have a clear answer to, and leaves people frustrated with both email and slack. I tried emailing longer form things at my current job and rapidly hit a cultural wall: people _do not like_ getting long emails, or emails with more than 1 or 2 replies. Slack people apparently have no problem with because it's "lighter weight", but I struggle to see how always-on disruption is lighter weight than check-it-a-couple-times-per-day email. I think a deeper problem is lack of delineation of responsibility and adequate planning. Slack & other "always on" communication systems make it easy to say "why plan? I can _just ask_ when I need to know something" or "we'll have a conversation" rather than specifying & recording or relying on a more rigid interface like a ticketing system. tl;dr: get off my lawn you dang kids!!
- Nursie 8y ago
  There's way too much noise in my email inbox, stuff gets lost. Important/immediate discussions take place in person, or on slack. (Or hipchat or sametime or lync or windows messenger or hoary old ICQ for all I care...)
  - bigiain 8y ago
    > There's way too much noise in my email inbox, stuff gets lost. I find that happens an order of magnitude more often in Slack than email. The number of times important things here don't get done on time (or at all) because "Oh, I must have missed that in Slack...)
- hfourm 8y ago
  Email can also create bottlenecks and unneeded silos of information...
  - sequoia 8y ago
    Sorry to get triggered but oh my god I dislike those buzzwords. I find those two come up any time attempts are made to delineate responsibilities or make it possible for teams to run in parallel (by saying "you work on this area of speciality, I'll work on that" i.e. "silos").
    - hfourm 8y ago
      Ehhh, you kinda mixing problems here.
- gregmac 8y ago
  I'm firmly in the "email has no place in internal discussions whatsoever" camp. Tasks belong in tickets, long-term documentation/policies/meeting notes/etc belong in shared space (wiki), and discussions are faster and more productive in realtime (in-person, video call, or chat). E-mail might kick some of this off, or be used to schedule, but that should be it. The problem I think most people run into with the realtime discussion is failing to document the outcome of the meeting -- and that of course goes into a ticket or long-term docs. A meeting with no notes or outcome might as well have not happened.
  - alanfranzoni 8y ago
    Your suggestions may work inside a company. E-mail is the only federated system we've left. If you need to contact somebody outside it, you're screwed. XMPP/Jabber could have solved some of this, but it's pretty dead right now.
    - throwaway1555 8y ago
      The org I work for has a bunch of Slack channels that we invite our clients into as single channel guests (If they don't already use Slack). We have Gov & corporate using it without issue and they love it.
    - keithnz 8y ago
      I generally agree with greg, and that covers 90% of the cases, for the times where Email is used with external entities, it usually gets dumped into issue tracking / wiki Most work communication is usually within our issue tracking system We use slack very lightly, - most of our conversations are face to face but anumber of remote employees, and slack is used instead of face to face. Often for video calls - copy pasting things to other people - a sort of mini internal HN where links are posted to interesting things in the dev world and we discuss - prodding people "Oi, my PR is still waiting .... " "did you setup ... ?" etc - telling people where we went to lunch so they can find us.
    - rrdharan 8y ago
      I think if you ask Slack about that they'll happily tell you about Slack Grid. EDIT: Whoops actually Shared Channels is the feature I was thinking of: https://slackhq.com/introducing-shared-channels-where-you-can-work-with-anyone-in-slack https://slackhq.com/introducing-shared-channels-where-you-ca...
- ebiester 8y ago
  Email: Two use cases. With email, how can I subscribe to conversations I'm interested in? Mailing lists are nice, but we have no real way to make mailing lists that start and stop on the fly like a chat channel in a way that is searchable to the entire organization during or after the fact. What email list system allows for quick creation and the ability for everyone in an organization to know that a conversation is happening and how to join with the ability to get all the context necessary in a chronological order? (Reading threads can get really repetitive in a mailing list, especially when trying to get up to speed on an issue.) You get to all the requirements, and you end up with a discussion board instead or a new product that is to email lists what slack is to chat. Email is great for some things, but there's a reason people use slack instead even when they already have email.
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    > Mailing lists are nice, but we have no real way to make mailing lists that start and stop on the fly like a chat channel in a way that is searchable to the entire organization during or after the fact. Isn’t that what subject lines and mail archives are useful for?
    - ebiester 8y ago
      What's the mail archive that can be set up with the same ease of use and permissions as slack? What, are you going to say hypermail? Nobody has put together a simple solution in the mail domain. Maybe there's a market for it - turns out someone might pay for it if it's better than the slack experience.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    > You get to all the requirements, and you end up with a discussion board instead or a new product that is to email lists what slack is to chat. This would also be acceptable IMO. Any medium that enables asynchronous long-form written communication has advantages that are fundamentally impossible for any synchronous chat medium to match. It turns out that listservs have successfully done this for decades. If there was even a fraction of the effort invested in this communication style as is invested in reinventing IRC with emoji and reaction gifs, I'm sure it would be even better.
- spookthesunset 8y ago
  > the illiterates took over and that was the end of that. That's pretty arrogant. Perhaps people have different communication styles than you. Not better, not worse... just different.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    What word would you use for people who are incapable of communicating through the written word? Or for an Internet that is increasingly designed to cater to such people? The dialup-era Internet was mostly text and a little bit of pictures. There was good text, bad text, and lots and lots of fanfiction, but at least it was text. Even if you went to The Onion, there might be one goofy photoshopped photo but you had to read an actual article with real paragraphs to get the jokes. Now everything is a video, or a picture, or a meme, and everything longer than 140 characters is “tl;dr”. That’s a cultural decline akin to when television displaced reading in the mid-20th century. I can communicate in either style, so it’s not a personal thing from my perspective—except, since I can communicate in either style, I can also tell which style is more conducive to deep and meaningful discussion.
- u801e 8y ago
  > I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp I wish there were more people who were in the "newsgroups should be used for substantive discussions" camp. They're better than email in that context.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    I never had a chance to get into newsgroups that much, but I believe you.
- KyeRussell 8y ago
  > the illiterates took over and that was the end of that. That's a very harsh attack and I'm sure you're aware of all the nuances you're conveniently skipping over. I'm not sure how you think this adds to the discussion at all.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  Email has unfortunately become "I don't check it or care anymore" I am flooded with automated notifications that basically are "who gives a shit". I think the main reason I use email is for password reset. When you receive 1-2 thousand emails of non-spam but still unimportant cruft, it gets ignored or overlooked. Email is pretty much dead to me as a meaningful way to communicate. Sidenote: the term "ping me" needs to go away.
brightball 8y ago
The different in the Linux/OSX comparison is that Linux is constantly improving. IRC hasn’t changed much in years.
- lossolo 8y ago
  > IRC hasn’t changed much in years. https://ircv3.net/ https://ircv3.net/ It's changing a lot for some time now.
  - Karunamon 8y ago
    A set of RFCs isn't really in the same ballpark of the same planet of the same local galactic group as a mature product that I can go sign up for and be using in under a minute. Maybe in a few years. I say maybe, because XMPP is an IETF RFC, and frankly, it sucks.
    - SamWhited 8y ago
      What do you not like about the protocol? Like everything, it has its warts, but having worked on a few more-or-less proprietary protocols XMPP is much better designed and thought out than most of them. The community has had a lot of time to address some of its flaws whereas Slack, Stride, et al. tend to reinvent the same problems XMPP solved 20 years ago.
      - hyperdimension 8y ago
        Let me just start by saying that I'm a big fan of XMPP. I run my own server, and talked to my friends exclusively through XMPP until that fateful day that Google turned off federation support for Gmail chat, and I lost contact with a bunch of friends. I still run my own server, though I don't use it nearly as much as I used to. XMPP is a well-thought-out protocol, and a lot of the XEPs are great features. The problem I always had with XMPP is that XEP support is unequally distributed among clients, and the fragmentation really undermines the amount of cool features XMPP has to offer. As a (made-up) example, Psi+ might support video calls, but not server-side history, and Pidgin only supports server-side history, and Adium is the only one that supports Service Discovery...if I want both, I have to pick a client, and possibly have to use two clients signed in with different resources. As a possible solution, we could have a "logo program" for XMPP, where a core set of XEPs are required to call yourself an XMPP client (this is the case already IIRC), and you get rights to call yourself "supporting XMPP-Enhanced" if you support these other XEPs, and "supporting XMPP-Full" if you support all of these XEPs. Something like that might work, but you'd have to have a way to actually drive development toward these features.
amorphid 8y ago
I don't see any compelling reason to adopt IRC. It does nothing that I care about that Slack doesn't do. If Slack completely implodes, I would search for Slack alternative. If IRC really was my only option, I'd use it just long enough to write a basic alternative myself that replaced or extended IRC w/ the features I really want.
- blkhawk 8y ago
  I don't see any compelling reason to adopt Slack. It does nothing that I care about that IRC doesn't do. If IRC completely implodes, I would run my own IRC server.
  - spookthesunset 8y ago
    > I would run my own IRC server That's nice for you personally, but how does running an inhouse bespoke IRC server have anything to do with whatever line of business your company is in?
  - Scene_Cast2 8y ago
    IRC is horrible on phones (shitty history when you drop out of an internet connection, no cross-device unread-count synchronization, no encryption or login, etc). There are add-ons that try to fix that, but it's still a giant pain. I personally love Riot and Matrix as a "modern IRC".
    - xPaw 8y ago
      The Lounge is an IRC client that solves the problems you describe (persistence on any device, synchronised unread counters, push notifications) - https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge It does require having your own server to host it on though.
      - linuxftw 8y ago
        Hadn't seen this before. Looks nice. I tried the demo, smooth other than the /j is not an alias for /join, which I think is an obvious oversight.
emodendroket 8y ago
It seems he is in a different camp, specifically the one where you aren't on a chat application all day
- eganist 8y ago
  You're in the mute-everything-non-critical class, which is a good practice regardless of the client. If they really need you, they'll ring/call/DM. Otherwise, you can check it whenever you're ready.
  - munificent 8y ago
    I think you're confusing communication throughput with latency. I also don't like using chat at work. It's not because I want less interaction, it's because I want less interruption. Email has a norm of asynchrony where I can respond to email when I reach a good point in my current task. With chat, the other party is presumed to be sitting staring at the screen waiting for my reply, so I have to drop what I'm doing to respond. I don't think the latter is good for my overall productivity.
    - greglindahl 8y ago
      I have a different expectation while using Slack. I agree that enough people have your expectation that it's something that should be discussed and agreed upon by everyone using the 'chat' system... Slack provides an easy @channel and @everyone mechanism to control notifications.
    - lifeisstillgood 8y ago
      I completely agree. It is also the effort to interruption ratio that has reached a tipping point. Once upon a time if I wanted someone's help right now i would have to walk to the actual desk, and bribe them with caffeine or chocolate. If the effort of levering myself out of my chair was greater than the benefit to me I stayed put - hence interrupting another person had a minimum price point - the other person may not like it but the price was paid in public and there was a perceived value to the business. Phones reduced that price point - but it still has a cost to me. Now IM / Slack has flipped it on its head - the cost to the interruptor is negligible but the cost for the interruptee is their mental derailment - and no ability to judge the overall benefit of helping until it is too late Plus I don't really see the win - for real time co-ordination it's hard to beat a mass phone conference ( we are doing a complex release with phased rollouts and devops watching the traffic - then get your headsets on, and everyone must hurry up and wait) Slack is just secondary for that - useful for spelling out what has been said but otherwise ... For letting others know what has happened - that's called an after the fact report or "email". So really i don't see the use case except it means that when like the phone, i reach you i am confident of a reply in a given time period - that may well be defining facto
Thkejehd 8y ago
When was the last time you used Linux? I installed Ubuntu on a Dell lappy provided by work, everything just worked and it required less tweaking than osx would have for serious SWE work.
- tigershark 8y ago
  I heard the same luring song for the last 20 or so years. If Linux works for you then enjoy it. Don’t even try to suggest that Linux is easier than Mac OS X because I don’t like liars.
  - denimnerd 8y ago
    it's easier for development. os x sucks, I use it to surf the web on my ouch. my real dev machine is in my office with linux
    - jen729w 8y ago
      It "sucks", really? You don't think that might be a bit of an overstatement? You may not prefer it, but it objectively does not "suck".
      - Thkejehd 8y ago
        Lol tell me about the openssl version osx ships with. You have to install a 3rd party pkg manager to install a serviceable openssl pkg. not to mention the garbage bsd userland I have to immediately replace w/ coreutils in addition to the insanely busted openssl libs. Not exactly batteries included. Recognize your bias. In many (most?) cases Ubuntu matches your server env in a way OSX never will and works a OK with non-gamer hardware. That's just scratching the surface. OSX empirically sucks for developing apps that run on Linux.
munchbunny 8y ago
I'm in the camp that Slack is a great UI for work chat, and that work chat is for low latency, low bandwidth communication. If I want high latency, high bandwidth, there's email. If I need low latency, high bandwidth, that's an in person whiteboard session or a video call. That does mean I think Slack is overhyped... but that also means I think Slack does something valuable. Just maybe not as valuable.
darth_mastah 8y ago
I would agree with most of what you said except for the point about Linux and OSX. Yes, it used to be like that some 10+ years ago, but not anymore. However I can still find this myth repeated here and there nowadays. These days Linux works out of the box, with no more tweaking or settings up than what is required for OSX.
halostatue 8y ago
Hipchat actually outperformed Slack for my team in every respect, with three exceptions (all of which were supposed to be solved by Stride): 1. No markdown support and half-assed code highlighting support. 2. No (real) message editing. 3. Silly parenthesis based emoji. Its search is better than Slack’s; its performance is better than Slack’s; its integrations are better than Slack’s; its client memory and CPU usage are better than Slack’s (whether in a tab or as a real, native app); its group video chat is better than Slack’s (does Slack even have video chat integrated, with screen sharing?). Most importantly for us, its price was 4x better than Slack’s all while offering better features, performance, etc. The only thing it didn’t win out on was hype. (It should also be noted that HipChat could also be bought in a self-hosted configuration, which allowed for HIPAA compliance, something that Slack won’t even bother competing on. I didn’t need it, but hey, it matters to some people.) Slack is an overpriced distraction monkey. They’re selling it like it’s the whole enchilada, but it’s a damned feature bullet. I personally cannot wait until Slack is dead, because it’s the worst chat service I’ve ever used (and I love full-featured integrations). Now, I have to find a replacement for HipChat that won’t cost us US$200 per month for our office (if we pay a year in advance, more if we don’t).
- mp01 8y ago
  You and I have had very different experiences with Hipchat. The search is terrible, the integrations are worse, the mobile app hardly ever sends me notifications when it should, there's almost no customizability, the native app randomly drops messages. For me, Slack isn't hype, it's simply a better product.
- sqldba 8y ago
  The lack of Slack on-prem over HipChat is a deal killer for major Enterprise. You can justify "cloud" when Microsoft is running it and has millions of dollars to put into feasibility and security studies and audits. Letting a strappy upstart have access to that data is a completely different story.
  - grantlmiller 8y ago
    This point is spot on, but often overlooked.

philwelch 8y ago

> There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp, but ever since we got the bandwidth and CPU necessary for the internet to not be a primarily text-based medium, the illiterates took over and that was the end of that.

smt88 8y ago
Email has a lot of problems, but the dealbreaker for my company is that it isn't secure.
- bigiain 8y ago
  And you somehow trust Slack as a "secure alternative"?
  - smt88 8y ago
    Where did I imply that? There are tons of options for business chat. My point was only that email isn't even in the running.
- tathougies 8y ago
  If you want secure emails use GPG. Unlike slack, GPG is both open-source and offers government-level security. I don't think slack is more secure than GPG.
  - spookthesunset 8y ago
    And how does that work for your average person using outlook / google for email?
    - tathougies 8y ago
      Then build on top of email, instead of developing yet another 'secure' proprietary system.
  - maw 8y ago
    If that were viable people would already be doing it. It's not, and so very few people are. I wish this weren't the case but it is.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    Companies are generally at more risk from failure to produce message content in a lawsuit, regulatory action, HR investigation, etc. than from eavesdropping. "Secure" in a corporate setting means subject to IT's surveillance, filtering, and archiving. If anything, security's job is to make sure employees aren't using things like PGP, personal webmail, Facebook, etc. to evade corporate retention policies. Maybe mysterious quasi-state actors will steal your secrets and outcompete you decades from now, but they could probably do that anyway. The SEC will certainly fuck you up right now if you can't demonstrate adequate controls on regulated employees' communications.
    - tathougies 8y ago
      I'm talking about personal e-mail. Still businesses can easily enforce retention policies with PGP by using a master key.
- closeparen 8y ago
  The security model for internal email on a corporate email server is pretty similar to a corporate slack instance.
  - smt88 8y ago
    I've never seen any email system used securely. Even smart people will send sensitive info to a personal address instead of corporate, for example. Email wasn't purpose-built for controlled internal comms. Part of this is a UI problem, but it's still a problem. I didn't say Slack is the answer, either. Just that email isn't a serious competitor to Slack.
pm90 8y ago
That's a little too harsh. Not everyone is good at expressing themselves through an email chain; doesn't mean they're illiterate though.
- eric_h 8y ago
  It's very much a learned skill. I was fortunate to learn it well in school (and polish it further in my professional life). People who haven't learned to express themselves clearly and concisely are indeed to the left of me in the spectrum of literacy. But again, it can be learned by everyone, it just takes time and effort.
- philwelch 8y ago
  Not everyone is good at expressing themselves in a real time conversation, either. Any medium of conversation excludes people who aren't good at that medium. But if you have to choose a medium of conversation, are you better off choosing one that excludes introverts, non-native speakers, and people who aren't loud and obnoxious enough to command the room? Or would you rather exclude people who lack the patience or intellectual ability to read or write more than two or three lines of text at a time? Which choice allows deeper and more thoughtfully considered ideas to enter the discussion? I'm loud and obnoxious enough to thrive either way, but I really don't want important professional decisions to be made by the "rofl tl;dr" crowd.
  - lovich 8y ago
    That's kind of a false dichotomy you've got going there. Introverts and non native speakers are all slow deep thinkers who need a thinkers medium to communicate, which is slow by your definition. Everyone using a quick communication medium is a moron though right? I assume that's what you meant by people who lack intellectual ability. They are just different mediums. Long form is better for getting across new ideas that have to be explained for the first time, but a medium like emoji allows for incredibly dense communication with single glyphs once the meaning has been established
    - philwelch 8y ago
tomnipotent 8y ago
Email is crap for many types of workflows that Slack excels in.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  It’s too bad most of those workflows don’t apply to business use cases. Is it a chat client? A knowledge base? A conference call? A command line? Who knows!
  - tomnipotent 8y ago
    > It’s too bad most of those workflows don’t apply to business use cases. Which is totally why Slack isn't popular with businesses. /s Just because you personally haven't found it useful, doesn't mean hundreds of thousands of other business users haven't.
    - emodendroket 8y ago
      Businesses pay for a lot of stuff that doesn't work. Simply saying everyone else is doing it is not necessarily convincing.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
- prlambert 8y ago
  I'm curious as to how that breaks down? Which kind of workflows are best in email, which in Slack?
  - sequoia 8y ago
    _This_ is the 64 thousand dollar question that no one seems to have a clear answer to, and leaves people frustrated with both email and slack. I tried emailing longer form things at my current job and rapidly hit a cultural wall: people _do not like_ getting long emails, or emails with more than 1 or 2 replies. Slack people apparently have no problem with because it's "lighter weight", but I struggle to see how always-on disruption is lighter weight than check-it-a-couple-times-per-day email. I think a deeper problem is lack of delineation of responsibility and adequate planning. Slack & other "always on" communication systems make it easy to say "why plan? I can _just ask_ when I need to know something" or "we'll have a conversation" rather than specifying & recording or relying on a more rigid interface like a ticketing system. tl;dr: get off my lawn you dang kids!!
Nursie 8y ago
There's way too much noise in my email inbox, stuff gets lost. Important/immediate discussions take place in person, or on slack. (Or hipchat or sametime or lync or windows messenger or hoary old ICQ for all I care...)
- bigiain 8y ago
  > There's way too much noise in my email inbox, stuff gets lost. I find that happens an order of magnitude more often in Slack than email. The number of times important things here don't get done on time (or at all) because "Oh, I must have missed that in Slack...)
hfourm 8y ago
Email can also create bottlenecks and unneeded silos of information...
- sequoia 8y ago
  Sorry to get triggered but oh my god I dislike those buzzwords. I find those two come up any time attempts are made to delineate responsibilities or make it possible for teams to run in parallel (by saying "you work on this area of speciality, I'll work on that" i.e. "silos").
  - hfourm 8y ago
    Ehhh, you kinda mixing problems here.
gregmac 8y ago
I'm firmly in the "email has no place in internal discussions whatsoever" camp. Tasks belong in tickets, long-term documentation/policies/meeting notes/etc belong in shared space (wiki), and discussions are faster and more productive in realtime (in-person, video call, or chat). E-mail might kick some of this off, or be used to schedule, but that should be it. The problem I think most people run into with the realtime discussion is failing to document the outcome of the meeting -- and that of course goes into a ticket or long-term docs. A meeting with no notes or outcome might as well have not happened.
- alanfranzoni 8y ago
  Your suggestions may work inside a company. E-mail is the only federated system we've left. If you need to contact somebody outside it, you're screwed. XMPP/Jabber could have solved some of this, but it's pretty dead right now.
  - throwaway1555 8y ago
    The org I work for has a bunch of Slack channels that we invite our clients into as single channel guests (If they don't already use Slack). We have Gov & corporate using it without issue and they love it.
  - keithnz 8y ago
    I generally agree with greg, and that covers 90% of the cases, for the times where Email is used with external entities, it usually gets dumped into issue tracking / wiki Most work communication is usually within our issue tracking system We use slack very lightly, - most of our conversations are face to face but anumber of remote employees, and slack is used instead of face to face. Often for video calls - copy pasting things to other people - a sort of mini internal HN where links are posted to interesting things in the dev world and we discuss - prodding people "Oi, my PR is still waiting .... " "did you setup ... ?" etc - telling people where we went to lunch so they can find us.
  - rrdharan 8y ago
    I think if you ask Slack about that they'll happily tell you about Slack Grid. EDIT: Whoops actually Shared Channels is the feature I was thinking of: https://slackhq.com/introducing-shared-channels-where-you-can-work-with-anyone-in-slack https://slackhq.com/introducing-shared-channels-where-you-ca...
ebiester 8y ago
Email: Two use cases. With email, how can I subscribe to conversations I'm interested in? Mailing lists are nice, but we have no real way to make mailing lists that start and stop on the fly like a chat channel in a way that is searchable to the entire organization during or after the fact. What email list system allows for quick creation and the ability for everyone in an organization to know that a conversation is happening and how to join with the ability to get all the context necessary in a chronological order? (Reading threads can get really repetitive in a mailing list, especially when trying to get up to speed on an issue.) You get to all the requirements, and you end up with a discussion board instead or a new product that is to email lists what slack is to chat. Email is great for some things, but there's a reason people use slack instead even when they already have email.
- sokoloff 8y ago
  > Mailing lists are nice, but we have no real way to make mailing lists that start and stop on the fly like a chat channel in a way that is searchable to the entire organization during or after the fact. Isn’t that what subject lines and mail archives are useful for?
  - ebiester 8y ago
    What's the mail archive that can be set up with the same ease of use and permissions as slack? What, are you going to say hypermail? Nobody has put together a simple solution in the mail domain. Maybe there's a market for it - turns out someone might pay for it if it's better than the slack experience.
- philwelch 8y ago
  > You get to all the requirements, and you end up with a discussion board instead or a new product that is to email lists what slack is to chat. This would also be acceptable IMO. Any medium that enables asynchronous long-form written communication has advantages that are fundamentally impossible for any synchronous chat medium to match. It turns out that listservs have successfully done this for decades. If there was even a fraction of the effort invested in this communication style as is invested in reinventing IRC with emoji and reaction gifs, I'm sure it would be even better.
spookthesunset 8y ago
> the illiterates took over and that was the end of that. That's pretty arrogant. Perhaps people have different communication styles than you. Not better, not worse... just different.
- philwelch 8y ago
  What word would you use for people who are incapable of communicating through the written word? Or for an Internet that is increasingly designed to cater to such people? The dialup-era Internet was mostly text and a little bit of pictures. There was good text, bad text, and lots and lots of fanfiction, but at least it was text. Even if you went to The Onion, there might be one goofy photoshopped photo but you had to read an actual article with real paragraphs to get the jokes. Now everything is a video, or a picture, or a meme, and everything longer than 140 characters is “tl;dr”. That’s a cultural decline akin to when television displaced reading in the mid-20th century. I can communicate in either style, so it’s not a personal thing from my perspective—except, since I can communicate in either style, I can also tell which style is more conducive to deep and meaningful discussion.
u801e 8y ago
> I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp I wish there were more people who were in the "newsgroups should be used for substantive discussions" camp. They're better than email in that context.
- philwelch 8y ago
  I never had a chance to get into newsgroups that much, but I believe you.
KyeRussell 8y ago
> the illiterates took over and that was the end of that. That's a very harsh attack and I'm sure you're aware of all the nuances you're conveniently skipping over. I'm not sure how you think this adds to the discussion at all.
paulie_a 8y ago
Email has unfortunately become "I don't check it or care anymore" I am flooded with automated notifications that basically are "who gives a shit". I think the main reason I use email is for password reset. When you receive 1-2 thousand emails of non-spam but still unimportant cruft, it gets ignored or overlooked. Email is pretty much dead to me as a meaningful way to communicate. Sidenote: the term "ping me" needs to go away.

brightball 8y ago

The different in the Linux/OSX comparison is that Linux is constantly improving. IRC hasn’t changed much in years.

lossolo 8y ago
> IRC hasn’t changed much in years. https://ircv3.net/ https://ircv3.net/ It's changing a lot for some time now.
- Karunamon 8y ago
  A set of RFCs isn't really in the same ballpark of the same planet of the same local galactic group as a mature product that I can go sign up for and be using in under a minute. Maybe in a few years. I say maybe, because XMPP is an IETF RFC, and frankly, it sucks.
  - SamWhited 8y ago
    What do you not like about the protocol? Like everything, it has its warts, but having worked on a few more-or-less proprietary protocols XMPP is much better designed and thought out than most of them. The community has had a lot of time to address some of its flaws whereas Slack, Stride, et al. tend to reinvent the same problems XMPP solved 20 years ago.
    - hyperdimension 8y ago
      Let me just start by saying that I'm a big fan of XMPP. I run my own server, and talked to my friends exclusively through XMPP until that fateful day that Google turned off federation support for Gmail chat, and I lost contact with a bunch of friends. I still run my own server, though I don't use it nearly as much as I used to. XMPP is a well-thought-out protocol, and a lot of the XEPs are great features. The problem I always had with XMPP is that XEP support is unequally distributed among clients, and the fragmentation really undermines the amount of cool features XMPP has to offer. As a (made-up) example, Psi+ might support video calls, but not server-side history, and Pidgin only supports server-side history, and Adium is the only one that supports Service Discovery...if I want both, I have to pick a client, and possibly have to use two clients signed in with different resources. As a possible solution, we could have a "logo program" for XMPP, where a core set of XEPs are required to call yourself an XMPP client (this is the case already IIRC), and you get rights to call yourself "supporting XMPP-Enhanced" if you support these other XEPs, and "supporting XMPP-Full" if you support all of these XEPs. Something like that might work, but you'd have to have a way to actually drive development toward these features.

amorphid 8y ago

I don't see any compelling reason to adopt IRC. It does nothing that I care about that Slack doesn't do. If Slack completely implodes, I would search for Slack alternative. If IRC really was my only option, I'd use it just long enough to write a basic alternative myself that replaced or extended IRC w/ the features I really want.

blkhawk 8y ago
I don't see any compelling reason to adopt Slack. It does nothing that I care about that IRC doesn't do. If IRC completely implodes, I would run my own IRC server.
- spookthesunset 8y ago
  > I would run my own IRC server That's nice for you personally, but how does running an inhouse bespoke IRC server have anything to do with whatever line of business your company is in?
- Scene_Cast2 8y ago
  IRC is horrible on phones (shitty history when you drop out of an internet connection, no cross-device unread-count synchronization, no encryption or login, etc). There are add-ons that try to fix that, but it's still a giant pain. I personally love Riot and Matrix as a "modern IRC".
  - xPaw 8y ago
    The Lounge is an IRC client that solves the problems you describe (persistence on any device, synchronised unread counters, push notifications) - https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge It does require having your own server to host it on though.
    - linuxftw 8y ago
      Hadn't seen this before. Looks nice. I tried the demo, smooth other than the /j is not an alias for /join, which I think is an obvious oversight.

emodendroket 8y ago

It seems he is in a different camp, specifically the one where you aren't on a chat application all day

eganist 8y ago
You're in the mute-everything-non-critical class, which is a good practice regardless of the client. If they really need you, they'll ring/call/DM. Otherwise, you can check it whenever you're ready.
- munificent 8y ago
  I think you're confusing communication throughput with latency. I also don't like using chat at work. It's not because I want less interaction, it's because I want less interruption. Email has a norm of asynchrony where I can respond to email when I reach a good point in my current task. With chat, the other party is presumed to be sitting staring at the screen waiting for my reply, so I have to drop what I'm doing to respond. I don't think the latter is good for my overall productivity.
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    I have a different expectation while using Slack. I agree that enough people have your expectation that it's something that should be discussed and agreed upon by everyone using the 'chat' system... Slack provides an easy @channel and @everyone mechanism to control notifications.
  - lifeisstillgood 8y ago
    I completely agree. It is also the effort to interruption ratio that has reached a tipping point. Once upon a time if I wanted someone's help right now i would have to walk to the actual desk, and bribe them with caffeine or chocolate. If the effort of levering myself out of my chair was greater than the benefit to me I stayed put - hence interrupting another person had a minimum price point - the other person may not like it but the price was paid in public and there was a perceived value to the business. Phones reduced that price point - but it still has a cost to me. Now IM / Slack has flipped it on its head - the cost to the interruptor is negligible but the cost for the interruptee is their mental derailment - and no ability to judge the overall benefit of helping until it is too late Plus I don't really see the win - for real time co-ordination it's hard to beat a mass phone conference ( we are doing a complex release with phased rollouts and devops watching the traffic - then get your headsets on, and everyone must hurry up and wait) Slack is just secondary for that - useful for spelling out what has been said but otherwise ... For letting others know what has happened - that's called an after the fact report or "email". So really i don't see the use case except it means that when like the phone, i reach you i am confident of a reply in a given time period - that may well be defining facto

Thkejehd 8y ago

When was the last time you used Linux? I installed Ubuntu on a Dell lappy provided by work, everything just worked and it required less tweaking than osx would have for serious SWE work.

tigershark 8y ago
I heard the same luring song for the last 20 or so years. If Linux works for you then enjoy it. Don’t even try to suggest that Linux is easier than Mac OS X because I don’t like liars.
- denimnerd 8y ago
  it's easier for development. os x sucks, I use it to surf the web on my ouch. my real dev machine is in my office with linux
  - jen729w 8y ago
    It "sucks", really? You don't think that might be a bit of an overstatement? You may not prefer it, but it objectively does not "suck".
    - Thkejehd 8y ago
      Lol tell me about the openssl version osx ships with. You have to install a 3rd party pkg manager to install a serviceable openssl pkg. not to mention the garbage bsd userland I have to immediately replace w/ coreutils in addition to the insanely busted openssl libs. Not exactly batteries included. Recognize your bias. In many (most?) cases Ubuntu matches your server env in a way OSX never will and works a OK with non-gamer hardware. That's just scratching the surface. OSX empirically sucks for developing apps that run on Linux.

munchbunny 8y ago

I'm in the camp that Slack is a great UI for work chat, and that work chat is for low latency, low bandwidth communication. If I want high latency, high bandwidth, there's email. If I need low latency, high bandwidth, that's an in person whiteboard session or a video call. That does mean I think Slack is overhyped... but that also means I think Slack does something valuable. Just maybe not as valuable.

darth_mastah 8y ago

I would agree with most of what you said except for the point about Linux and OSX. Yes, it used to be like that some 10+ years ago, but not anymore. However I can still find this myth repeated here and there nowadays. These days Linux works out of the box, with no more tweaking or settings up than what is required for OSX.

halostatue 8y ago

Hipchat actually outperformed Slack for my team in every respect, with three exceptions (all of which were supposed to be solved by Stride): 1. No markdown support and half-assed code highlighting support. 2. No (real) message editing. 3. Silly parenthesis based emoji. Its search is better than Slack’s; its performance is better than Slack’s; its integrations are better than Slack’s; its client memory and CPU usage are better than Slack’s (whether in a tab or as a real, native app); its group video chat is better than Slack’s (does Slack even have video chat integrated, with screen sharing?). Most importantly for us, its price was 4x better than Slack’s all while offering better features, performance, etc. The only thing it didn’t win out on was hype. (It should also be noted that HipChat could also be bought in a self-hosted configuration, which allowed for HIPAA compliance, something that Slack won’t even bother competing on. I didn’t need it, but hey, it matters to some people.) Slack is an overpriced distraction monkey. They’re selling it like it’s the whole enchilada, but it’s a damned feature bullet. I personally cannot wait until Slack is dead, because it’s the worst chat service I’ve ever used (and I love full-featured integrations). Now, I have to find a replacement for HipChat that won’t cost us US$200 per month for our office (if we pay a year in advance, more if we don’t).

mp01 8y ago
You and I have had very different experiences with Hipchat. The search is terrible, the integrations are worse, the mobile app hardly ever sends me notifications when it should, there's almost no customizability, the native app randomly drops messages. For me, Slack isn't hype, it's simply a better product.
sqldba 8y ago
The lack of Slack on-prem over HipChat is a deal killer for major Enterprise. You can justify "cloud" when Microsoft is running it and has millions of dollars to put into feasibility and security studies and audits. Letting a strappy upstart have access to that data is a completely different story.
- grantlmiller 8y ago
  This point is spot on, but often overlooked.