14 ms·

Slack will never replace email

169 points by thereyougo 7y ago

flywithdolp 7y ago
I'm using slack in my office (We also use trello for checklist but Slack for communication) And I do think it'ss a bad decision for Slack to get into the email world. It will open a door for security breaches and in my company we have some pretty important content on Slack I also don't want EVERYTHING to be in one place I like the Slack as it is now, Adding emails to slack aswell will make it a really large platform.
xfitm3 7y ago
Slack is a productivity killer and whatever they are doing next is certain to be annoying. People ping each other asking questions instead of reading docs. People have calls instead of figuring it out. Annoying people just can’t resist the temptation of @here. It wouldn’t be so bad if I could customize my experience but Slack fights hard against this. They claim one size fits all, if it’s annoying then it’s a cultural issue. You can’t get thousands of people on the same page. Different mindsets should be fostered, not punished.
- dewey 7y ago
  > Annoying people just can’t resist the temptation of @here If people keep doing that repeatedly even after being told then you probably have bigger problems in the company than the messaging app of choice. You can also just disable it: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/115004855143-Set-who-can-notify-a-channel-or-workspace https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/115004855143-Set-wh... > People ping each other asking questions instead of reading docs. That's not a Slack problem, it always existed on IRC, people tapping you on the shoulder in the office or on mailing lists and forums.
  - xfitm3 7y ago
    You're missing the point. Slack is engineering increased engagement which changes thinking and working patterns to be more social vs heads down.
    - drgath 7y ago
      In 15 years as a professional software engineer, I’ve never worked somewhere that wasn’t heavily using IRC, Hipchat, or Slack. The conversations are identical, the only thing that has changed is the service being used. As previous poster alluded to, your complaints aren’t a Slack issue, it’s a co-worker issue.
      - alrs 7y ago
        The nice thing about pre-Slack was that there was a bozo filter: the only people who could bother you were the people who could figure out how to use an IRC client.
      - dijit 7y ago
        Also 15 years professional here; And I agree, it's largely similar. One difference though is that IRC doesn't have a @here equivalent. People do like to overuse that one in particular. (you can turn it off but the default is frustrating and the UX is poor for disabling)
        yoz-y 7y ago
        This lack can be fixed by the amazing dau irssi plugin.
      - xfitm3 7y ago
        No, it’s Slack. My company was IRC based and moved to Slack. It’s changed working patterns.
      - mertnesvat 7y ago
        Totally agree on that! Sometimes we're so focused to the product we ignore who is using it.
  - smelendez 7y ago
    For whatever reason, most orgs I've seen are terrible at getting people who talk too much to stop, whether it's in meetings, at the work table or in Slack.
  - fogetti 7y ago
    I never understood people who get annoyed by @here. If you are somewhere where you don't want to be, and people send a message to you that you don't care about, you shouldn't be there in the first place. We have many channels in our company where complete strangers hang out, for example in the engineering channel like it was a garden party of some sort. You know: just for fun. I mean WTF is wrong with these people? Why are they in the channel if they are not interested? When I message with @here I don't give a shit if it annoys someone or not, as long as the message is completely in line with the channel's intended purpose.
    - deleted 7y ago
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- playeren 7y ago
  > Slack is a productivity killer I think that notifications is a productivity killer in general - no matter the software behind it.
- karmelapple 7y ago
  I’m in some Slacks that have thousands of people all on the same page. It’s impressive and inspiring how the communication style and culture has developed and is enforced.
- javagram 7y ago
  > People have calls instead of figuring it out. I find the opposite, I can often help my coworkers debug something pretty quickly via a quick Slack call and screen sharing session, whereas other times I have seen similar problems resulting in hours of struggle as someone tries to 'figure it out' on their own without being able to tap the expertise of someone who's familiar with the problem or system at hand. That said, there are definitely downsides to the abundant distractions through Slack as well.
  - deleted 7y ago
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  - devocracy 7y ago
    Is there not value to be gained when someone is struggling to get past a problem? I've seen what happens when people too quickly phone a friend whenever they hit a problem, the end result being they don't round out their knowledge.
    - javagram 7y ago
      It depends on the person and the problem I think. I have also seen people sort of struggle and not really make progress and leaving them in their own wouldn’t be a learning experience. Like how if you throw someone who doesn’t know how to swim in the ocean they might just thrash about until they get tired and drown... I do always try to work with them to explain the steps I am taking to troubleshoot but it’s definitely a balancing act as you want them to learn not just have it done for them.
playeren 7y ago
All these complaints about Slack, are strangely reminiscent of all the complaints about email pre-Slack; "re:re:re:re:re:", cc all the people, 200+ non-relevant emails per day etc etc. I worry that people are trying fix org culture problems with communication software, which is unlikely to succeed.
- rakoo 7y ago
  On the other hand, there is a case to be made that if everyone makes "mistakes" it's because it's the first option they have, so we (as an industry) should make softwares do the correct thing by default. Users don't have time to fiddle with options, the software should serve them.
  - playeren 7y ago
    I generally agree with that opinion, but in this case I believe communication tool feature sets are not the right setting to enforce organisational culture. You would end up with a highly opinionated piece of software, which would imply that one size fits all, when it comes to org culture. Slack et al. (and email for that matter), can be used in a myriad of different ways to suit different types of organisations, which I strongly believe is a good thing. We probably do need software to help us all with org culture, but I don't think comms is the right place to implement that.
- Kasper99 7y ago
  That's exactly why we need to fix email - not replace it with another app with more notifications. I agree with Dvir - email's asynchronous nature is what makes the exact solution for business comms. It's instant, but not invasive, and doesn't expect an instant reply. Culturally, we need to also respect people's time. I'm sticking with email.
  - playeren 7y ago
    Most of the Slack channels I use are used async, and I only have notifications on for 2 out of ~15 channels. Good comms culture was much easier to develop with Slack + [Something for docs] for the teams I have worked with. But I very much understand that teams are different, and different cultures work optimally for different teams.
iLemming 7y ago
Slack also has other problems that have been totally ignored and neglected for years. One of them is accessibility. The app is impossible to work with without a mouse. They say it is "keyboard driven" and they keep adding features that ignore keyboard completely. Have you ever tried to jump to a thread without using the mouse? Or copy a link to the last message? Or share it? Or ask Slack to remind about it? Or snooze all notifications? They could at least put them in the main menu. People with disabilities who rely on things being in the menu, they can't do any those things. Can you imagine having to hire someone and they'd be like: "Ah sorry, I have to tell you something. I cannot use Slack app. I hope that's not a deal breaker". I wouldn't be surprised if someone sues SlackHQ for being discriminatory.
- Jack1012 7y ago
  I totally agree.
  - hardwaresofton 7y ago
    Just in case you're curious on why this comment is getting downvoted -- this isn't a very substantive comment (in my opinion at least). From the HN guidelines[0] > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. If you agree, the upvote button should be enough [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- x0x0 7y ago
  tab gets you there. maybe not fast, but it does. up and down work pretty well once focus is in the historical messages window rather than the edit window this is on the current mac client
  - iLemming 7y ago
    > Tab gets you there. maybe not fast, but it does. People choose keyboard-centric workflows: a) For efficiency (if it takes a few milliseconds to press a key, why would you even reach for the mouse?) b) For accessibility Your point is not helpful for any of these cases. Asking to try to use Slack App with a blindfold might be a bit extreme, what if I suggest you to try to use it for a few hours without touching the mouse? How's that for a challenge? Try that and maybe then you'd feel how it supposed "to get you there" for people with disabilities.
einpoklum 7y ago
Uh, why _would_ Slack replace email? Non-sequitur.
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  Because of Slack positioning itself like that: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/13/slack-releases-new-financials-ahead-of-investor-day.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/13/slack-releases-new-financial...
deleted 7y ago
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zamalek 7y ago
I don't think Slack could universally replace email, but it could for some teams (ubiquitous addresses aside). One of the teams I work with communicate solely through Slack (and do use it asynchronously). All the other teams use some combination of email and Slack, and it wouldn't surprise me if there were teams out there avoiding Slack altogether. It's just another tool. The usage depends entirely on the audience.
deleted 7y ago
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zxcvbn4038 7y ago
When the Slack sales team came to my employer they pitched it as some sort of memory store - the reality is that it’s nigh impossible to pick out a specific bit of information after a couple of months unless you remember who said something, where they said it, and approximately when. It’s also annoying when an admin leaves because only the owner can remove their account - not another admin. I would also say Slack has a very bad habit of forcing new features down users throats - people have been complaining about threads for years but there is STILL no way to mute them or disable them. Someone installs an add-in that makes a lot of noise? Tough cookies to you, your options are to put up with it or uninstall it, there is no way to mute it. Like people joining you to new channels? No way to stop that either. Their API is a pain to deal with in staticly typed languages - you often have to decode a member of a substructure to discover what the overall type is. So overall I would say it’s definitely not an e-mail replacement and it’s very heavy handed for IM, there is definitely room for another product. I would personally prefer something more akin to IRC or the classic “cb simulators”. The only real challenge today is working with mobile clients (and challenge is probably too strong a word).
bcp2384 7y ago
I'm relatively bearish on Slack, but who knows what will happen in 5 years. Anecdotally I find a lot of people (myself included) have long shifted from "Slack is the greatest thing ever (e.g. 2015/2016)" to "Slack is more annoying than email." At the same time, I don't feel like there's been much new outside of changing the design of their homepage every 3-4 months (can someone explain why it makes sense to throw design/eng resources on this?) and search is still terrible.
throwaway66666 7y ago
My only complaint for Slack (and any instant messaging app), is the sense of urgency it creates. It has been discussed on HN a lot, but I 've never seen someone complaint about the fact that you can invite to your organization people from other orgs. This feature is beloved by product managers. And hated by everyone else. See. Before 'Slack', we had 3 channels of communication. 1. Email (usually expectation of getting a reply within hours) 2. Phonecall (reserved for urgent situations, expecting a reply within... seconds) 3. Ticket system that had a little drop-down where you could select urgency. And you would expect a reply based on the urgency. If you abused the urgency, we had a way to track that, and let you know. Today however, Slack's "multiple organizations" feature pretty much shadowed the above. Now product manager from client org X, will require that you make a channel called "X-feature Commandos/dream team" then invite everyone involved on the project. Then they will ALWAYS end up wasting everyone's time for no reason. "Hey @here, X page is slow can you check it out?". "Sorry guys my bad. I was under the bay sea riding the Bart! Forgot LTE connections can be finnicky 100m under water. heh (ultra fast parrot emoji)"
- theamk 7y ago
  I don't see how this is different? > If you abused the urgency, we had a way to track that, and let you know. So how is Slack different? You can still track the urgency and let the person know -- it is right there in the message. And if they really don't understand that @here is bad, then you can always disable @here on per-channel basis (I have this on a few channels, in fact)
  - krzat 7y ago
    Spamming multiple messages a on slack seems more innocent than spamming multiple emails a day.
  - paranoidrobot 7y ago
    I had to fight our HR manager over access to @here and it's equivalent. Global company, people working all sorts of schedules and they want to use @here in the primary channel (which you can't mute) to send inane bullshit about unimportant stuff. (In theory @here only sends notifications when you are 'here', but I found it to be less than reliable) The first few times people did it, I asked them not to, and then turned it off for non-admins. Thus the fight with HR.
juskrey 7y ago
Email is Lindy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
- cpeterso 7y ago
  For those who don't what the Lindy Effect is: The Lindy effect is a theory that the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things like a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy. Where the Lindy effect applies, mortality rate _decreases_ with time.
deleted 7y ago
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axaxs 7y ago
I've already replaced email with Slack. It's not hard, email is really bad. That said, Slack is sorely lacking here, especially with threads. Slack "threads" are an awful experience, with replies generally ignored, so people don't use them. All I'd need is for Slack to treat threads like a real first class citizens, with a view like HN or Reddit, and I'd be a happy camper.
- karlding 7y ago
  Threads as first class citizens is something that Zulip [0] focuses on, which makes it much easier to have multiple conversations within the same space. It also makes it easier to ignore any conversations you don't care about. This avoids the problem with Slack where some people might use the threading features, while others ignore it. Personally I'm a huge fan of Zulip, having used HipChat, Slack, Mattermost, Skype for Business, and Discord in the past. [0] http://zulip.org http://zulip.org
  - austhrow743 7y ago
    Do you know if zulip is useable with only the keyboard?
    - rishig 7y ago
      yes, it is. https://zulipchat.com/help/keyboard-shortcuts https://zulipchat.com/help/keyboard-shortcuts has the list of keyboard shortcuts.
      - austhrow743 7y ago
        thanks!
zmmmmm 7y ago
I just wish the client wasn't so bad. I can't believe that if I send a message and I'm not connected at that precise instant that it catn't store and forward the message when I do get connected. In fact, I can't look at any of my slack messages at all. Every other IM client, email, basically every communications medium since about 1998 has been able to do this, but apparently not Slack.
stingrae 7y ago
The longer I use slack, the more unusable it is. People keep creating small groups with requests. Once you read a message it is almost impossible to find unless you remember everyone that was selected to be in the group. The search is practically useless.
module17 7y ago
Never say never. Something will definitely replace email.
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  The only thing that can replace email is a better email. If we had a version of IMAP that worked with labels (download a message once regardless of how it's tagged) + push, email would be usable again. Currently this is only possible with IMAP with all its flaws OR by giving all your email to a third party to serve through an API designed for modern email. There are perverse incentives preventing this from occurring in any widespread fashion, which is allowing Slack to flourish on the dysfunction of the current communication ecosystem. If we do have a replacement for email, it's not gonna be from a for-profit entity. Anyway, real-time communications are inherently a different beast from async communications—one is a highly searchable and taggable data store where you're expected to carefully read and type and form workflows around, and the other is for essentially war rooms for collaborative real-time work. Pitching slack as a replacement for email seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of the product.
dang 7y ago
In case anybody doesn't know: Shift+Esc marks all messages read. Rarely is a keyboard shortcut so good for one's health. I got this from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17374500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17374500 but there have been other benefactors: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=shift%2Besc%20read&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=shift%2Besc%20read&sort=byDate...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mulmen 7y ago
  Sometimes. It's about as reliable as the rest of Slack, which is to say not very.
znpy 7y ago
My company dropped slack for Microsoft Teams since it is basically free (bundled in the office 365 subscription). Email still rocks all of our inter-branch communications and teams is better. The only advantage that Slack has over teams is that it works on GNU/Linux...
vmurthy 7y ago
The article talks about a few great features of e-mail that I totally agree with: open standards, portability, asynchronicity. While asynchronicity is achievable with Slack ,I get the feeling that if all of your colleagues are on synchronous mode and you're the odd one out, it'll create problems in the company as you can be labeled a slacker (heh!).
zby 7y ago
The number one point is to recognize the situation as a conflict of interests - everyone wants an immediate answer to his burning question, but nobody wants to be interrupted to answer somebody else questions. For the team as a whole there is probably some optimal interruption level which is higher than what the interrupted would set and lower than what the interrupter would choose. That is why muting and 'urgent' messages don't work - because people would tend to mute channels too much and on the other hand 'urgent' quickly inflates and everything starts to be urgent. I think a solution to this could be "attention budgets". There are many complications of course - there are times when you don't mind being interrupted and times when you do, and it is taxing to think about it consciously and set your levels. But I would start from attention budgets - this would also be a solution to general spam, but synchronous spam is much worse than asynchronous - so synchronous is a good place to start.
ga-vu 7y ago
Probably because they are two different things.... just sayin
sdfhbdf 7y ago
I agree with the points about the culture problems that are communication medium agnostic. But the solution that the author of this article suggests is Spike, their product. I looked at Spike and while I got the gist of what Spike is for I did not get how does it work. Does it replace G Suite for example? Is it an email hosting? Or is it a complimentary app for G Suite/O365 users? How does it integrate? How does it look like when a person not using Spike receives and email send via Spike? Do they know it comes from Spike?
- Kasper99 7y ago
  that's the point that the writer made - Spike can work with anyone (unlike other apps like Slack, Teams, Skype, etc.) Spike works with your regular email, like Gsuite and turns your emails into a chat conversation. The other person doesn't know you're using Spike - they see a regular email. You can even create a channel and message with people not on Spike. That's pretty cool stuff IMO
oxfordmale 7y ago
Slack will never replace email as long as it doesn't have end to end encryption, a feature Slack has indicated it is not going to deliver anytime soon due to the "priorities of paying customers". Personally I hate Slack as it provides too many distractions. Recently I have starting closing down Slack and only allow myself to check it every half an hour to improve my attention span and concentration. Slack seems to be a great tool for product and project managers, however, less so for developers. It would be great if Slack would allow me to selectively mute certain channels.For example, the lunch-club channel is only relevant when I am actually onsite, however, I always want to be kept up to date on critical production issues.
- monsieurbanana 7y ago
  When you're on a channel, on the top right you have a cogs for "Channel Settings" where you can find the option to mute that specific channel.
  - oxfordmale 7y ago
    Can you also mute certain colleagues ?
benjaminwootton 7y ago
Slack has replaced 99% of internal emails in our organisation. When pointing towards other platforms for long lived content, email just doesn’t seem to have a use case. We still need it for external comms obviously.
raxxorrax 7y ago
The advent of proprietary communication tools isn't really something I like, be that slack or discord or other services. Something tells me that in 10 years neither service will be hip enough to warrant extensive support. If they were to hold relevant business critical information, it would need to be archived but will probably just end up being lost. That is at least a difference to mail. Also external contacts could be invited to the appropriate channels, but I don't really see much engagement from these users if that actually does happen.
SomeOldThrow 7y ago
Slack: it’s like email, but you can’t find shit.
rezeroed 7y ago
Does no one else use rocketchat?
ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
I worked for a corporation with a 13- to 14-hour time difference. Also, the language barrier was significant. When we sent an email, it had to be translated to Japanese, then the reply often translated back. Slack (or any IM medium) was 100% worthless for this. It has its place, but it is not a cure-all.
moonhorse 7y ago
Chinese companies have been relying on instant messenger as the primary communication channel for a long time. So definitely it works.
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  You can also eschew all electronic communication and do things purely in person—that works too. The valuable question to answer here is how well do these processes work compared to each other.
0xCMP 7y ago
I find things like this funny because Email is often much worse for getting ideas across and VERY FEW people put their whole idea in an Email and simply treat it with chat + 6 line signatures. Where I've worked email has simply been a very poor chat which I could not distinguish "info broadcasts" from "the server is down" without getting all notifications or none. We switched to slack in 2014 because 1) it allowed us to notify mindfully for team-wide and person specific things. 2) it allowed people to have full blown conversations and keep others up to date on status/problems in channels. And 3) it allowed us to build automation right inline with the communication we were already doing. Much of the complaints of slack seem to be from people who work with those who do not respect how to use it. Spamming @here for everything is the same as replying-all in email. Or, my personal pet-peeve, creating a new private group chat for everything making finding the old conversation nearly impossible. Discord has tons of improvements I've love to see in Slack namely around groups of channels and role management, but for the most part it seems the problems with slack are organization's unwillingness to understand it's purpose and how to best use it not as a pager system for your whims, but actually as an async communication system.
- Fnoord 7y ago
  > Where I've worked email has simply been a very poor chat which I could not distinguish "info broadcasts" from "the server is down" without getting all notifications or none Something like Procmail could provide such feature. Slack (and Discord) is on the long term worse than e-mail/IRC because it isn't federated, nor an open protocol, nor FOSS. This means people are forced into a proprietary, centralized theme park of clients and servers. Its a potential security hazard to put sensitive data in such software. Of course, Slack (and Discord) both have their set of advantages as well. The good news is, its a matter of time before FOSS alternatives catch up and become good enough.
fogetti 7y ago
Something that I can't seem to find highlighted ever in any discussion about communication tools (but I acknowledge it was kind of hinted at by the federated nature of email in this post) is that by using email you have ultimate and complete control over the information received. I mean in slack you don't have much chance to download an archive of your messages, mentions and message threads (although it might be possible,IDK). On the other hand hosting your own email server (or even by using most of the popular email providers) you have this option out of the box. And this is more important then you think. In court for example this might be the decisive factor in your favour (e.g. having something vs having nothing). But it might be useful in other disputes too, not only in legal cases.
awkward 7y ago
For me, Slack has fully replaced email for any time sensitive communication. Email still exists but only for the following: - Company or department wide announcements - Welcoming new hires - Artifacts from build systems and automated tools - Inter-team communications when planning something new Anything with a real deadline is communicated through slack or skype.
throwaway743 7y ago
Big problem I've seen is behavior in using Some vs email, and the monitoring capabilities managers have in monitoring either. From my observations, people use Slack very casually in the sense that they use it like they would any IM platform to socialize/gossip/vent on a whim while at work, not expecting that management has access to viewing each and every thread. This has lead to management playing favorites/politics. In the case of a friend who got a promotion to management at their employers recently, they had to see many of their teammates pre promotion get fired due to those teammates venting on Slack about inefficiencies/incompetencies in management, and management having read each and every response without those teammates realizing they had access. Email still presents this issue, but not at this level of casual use/expectation of access by management

169 points by thereyougo 7y ago

I'm using slack in my office (We also use trello for checklist but Slack for communication) And I do think it'ss a bad decision for Slack to get into the email world. It will open a door for security breaches and in my company we have some pretty important content on Slack I also don't want EVERYTHING to be in one place I like the Slack as it is now, Adding emails to slack aswell will make it a really large platform.

xfitm3 7y ago

Slack is a productivity killer and whatever they are doing next is certain to be annoying. People ping each other asking questions instead of reading docs. People have calls instead of figuring it out. Annoying people just can’t resist the temptation of @here. It wouldn’t be so bad if I could customize my experience but Slack fights hard against this. They claim one size fits all, if it’s annoying then it’s a cultural issue. You can’t get thousands of people on the same page. Different mindsets should be fostered, not punished.

dewey 7y ago
> Annoying people just can’t resist the temptation of @here If people keep doing that repeatedly even after being told then you probably have bigger problems in the company than the messaging app of choice. You can also just disable it: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/115004855143-Set-who-can-notify-a-channel-or-workspace https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/115004855143-Set-wh... > People ping each other asking questions instead of reading docs. That's not a Slack problem, it always existed on IRC, people tapping you on the shoulder in the office or on mailing lists and forums.
- xfitm3 7y ago
  You're missing the point. Slack is engineering increased engagement which changes thinking and working patterns to be more social vs heads down.
  - drgath 7y ago
    In 15 years as a professional software engineer, I’ve never worked somewhere that wasn’t heavily using IRC, Hipchat, or Slack. The conversations are identical, the only thing that has changed is the service being used. As previous poster alluded to, your complaints aren’t a Slack issue, it’s a co-worker issue.
    - alrs 7y ago
      The nice thing about pre-Slack was that there was a bozo filter: the only people who could bother you were the people who could figure out how to use an IRC client.
    - dijit 7y ago
      Also 15 years professional here; And I agree, it's largely similar. One difference though is that IRC doesn't have a @here equivalent. People do like to overuse that one in particular. (you can turn it off but the default is frustrating and the UX is poor for disabling)
      - yoz-y 7y ago
        This lack can be fixed by the amazing dau irssi plugin.
    - xfitm3 7y ago
      No, it’s Slack. My company was IRC based and moved to Slack. It’s changed working patterns.
    - mertnesvat 7y ago
      Totally agree on that! Sometimes we're so focused to the product we ignore who is using it.
- smelendez 7y ago
  For whatever reason, most orgs I've seen are terrible at getting people who talk too much to stop, whether it's in meetings, at the work table or in Slack.
- fogetti 7y ago
  I never understood people who get annoyed by @here. If you are somewhere where you don't want to be, and people send a message to you that you don't care about, you shouldn't be there in the first place. We have many channels in our company where complete strangers hang out, for example in the engineering channel like it was a garden party of some sort. You know: just for fun. I mean WTF is wrong with these people? Why are they in the channel if they are not interested? When I message with @here I don't give a shit if it annoys someone or not, as long as the message is completely in line with the channel's intended purpose.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
playeren 7y ago
> Slack is a productivity killer I think that notifications is a productivity killer in general - no matter the software behind it.
karmelapple 7y ago
I’m in some Slacks that have thousands of people all on the same page. It’s impressive and inspiring how the communication style and culture has developed and is enforced.
javagram 7y ago
> People have calls instead of figuring it out. I find the opposite, I can often help my coworkers debug something pretty quickly via a quick Slack call and screen sharing session, whereas other times I have seen similar problems resulting in hours of struggle as someone tries to 'figure it out' on their own without being able to tap the expertise of someone who's familiar with the problem or system at hand. That said, there are definitely downsides to the abundant distractions through Slack as well.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- devocracy 7y ago
  Is there not value to be gained when someone is struggling to get past a problem? I've seen what happens when people too quickly phone a friend whenever they hit a problem, the end result being they don't round out their knowledge.
  - javagram 7y ago
    It depends on the person and the problem I think. I have also seen people sort of struggle and not really make progress and leaving them in their own wouldn’t be a learning experience. Like how if you throw someone who doesn’t know how to swim in the ocean they might just thrash about until they get tired and drown... I do always try to work with them to explain the steps I am taking to troubleshoot but it’s definitely a balancing act as you want them to learn not just have it done for them.

playeren 7y ago

All these complaints about Slack, are strangely reminiscent of all the complaints about email pre-Slack; "re:re:re:re:re:", cc all the people, 200+ non-relevant emails per day etc etc. I worry that people are trying fix org culture problems with communication software, which is unlikely to succeed.

rakoo 7y ago
On the other hand, there is a case to be made that if everyone makes "mistakes" it's because it's the first option they have, so we (as an industry) should make softwares do the correct thing by default. Users don't have time to fiddle with options, the software should serve them.
- playeren 7y ago
  I generally agree with that opinion, but in this case I believe communication tool feature sets are not the right setting to enforce organisational culture. You would end up with a highly opinionated piece of software, which would imply that one size fits all, when it comes to org culture. Slack et al. (and email for that matter), can be used in a myriad of different ways to suit different types of organisations, which I strongly believe is a good thing. We probably do need software to help us all with org culture, but I don't think comms is the right place to implement that.
Kasper99 7y ago
That's exactly why we need to fix email - not replace it with another app with more notifications. I agree with Dvir - email's asynchronous nature is what makes the exact solution for business comms. It's instant, but not invasive, and doesn't expect an instant reply. Culturally, we need to also respect people's time. I'm sticking with email.
- playeren 7y ago
  Most of the Slack channels I use are used async, and I only have notifications on for 2 out of ~15 channels. Good comms culture was much easier to develop with Slack + [Something for docs] for the teams I have worked with. But I very much understand that teams are different, and different cultures work optimally for different teams.

iLemming 7y ago

Slack also has other problems that have been totally ignored and neglected for years. One of them is accessibility. The app is impossible to work with without a mouse. They say it is "keyboard driven" and they keep adding features that ignore keyboard completely. Have you ever tried to jump to a thread without using the mouse? Or copy a link to the last message? Or share it? Or ask Slack to remind about it? Or snooze all notifications? They could at least put them in the main menu. People with disabilities who rely on things being in the menu, they can't do any those things. Can you imagine having to hire someone and they'd be like: "Ah sorry, I have to tell you something. I cannot use Slack app. I hope that's not a deal breaker". I wouldn't be surprised if someone sues SlackHQ for being discriminatory.

Jack1012 7y ago
I totally agree.
- hardwaresofton 7y ago
  Just in case you're curious on why this comment is getting downvoted -- this isn't a very substantive comment (in my opinion at least). From the HN guidelines[0] > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. If you agree, the upvote button should be enough [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
x0x0 7y ago
tab gets you there. maybe not fast, but it does. up and down work pretty well once focus is in the historical messages window rather than the edit window this is on the current mac client
- iLemming 7y ago
  > Tab gets you there. maybe not fast, but it does. People choose keyboard-centric workflows: a) For efficiency (if it takes a few milliseconds to press a key, why would you even reach for the mouse?) b) For accessibility Your point is not helpful for any of these cases. Asking to try to use Slack App with a blindfold might be a bit extreme, what if I suggest you to try to use it for a few hours without touching the mouse? How's that for a challenge? Try that and maybe then you'd feel how it supposed "to get you there" for people with disabilities.

einpoklum 7y ago

Uh, why _would_ Slack replace email? Non-sequitur.

SomeOldThrow 7y ago
Because of Slack positioning itself like that: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/13/slack-releases-new-financials-ahead-of-investor-day.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/13/slack-releases-new-financial...

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zamalek 7y ago

I don't think Slack could universally replace email, but it could for some teams (ubiquitous addresses aside). One of the teams I work with communicate solely through Slack (and do use it asynchronously). All the other teams use some combination of email and Slack, and it wouldn't surprise me if there were teams out there avoiding Slack altogether. It's just another tool. The usage depends entirely on the audience.

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zxcvbn4038 7y ago

When the Slack sales team came to my employer they pitched it as some sort of memory store - the reality is that it’s nigh impossible to pick out a specific bit of information after a couple of months unless you remember who said something, where they said it, and approximately when. It’s also annoying when an admin leaves because only the owner can remove their account - not another admin. I would also say Slack has a very bad habit of forcing new features down users throats - people have been complaining about threads for years but there is STILL no way to mute them or disable them. Someone installs an add-in that makes a lot of noise? Tough cookies to you, your options are to put up with it or uninstall it, there is no way to mute it. Like people joining you to new channels? No way to stop that either. Their API is a pain to deal with in staticly typed languages - you often have to decode a member of a substructure to discover what the overall type is. So overall I would say it’s definitely not an e-mail replacement and it’s very heavy handed for IM, there is definitely room for another product. I would personally prefer something more akin to IRC or the classic “cb simulators”. The only real challenge today is working with mobile clients (and challenge is probably too strong a word).

bcp2384 7y ago

I'm relatively bearish on Slack, but who knows what will happen in 5 years. Anecdotally I find a lot of people (myself included) have long shifted from "Slack is the greatest thing ever (e.g. 2015/2016)" to "Slack is more annoying than email." At the same time, I don't feel like there's been much new outside of changing the design of their homepage every 3-4 months (can someone explain why it makes sense to throw design/eng resources on this?) and search is still terrible.

throwaway66666 7y ago

My only complaint for Slack (and any instant messaging app), is the sense of urgency it creates. It has been discussed on HN a lot, but I 've never seen someone complaint about the fact that you can invite to your organization people from other orgs. This feature is beloved by product managers. And hated by everyone else. See. Before 'Slack', we had 3 channels of communication. 1. Email (usually expectation of getting a reply within hours) 2. Phonecall (reserved for urgent situations, expecting a reply within... seconds) 3. Ticket system that had a little drop-down where you could select urgency. And you would expect a reply based on the urgency. If you abused the urgency, we had a way to track that, and let you know. Today however, Slack's "multiple organizations" feature pretty much shadowed the above. Now product manager from client org X, will require that you make a channel called "X-feature Commandos/dream team" then invite everyone involved on the project. Then they will ALWAYS end up wasting everyone's time for no reason. "Hey @here, X page is slow can you check it out?". "Sorry guys my bad. I was under the bay sea riding the Bart! Forgot LTE connections can be finnicky 100m under water. heh (ultra fast parrot emoji)"

theamk 7y ago
I don't see how this is different? > If you abused the urgency, we had a way to track that, and let you know. So how is Slack different? You can still track the urgency and let the person know -- it is right there in the message. And if they really don't understand that @here is bad, then you can always disable @here on per-channel basis (I have this on a few channels, in fact)
- krzat 7y ago
  Spamming multiple messages a on slack seems more innocent than spamming multiple emails a day.
- paranoidrobot 7y ago
  I had to fight our HR manager over access to @here and it's equivalent. Global company, people working all sorts of schedules and they want to use @here in the primary channel (which you can't mute) to send inane bullshit about unimportant stuff. (In theory @here only sends notifications when you are 'here', but I found it to be less than reliable) The first few times people did it, I asked them not to, and then turned it off for non-admins. Thus the fight with HR.

juskrey 7y ago

Email is Lindy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

cpeterso 7y ago
For those who don't what the Lindy Effect is: The Lindy effect is a theory that the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things like a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy. Where the Lindy effect applies, mortality rate _decreases_ with time.

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axaxs 7y ago

I've already replaced email with Slack. It's not hard, email is really bad. That said, Slack is sorely lacking here, especially with threads. Slack "threads" are an awful experience, with replies generally ignored, so people don't use them. All I'd need is for Slack to treat threads like a real first class citizens, with a view like HN or Reddit, and I'd be a happy camper.

karlding 7y ago
Threads as first class citizens is something that Zulip [0] focuses on, which makes it much easier to have multiple conversations within the same space. It also makes it easier to ignore any conversations you don't care about. This avoids the problem with Slack where some people might use the threading features, while others ignore it. Personally I'm a huge fan of Zulip, having used HipChat, Slack, Mattermost, Skype for Business, and Discord in the past. [0] http://zulip.org http://zulip.org
- austhrow743 7y ago
  Do you know if zulip is useable with only the keyboard?
  - rishig 7y ago
    yes, it is. https://zulipchat.com/help/keyboard-shortcuts https://zulipchat.com/help/keyboard-shortcuts has the list of keyboard shortcuts.
    - austhrow743 7y ago
      thanks!

zmmmmm 7y ago

I just wish the client wasn't so bad. I can't believe that if I send a message and I'm not connected at that precise instant that it catn't store and forward the message when I do get connected. In fact, I can't look at any of my slack messages at all. Every other IM client, email, basically every communications medium since about 1998 has been able to do this, but apparently not Slack.

stingrae 7y ago

The longer I use slack, the more unusable it is. People keep creating small groups with requests. Once you read a message it is almost impossible to find unless you remember everyone that was selected to be in the group. The search is practically useless.

module17 7y ago

Never say never. Something will definitely replace email.

SomeOldThrow 7y ago
The only thing that can replace email is a better email. If we had a version of IMAP that worked with labels (download a message once regardless of how it's tagged) + push, email would be usable again. Currently this is only possible with IMAP with all its flaws OR by giving all your email to a third party to serve through an API designed for modern email. There are perverse incentives preventing this from occurring in any widespread fashion, which is allowing Slack to flourish on the dysfunction of the current communication ecosystem. If we do have a replacement for email, it's not gonna be from a for-profit entity. Anyway, real-time communications are inherently a different beast from async communications—one is a highly searchable and taggable data store where you're expected to carefully read and type and form workflows around, and the other is for essentially war rooms for collaborative real-time work. Pitching slack as a replacement for email seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of the product.

dang 7y ago

In case anybody doesn't know: Shift+Esc marks all messages read. Rarely is a keyboard shortcut so good for one's health. I got this from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17374500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17374500 but there have been other benefactors: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=shift%2Besc%20read&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=shift%2Besc%20read&sort=byDate...

deleted 7y ago
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mulmen 7y ago
Sometimes. It's about as reliable as the rest of Slack, which is to say not very.

znpy 7y ago

My company dropped slack for Microsoft Teams since it is basically free (bundled in the office 365 subscription). Email still rocks all of our inter-branch communications and teams is better. The only advantage that Slack has over teams is that it works on GNU/Linux...

vmurthy 7y ago

The article talks about a few great features of e-mail that I totally agree with: open standards, portability, asynchronicity. While asynchronicity is achievable with Slack ,I get the feeling that if all of your colleagues are on synchronous mode and you're the odd one out, it'll create problems in the company as you can be labeled a slacker (heh!).

zby 7y ago

The number one point is to recognize the situation as a conflict of interests - everyone wants an immediate answer to his burning question, but nobody wants to be interrupted to answer somebody else questions. For the team as a whole there is probably some optimal interruption level which is higher than what the interrupted would set and lower than what the interrupter would choose. That is why muting and 'urgent' messages don't work - because people would tend to mute channels too much and on the other hand 'urgent' quickly inflates and everything starts to be urgent. I think a solution to this could be "attention budgets". There are many complications of course - there are times when you don't mind being interrupted and times when you do, and it is taxing to think about it consciously and set your levels. But I would start from attention budgets - this would also be a solution to general spam, but synchronous spam is much worse than asynchronous - so synchronous is a good place to start.

ga-vu 7y ago

Probably because they are two different things.... just sayin

sdfhbdf 7y ago

I agree with the points about the culture problems that are communication medium agnostic. But the solution that the author of this article suggests is Spike, their product. I looked at Spike and while I got the gist of what Spike is for I did not get how does it work. Does it replace G Suite for example? Is it an email hosting? Or is it a complimentary app for G Suite/O365 users? How does it integrate? How does it look like when a person not using Spike receives and email send via Spike? Do they know it comes from Spike?

Kasper99 7y ago
that's the point that the writer made - Spike can work with anyone (unlike other apps like Slack, Teams, Skype, etc.) Spike works with your regular email, like Gsuite and turns your emails into a chat conversation. The other person doesn't know you're using Spike - they see a regular email. You can even create a channel and message with people not on Spike. That's pretty cool stuff IMO

oxfordmale 7y ago

Slack will never replace email as long as it doesn't have end to end encryption, a feature Slack has indicated it is not going to deliver anytime soon due to the "priorities of paying customers". Personally I hate Slack as it provides too many distractions. Recently I have starting closing down Slack and only allow myself to check it every half an hour to improve my attention span and concentration. Slack seems to be a great tool for product and project managers, however, less so for developers. It would be great if Slack would allow me to selectively mute certain channels.For example, the lunch-club channel is only relevant when I am actually onsite, however, I always want to be kept up to date on critical production issues.

monsieurbanana 7y ago
When you're on a channel, on the top right you have a cogs for "Channel Settings" where you can find the option to mute that specific channel.
- oxfordmale 7y ago
  Can you also mute certain colleagues ?

benjaminwootton 7y ago

Slack has replaced 99% of internal emails in our organisation. When pointing towards other platforms for long lived content, email just doesn’t seem to have a use case. We still need it for external comms obviously.

raxxorrax 7y ago

The advent of proprietary communication tools isn't really something I like, be that slack or discord or other services. Something tells me that in 10 years neither service will be hip enough to warrant extensive support. If they were to hold relevant business critical information, it would need to be archived but will probably just end up being lost. That is at least a difference to mail. Also external contacts could be invited to the appropriate channels, but I don't really see much engagement from these users if that actually does happen.

SomeOldThrow 7y ago

Slack: it’s like email, but you can’t find shit.

rezeroed 7y ago

Does no one else use rocketchat?

ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago

I worked for a corporation with a 13- to 14-hour time difference. Also, the language barrier was significant. When we sent an email, it had to be translated to Japanese, then the reply often translated back. Slack (or any IM medium) was 100% worthless for this. It has its place, but it is not a cure-all.

moonhorse 7y ago

Chinese companies have been relying on instant messenger as the primary communication channel for a long time. So definitely it works.

SomeOldThrow 7y ago
You can also eschew all electronic communication and do things purely in person—that works too. The valuable question to answer here is how well do these processes work compared to each other.

0xCMP 7y ago

I find things like this funny because Email is often much worse for getting ideas across and VERY FEW people put their whole idea in an Email and simply treat it with chat + 6 line signatures. Where I've worked email has simply been a very poor chat which I could not distinguish "info broadcasts" from "the server is down" without getting all notifications or none. We switched to slack in 2014 because 1) it allowed us to notify mindfully for team-wide and person specific things. 2) it allowed people to have full blown conversations and keep others up to date on status/problems in channels. And 3) it allowed us to build automation right inline with the communication we were already doing. Much of the complaints of slack seem to be from people who work with those who do not respect how to use it. Spamming @here for everything is the same as replying-all in email. Or, my personal pet-peeve, creating a new private group chat for everything making finding the old conversation nearly impossible. Discord has tons of improvements I've love to see in Slack namely around groups of channels and role management, but for the most part it seems the problems with slack are organization's unwillingness to understand it's purpose and how to best use it not as a pager system for your whims, but actually as an async communication system.

Fnoord 7y ago
> Where I've worked email has simply been a very poor chat which I could not distinguish "info broadcasts" from "the server is down" without getting all notifications or none Something like Procmail could provide such feature. Slack (and Discord) is on the long term worse than e-mail/IRC because it isn't federated, nor an open protocol, nor FOSS. This means people are forced into a proprietary, centralized theme park of clients and servers. Its a potential security hazard to put sensitive data in such software. Of course, Slack (and Discord) both have their set of advantages as well. The good news is, its a matter of time before FOSS alternatives catch up and become good enough.

fogetti 7y ago

Something that I can't seem to find highlighted ever in any discussion about communication tools (but I acknowledge it was kind of hinted at by the federated nature of email in this post) is that by using email you have ultimate and complete control over the information received. I mean in slack you don't have much chance to download an archive of your messages, mentions and message threads (although it might be possible,IDK). On the other hand hosting your own email server (or even by using most of the popular email providers) you have this option out of the box. And this is more important then you think. In court for example this might be the decisive factor in your favour (e.g. having something vs having nothing). But it might be useful in other disputes too, not only in legal cases.

awkward 7y ago

For me, Slack has fully replaced email for any time sensitive communication. Email still exists but only for the following: - Company or department wide announcements - Welcoming new hires - Artifacts from build systems and automated tools - Inter-team communications when planning something new Anything with a real deadline is communicated through slack or skype.

throwaway743 7y ago

Big problem I've seen is behavior in using Some vs email, and the monitoring capabilities managers have in monitoring either. From my observations, people use Slack very casually in the sense that they use it like they would any IM platform to socialize/gossip/vent on a whim while at work, not expecting that management has access to viewing each and every thread. This has lead to management playing favorites/politics. In the case of a friend who got a promotion to management at their employers recently, they had to see many of their teammates pre promotion get fired due to those teammates venting on Slack about inefficiencies/incompetencies in management, and management having read each and every response without those teammates realizing they had access. Email still presents this issue, but not at this level of casual use/expectation of access by management