Interesting. Nearly 100% of the comments here are negative, perhaps because the title paints things in black and white? Life before workplace group chats was r

Interesting. Nearly 100% of the comments here are negative, perhaps because the title paints things in black and white? Life before workplace group chats was really painful. We had IRC for those of us who knew how to use it, but it was never going to pass muster in a corporate office. Email was next to meetings as "the worst thing about work" and you were both drowning in it, but never able to get the things you needed over it. 1-1 chat with AIM, etc helped, but then every task went off into the void until those people reported back. I love slack. We went from Hipchat to Flowdock to Slack over the years and Slack is the one that gets pretty much everything right. I've got channels for every client we work with, and they actually participate. I've got different Slack instances for work, friend groups, my hackerspace, etc. I can flip through and stay up to date on WAY more than I would without it. And most importantly, people actually use the thing. It's easy, it's on everything, and it gives me the option to ping them or not as needed. Not everything is the same level of urgency. It doesn't kill mail - mail still has it's place for longer form messages that need more thought and a deeper response, but damn if Slack isn't the right tool for a lot of my jobs.