>, Slack has been pushed as the replacement of email [...] Yes, I empathize your perspective which is very common common among people who want to concentrate w

>, Slack has been pushed as the replacement of email [...] Yes, I empathize your perspective which is very common common among people who want to concentrate without interruptions. Donald Knuth is an extreme example of not wanting to be interrupted -- not even with async email.[1] However your cause & effect of why chat/Slack is popular is not correct. Chat apps are more of a replacement for walking up to a coworker's cubicle or desk and interrupting them face-to-face. >[...] without ever wondering if it really provides a productivity benefit. It's a productivity benefit to the people who are doing the interrupting. We don't work in an office full of "Donald Knuths" who don't want to bother each other. Because the interrupters outnumber the deep thinkers, that's why a chat tool like AIM/YahooMessenger/Skype/Whatsapp/Slack/etc dominates. I previously mentioned how early Facebook programmers chatted on instant messaging (AOL AIM ~9 years before Slack) even though they sat next to each other.[2] Their behavior is not replacing "email". They are replacing "realtime speech" without making verbal sounds. If one doesn't understand that, you'll always be mystified why email isn't used in place of instant messaging! Email is less ergonomic than chat. Email has extra friction of entering a "subject:" line before the body of the text. Chat doesn't need a subject line because the chat room is already the implied subject. Email also has extra friction of hitting "reply" button instead of just typing. Email is oriented around the "inbox". Chat is oriented around people who are actively online. Likewise, when my mom texts me an SMS on my smartphone, she isn't replacing email. She's replacing a phone call. [1] do a mental search & replace : s/email/chat s/snailmail/email ...on this excerpt from https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html: >Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study. >On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode --- like, one day every six months. So if you want to write to me about any topic, please use good ol' snail mail and send a letter [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18321783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18321783