You don't have to talk sync with chat, you don't have to do one line back and forths on chat, you can take hours or days to reply if you so choose on chat like

You don't have to talk sync with chat, you don't have to do one line back and forths on chat, you can take hours or days to reply if you so choose on chat like email, you can easily do rich paragraphs. Slack is not synchronous communication, video / voice calls are. Slack wins over discourse forms, stack overflow and email because it adds too much friction to do essentially the same thing. Slack wins because it's the least friction interface that gives you form and email equivalents, plus it organizes a bit better naturally . If you want to beat slack and change the communication defaults, you need to make a UI that works with less friction than slack. You can change your chat culture with changing your behaviors and encouraging changes like nohello.net and threading like this post is doing and setting boundaries with how you will communicate. Also, different people work better with different communication mediums, the slack hate that you see on HN is not universal, there is a quiet majority that works well with slack, otherwise you wouldn't see it naturally adopted so much like the author encountered themselves. There will always be a set that hates whatever the default is. Now WFH is default in the industry, there is a subset that hates it greatly and wish we had offices again. Go back to offices with private rooms or open offices, there will be a set that doesn't like it too.