You can't put the genie back in the bottle. The reason AIM felt better was because way fewer people were online and it tended towards smaller groups of more re

You can't put the genie back in the bottle. The reason AIM felt better was because way fewer people were online and it tended towards smaller groups of more recent friends. In that environment synchronous chat was fun and novel. Since then we've been inundated with always-on expectations, and the only way to maintain sanity now is to treat all text communications as varying degrees of asynchronous. Slack and others provide plenty of tools for this, though ultimately it's up to the individual to enforce them.