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I even think it's bad for generalized communication (ie. Slack/Teams/Discord/etc.) that isn't completely throwaway. Email is better in every single way for anyt

I even think it's bad for generalized communication (ie. Slack/Teams/Discord/etc.) that isn't completely throwaway. Email is better in every single way for anything that might ever be relevant to review again or be filtered due to too much going on.

taeric 2y ago
Anything that needs to be filtered for viewing again pretty much needs version control. Email largely fails at that, as hard as other correspondence systems. That said, we have common workflows that use email to build reviewed artifacts. People love complaining about the email workflow of git, but it is demonstrably better than any chat program for what it is doing.
- packetlost 2y ago
  I don't think I agree with this. Sure, many things should be versioned, but I don't think most correspondence requires it, which is emails primarily purpose.
  - taeric 2y ago
    Agreed if it is correspondence that we are talking about. So, agreed I'm probably too strong that anything needing filtering and such is bad. I'm thinking of things that are assembled. The correspondence that went into the assembly is largely of historical interest, but not necessarily one of current use.
    - packetlost 2y ago
      Yup, I agree there. Email is a horrible means of collaborating on changes in general, but doubly so in realtime. But so is IM.
    - esafak 2y ago
      So you mean like collaborating on a document? Modern word processors are versioned, or you can use text and your own VCS, same as with your code. Is your issue that you want to discuss the thing you are collaborating on outside of the tool you are creating it in?
      - taeric 2y ago
        This feels inline with my point? Versioning of documents is better done using other tools. Correspondence is fine over email. We have some tools integrated with email to help version control things. But the actual version control is, strictly, not the emails.
goosejuice 2y ago
I've had the opposite experience. I have never had any issue finding information in slack with history going back nearly a decade. The only issue I have with Slack is a people problem where most communication is siloed in private channels and DMs. Email threads are incredibly hard to follow though. The UX is rough and it shows.
- packetlost 2y ago
  I hard disagree. Don't have a conversation? Ask someone who does to forward it. Email lets the user control how to organize conversations. Want to stuff a conversation in a folder? Sure. Use tags religiously? Go for it. Have one big pile and rely on full-text search and metadata queries? You bet. Only the last of these is possible with the vast majority of IM platforms because the medium just doesn't allow for any other paradigm. The fact that there's a subject header alone leads people to both stay on topic and have better thought out messages. I agree that email threads could have better UX. Part of that is the clients insistence on appending the previous message to every reply. This is completely optional though and should probably be turned off by default for simple replies.
  - goosejuice 2y ago
    That's fine. Email is really powerful but people simply aren't good at taking advantage of it and it varies by email client. Doing some IT work at a startup made this pretty clear to me. I found Slack was much more intuitive for people. Both systems rely on the savviness of the users for the best experience and I just think email is losing the UX war. Given how terrible people seem to be at communicating I think it's a pretty important factor to consider.
    - packetlost 2y ago
      I think this could reasonably be addressed, and several startups have. The trouble is that the default email clients (gmail, outlook, etc.) don't really try to make it any better. I've also generally had the opposite experience, a huge amount of business offices live and breath in email (mostly Outlook, but I'm sure it varies). Startups tend to run fast and lean, but as soon as you have some threshold of people, email is king.

taeric 2y ago

Anything that needs to be filtered for viewing again pretty much needs version control. Email largely fails at that, as hard as other correspondence systems. That said, we have common workflows that use email to build reviewed artifacts. People love complaining about the email workflow of git, but it is demonstrably better than any chat program for what it is doing.

packetlost 2y ago
I don't think I agree with this. Sure, many things should be versioned, but I don't think most correspondence requires it, which is emails primarily purpose.
- taeric 2y ago
  Agreed if it is correspondence that we are talking about. So, agreed I'm probably too strong that anything needing filtering and such is bad. I'm thinking of things that are assembled. The correspondence that went into the assembly is largely of historical interest, but not necessarily one of current use.
  - packetlost 2y ago
    Yup, I agree there. Email is a horrible means of collaborating on changes in general, but doubly so in realtime. But so is IM.
  - esafak 2y ago
    So you mean like collaborating on a document? Modern word processors are versioned, or you can use text and your own VCS, same as with your code. Is your issue that you want to discuss the thing you are collaborating on outside of the tool you are creating it in?
    - taeric 2y ago
      This feels inline with my point? Versioning of documents is better done using other tools. Correspondence is fine over email. We have some tools integrated with email to help version control things. But the actual version control is, strictly, not the emails.

goosejuice 2y ago

I've had the opposite experience. I have never had any issue finding information in slack with history going back nearly a decade. The only issue I have with Slack is a people problem where most communication is siloed in private channels and DMs. Email threads are incredibly hard to follow though. The UX is rough and it shows.

packetlost 2y ago
I hard disagree. Don't have a conversation? Ask someone who does to forward it. Email lets the user control how to organize conversations. Want to stuff a conversation in a folder? Sure. Use tags religiously? Go for it. Have one big pile and rely on full-text search and metadata queries? You bet. Only the last of these is possible with the vast majority of IM platforms because the medium just doesn't allow for any other paradigm. The fact that there's a subject header alone leads people to both stay on topic and have better thought out messages. I agree that email threads could have better UX. Part of that is the clients insistence on appending the previous message to every reply. This is completely optional though and should probably be turned off by default for simple replies.
- goosejuice 2y ago
  That's fine. Email is really powerful but people simply aren't good at taking advantage of it and it varies by email client. Doing some IT work at a startup made this pretty clear to me. I found Slack was much more intuitive for people. Both systems rely on the savviness of the users for the best experience and I just think email is losing the UX war. Given how terrible people seem to be at communicating I think it's a pretty important factor to consider.
  - packetlost 2y ago
    I think this could reasonably be addressed, and several startups have. The trouble is that the default email clients (gmail, outlook, etc.) don't really try to make it any better. I've also generally had the opposite experience, a huge amount of business offices live and breath in email (mostly Outlook, but I'm sure it varies). Startups tend to run fast and lean, but as soon as you have some threshold of people, email is king.