I also don't like using chat at work. It's not because I want less interaction, it's because I want less interruption. Email has a norm of asynchrony where I can respond to email when I reach a good point in my current task. With chat, the other party is presumed to be sitting staring at the screen waiting for my reply, so I have to drop what I'm doing to respond.

I don't think the latter is good for my overall productivity.

What do you think has caused that expectation in your mind? Do you wish that for the people you’re chatting with? Have you worked with people who do expect that? Honestly curious.

I wonder how my growing up with it, and in chat rooms with mostly tech-savvy folks, has affected my use and expectations of it, too.

> Have you worked with people who do expect that?

Yes. Manager expects it to be like talking to you across the room. You answer there and then. If you slack him though he doesn't expect to reply immediately and gets annoyed if you interrupt him to say you really need an answer.

> Do you wish that for the people you’re chatting with? Yes, saves making a telephone call.

There again, if I Slack someone, it'd better be important not time-wasting.

OK, maybe not literally staring at the screen.

> What do you think has caused that expectation in your mind?

I think the structural analogue and communication style — even the name! — of chat is a verbal conversation. In a conversation, you say as little as needed and then pause for the other person to take their turn. Each utterance is pretty short so that you give the other party a chance to respond.

If you do that asynchronously, it takes forever to work through a sizeable quantity of content.

In email, the analogue is written letters. The expected asynchrony is high and in return the writing style accommodates that: each email is usually a roughly complete though with possibly some paragraphs. Since you know the person replying to you can reply to individual sections, it's OK to put out a complete thought. You don't have to shorten it to give them a chance to interject.

Phones reduced that price point - but it still has a cost to me.

Now IM / Slack has flipped it on its head - the cost to the interruptor is negligible but the cost for the interruptee is their mental derailment - and no ability to judge the overall benefit of helping until it is too late

Plus I don't really see the win - for real time co-ordination it's hard to beat a mass phone conference ( we are doing a complex release with phased rollouts and devops watching the traffic - then get your headsets on, and everyone must hurry up and wait)

Slack is just secondary for that - useful for spelling out what has been said but otherwise ...

For letting others know what has happened - that's called an after the fact report or "email".

So really i don't see the use case except it means that when like the phone, i reach you i am confident of a reply in a given time period - that may well be defining facto

It's the "check it" that's a mess in a high-volume environment.

E-mail threads that can be seen to branch, and in a pinch I can skip irrelevant branches once I've determined their vector.

But each Slack channel is a continuous stream of text with a tiny scroll slider. There's no possibility of skipping a couple of pages of messages unless one just seaeches for direct mentions, at which point why bother? If it's important they'll just ring / call / e-mail..

I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp, but ever since we got the bandwidth and CPU necessary for the internet to not be a primarily text-based medium, the illiterates took over and that was the end of that.

Tasks belong in tickets, long-term documentation/policies/meeting notes/etc belong in shared space (wiki), and discussions are faster and more productive in realtime (in-person, video call, or chat). E-mail might kick some of this off, or be used to schedule, but that should be it.

The problem I think most people run into with the realtime discussion is failing to document the outcome of the meeting -- and that of course goes into a ticket or long-term docs. A meeting with no notes or outcome might as well have not happened.

Real-time discussion is great if you don't have to think about what you're going to say before you say it. Unfortunately, that places a very, very low upper limit on the level of depth and consideration that a discussion can reach. Some decisions are hard enough and some situations are nuanced enough that you need to take your time with them, enough that the additional cost of making all of that time strictly synchronous can grow exponentially.

It also excludes large categories of people, including introverts and non-native speakers. I've worked with a number of people who just flat out did not or could not participate in real-time face-to-face discussions, but who could express themselves masterfully via email.

Of course, the "faster! instant! now! now! now!" crowd don't even have the patience for slower, deeper, better-reasoned discussions, which is why they shy away from any form of communication that has any more depth than a tweet or a PowerPoint slide. Slack is great for these people because they don't even have to string words together to communicate, they can just click on a reaction emoji.

Sure, some things (operations, for instance) have genuine urgency to them, and I think real-time communication is essential for situations like that. But if you're doing work that will have an impact on the span of months, quarters, or years--either major strategic business decisions, design, or project development--you're better served by thinking deeper instead of thinking faster, and deep thought is exactly what the long-form written word was invented for.

There are so many examples of teams successfully communicating state, sentiment and other information among each other with memes and videos an what not.

Also, to help people blow off steam. We don't need to be absolute productive units operating at 100% all the time.

Goofin off is healthy

The internet is such a large collection of knowledge, I just wish more people used it to improve themselves, or at least their understanding of the many different things we have in the world.

I tend towards being an introvert, and I'm not always good at coming up with an argument on the spot. I recognize this, and I will often end the real-time discussion by literally just saying "Ok, I need to go think about this before we discuss it anymore. Let's come back in a day or two." Just like you don't have to respond to e-mails the instant they come in, you don't have to do it for real-time or chat, either.

I will also do the same to others when I can. For example, yesterday I suggested a new approach to how a certain part of our product works, and pitched it to the team. There was only minor feedback so I just said "okay, go think about it, and I'll bring it up again later", so I will probably ask tomorrow to see if anyone has further thoughts on it. It's amazing what sleeping on ideas can do.

The thing I'm really trying to get at here is real-time doesn't mean "now! now! now!". There's absolutely nothing wrong with several meetings over the course of days or weeks or months. For strategic and key design discussions, there should absolutely be documentation written between those discussions. In fact, that's basically the way I operate: discuss, document, give time for people to review, and then discuss again, repeating as much as needed.

There's people that are opposite and want the response "now!", and don't want to take time to think through problems -- but I would guess there's a large overlap with the type of people that come over to your desk / call you and say "I just sent you an e-mail, did you get it?" and then only read the first sentence or two of your reply anyway.

The reality is that email fails to serve the purpose for complex discussions that involve many people, especially when you're using a rubbish email system like outlook.

Another form, be it meetings, chat, forum, whatever is required for this... and to be fair, gmail and the like offer some form of searching and sorting nested threads...

...but your complaint is broadly the same as the argument against having meetings in general.

Certainly, it is an oppinion, but not helpful or realistic.

Slack is disruptive, but 'just use email' isn't the answer.

Seriously, go read the lkml archives sometime, and go tell the authors of one of the most important and high quality pieces of foundational software in the world that they would be better served with something like Slack.

Most work communication is usually within our issue tracking system

We use slack very lightly,

- most of our conversations are face to face but anumber of remote employees, and slack is used instead of face to face. Often for video calls

- copy pasting things to other people

- a sort of mini internal HN where links are posted to interesting things in the dev world and we discuss

- prodding people "Oi, my PR is still waiting .... " "did you setup ... ?" etc

- telling people where we went to lunch so they can find us.

EDIT: Whoops actually Shared Channels is the feature I was thinking of: https://slackhq.com/introducing-shared-channels-where-you-ca...

I wonder how much of this attitude is a result of poor email client UIs. I switched over to using notmuch for my mail about a year ago, and I now consider email to be a great place for discussions: I can search my entire history almost instantaneously, far faster than with Gmail or Inbox.

> The problem I think most people run into with the realtime discussion is failing to document the outcome of the meeting -- and that of course goes into a ticket or long-term docs. A meeting with no notes or outcome might as well have not happened.

I definitely agree here. This falls under the heading of 'things we used to know as a society that we've forgotten.' Every meeting should have an agenda, even it's just a single agendum 'discuss $FOO,' and every meeting should have some sort of minutes, even if they're just 'discussed $FOO, decided to pursue course $BAR.'

I think the attraction of email is it looks like it short-circuits the need for this. "It's all in writing in the email trail" makes moving fast look easy (no realtime meeting that then has to be written up, the document amended on people's feedback etc). But understanding is missing and misunderstanding happens.

I'm starting to move an organisation's planning from emails into meetings and specifications. They are resisting massively because it "wastes" time. Given every project up to now has changed spec twice after launch, I see time being saved if it's correct at launch.

But again, it can be learned by everyone, it just takes time and effort.

But if you have to choose a medium of conversation, are you better off choosing one that excludes introverts, non-native speakers, and people who aren't loud and obnoxious enough to command the room? Or would you rather exclude people who lack the patience or intellectual ability to read or write more than two or three lines of text at a time? Which choice allows deeper and more thoughtfully considered ideas to enter the discussion?

I'm loud and obnoxious enough to thrive either way, but I really don't want important professional decisions to be made by the "rofl tl;dr" crowd.

They are just different mediums. Long form is better for getting across new ideas that have to be explained for the first time, but a medium like emoji allows for incredibly dense communication with single glyphs once the meaning has been established

With email, how can I subscribe to conversations I'm interested in? Mailing lists are nice, but we have no real way to make mailing lists that start and stop on the fly like a chat channel in a way that is searchable to the entire organization during or after the fact.

What email list system allows for quick creation and the ability for everyone in an organization to know that a conversation is happening and how to join with the ability to get all the context necessary in a chronological order? (Reading threads can get really repetitive in a mailing list, especially when trying to get up to speed on an issue.)

You get to all the requirements, and you end up with a discussion board instead or a new product that is to email lists what slack is to chat.

Email is great for some things, but there's a reason people use slack instead even when they already have email.

I hope you all do well with this!

Isn’t that what subject lines and mail archives are useful for?

Nobody has put together a simple solution in the mail domain. Maybe there's a market for it - turns out someone might pay for it if it's better than the slack experience.

There's always newsgroups, which use NNTP (which isn't that dissimilar to email). They have existing groups in a hierarchy that can be subscribed to. It doesn't really give users the ability to create new newsgroups in the fly though.

This would also be acceptable IMO. Any medium that enables asynchronous long-form written communication has advantages that are fundamentally impossible for any synchronous chat medium to match.

It turns out that listservs have successfully done this for decades. If there was even a fraction of the effort invested in this communication style as is invested in reinventing IRC with emoji and reaction gifs, I'm sure it would be even better.

Additionally, all this bloat and lack of structure makes it hard to search the text for both humans and machines.

Not saying that Slack is better, it addresses some of the structuring and some bloat problems, but adds distraction and encourage discussion bloat instead.

Is it a chat client? A knowledge base? A conference call? A command line? Who knows!

Which is totally why Slack isn't popular with businesses. /s

Just because you personally haven't found it useful, doesn't mean hundreds of thousands of other business users haven't.

I tried emailing longer form things at my current job and rapidly hit a cultural wall: people _do not like_ getting long emails, or emails with more than 1 or 2 replies. Slack people apparently have no problem with because it's "lighter weight", but I struggle to see how always-on disruption is lighter weight than check-it-a-couple-times-per-day email.

I think a deeper problem is lack of delineation of responsibility and adequate planning. Slack & other "always on" communication systems make it easy to say "why plan? I can _just ask_ when I need to know something" or "we'll have a conversation" rather than specifying & recording or relying on a more rigid interface like a ticketing system.

tl;dr: get off my lawn you dang kids!!

I wish there were more people who were in the "newsgroups should be used for substantive discussions" camp. They're better than email in that context.

I am flooded with automated notifications that basically are "who gives a shit". I think the main reason I use email is for password reset. When you receive 1-2 thousand emails of non-spam but still unimportant cruft, it gets ignored or overlooked.

Email is pretty much dead to me as a meaningful way to communicate.

Sidenote: the term "ping me" needs to go away.

Part of this is a UI problem, but it's still a problem.

I didn't say Slack is the answer, either. Just that email isn't a serious competitor to Slack.

Maybe mysterious quasi-state actors will steal your secrets and outcompete you decades from now, but they could probably do that anyway. The SEC will certainly fuck you up right now if you can't demonstrate adequate controls on regulated employees' communications.

Important/immediate discussions take place in person, or on slack. (Or hipchat or sametime or lync or windows messenger or hoary old ICQ for all I care...)

I find that happens an order of magnitude more often in Slack than email. The number of times important things here don't get done on time (or at all) because "Oh, I must have missed that in Slack...)

That's a very harsh attack and I'm sure you're aware of all the nuances you're conveniently skipping over. I'm not sure how you think this adds to the discussion at all.

That's pretty arrogant. Perhaps people have different communication styles than you. Not better, not worse... just different.

The dialup-era Internet was mostly text and a little bit of pictures. There was good text, bad text, and lots and lots of fanfiction, but at least it was text. Even if you went to The Onion, there might be one goofy photoshopped photo but you had to read an actual article with real paragraphs to get the jokes. Now everything is a video, or a picture, or a meme, and everything longer than 140 characters is “tl;dr”. That’s a cultural decline akin to when television displaced reading in the mid-20th century.

I can communicate in either style, so it’s not a personal thing from my perspective—except, since I can communicate in either style, I can also tell which style is more conducive to deep and meaningful discussion.

(But I realise I'm well out on the losing end of this argument, even in groups of old-school hard core technical friends/colleagues, I've been given the "crazy look" when suggesting we just use irc for chat... )

I'm not doubting you, and I acknowledge that I hear that kind of thing with some frequency, but I've not seen Slack (running in Chrome on Ubuntu) use anything like those amounts of resources.

I've had a pretty busy slack client running for several days, and it's using 204,484K of memory and 2.0% of one CPU.

    USER        PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ    RSS TT  STAT   STARTED      TIME COMMAND
    fubar      2922  0.0  0.1  61648  26668  2  S0+    19Mar18  22:58.73 weechat

Re: Slack resource utilization: I'm not passing a value judgment as much as expressing confusion over multiple claims I've noticed about Slack utilization that is far, far greater than anything I've seen.

I personally love Riot and Matrix as a "modern IRC".

It does require having your own server to host it on though.

That's nice for you personally, but how does running an inhouse bespoke IRC server have anything to do with whatever line of business your company is in?

IRC is just a particular implementation of chat. The only thing keeping it relevant is the several hundred thousand people currently connected to servers.

Within a more defined context, such as work communication, adoption network effects become irrelevant. You can just build your own system and set everybody up to use it.

If I want high latency, high bandwidth, there's email. If I need low latency, high bandwidth, that's an in person whiteboard session or a video call.

That does mean I think Slack is overhyped... but that also means I think Slack does something valuable. Just maybe not as valuable.

1. No markdown support and half-assed code highlighting support. 2. No (real) message editing. 3. Silly parenthesis based emoji.

Its search is better than Slack’s; its performance is better than Slack’s; its integrations are better than Slack’s; its client memory and CPU usage are better than Slack’s (whether in a tab or as a real, native app); its group video chat is better than Slack’s (does Slack even have video chat integrated, with screen sharing?). Most importantly for us, its price was 4x better than Slack’s all while offering better features, performance, etc. The only thing it didn’t win out on was hype. (It should also be noted that HipChat could also be bought in a self-hosted configuration, which allowed for HIPAA compliance, something that Slack won’t even bother competing on. I didn’t need it, but hey, it matters to some people.)

Slack is an overpriced distraction monkey. They’re selling it like it’s the whole enchilada, but it’s a damned feature bullet. I personally cannot wait until Slack is dead, because it’s the worst chat service I’ve ever used (and I love full-featured integrations).

Now, I have to find a replacement for HipChat that won’t cost us US$200 per month for our office (if we pay a year in advance, more if we don’t).

I think even though the industry is fairly nascent, a lot of team messaging products seem to occupy unique sweetspots. It's probably just a case of which product suits an individual's/ team's working style more. In fact, I have seen different people rate the same set of features in contrasting ways.

That said, a lot of stuff which you mentioned resonates with features we feel are critical as well (integrated group video chat with screen sharing, seamless integrations, better pricing, among others). We have had a bunch of Hipchat users migrate to Flock over the past few months using our migration tool. Per the reviews we got, they found the transition pretty seamless. If you want to give us a try, reach out to us at support at flock dot com. We do have some offers for Hipchat/ Stride users :)

Letting a strappy upstart have access to that data is a completely different story.

Really IRC just needs some well designed clients, I don’t like any of the offerings I’ve seen for iOS or desktop.

https://ircv3.net/

It's changing a lot for some time now.

https://ircv3.net/irc/

IRC is interesting, but it doesn't solve the use case by itself. (IE, as a user I can easily look back to the entire history of the channel regardless of when I joined and can search every message that was ever sent on the server - or every message in the last 12 months even.)

I use that daily.

Maybe in a few years. I say maybe, because XMPP is an IETF RFC, and frankly, it sucks.

XMPP is a well-thought-out protocol, and a lot of the XEPs are great features. The problem I always had with XMPP is that XEP support is unequally distributed among clients, and the fragmentation really undermines the amount of cool features XMPP has to offer. As a (made-up) example, Psi+ might support video calls, but not server-side history, and Pidgin only supports server-side history, and Adium is the only one that supports Service Discovery...if I want both, I have to pick a client, and possibly have to use two clients signed in with different resources.

As a possible solution, we could have a "logo program" for XMPP, where a core set of XEPs are required to call yourself an XMPP client (this is the case already IIRC), and you get rights to call yourself "supporting XMPP-Enhanced" if you support these other XEPs, and "supporting XMPP-Full" if you support all of these XEPs. Something like that might work, but you'd have to have a way to actually drive development toward these features.

XMPP could be used to build a service like Slack (with its own clients, specific feature set, etc.) that may or may not be federated and it would still have the benefits of using an open protocol (even if it's not federated I can use a more accessible client, a client on a platform they don't support, less work to get up and running because libraries exist, etc.)

I'm hoping the Compliance Suites will become something like you mentioned in the future, but I'm no longer the author so we'll see what the new authors do with it: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0387.html

That way you could very easily coordinate a common target for XEPs. Clients which would not support the newest features would still work with the others but users could simply see which clients support the state of the art features. And for developers it would make it easier to identify and skip old XEPs (e.g. how many XEPs are there to confirm a message has been received? Which is the recommended one for new implementations?).

You may not prefer it, but it objectively does not "suck".