I'm firmly in the "email has no place in internal discussions whatsoever" camp.

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.

"discussions are faster and more productive in realtime"

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.

I agree with you and I feel your points are well articulated. I especially like how you summarized the internet as 'the illiterates took over.' Very poignant, indeed. So much of the average person's internet usage boils down to memes and videos, it's quite unfortunate.

One thing to think about with respect to memes and videos is they may evolve to be more dense in their ability to symbolize and convey a much larger amount of information.

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

I don't disagree with not being productive 100% of the time. My gripe is that for many non-tech people, their computer time is majority memes and videos. The ratio is all wrong, IMO. This incorrect ratio has created the click-bait internet and other scorns of the modern internet IMO as corporations are catering to the masses.

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.

Goofing off via chat has been a thing since IRC, and you don’t really need much above and beyond IRC to goof off. And if tech companies treated Slack as belonging to the same class as ping pong tables and kegerators, that would be highly appropriate. But they treat Slack like it’s a serious business communication tool.

One of my biggest frustrations with e-mail as long-form discussion like this is misunderstanding points. Someone will write paragraphs of text arguing their position, but they made a bad assumption or missed something simple at the start that either partly or completely invalidates the rest of what they are saying. Depending on if people realize this or not, it's easy to slip into a kind of bike-shedding discussion arguing about the incorrect details. I've been on both sides of this, and it's one of the reasons I dislike e-mail for it.

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.

Its superficial to suppose the immediacy of slack is its only feature.

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.

Outlook may very well be shit, but that’s largely because business/enterprise email products are optimized for the same PowerPoint-addled minds that Slack is. Rich text is where email first started to go wrong.

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.

Your suggestions may work inside a company. E-mail is the only federated system we've left. If you need to contact somebody outside it, you're screwed. XMPP/Jabber could have solved some of this, but it's pretty dead right now.

I generally agree with greg, and that covers 90% of the cases, for the times where Email is used with external entities, it usually gets dumped into issue tracking / wiki

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.

The org I work for has a bunch of Slack channels that we invite our clients into as single channel guests (If they don't already use Slack). We have Gov & corporate using it without issue and they love it.

I think if you ask Slack about that they'll happily tell you about Slack Grid.

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

> 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).

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.'

> 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 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.

I'm in the same camp. In my company there is so much knowledge hidden in inboxes that should be available and searchable by everybody instead. I ask my colleague and be forwards me an email thread from three months ago where I was not included. This is inefficient.

That's a little too harsh. Not everyone is good at expressing themselves through an email chain; doesn't mean they're illiterate though.

It's very much a learned skill. I was fortunate to learn it well in school (and polish it further in my professional life). People who haven't learned to express themselves clearly and concisely are indeed to the left of me in the spectrum of literacy.

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

Not everyone is good at expressing themselves in a real time conversation, either. Any medium of conversation excludes people who aren't good at that medium.

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.

That's kind of a false dichotomy you've got going there. Introverts and non native speakers are all slow deep thinkers who need a thinkers medium to communicate, which is slow by your definition. Everyone using a quick communication medium is a moron though right? I assume that's what you meant by people who lack intellectual ability.

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

It’s not a false dichotomy because it’s not a dichotomy: I’ve mentioned that I myself can communicate effectively either way. A lot of people can.

Email: Two use cases.

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.

Our product https://www.fwdeveryone.com does almost all of what you’re looking for, and will do everything within a few months. (We still need to add live updating threads, and we’re also working on an add-on so you can upload content directly from gmail.)

I like it, and that solves an interesting use case. I'd say there's a use case of assumed-private email and assumed-public email, and you're trying to solve both at the same time. What I'd want is basically this combined with a mailing list system where mailing lists could be made and ended quickly - like a slack channel, that ties to this.

I hope you all do well with this!

> 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.

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

What's the mail archive that can be set up with the same ease of use and permissions as slack? What, are you going to say hypermail?

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.

> With email, how can I subscribe to conversations I'm interested in?

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.

Are there any resources on deploying your own internal NNTP service

The standard software package is called INN ( https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/inn/). It should come pre-packaged in upstream repositories for various linux distributions.

> 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.

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.

Email is crap for many types of workflows that Slack excels in.

Email is crap because there is no agreed on way to structure old and new content, quotes, references and links, everyone insists on bloating with html signatures and crap that isn't part of the discussion.

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.

It’s too bad most of those workflows don’t apply to business use cases.

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

> It’s too bad most of those workflows don’t apply to business use cases.

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.

Businesses pay for a lot of stuff that doesn't work. Simply saying everyone else is doing it is not necessarily convincing.

I'm curious as to how that breaks down? Which kind of workflows are best in email, which in Slack?

_This_ is the 64 thousand dollar question that no one seems to have a clear answer to, and leaves people frustrated with both email and slack.

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!!

Featured specifications work better in email, live debugging/forensics work better in Slack.

Featured specifications work better in source control...

You can have both with git format-patch/git send-email and git am :)

> I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp

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 never had a chance to get into newsgroups that much, but I believe you.

Email has unfortunately become "I don't check it or care anymore"

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.

Email has a lot of problems, but the dealbreaker for my company is that it isn't secure.

And you somehow trust Slack as a "secure alternative"?

Where did I imply that? There are tons of options for business chat. My point was only that email isn't even in the running.

The security model for internal email on a corporate email server is pretty similar to a corporate slack instance.

I've never seen any email system used securely. Even smart people will send sensitive info to a personal address instead of corporate, for example. Email wasn't purpose-built for controlled internal comms.

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.

If you want secure emails use GPG. Unlike slack, GPG is both open-source and offers government-level security. I don't think slack is more secure than GPG.

Companies are generally at more risk from failure to produce message content in a lawsuit, regulatory action, HR investigation, etc. than from eavesdropping. "Secure" in a corporate setting means subject to IT's surveillance, filtering, and archiving. If anything, security's job is to make sure employees aren't using things like PGP, personal webmail, Facebook, etc. to evade corporate retention policies.

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.

I'm talking about personal e-mail. Still businesses can easily enforce retention policies with PGP by using a master key.

If that were viable people would already be doing it. It's not, and so very few people are. I wish this weren't the case but it is.

And how does that work for your average person using outlook / google for email?

Then build on top of email, instead of developing yet another 'secure' proprietary system.

There's way too much noise in my email inbox, stuff gets lost.

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...)

> There's way too much noise in my email inbox, stuff gets lost.

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...)

Email can also create bottlenecks and unneeded silos of information...

Sorry to get triggered but oh my god I dislike those buzzwords. I find those two come up any time attempts are made to delineate responsibilities or make it possible for teams to run in parallel (by saying "you work on this area of speciality, I'll work on that" i.e. "silos").

Ehhh, you kinda mixing problems here.

> the illiterates took over and that was the end of that.

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.

> the illiterates took over and that was the end of that.

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

What word would you use for people who are incapable of communicating through the written word? Or for an Internet that is increasingly designed to cater to such people?

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.