Should Slack-Like Chat Clients Replace Email? (indiatimes.com) 164
This week the New York Times' Style section asked an interesting question. "Slack wants to replace email. Is that what we want?"
The company says it has 88,000 paying customers -- a sliver of a sliver of the world's desk-and-phone-bound office workers, and fewer than work full time at, for example, Google's parent company, Alphabet. Speaking of Google, the company has a Slack alternative of its own, called Hangouts Chat, as does Facebook, in Workplace. Microsoft has Teams, which is bundled with its Office software and which the company says is being used by more than 500,000 organizations. This multifront attack on email is just beginning, but a wartime narrative already dominates: The universally despised office culture of replies and forwards and mass CCs and "looping in" and "circling back" is on its way out, and it's going to be replaced by chat apps. So what happens if they actually win...?
For the right office, it's a huge relief to chat. "I know for the engineering team it's a game-changer," said Shannon Todesca, an employee at CarGurus, an automotive shopping site. "It's used to keep track of code pushes," she said, as well as system errors. Workers also report dentist appointments and sick days to the #ooo (out of office) channel, preventing inboxes from getting clogged, or an early heads-up from getting lost. At Automattic, which runs Wordpress.com and a handful of smaller internet services, Slack is the glue that binds a fully remote "virtual office" of nearly 1,000 employees living in dozens of countries and working on vastly different products...
Rank-and-file employees were more likely to share concerns about the new era of office chat... Most common were mixed feelings, often related to privacy and productivity. "We've had to consciously discuss using Slack less often," said Lacey Berrien, who works at marketing startup Drift. "I had our IT team check a few weeks ago, and we were up to over 950 Slack channels," she said, "and that doesn't count the private ones...." I have also spent the last 10 years at companies where work chat was the norm and observed the arrival of Slack with both relief and suspicion. Finally, a better work chat app. Then: Oh god, this is really how people are going to work, now?
I remember using chat logs to trace back the discussions that led to buggy programs. (Though obviously you can do the same thing with archived emails.) So I'd be interested to hear how Slashdot's readers would answer the question.
Should Slack-like chat clients replace email?
For the right office, it's a huge relief to chat. "I know for the engineering team it's a game-changer," said Shannon Todesca, an employee at CarGurus, an automotive shopping site. "It's used to keep track of code pushes," she said, as well as system errors. Workers also report dentist appointments and sick days to the #ooo (out of office) channel, preventing inboxes from getting clogged, or an early heads-up from getting lost. At Automattic, which runs Wordpress.com and a handful of smaller internet services, Slack is the glue that binds a fully remote "virtual office" of nearly 1,000 employees living in dozens of countries and working on vastly different products...
Rank-and-file employees were more likely to share concerns about the new era of office chat... Most common were mixed feelings, often related to privacy and productivity. "We've had to consciously discuss using Slack less often," said Lacey Berrien, who works at marketing startup Drift. "I had our IT team check a few weeks ago, and we were up to over 950 Slack channels," she said, "and that doesn't count the private ones...." I have also spent the last 10 years at companies where work chat was the norm and observed the arrival of Slack with both relief and suspicion. Finally, a better work chat app. Then: Oh god, this is really how people are going to work, now?
I remember using chat logs to trace back the discussions that led to buggy programs. (Though obviously you can do the same thing with archived emails.) So I'd be interested to hear how Slashdot's readers would answer the question.
Should Slack-like chat clients replace email?
no but /. should replace (Score:3, Insightful)
Junior editor beauhd
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Betteridge Law of Headlines applies here. Short answer is NO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
Marr, Andrew (2004). My Trade: a short history of British journalism. London: Macmillan. p. 253. ISBN 9781405005364.
A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic. To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means 'don't bother reading this bit'
Why do people hate email (Score:5, Insightful)
This multifront attack on email is just beginning, but a wartime narrative already dominates: The universally despised office culture of replies and forwards and mass CCs and "looping in" and "circling back" is on its way out, and it's going to be replaced by chat apps. So what happens if they actually win...?
People hate email because they aren't actually working, they are doing busy work. Busy work sucks worse than work. If everyone switches to Slack, they will move the busy work with them, and will hate Slack just as much as they hated email, if not more. The problem isn't the medium, it's the mode.
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They also hate spams in e-mails.
Re:Why do people hate email (Score:5, Insightful)
Chat is even worse. I can ignore email. It's harder to ignore a skype message saying "just a quick question!" that pops up in your screen. If email is busy work, then chatting is really busy work. Many of my chats I end up ending with "email me the details so I don't forget", because chatting online is just as terrible a tool for getting stuff done as chatting in person.
I don't know what Slack is or how it's different from the thousands of other chat programs that have been around for decades, but I doubt that it has changed the chat game to suddenly be useful.
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So right!
I have to read work email - but I read it when I have the time for it. So I can put email aside for a couple of days and do work that require uninterrupted concentration. There are no software that pops up any kind of notifications - so yes, I can work uninterrupted. Then I catch up on those emails.
Can "the chat to replace email" be used in this manner? Never interrupting me, no notifications popups/sounds - and still no loss of information? Can I process the "inbox" when it suits me, regardless of
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Slack is great because the messages disappear on their own after a while. That is about the only benefit— temporal communication doesn’t stick around forever in your inbox.
Of course, the reason inboxes grow is because you don’t always know what is temporal data and what is archival data when you first read or write it.
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Slack is great because the messages disappear on their own after a while.
You call that a benefit? The automatic loss of potentially valuable business data?
In email nothing gets lost. That's a feature.
If your inbox gets cluttered, you can archive messages to folders. You can make a separate folder for each topic for easy access. You can search within a single folder, or all messages at once. Each email has a title which also allows for easily finding the content you want.
How many of these features does Slack have?
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Sarcasm. It is a theoretical advantage only. Email storage is cheap and the lost data from Slack is a huge issue if it is anything more than Starbucks orders and coordinating where people want to go for lunch.
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"You can make a separate folder for each topic for easy access. You can search within a single folder, or all messages at once."
Some email apps make this easier than others. Whatever you may think of Outlook, it does this well, meaning searches are fast. (I could sometimes wish it supported full regex searching.) Thunderbird, which I have on my home computer, makes searching the body of emails so wretchedly slow that I don't do it. In fact I installed Mailstore Home just for that, although I seldom reme
Re: Why do people hate email (Score:2)
"how it's different from the thousands of other chat programs"
Slack:
- easily integrates with popular cloud services
- has a proprietary client that looks nicer, runs on any OS, sucks preposterous memory for a mere chat client, and offers rather limited control over notifications
- snoops all your chats to the gestapo (it's a product of Surveillance Valley)
- easy to setup, zero maintenance SaaS with fairly pricey monthly recurring cost
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I feel like the flaw with email is that it became the catch all for anything that needed to reach you.
Calendar invite? Send an email. Build failed? Send an email. Touched a bug? Send an email.
For me I find chat integrations have the same problem and ultimately distract from the purpose of the tools.
I've thought for a while what we actually need a general purpose notification tool I envision working like Android notification shade. This could be integrated as a sidebar or whatever.
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It violates the most basic principles of communication and organization health
As far as basic principles of communication go, your own personal communication would be improved if you had actually said what was bothering you, instead of hiding behind some vague "basic principles."
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It violates the most basic principles of communication and organization health and will never be welcome in my office
What utility is there in sharing this sentiment without explaining what you consider "the most basic principles of communication and organization[al] health" to be?
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I wish the poster had also explained what the antecedent of "it" was: email or slack?
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"I look up shit I myself sent to remind myself what exact I did/said." Sadly, this is becoming ever more true as I get older...
"real-time dialog is helpful": in my experience (ymmv), rarely so. It hinders me from accomplishing useful things while I wait for an IM reply (the 'I' stands for "Instant", right?), and even less helpfully occasionally pops up a message just to tell me that the person on the other end is typing. Why disturb my work to tell me that? (It's possible that by "chat" you mean Slack,
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(replying to myself--bad form, I know...) There's one situation where I've found IM helpful, although I think email would work almost as well. It's when more than one of us at our organization is on a telecon with somebody outside the org, and for some reason we're not taking the call in the same room. The other employee and I can IM things in the background that we don't want to talk about over the phone with the outside person listening in. Dunno if Slack lends itself to that.
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I hate email, but agree with all your reasons for "not hating email".
I hate the protocol. It's obsolete, developed in a time of naive trust in a benevolent Internet. It's been a slow motion train wreck since day one.
Email needs to be replaced, but not by "chat". Whatever replaces it has to mimic mail (by that I mean snail mail) in the sense that it does not come with the expectation of instant response and may sit for days or weeks before being responded to, provides an archival record in a useful format
If only (Score:3)
"I know for the engineering team it's a game-changer," said Shannon Todesca, an employee at CarGurus, an automotive shopping site. "It's used to keep track of code pushes," she said,
If only we'd had a way to keep track of code pushes before Slack. If we had, maybe the Software As A Service nightmare wouldn't have happened. /s
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If only we'd had a way to keep track of code pushes before Slack.
Okay, this is anecdotal - but it seems that it's increasingly common for startups to be created / pitched by "idea people" who actually have no technical skills to bring to the table. And, given that, there's a lot of wheel reinvention happening in these companies.
I'm not going to name the company, but one in the Seattle area that's recently gotten some buzz made heavy use of engineering students to do pretty much all the development work on their product. In a recent profile piece, the founders (who seemi
Re: If only (Score:2)
"it's increasingly common for startups to be created / pitched by "idea people" who actually have no technical skills to bring to the table."
The VC Cabal absolutely will not fund a "startup" founded by nerds.
Frat boys and/or Social Just-us Nazis from upper class schools are the only founder demographic acceptable to the Cabal.
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I remember being happy to see code pushes and checkin notices in email. A couple days later I realized how horrible this was and shoved everything off to a folder that I have not checked in many years.
I think the people using Slack honestly have never used anything else. They think it's new because they've got so little experience in using anything else. Maybe they're at a company that finally decides to track code pushes and the devs mistakenly think "oh, it must be Slack that invented this!" Maybe so
Re: If only (Score:2)
Recall that many Cabal-funded companies in Surveillance Valley make it a de facto policy to hire no one with over 5 years of experience. The less experience the better is currently popular thinking at the cocktail parties in Palo Alto where all real decisions are made.
The thinking goes: Inexperienced devs + Agile(tm)!!!1!! = cheap(er) software with utter contempt for its users' privacy
However that combination also leads to copious security issues and daily wheel reinvention.
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Ugh, we can be the opposite sometimes. Someone with no experience is useless so often. I suspect those who want less experience are companies looking for a cookie-cutter employee, they do the same job, using the currently fashionable language or roles, and can be replaced in an instant (locally or overseas). That person with 1 year of experience however is usually not going to be designing the company's core products.
There's also the thing that if you are going to pay someone in worthless stock options a
If you think Slack will fix your problems (Score:5, Informative)
If you think of Slack as anything other than a "slightly more convenient way to communicate," then you don't understand Slack.
Re:If you think Slack will fix your problems (Score:5, Interesting)
Slack as anything other than a "slightly more convenient way to communicate,"
Except notifications all day long are proven to kill productivity. That's also a profit killer, which is quite inconvenient to the people who depend on revenues for a living or RoI.
Somebody said recently, paraphrasing, "our company is now in end-game Slack. All of us have notifications turned off, so now it's basically email with a shittier user interface".
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Except notifications all day long are proven to kill productivity. That's also a profit killer, which is quite inconvenient to the people who depend on revenues for a living or RoI. Somebody said recently, paraphrasing, "our company is now in end-game Slack. All of us have notifications turned off, so now it's basically email with a shittier user interface".
This is the typical case, the problem isn't actually the medium it's that if bugging/nagging people gets priority it becomes an arms race, same with priority. I got one coworker that on the low-medium-high scale reports 95% high priority and 5% medium priority issues. I have another coworker that's notorious for walking over and physically talking to us, to the point that he's admitted he intentionally does it to avoid being prioritized down. Also many people use email to avoid the service desk system. I fe
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And if the goalie/support person is out, the entire team can easily see all of the inter-team conversations they were having. Can't do that with email unless they reply-to-all to everyone and keep everyone included.
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But did Slack invent this? I've seen nothing that it does that has not been done many times in the past. If you have a team that never see each other face to face (everyone is slacking at home), then maybe it's useful. But if you don't like email then why not just talk face-to-face to the person who's two cubes away?
"Ohh, that's so intrusive!" Yes, but so is sending a text. It's MORE intrusive than email. And for younger people they've been conditioned since they were a toddler to instantly and withou
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Re: If you think Slack will fix your problems (Score:2)
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Is it even slightly more convenient?
Replacing email with Slack is a joke (Score:3)
Whatever Slack may actually be good for, it's a lousy replacement for email. Slack turned a project that got things done into a scheduled hourlong debate on when the next Slack meeting should happen.
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The worst thing about slack is when I setup a new account somewhere and send myself the password.
Now it seems like I'm constantly ordering stuff that I don't remember ordering. That didn't happen with email.
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Slack == Online "Open Office Layout" (Score:3, Insightful)
I look at Slack as the online equivalent of an open office layout with rows of half-height cubicles. It's disruptive to focused thought, in my opinion. Is it good for centralizing notifications (like commit messages, etc)? Sure. But it's basically a glorified chat room otherwise. I'm not a fan.
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I ignore email constantly. I have to because I can't work otherwise (ten times the amount of junk showing up when you become a manager). So I open up an editor and start working, and maybe hours later I will check the email. Just because I let it sit there and ripen doesn't mean the world is going to end. With chat though it's worse, it pops up in the middle of the screen and demands that I do something to make it go away.
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200
Betteridge Farms Remembers (Score:2)
No, Slack should be based on email.
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Latency. Slack latency is fairly low, usually within seconds. Email can be 10s of seconds to minutes. A high latency like that is a killer. Everything else about your plan is perfect. How do you work around that?
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Off the top of my head, dedicated servers, and/or special server configuration, but I have no particular specific proposal. Priority servers for centrally authenticated connections, maybe.
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So you need a separate server to handle that, but if it lags, it's not a big problem. You could do that with a SMTP extension, too, to avoid having to connect to more ports.
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In fact now I think about it, a new SMTP command is definitely the right way to handle this, because you're going to use persistent SMTP anyway. Then once the timeout has been reached (let's say 180-300 seconds) you drop the connection until the next time you send a message. Or, if you have the client so configured, when you start typing one. TYPE TO address, perhaps?
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My experience with that particular message is that SaaS messaging platforms are super lazy about updating it and latency is barely a consideration. Just playing around with hangouts, slack, and discord, they are very sloppy with starting and stopping typing notifications. Furthermore, notifications of future, potential incoming messages are a waste of user time. Go do something else and wait for a notification of actionable information. Or check back in 25 minutes at the end of a pomodoro cycle, exactly lik
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Why is latency bad? If you don't want latency just talk to the person face to face. The sorts of people who insist that I respond immediately also tend to be the people who do the last amount of useful work anyway.
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Email within the same server (usual corporate use case) is pretty much instant. Server to server can end up queued for efficiency (batched sends every 5 minutes is more efficient than a separate connection for every email when the remote email server involved is often the same), but sysadmins can tweak that fairly easily, and most big mail providers now have theirs set so that delivery is pretty much instant.
If you're seeing significant delays, check your client settings - if you are stuck in the 1990s an
No (Score:2, Interesting)
I have clients who contact me on Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Text, Mobile Phone etc, a dozen different ways at any time of day they feel is reasonable.
As soon as any conversation gets beyond a few sentences or a direct request to action something I tell them to send me an e-mail. I do this firstly because I forget what they've just said, secondly because it means everything is in one place, chronologically ordered, quantized into individual communiques and searchable. But by far the most important reason i
Levels of Formality (Score:5, Informative)
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Obligatory now (Score:2)
No (Score:3)
There is still value in taking the time to construct thoughts, arguments, position.
Words are the handles by which we grasp concepts. Sometimes, simple isn't better: subtle and nuanced is all that suffices.
With this said, there is tremendous value in "interactive communication". But that is so much better when we get the full value of the body language and such that comes from being in person.
Text formats, including Slack, seem to encapsulate the worst of both worlds. They give the conciseness of twitter without the body language of personal interactive conversation.
So, no thanks.
There is one thing email does (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're working on a project with multiple entities, you don't have to deal with:
"The company says it has 88,000 paying customers -- a sliver of a sliver of the world's desk-and-phone-bound office workers, and fewer than work full time at, for example, Google's parent company, Alphabet. Speaking of Google, the company has a Slack alternative of its own, called Hangouts Chat, as does Facebook, in Workplace. Microsoft has Teams, which is bundled with its Office software and which the company says is being used by more than 500,000 organizations."
Email, on the other hand, has tied together most mail systems to the point where most users don't even worry what other companies use.
What Slack wants is to have everyone pay Slack and not have to worry about interoperability between multiple competing platforms.
Re: There is one thing email does (Score:2)
Email is a holdover of from the old - decentralized, free-like-freedom - internet. Slack is a posterboy for the new dystopia.
Slack and email are two different tools (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, this should be obvious, but Slack and email are two different tools and support different styles of conversation, but they're both useful when used for their strengths.
Slack is great if you need quick, iterative answers. For example, tracking down a bug is likely to be far faster via Slack than email. ("OK, I changed this, can you see if it still happens?" "Hm, now it's doing this. So still broken, but broken differently." "Oh, whoops, I see what I did wrong, try again.")
Slack sucks for things email is good at, where you'd want to write a lot of text and have a slower discussion, where answers are not immediate and also not expected to be immediate. If you want to give a long, thoughtful answer to a question, or spend time on getting the right answers, Slack sucks for that. Email is great for this.
So, no, Slack is not going to replace email. They're two different tools for two different types of conversation, and they should be used for those two different types of conversations. Generally speaking, most people do not need the immediacy of Slack, and that immediacy sort of becomes a detriment - threads of conversation get lost because it's hard to reply to something that was brought up hours ago. (Which is what Slack threads are supposed to solve, I think, but they don't quite solve the problem.) Email is going to stick around because it solves a different problem than Slack does.
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I'm failing to see what Slack brings to the table that isn't addressed via other communication methods. Your example, for instance, would be better served with a phone call, a medium which is more appropriate given the dramatically lower latency of verbal comms.
Slack is just another in a long line of substandard products with an outstanding marketing team behind it, but as with all those other products they'll crash and burn.
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Specifically for Slack vs. a Phone Call, the answer is group chat is better than group phone calls in every way that includes lower latency, etc. Why it's better than a server running OpenFire(OSS) using XMPP, I have no idea.
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I disagree, if only because I hate phone calls. But there's a simple answer as to why a Slack chat can be better than a phone call: you can send code snippets or log snippets via Slack. You can't really do that over the phone. I mean, you can try, but you can't copy and paste code out of a phone call.
Another reason is that I can ignore the Slack chat while I'm doing something. You can't do that with a phone call - if you miss what someone says over the phone, you either have to hope it wasn't important or a
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- Chat communication can leave searchable records.
- Chat is amenable to copy paste, URL-passing, images.
- Verbal communication is difficult for some. Accents, hearing issues, people who are sick, people who are in a loud environment, people who are in a quiet environment where they would be disruptive if they start talking, and just the psychology of conversation (yes, this cuts both ways, there are legit reasons for chat communication to be difficult for some, but you're the one failing to see the benefit
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Slack is all "ooh, shiny!" (Score:3)
I used to work with a group that sat in extreme proximity, and so spent the day looking whenever one of us said "ooh, shiny!".
Slack is a distributed simulation of that.
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"Slack is great if you need quick, iterative answers. For example, tracking down a bug is likely to be far faster via Slack than email. ('OK, I changed this, can you see if it still happens?' 'Hm, now it's doing this. So still broken, but broken differently.' 'Oh, whoops, I see what I did wrong, try again.')"
Guess I'm not seeing this. In my experience, there's too much of a lag in bug fixing for it to be "quick". I get a description of what's going wrong, then I run the program, see if I can reproduce t
Group chat yes, P2P no... (Score:2)
I don't mind slack for group chat, it's a good way to keep teams connected.
But for person to person, I avoid slack. Why? Because while we might think that the P2P chat is just between us, everything is gathered and saved by slack and visible to the account owner(s), meaning your boss.
It's not that I go around saying crazy stuff, but I would like to know that when I'm complaining w/ a coworker about some pointy-haired boss that it isn't going any farther. With P2P slack, it is all too easy to forget that you
it's digital ivory towers (Score:2)
with all the private channels departments make it's used to keep potentially embarrassing info away from other departments and reduce co-working between departments. Same beauracratic nonsense as the last century but with a computer based twist.
My time is more valuable than yours. (Score:5, Interesting)
For the right office, it's a huge relief to chat.
Seems like a potential immediate time suck.
One of the benefits of email is that I can review and respond according to *my* schedule. If someone starts a chat with me, I have deal with them on *their* schedule and my time is more valuable (to me anyway) than yours. I imagine that for something short/quick, it could be like a texting, but for something longer and/or that requires some thought, email seems like a better choice. If it's something truly needing a discussion, why not have an actual discussion (in-person, phone or conference call) -- unless one of the parties is in a place where they can't easily talk out loud.
I've been using email practically since it was invented and have never had a problem using it and being productive.
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One of the benefits of email is that I can review and respond according to *my* schedule. If someone starts a chat with me, I have deal with them on *their* schedule and my time is more valuable (to me anyway) than yours.
It's more than that as was best explained to me by my frienr Roger, from Tarantella, 20 years ago.
Tasks that require heavy concentration can take up to 20 minutes to recover from an interruption. Articles on exactly this wrre published a few years ago here to sd.
Roger used to ask even people sitting next to him to email even simple questions to him, because he had to concentrate on what he was doing.
Smartphones in general are turning everyone into mindless stress bunnies, unable to cope with the simplest o
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Slack, telegram, LINE, wechat, they DEMAND our attention.
No they don't, you just ignore them, like you ignore email.
So no, slack must not replace email, or bugtrackers, or IRC,or wikis. ... there is none. Except that Slack is a brand and IRC an "open thing".
What is the difference between Slack and IRC? Ooops
Anyone who has done libre project management knows that forums and chat cannot replace FAQs and training HOWTOs that are collaboratively and iteratively developed over time
A forum is mandatory. As FAQs a
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chat cannot replace FAQs and training HOWTOs that are collaboratively and iteratively developed over time
A forum is mandatory. As FAQs and HOWTOs are always out of date.
Then as I mentioned in the last paragraph, that is down to people not being sufficiently disciplined so as to keep the documents up to date.
This is a mindset and awareness issue. Personally I cannot understand why people repeatedly repeatedly ask the same questions over and over, being far more unproductive than if they *spent the time updating the docs*! It's literally the definition of madness!
The most extreme example I ever encountered was a referral in a wiki online to page SEVEN HUNDRED AND FORTY EIGH
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Yes, chat can be used to demand your attention now. A group update channel can also be used to save the recipient time.
If I tell everyone "cake in the breakroom" in a group update channel you don't have to then sort through that email when you come back from your trip, meeting etc..
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The best ability that slack has, and not to say it's better than everything else, is I can micro-adjust filters for what I want to be notified about. The second best thing is I can ea
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With email, I have to treat all emails as directed at me until I read them, and anything directed at me must be promptly replied to.
No, there is no need to reply promptly. Learn to treat email for what it is: a paper mail replacement. No one would read a paper mail and instantly start typing a reply.
then people start replying to that fork of the chain. WHHHYYYY!?!?!?!?!?!?! Because no one taught them netticette.
No Silver Bullet (Score:5, Insightful)
Sigh! Why is it that all new-fangled (in this case old, really) ideas are presented as a panacea, the silver bullet that immediately alleviates all previous problems. To a certain extent, it is the modern-day "snake oil".
E-mail, chat, and phone calls all serve different, albeit overlapping purposes.
Phone calls are good for quickly exchanging ideas, making clarifications and informing about whatever needs be informed about. Phone calls are good at discussing things as it is possible to hear the other person's inflection and speech patterns, and thereby allow you to gauge possible changes in mood and catch misunderstandings. You can interrupt the other person in a call and thus spare them long travels down an unproductive route, and such.
Chat is a bit like phone calls but loses some of the spontaneity but gains the possibility of referring back to the logs, making it good when you want to document what is/has been going on. Personally I find it easier to participate in a multi-people chat session than in a multi-people phone call. Chat is often slower than phone calls as people in general are slower at typing than talking.
The problem with these is obviously the demand for your full attention here and now, which can be rather disruptive when you are in the middle of something else.
E-mail is better when you do not have to have a quick discussion or immediate reactions as most E-mails can be handled as and when and prioritised whereas phone calls and chats are here-and-now. E-mail is ubiquitous, mostly standardised, and the de-facto electronic medium for exchanging information across (and sometimes even within) companies/institutions as opposed to chat platforms, of which there is a plethora, like WhatsApp, Telegram, Skype, IRC, Slack, ...
Each type of interacting has advantages and disadvantages, but thinking that either of them is the be-all/do-all of our communication needs is disingenuous.
Re: (Score:2)
I think what is being noticed here is the appropriateness of chat for non-conversational updates that can be safely ignored if you don't see them (e.g. in meetings all day) or merely skim them.
As you point out email is allows delayed response. This also means that you have to catchup on emails. Things like OOO status updates or announcements about cake in the breakroom and other time qualified informational updates clutter email boxes and require sorting through when they shouldn't.
A seperate channel for
No (Score:2)
No. they are different tools. As much as I like them, Slack and other persistent chatroom applications lack decent threading and search capabilities.
Email has it's own issues. Personally, I think orgs should use forums more for group discussions.
Re: (Score:2)
Slack and other persistent chatroom applications lack decent threading and search capabilities.
That is double nonsense. The "thread" is the chat you are in and the search capability is cmd-F or ctrl-F ... can't be so hard.
Re: (Score:2)
I didn't say they were hard. The are not as good as other tools for threaded conversations and searching. I can tell you from trying REPEATEDLY to get people off of email that it is an uphill battle.
Just voicing my opinion based on my experiences.
Three Benefits of E-mail (Score:5, Insightful)
Benefit #1: E-mail allows both the sender and recipient to deal with issues on their own time. Neither has to be involved when the other is composing or reading the message. Across different time zones this can be important. I am a "late bird", going to bed around 11:00pm local time and waking around 7:30am. My daughter is an "early bird", going to bed around 8:30pm local time and waking around 5:00am. For me, "local time" is Pacific time; for my daughter (living some 2,000 miles away), "local time" is Central time, a 2 hours difference. I can send her a message after dinner while she is already asleep, and she can respond before breakfast while I am still sleeping. This ability to communicate without regard to time zones and circadian rhythms is also a benefit to businesses; think of an international corporation with offices in San Francisco (USA) and Paris (France).
Benefit #2: E-mail messages use internationally recognized protocols. I send and receive E-mail via Thunderbird running under Windows. My daughter sends and receives E-mail via her cell phone, iPad, and Apple computer. I also exchange messages with others who use Gmail, AOL's Webmail, Outlook, etc. No one is tied to a specific method or application for composing and sending E-mail messages.
Benefit #3: E-mail does not depend on a single service provider. If I do not like the service I am getting, I can always change providers. (This is facilitated by the fact that I have a personalized domain and do not have to notify anyone other than the ISP of the change.) I can choose a local provider while my daughter chooses a different local provider with no impact on exchanging messages. Actually, my daughter and I each have second, alternative providers. With Slack's proposal, users are tied to Slack as the ONLY provider. If Slack goes down, communication stops. If Slack becomes too expensive or otherwise problematical, you must either stick with Slack or else have everyone in your communication group change providers -- and software -- all at the same time.
Re: (Score:2)
How are these benefits?
Especially #2 and #3. The idea that people send messages using a system that is not owned by a large company is such a 20th century idea.
Signal to Noise Ratio (Score:2)
My experience with Slack, working with a couple of startups, is that people are mostly sharing rubbish. For example piece of potentially useful content, there are 15 replies that include giphys and irrelevant shit.
A.
Yet another ... replace email thread. (Score:2)
compatible chats (Score:2)
Chat and email serve different purposes. But for chat we need something that works like email; something that federates and interoperates. That something is called matrix.org
Different Uses (Score:2)
The fundamental problem that is being addressed here is the need for two channels of communication. One for updates and info that doesn't need to be revisited if you don't see it or act on it right away. The other for communication based todos (either to read/reply/act).
The chat channel works best for temporary updates that don't need to be acted on if you miss them. If someone says they are OOO for a dentist on tuesday you don't need to take any action on that if you are in meetings all day tuesday and
Re: (Score:2)
To be clear I'm only talking about the kinds of email replacement style uses here. Obviously chat has other benefits regarding instant communication and conversation.
Gmail inferior to Outlook (Score:2)
Yes let's replace e-mail (Score:2)
Being able to receive a message from anyone in the world, literally billions of people, is so overrated. There is a such thing as too good of a technology. We need to make something that is less ubiquitous, less scalable, and more expensive. And if there is a way to insert marketing research and advertisements, even better.
No. (Score:2)
Are there any other questions?
None / Never? (Score:2)
How should a chat client replace email? ...
The question is like: when will cars replace bicycles.
Never, stupid question
NO (Score:2)
>"Slack wants to replace email. Is that what we want?"
100% absolutely *NO*
No. (Score:2)
This has been another edition of Easy Answers to Click-bait Questions.
Why does this idiotic nonsense keep coming? (Score:2)
Email is universal, vendor-independent offline communication. No chat can "replace" it, as chat is a different mode of communication and it will certainly not be some vendor-based chat.
Is that what we want? (Score:2)
Nope. Email works just fine when properly filtered.
Re: (Score:2)
"No"
Ian Betterige, is that you?
Re: Should Slack-Like Chat Clients Replace Email? (Score:2)
Sounds like the real problem is your company is managed by a bunch of nazis.
Err, wait - that describes most companies...
Re: Whatever (Score:2)
Slashdot is now run by unamerican Corporate Progressive nazis.
Re: (Score:2)
Colonel Bogey's March.
No, replace the words (Score:2)
Old fogey here.
reach out (v.) send (email)
circle back (v.) reply
loop in (v.) forward