Slack also has other problems that have been totally ignored and neglected for years. One of them is accessibility. The app is impossible to work with without a mouse. They say it is "keyboard driven" and they keep adding features that ignore keyboard completely. Have you ever tried to jump to a thread without using the mouse? Or copy a link to the last message? Or share it? Or ask Slack to remind about it? Or snooze all notifications? They could at least put them in the main menu. People with disabilities who rely on things being in the menu, they can't do any those things. Can you imagine having to hire someone and they'd be like: "Ah sorry, I have to tell you something. I cannot use Slack app. I hope that's not a deal breaker". I wouldn't be surprised if someone sues SlackHQ for being discriminatory.
My only complaint for Slack (and any instant messaging app), is the sense of urgency it creates. It has been discussed on HN a lot, but I 've never seen someone complaint about the fact that you can invite to your organization people from other orgs. This feature is beloved by product managers. And hated by everyone else.<p>See. Before 'Slack', we had 3 channels of communication.
1. Email (usually expectation of getting a reply within hours)
2. Phonecall (reserved for urgent situations, expecting a reply within... seconds)
3. Ticket system that had a little drop-down where you could select urgency. And you would expect a reply based on the urgency.<p>If you abused the urgency, we had a way to track that, and let you know.<p>Today however, Slack's "multiple organizations" feature pretty much shadowed the above. Now product manager from client org X, will require that you make a channel called "X-feature Commandos/dream team" then invite everyone involved on the project. Then they will ALWAYS end up wasting everyone's time for no reason. "Hey @here, X page is slow can you check it out?". "Sorry guys my bad. I was under the bay sea riding the Bart! Forgot LTE connections can be finnicky 100m under water. heh (ultra fast parrot emoji)"
When the Slack sales team came to my employer they pitched it as some sort of memory store - the reality is that it’s nigh impossible to pick out a specific bit of information after a couple of months unless you remember who said something, where they said it, and approximately when. It’s also annoying when an admin leaves because only the owner can remove their account - not another admin. I would also say Slack has a very bad habit of forcing new features down users throats - people have been complaining about threads for years but there is STILL no way to mute them or disable them. Someone installs an add-in that makes a lot of noise? Tough cookies to you, your options are to put up with it or uninstall it, there is no way to mute it. Like people joining you to new channels? No way to stop that either. Their API is a pain to deal with in staticly typed languages - you often have to decode a member of a substructure to discover what the overall type is. So overall I would say it’s definitely not an e-mail replacement and it’s very heavy handed for IM, there is definitely room for another product. I would personally prefer something more akin to IRC or the classic “cb simulators”. The only real challenge today is working with mobile clients (and challenge is probably too strong a word).
All these complaints about Slack, are strangely reminiscent of all the complaints about email pre-Slack; "re:re:re:re:re:", cc all the people, 200+ non-relevant emails per day etc etc.<p>I worry that people are trying fix org culture problems with communication software, which is unlikely to succeed.
Slack is a productivity killer and whatever they are doing next is certain to be annoying. People ping each other asking questions instead of reading docs. People have calls instead of figuring it out. Annoying people just can’t resist the temptation of @here.<p>It wouldn’t be so bad if I could customize my experience but Slack fights hard against this. They claim one size fits all, if it’s annoying then it’s a cultural issue.<p>You can’t get thousands of people on the same page. Different mindsets should be fostered, not punished.
The number one point is to recognize the situation as a conflict of interests - everyone wants an immediate answer to his burning question, but nobody wants to be interrupted to answer somebody else questions. For the team as a whole there is probably some optimal interruption level which is higher than what the interrupted would set and lower than what the interrupter would choose. That is why muting and 'urgent' messages don't work - because people would tend to mute channels too much and on the other hand 'urgent' quickly inflates and everything starts to be urgent. I think a solution to this could be "attention budgets". There are many complications of course - there are times when you don't mind being interrupted and times when you do, and it is taxing to think about it consciously and set your levels. But I would start from attention budgets - this would also be a solution to general spam, but synchronous spam is much worse than asynchronous - so synchronous is a good place to start.
I find things like this funny because Email is often much worse for getting ideas across and VERY FEW people put their whole idea in an Email and simply treat it with chat + 6 line signatures. Where I've worked email has simply been a very poor chat which I could not distinguish "info broadcasts" from "the server is down" without getting all notifications or none.<p>We switched to slack in 2014 because 1) it allowed us to notify mindfully for team-wide and person specific things. 2) it allowed people to have full blown conversations and keep others up to date on status/problems in channels. And 3) it allowed us to build automation right inline with the communication we were already doing.<p>Much of the complaints of slack seem to be from people who work with those who do not respect how to use it. Spamming @here for everything is the same as replying-all in email. Or, my personal pet-peeve, creating a new private group chat for everything making finding the old conversation nearly impossible.<p>Discord has tons of improvements I've love to see in Slack namely around groups of channels and role management, but for the most part it seems the problems with slack are organization's unwillingness to understand it's purpose and how to best use it not as a pager system for your whims, but actually as an async communication system.
The advent of proprietary communication tools isn't really something I like, be that slack or discord or other services.<p>Something tells me that in 10 years neither service will be hip enough to warrant extensive support. If they were to hold relevant business critical information, it would need to be archived but will probably just end up being lost.<p>That is at least a difference to mail. Also external contacts could be invited to the appropriate channels, but I don't really see much engagement from these users if that actually does happen.
I've already replaced email with Slack. It's not hard, email is really bad. That said, Slack is sorely lacking here, especially with threads. Slack "threads" are an awful experience, with replies generally ignored, so people don't use them. All I'd need is for Slack to treat threads like a real first class citizens, with a view like HN or Reddit, and I'd be a happy camper.
I just wish the client wasn't so bad. I can't believe that if I send a message and I'm not connected at that precise instant that it catn't store and forward the message when I do get connected. In fact, I can't look at any of my slack messages at all.<p>Every other IM client, email, basically every communications medium since about 1998 has been able to do this, but apparently not Slack.
Big problem I've seen is behavior in using Some vs email, and the monitoring capabilities managers have in monitoring either. From my observations, people use Slack very casually in the sense that they use it like they would any IM platform to socialize/gossip/vent on a whim while at work, not expecting that management has access to viewing each and every thread. This has lead to management playing favorites/politics. In the case of a friend who got a promotion to management at their employers recently, they had to see many of their teammates pre promotion get fired due to those teammates venting on Slack about inefficiencies/incompetencies in management, and management having read each and every response without those teammates realizing they had access.<p>Email still presents this issue, but not at this level of casual use/expectation of access by management
I worked for a corporation with a 13- to 14-hour time difference. Also, the language barrier was significant. When we sent an email, it had to be translated to Japanese, then the reply often translated back. Slack (or any IM medium) was 100% worthless for this. It has its place, but it is not a cure-all.
Something that I can't seem to find highlighted ever in any discussion about communication tools (but I acknowledge it was kind of hinted at by the federated nature of email in this post) is that by using email you have ultimate and complete control over the information received. I mean in slack you don't have much chance to download an archive of your messages, mentions and message threads (although it might be possible,IDK). On the other hand hosting your own email server (or even by using most of the popular email providers) you have this option out of the box. And this is more important then you think. In court for example this might be the decisive factor in your favour (e.g. having something vs having nothing). But it might be useful in other disputes too, not only in legal cases.
Slack will never replace email as long as it doesn't have end to end encryption, a feature Slack has indicated it is not going to deliver anytime soon due to the "priorities of paying customers".<p>Personally I hate Slack as it provides too many distractions. Recently I have starting closing down Slack and only allow myself to check it every half an hour to improve my attention span and concentration. Slack seems to be a great tool for product and project managers, however, less so for developers.<p>It would be great if Slack would allow me to selectively mute certain channels.For example, the lunch-club channel is only relevant when I am actually onsite, however, I always want to be kept up to date on critical production issues.
In case anybody doesn't know: Shift+Esc marks all messages read. Rarely is a keyboard shortcut so good for one's health.<p>I got this from <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17374500" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17374500</a> but there have been other benefactors:
<a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?query=shift%2Besc%20read&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?query=shift%2Besc%20read&sort=byDate...</a>
I'm using slack in my office (We also use trello for checklist but Slack for communication)
And I do think it'ss a bad decision for Slack to get into the email world.<p>It will open a door for security breaches and in my company we have some pretty important content on Slack<p>I also don't want EVERYTHING to be in one place
I like the Slack as it is now, Adding emails to slack aswell will make it a really large platform.
My company dropped slack for Microsoft Teams since it is basically free (bundled in the office 365 subscription).<p>Email still rocks all of our inter-branch communications and teams is better. The only advantage that Slack has over teams is that it works on GNU/Linux...
The longer I use slack, the more unusable it is. People keep creating small groups with requests. Once you read a message it is almost impossible to find unless you remember everyone that was selected to be in the group.<p>The search is practically useless.
I agree with the points about the culture problems that are communication medium agnostic. But the solution that the author of this article suggests is Spike, their product. I looked at Spike and while I got the gist of what Spike is for I did not get how does it work. Does it replace G Suite for example? Is it an email hosting? Or is it a complimentary app for G Suite/O365 users? How does it integrate? How does it look like when a person not using Spike receives and email send via Spike? Do they know it comes from Spike?
I'm relatively bearish on Slack, but who knows what will happen in 5 years. Anecdotally I find a lot of people (myself included) have long shifted from "Slack is the greatest thing ever (e.g. 2015/2016)" to "Slack is more annoying than email." At the same time, I don't feel like there's been much new outside of changing the design of their homepage every 3-4 months (can someone explain why it makes sense to throw design/eng resources on this?) and search is still terrible.
I don't think Slack could universally replace email, but it could for some teams (ubiquitous addresses aside).<p>One of the teams I work with communicate <i>solely</i> through Slack (and do use it asynchronously). All the other teams use some combination of email and Slack, and it wouldn't surprise me if there were teams out there avoiding Slack altogether.<p>It's just another tool. The usage depends entirely on the audience.
The article talks about a few great features of e-mail that I totally agree with: open standards, portability, asynchronicity. While asynchronicity is achievable with Slack ,I get the feeling that if all of your colleagues are on synchronous mode and you're the odd one out, it'll create problems in the company as you can be labeled a slacker (heh!).
For me, Slack has fully replaced email for any time sensitive communication. Email still exists but only for the following:<p>- Company or department wide announcements<p>- Welcoming new hires<p>- Artifacts from build systems and automated tools<p>- Inter-team communications when planning something new<p>Anything with a real deadline is communicated through slack or skype.
Slack has replaced 99% of internal emails in our organisation. When pointing towards other platforms for long lived content, email just doesn’t seem to have a use case. We still need it for external comms obviously.