What I took back from this article was that it's not about Slack vs. Hipchat vs. IRC vs. Skype vs. Basecamp or anything else. Whatever you do with your S/H/I/S/B app settings, the very mode of communication without specific granular contexts and separation of those contexts (like in email) is a big issue, not some notification setting that could possibly get rid of the issues of this medium.<p>Chat has its benefits as mentioned in the article, but there is a big deal of frustration -- "How do I respond to point #1 by A, point #2 by B, point #3 by C, point #4 by D that was in reply to point #2 by B"-- and exhaustion -- "I can never catch up with this" -- not to mention it being futile in some cases.<p>If the topic at hand is granular enough (which never is the case, especially when dealing with complex things like software design and development) then chats could be useful. For anything broader, depending on people's availability, asynchronous communication (say email) or synchronous voice communication (say a phone or VoIP call with a shared whiteboard) may be better choices with more focus and productivity.<p>The whole problem exponentially increases in its (negative) impact with the addition of more people into a group chat. This part has commonality with other communication modes, but the way to control it and the effectiveness of controlling it vary.<p>On a tangent, a voice call with a larger group is useless unless it has a shared screen or presentation to keep people's eyes also busy and in sync. If there's a way to make people participate, that's a big bonus. Otherwise many will drift off to chat windows, email, browser tabs, etc., resulting in the oft-repeated phrase in conference calls "Sorry, I didn't get that last part. Could you please repeat it?" :)