The experience of Slack is horrid, IMO.<p>- Anyone can be interrupted at any time (to say nothing of @everyone), so it's essentially just an all-day meeting. At least emails could be responded to at relative leisure.<p>- There are only three notification states: "nothing" (normal icon) "something happened in a non-muted channel" (red dot), and "you were mentioned specifically". There's no way to gauge importance without disrupting your flow. Some pointless cat GIF (why are these being posted on <i>work</i> chat?) is ranked the same as "what should we do next?". Similarly, "@everyone there are donuts in the kitchen, OMG" is ranked the same as "@someone THE SERVER IS ON FIRE".<p>- Channels are never-ending, so it's relatively impossible to tell where one topic began and another ended. Additionally, multiple conversations can be held at the same time, and it's difficult to tell who's replying to who.<p>However, I quite like Slack's group private chats. I'd like to see a group-chat solution that promoted those and completely got rid of static channels. Everything's just a private group chat, with all of the people that are needed. When the discussion's done, archive it - it's searchable, of course, but if you need to continue the discussion, make a new one! Maybe everyone in the chat even gets a summary emailed to them that they can search in their email client as well (thus solving the "wait, where did we discuss that" problem).<p>There are a few other changes I would make - for example, the return key should be newline by default to prevent people from writing<p>like<p>this<p>and instead<p>putting their thoughts into well-composed<p>messages