
Slack Wants to Replace Email. Is That What We Want? - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/style/slack-replace-email-ipo-listing.html
======
clouddrover
No, we don't want that. I find Slack to be slow, clumsy, and inefficient.
Monolithic services like Slack don't provide the flexibility of federated
services like email.

I use a desktop mail client. It's faster, has more powerful search features,
works with any email service, I don't need to pay anyone a fee to access my
old mail, and I can use it even when I'm offline.

~~~
dheera
On the other hand I must say Slack is the _perfect_ tool for couples. You can
create channels for #restaurantstotry #moviestowatch #hikes and so on, and it
is possible to leave notifications on for just that one workspace while
turning off literally all other notifications and calls on your phone. The API
integrations can also allow you to give each other access to smart locks,
thermostats, expense tracking, and other things if you wish.

~~~
vorpalhex
Trello. Not only can you add upvotes and all, but you can tag things with
locations and then get a map view - great for vacation planning.

~~~
a_shane
Bump for Trello. I use it to manage my team (who work remotely) and personal
life, too. We use it for vacations, long-tern house projects (gardening,
building things, etc.)

I've tried Slack in a few different contexts and have always found that the
chat-based interface encouraged users to do just that: chat.

A combo of Trello + email work better for keeping communication focused on the
product/project, in my experience.

------
ericskiff
Interesting. Nearly 100% of the comments here are negative, perhaps because
the title paints things in black and white?

Life before workplace group chats was really painful. We had IRC for those of
us who knew how to use it, but it was never going to pass muster in a
corporate office. Email was next to meetings as "the worst thing about work"
and you were both drowning in it, but never able to get the things you needed
over it. 1-1 chat with AIM, etc helped, but then every task went off into the
void until those people reported back.

I love slack. We went from Hipchat to Flowdock to Slack over the years and
Slack is the one that gets pretty much everything right. I've got channels for
every client we work with, and they actually participate. I've got different
Slack instances for work, friend groups, my hackerspace, etc. I can flip
through and stay up to date on WAY more than I would without it.

And most importantly, people actually use the thing. It's easy, it's on
everything, and it gives me the option to ping them or not as needed. Not
everything is the same level of urgency.

It doesn't kill mail - mail still has it's place for longer form messages that
need more thought and a deeper response, but damn if Slack isn't the right
tool for a lot of my jobs.

~~~
Justsignedup
Slack isn't great. No slack is worse. It still needs some diligence to not get
distracted. But overall an improvement.

The nyt is just publishing some bs article right on the heels of slacks
announcement.

------
davidw
No.

Slack is ok for chatting and quickly sharing stuff, but not for longer, more
thoughtful, drawn out, asynchronous discussions.

~~~
simonw
I find this varies between people.

I have co-workers with whom I've had fantastic, multiple-day drawn-out
asynchronous discussions on Slack.

I have other co-workers for whom this form of communication fails completely.

I'm not sure if this is a learnable skill or if it's down to something
fundamental connected to different people's communication styles.

~~~
mixmastamyk
I used to lament there were folks who insisted on talking on the phone, when I
needed requirements written down to refer to later. Both approaches have merit
at times.

------
randlet
You can pry my email from my cold dead hands.

Why anybody would want an email replacement controlled by a single company is
beyond comprehension.

~~~
andrei_says_
I honestly think it’s just a slow news day.

~~~
SI_Rob
It's because Slack's IPO is tomorrow

~~~
m463
game set match

------
icedchai
What we really want is a simple, federated IM protocol that isn't an overly
complicated mess. This leaves out XMPP / Jabber.

AIM and Windows Messenger were probably closest to this... AOL and Microsoft
missed a huge opportunity here.

~~~
mxuribe
I'm a fan of the matrix protocol. Its still early days...but I'm hopeful for
the future.

------
rococode
How easy is it on Slack to contact a person outside of your company? My
impression is that it's fairly convoluted compared to email, but we don't use
Slack extensively at my org (only for casual internal chats), so I don't know
if that's actually the case. I don't see it ever replacing email without a way
to conveniently communicate with people in a different workspace.

I think it'd be nice if Slack was setup more like Discord, where users have
unique IDs that they can use to contact other people directly.

~~~
leetcrew
> How easy is it on Slack to contact a person outside of your company?

in general, contacting arbitrary people outside your org is just not a use
case slack supports.

that said, the slack administrator can create certain channels that "bridge"
two or more organizations' slacks. this makes it easy to chat with business
partners without necessarily giving them access to all the other channels. you
can dm these people if the admin chooses to allow it.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
So, no, Slack is not replacing email. Most of us have exactly no interest in
an email "replacement" where you need the administrator's approval to talk to
people outside your organization.

For in-organization email... they might. Outside, no way.

~~~
leetcrew
depends what you use email for. it's not gonna work well for corresponding
with your grandma, but I personally prefer it for work comms. ymmv.

------
rolleiflex
Slack is a very interesting thing to compete with – I do have some personal
experience with that, our product having been squarely aimed at this exact
underserved space between email and Slack.

The core issue is that Slack is useful as a social tool at work, for work, but
its main stickiness comes from the fact that it can be a _respite_ from work.
This is what the 'fun' is a code word for that is mentioned in all Slack
marketing materials.

So if you make a tool that is better at getting people be productive, it ends
up being less sticky than Slack. If you make one that is more social, then it
gets disqualified by 'serious' purchasing departments as a fun toy that some
employees are playing with.

That's a tough one. Ultimately the solution, or at least the way I'm betting
my chips, is that you can find a less anxiety-inducing medium of communication
to underlie work comms, and make it modern (less JIRA and more Discord) that
can be a winning bet.

 _[!Plug alert from this point on!]_ An attempt at formulating how that could
look is the thing I'm working on. It's the private version of
[https://getaether.net](https://getaether.net) for companies, in private beta.

------
Tempest1981
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20194320](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20194320)

My favorite comment:
[https://twitter.com/cabel/status/703383420286578688](https://twitter.com/cabel/status/703383420286578688)

"Slack is amazing it totally replaced my e-mail inbox!!!!

 _secretly now has 95 separate inboxes_ "

------
zippergz
Perhaps a minor quibble, but I think this sentence is a little bit misleading:
"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."

I'm fairly sure that by their definition, a "customer" would be a single
paying entity. AKA a company. Which itself might have many thousands of users
in it. I guarantee that Slack has FAR more than 88k USERS on paid accounts.
And users is the correct number if you're going to compare it against "the
world’s desk-and-phone-bound office workers" or the number of employees at
Alphabet.

~~~
enjoiful
The article says 10M daily active users.

~~~
zippergz
Right, so they had better data (though I think that includes free accounts),
yet they chose to use something misleading in the intro to the article.

------
ProAm
Email doesnt take 1GB+ of RAM when running.

~~~
paxy
You clearly haven't used Outlook for Mac

~~~
andrei_says_
Not OP but I haven’t either, because I don’t need to. Email is client
agnostic.

------
hw
Replacing email completely is an arduous task, if not impossible. You can
replace email for internal communications, via apps like Slack, Microsoft
Teams, Google Groups etc, there still needs to be an email interface with
everyone else outside the company. Everything is so tied to email, such as it
being a primary identifier and login for most websites.

Having said that, email is becoming less and less relevant for communications.
Businesses are relying more on other forms of asynchronous messaging like on-
site chat, SMS, WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, Facebook Messenger, Push
messaging, conversational support platforms, etc to communicate with their
customers.

I think apps like Slack will continue to be more effective and popular vs
email for internal use, while email will remain king for external
communications.

------
woofwoofwoof
Slack's ok as long as you silence all notifications and leave/mute all semi-
important channels.

------
michaelcampbell
Does it matter what Slack wants? People tend to use what THEY want.

------
motohagiography
Slack is useful for solving problems, it is not useful for managing dynamics.
It encourages a kind of public performance among non-technical people, and
creates the situation for a kind of callout culture where you can apply
pressure by creating a public paper trail.

It's great for small teams, but it does not scale. It rapidly becomes twitter
with your bosses and co-workers, where almost nothing being said is worth
saying, and anything worth saying shouldn't be said there.

------
irrational
I work for a Fortune 100 company and we don't use Slack, but we do use email.
I think step one for slack to replace email is to get a larger market share.

------
dzhiurgis
I feel like hn lives in parallel world from me. I hate business email, and
slack has cut out 99% of it. Whenever someone forwards me 30 message thread
with message "can you do this" I wanna punch them in the face.

Perhaps this thread self selected people who misinterpreted the title. Email
is still OK for newsletters, transactional messages, receipts, spam or from
business - something very official.

~~~
frumiousirc
How would Slack make this human behavior different?

~~~
dzhiurgis
Slack threads are much easier to follow.

But big corps still could improve of how they misuse slack (first - stop
creating millions of channels).

------
rowanseymour
Our team just recently switched from Slack to Twist.. precisely because Slack
doesn't feel like a good replacement for email. It has support for threaded
conversations but it feels like an afterthought and doesn't fit well into our
workflow of "discuss something in a thread, archive it when it's resolved"

------
mastrsushi
Slack is good because it does one thing really well. That's organizing group
chats amongst coworkers. That isn't monolithic, the FANG approach of having
you enter their environment to use a single product like Hangout is
monolithic. Rival services get in the way with this OS-styled approach, when
really internet utilities should be following the same focus that unix did.
Most people don't like to feel locked into one companies' suite of
applications. This industry is far to complicated for that approach. That's
also why Slack won't replace email. We already use email addresses as our
internet mailbox, where all our accounts are linked. Email is the most
professional way of electronically sending someone a message period. Slack may
of gone public, but that seems to be far beyond their reach.

------
sebringj
I see organizations using emails like they were only for alerts and becoming
so many and so unread and backed up, you simply don't care about unread
anymore at all. That's why google has to do the contextual meaning of them and
bring them to your attention with AI. Slack or anything slack-like, makes
things more inline to how we work with people, at least from what I experience
and no AI needed to duct tape its shortcomings.

This makes me think that phones should be disrupted, in terms of using phone
numbers. Calls are spammed now just like email. We need a permission-based
phone system like slack where only people that we know can contact us. Wait nm
that's dumb, we already have the internet and you can call someone through
slack video already.

~~~
flippyhead
For us at least, email had also become this.

------
malandrew
I have zero interest in something that isn't federated and portable. I want to
own all my correspondence and if some provider is not meeting my needs, I want
to be able to take advantage of DNS to move to another provider transparently
to the people that want to contact me.

------
the-pigeon
There's been thousands of attempts to replace email already. What makes this
one any different?

~~~
xmichael999
Their extra high price for IRC (:

------
xmichael999
No, Slack is annoying and a rip off.

------
anotheryou
I don't see much benefit from slack over IRC, but definitely over mail.

mail threads are horrible, it's impossible to sort incoming by topic, quoting
in replies is quirky, I can't bookmark mails well (at least not when forced to
use outlook) and people abuse it as a to-do list making them forget anything
that is not a mail...

I really like the forced threads in this one other slack competitor though
(forgot which), there everything is a thread by default.

What I recommend for slack: star all persons and channels that are important,
mute any channel with bots, notications only for mentions, occasionally go DND
and edjucate people that they can overide it DND with a PM.

If you need to have it as a to-do: use the star function on messages.

------
josteink
As someone who likes email and irc...

What’s the point of slack? What’s the appeal? Honest question!

~~~
asark
* You can use it in a web browser.

* File sharing's pretty dang good.

* Client supports tons of bells & whistles like inline file preview. And emoji and anigifs and all that stuff which, love them or hate them, most people love.

* Pretty good multi-device notification.

* Pretty good notification settings that, set anywhere, work seamlessly with the above on all your devices.

* The client(s) may be janky thanks to the underlying tech, but the _design_ is rarely janky-feeling.

* Search that's not half bad.

* Pretty good interface for ad-hoc private 1 on 1 or multiparty rooms.

* You can sign your org up online for free to try it out and have all the above, no configuring anything, no setting up bouncers, no persistent daemons per user on any server anywhere. No server at all, for you. Just a web form, and you're off to the races.

* Tons of 3rd party integrations with setup processes often little more complicated than the original Slack signup, if even that hard. Pointy, clicky, maybe a copy-paste, and you're getting Jira notifications in a channel (ugh).

[EDIT] deleted a duplicate bullet point.

------
granshaw
Seems like I’m in the tiny minority here, but since adopting Slack at work my
emails have basically been reduced to just automated github notifications and
the such, or the very rare capital-S-Serious topic threads.

Starring channels I care about and muting everything else, I end up with a way
more flexible communication medium where I can still decide when to respond,
and do way more things than I could with email (eg edit past messages)

Am I crazy?

------
atoav
I don't even want Slack to replace Irssi and I am what they call a "digital
native".

If it isn't important enough for an email, don't write me, come for a Coffee
and a chat. If you want to talk with me directly, ask me or call me.

I can imagine organisations where slack would work, but I don't really see the
benefits outweighing the potential issues.

------
ohnope
Slack would be a lot more bearable if people in my office made using threads a
habit.

~~~
Jedd
We have slack advocates at my work that push this line.

The stated intent is to replace email with slack - but now I effectively have
50+ inboxes to check and track.

Multiple threads blow out the number of places I have to check (and
consequently mouse-clicking) by at least an order of magnitude.

------
amelius
What features does slack have that a well designed email client could not
have?

~~~
simonw
The ability to share links to conversations. I can link to any message on
Slack, in context, going back to the beginning. I can't link to emails: I have
to find and forward them to people.

~~~
Jedd
> I can link to any message on Slack, in context, going back to the beginning.
> I can't link to emails: I have to find and forward them to people.

This sounds disingenuous.

In order to 'link a message' in Slack, don't you have to find it first?

So the 'find and forward' email problem is half-shared there in either
environment.

Forwarding an email is straightforward -- a single keypress in most email
clients, then identify the recipient(s), who can be anyone with an email
address.

I'm guessing that linking a message on Slack requires the recipients to have
previously signed up and provided some personal information to Slack.com?

~~~
simonw
Yes, linking to messages in Slack only works for other co-workers with access
to your Slack instance. I'm thinking in terms of internal-corporate-
communication here.

I link to Slack conversations all the time - from other Slack conversations,
from JIRA tickets, even from some commit messages.

------
c3534l
Slack can replace email for certain things, namely intra-company discussion
where you wind up CCing half a dozen people anyway. But I'm not going to start
getting receipts or reset my password over slack.

------
davidivadavid
How can your mission be to just replace some arbitrary technology? What
matters is that the replacement allows for better outcomes than whatever it
replaces. I'm not sure that's the case with Slack.

------
ykevinator
It's so weird to me that a chat tool is a company about to ipo.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
It's a lot more than a chat tool. The API integrations make it sticky and
difficult to switch to something else. It's painful to leave Slack for
something else after adopting Slack.

------
senectus1
I have seen two scenarios in Australia where they're using MSTeams (MS version
of slack) exclusively for internal comms and emails are just for external
communications....

It seems very doable.

------
luqa
I'm just 26 but I heard countless tools ready to replace emails.

I have a B2B startup and only calling is most effective than emails. I don't
see how Slack can replace them.

------
chiefalchemist
Want might not be the question. It might be more of an actual __need__ at this
point. Email is a fax machine, at best, at this point.

Frankly, I'm still upset that Google botched Wave so badly. I'm not sure
if/how it would have translated to a small screen, but I'm pretty sure someone
could have figured that out. As it is, almost daily, I'm forced to use email
by reasonable and (for the most part) intelligent people. Yes at works, but in
too many cases to me it feels like we're using a screwdriver to pound nails.

------
matchagaucho
Slack's frictionless onboarding seems pretty heavily dependent on MX records.
So it'd be difficult to decouple Slack from email.

------
latexr
Companies are always trying to replace email. I’ve read this story over and
over. What they all have in common is that none succeeded.

------
lucidguppy
It seems you need to have multiple channels. People tend to drift from one
means of comms to another - and you need to chase them.

~~~
romwell
It's as if different people want to use different tools for different tasks or
something.

------
jhabdas
The day I saw what the VP of Tech saw when _they_ logged into Slack was the
day I stopped complaining about email.

------
alexandros
Slack (and chat-in-general) _has_ replaced email for many things it used to be
used for. And we're all better for it. Other things still go over email and
slack can't ever touch them. It's called disaggregation. Why does everything
have to be "x wants to replace y", "is x the y-killer?", "x will destroy y"
etc etc. I wonder who wants to replace clickbait headlines...

------
jmalkin
For me, Slack is good because it adds fun to the workplace, especially in one
too big to chat to all these far flung people

You get to know people you work with before you even met them in person

And you swap gifs and jokes. It just helps built a positive culture I think

------
RandomInteger4
What are the upsides of email? Spam?

------
NeoBasilisk
no lmao no

------
thomastjeffery
No.

I also don't want to enable cookies just to read your article, NYT.

------
QuickToBan
Given how expensive Slack is, and given that it's assumably not open source,
the answer is an unequivocal "no". I would rather use something open source
even if it has only half the functionality.

------
romwell
Betteridge's Law of Headlines[1] definitely applies here.

TL;DR: No.

______

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

------
deboflo
Yes.

