
Soon You'll Hate Group Chat as Much as You Hate E-mail - walterbell
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-27/soon-you-ll-hate-group-chat-as-much-as-you-hate-e-mail
======
fingerprinter
I already hate group chat. For my use case, it's demonstrably worse than
email. I imagine for many (possibly the vast majority) this is the case.

The thing is, as I've seen in this, group chat has a "cuteness" to it. Just
like IRC back in the day (or today depending on if you still use it), people
are much less formal in group chat and there seems to be less expectation of
formality. There is cat pictures and funny emoticons. This isn't a tool
challenge; both email and group chat can be equally informal and cute. I
contend that email /still/ is a better mechanism given the non-realtime nature
of it.

But then again, the realtime nature of group chat is what some like. It's
precisely what I don't like. I like 1-1 chat quite a bit, though I very
quickly default to video in these cases as well (higher fidelity, quicker,
less prone to written miscommunication).

Hipchat/Slack/IRC are great for some use cases that require the type of
communication (specifically I think of operations, incidents or things along
those lines). I feel other general team communication in these mechanisms is,
well, overblown. My gut tells me PRs are better for much of what group chat
serves, and if not PRs, email/ML are still great. And don't forget getting
everyone into a room or video hangout.

I don't particularly like email, but I don't hate it either. I do, however,
very much dislike group chat.

~~~
dbot
The objectives of office communication are usually either (1) spreading
awareness (of ideas, news, task updates...) or (2) making records. For
example, an in-person meeting spreads awareness, and writing minutes creates
the records. But not every meeting requires minutes.

If most of your office communication is about spreading awareness, email is
pretty terrible. It requires every person to manually handle each individual
message. Most users struggle with this badly. It's a huge waste of time when
the effects are propagated throughout an office - everyone is receiving and
filing exact copies of the same messages. That's the advantage of team chat -
it spreads awareness without the mental overhead applied to each worker.

If you need to make a record, email is great. I've found that response
expectations are far less affected by the medium (email or team chat) than by
the office culture. One is simply easier to manage and respond to.

~~~
fingerprinter
I don't see the difference in your #1 between email and group chat in
spreading awareness other than 1. ease of absorption (email is easier) and 2.
ability to respond (again, email is easier). Imagine trying to read backscroll
of a chat conversation and then trying to "redo" this in chat vs the same in
email. The chances (not saying it doesn't happen, but the likelihood) is
higher that you can have an effective email exchange. If you aren't right
there for the chat, it's over. Some people love this, some people hate it.
It's certainly not efficient for group settings. And dear god, please don't
make and announce decisions this way.

It's about shelf life. Both group chats and emails have a shelf life. Emails
have a longer shelf life (probably up to 48 hours in responding and staying
relevant in many cases) whereas group chat's have shelf lives measured in
minutes. Chat is great for quick one off's, maybe even a few key people on
hand, but not for extended groups. In fact, it's rather terrible.

Nothing beats meetings with all the right folks, though. Meetings are much
better than both group chat or email for spreading awareness. Actually, now
that I write this, this might be a use of chat; a virtual meeting via chat.
Though, I argue the utility is in having all the parties present and not the
protocol.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I disagree with you on both points; I think that it's easier to communicate by
blurting out questions into a chatroom, and it's easier to respond in the
same.

------
jclulow
E-mail and mailing lists are still, I think, a good tool for long-form
asynchronous communication. For some things, I want the opportunity to think
about my broader point for a while before I subject others to it. In response,
I want to extend the same courtesy to others; after all, I would like a
reasoned reply!

I acknowledge that having Too Much e-mail is terrible and frustrating. But I
think this is the same as any other distracting time sink; e.g., agendaless
face-to-face meetings, especially if organised on a daily or weekly cadence.

What, for me, is the root cause of the frustration is when I spend so much
time feeling very busy, but getting nothing substantial done. This applies to
any source of unlimited distractions: e-mail, meetings, chat, or even Twitter.

I think the solution to these problems is partially cultural. It has to be
broadly understood that it is just fine to switch off IM and get some work
done for a while. It's generally not polite to pounce on people at their
desks; doing so over IM can be just as disruptive. Don't expect a response to
e-mail as soon as you've hit send, and don't schedule endless meetings unless
you've something to discuss.

This is mostly how things are at my workplace these days, and I feel much
better as a result. Next up: following less people on Twitter!

~~~
Outdoorsman
> Don't expect a response to e-mail as soon as you've hit send, and don't
> schedule endless meetings unless you've something to discuss.<

Spot on advice...I've mostly done contract and full-stack (retainer) work for
almost a decade, but there was a time when I'd be a year to 18 months on a
gig...regular meetings even when there were no problems...no clear
purpose...people dropping by asking, "did you get my email?", when they'd sent
it maybe 10 minutes ago...

That's the pace of life now, apparently--click and swipe and fret, then go
home thinking you've done a day's work...heh...

------
tootie
E-mail is great. Group chat is great. People are jerks and no technology can
fix that. Slack and HipChat work best if you divvy up channels. One for
project team, one for each discipline or interest group, and maybe one just to
post gifs and chit chat. You can tune in and out to whatever is relevant. Chat
is both clear and precise like email (written not spoken), is asynchronous so
you can go to the bathroom between messages, but still more immediate than
emails that may go unanswered for days.

~~~
jnbiche
> and maybe one just to post gifs and chit chat.

That's a great idea and would solve at least one of my frustrations with group
chat.

~~~
ceras
This is what my group does and I'm very happy with it. Half the team loves the
social chat, while the other half of us safely ignore it.

------
jnbiche
I despise group chat. In 2 years, I've gone from mostly enjoying doing remote
consulting/freelancing, to mostly hating it, all because most clients now
want/require me to participate in non-stop chat sessions on Hipchat, Slack, or
their company's internal group chat.

There's very little productive going on in those group chats. Far more
socializing than anything else. Memes in particular abound. And the
interruptions are constant, driving my productivity to a fraction of what it
should be otherwise.

Really, email was great, and 10 years of freelancing taught me to be a very
good communicator on email (maybe even _over_ communicating).

Now all that is ruined, and I'm trying (unsuccessfully so far) to bootstrap a
software company so I'll no longer have to spend my days chatting about
trivial matters on Slack when I have work to do.

~~~
freshfey
And before email, people expected you to be available between 9am and 5pm via
phone. I think you just have to clearly communicate that the group chat, in
your case, doesn't benefit the working relationship. So it has nothing to do
with group chat per se, but more with how you communicate to your freelancing
clients, no?

~~~
jnbiche
>And before email, people expected you to be available between 9am and 5pm via
phone.

People were _vastly_ more careful about interrupting you via phone, in my
experience. The careless way people interrupt on group chat is an extension of
the general way people tend to dehumanize others online.

> I think you just have to clearly communicate that the group chat, in your
> case, doesn't benefit the working relationship.

Yes, I've not only said that, but _proved_ it (by being extraordinarily
productive during a 2-week "chat free" trial period). But the clients I deal
with want me to be on chat, I'm guessing for the same reason that they'd
_really_ rather I work in their office. So the managers can monitor the hours
I'm "clocked in" (nevermind what I actually accomplish during that time).

Basically, chat lets employers monitor their workers (even contract workers)
in the same way that they monitor their workers in the office, by observing
"butts in chairs".

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csours
Well, this is a dumb article. The good stuff is at the very end.

> Slack, Google, and Apple all see the possibility of people overdosing on
> their services. Each offers its own “do not disturb” mode—Slack unveiled its
> version just last month—a message to fellow chatters that says you’re busy.
> _The features let people read and respond to messages at their leisure,
> instead of in real time—which sounds a lot like e-mail._

So you can use group chat just like email when you need to, and as group chat
when you need to. It's a very common practice (in my experience) to send a few
rapid fire emails, and then switch to chat to discuss.

In future Group chat may evolve to be Slow-First, instead of Fast-First:
Present an email style interface - no chat context, lots of white space,
Subject line, etc. Then if you are both online and the recipient(s) respond
quickly, dump the email stream into a chat window.

Or the other way around. When a conversation slows down to less than 1 reply
per 5 minutes, it will quietly minimize itself and later archive itself.

~~~
robotmlg
> In future Group chat may evolve to be Slow-First, instead of Fast-First:
> Present an email style interface - no chat context, lots of white space,
> Subject line, etc. Then if you are both online and the recipient(s) respond
> quickly, dump the email stream into a chat window.

Wasn't this the one of the central ideas of Google Wave?

~~~
babuskov
Slack is re-doing Google Wave in such a way that people can understand it ;)

------
FreedomToCreate
I already have to mute or turn off slack for periods of time at work because
the group chats I am in get out of hand. I also use WeChat and remember a
couple of colleagues transforming our event organizing group into a debate
about racial standards in America. It makes sharing links easier, but it can
be frustrating receiving updates that have nothing to do with you. Unlike
email, people know if you are online with Slack, so answers are usually
expected right away.

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intopieces
The word "Soon" in the headline undermines this author's claim. Email, as
claimed in the article, came about in 1987 and was widespread in 1991. There
are Slack users younger than email. If Group chat (which itself is not new --
IRC has been around much longer, though its operation is not as slick) is on
the same trajectory or even twice as fast, we have plenty of time for the next
technology to be developed.

~~~
ghaff
>came about in 1987

Well, no. Email dates to about 1971. [1] In the 1987 timeframe, it was widely
used within some walled gardens (my company at the time used email extensively
within our own network with our proprietary software) and it was doubtless
fairly widely used in various corners of the proto-Internet.

My recollection is that 1991 is still pretty early to call it "widely used"
among the general public--although the "endless September" was in 1993 so
perhaps it was getting close.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Tomlinson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Tomlinson)

------
sandworm101
Am I the only one who doesn't hate email? It's certainly easier than typed
memos and postit notes we used to use. And the fact that it is all recorded
does seem to stem some of the inane chatter. Email remains my primary means of
communicating with clients and I haven't felt any push to get rid of it.

------
makecheck
For me the hard part is keeping information together and going back to it
later.

Chat will always be too temporary to compare to more manageable things like
E-mail.

Was an entire conversation captured in the comments of a bug report? Was it
captured in an E-mail thread? Was it discussed elsewhere? Or more likely, some
crazy combination of all possible communication methods...

E-mail is only a problem because no one seems to improve the tools anymore.
(Or they get worse.) There is plenty of room to innovate, still. Why, for
instance, can I not even _edit_ my E-mail subject lines...must I be forever
cursed just because someone chose "Re: " as their entire subject? Also, it's
great that E-mail clients usually correctly guess what a thread should be but
why can't I manually intervene and make or modify my own threads? Why aren't
there literally dozens of more options for rules and filtering?

~~~
xorcist
> Why, for instance, can I not even edit my E-mail subject lines

A bit of a strange thing to say, and give no explanation. I think subject
lines have been editable in every email system I've seen during the past 30
years.

~~~
makecheck
Edit the subject of an E-mail that I _receive_. That way, it can be made more
sensible to me, or categorized more automatically. (I typically use Apple
Mail.)

~~~
xorcist
That makes more sense. I misunderstood. But I don't think the architecture of
imap makes it difficult. You can edit any email at any time. Try it, and see
if it makes a difference to your workflow.

------
rdiddly
It's not about the tool. It's about applying knowledge, consideration &
discipline in the use of the tool. What you hate is people.

------
Kluny
Um, group chat has been around since 1996 (in my memory) and much longer (in
the world at large). It's been annoying the whole time. They key is being able
to turn off notifications.

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davidbanham
The advantage Slack et al have over email is that the list of people who can
reach me through them is limited. Any idiot on the internet can email me, only
people we've specifically admitted can Slack me.

The author also seems to exist in a world where group chat is only used for
chit chat and cat pictures. If that's the case, You're Doing It Wrong. For me,
Slack is the place where we communicate project state, hash out ideas, etc.
That's the value.

~~~
nroach
The one vulnerability to this model is integrations. Spam filters have become
good enough that I seldom see true spam in my email. It's all the ham -
automated garbage, purchase confirmations, and newsletters that I've been
opted into that clog up my box.

If Slack admins go crazy on integrations, you can still get a lot of low-value
notifications. In our instance, we only run integrations into topic-specific
channels (such as a channel for system notifications) so it's manageable.

But I can see that changing as the scope of integrations grow.

~~~
davidbanham
My other trick is to turn off basically all notifications. The only thing that
bloops my devices is a DM or an @mention. Anything else, I pick up when I open
the app to specifically look for it. Makes the Github notifications much
easier to blast through.

------
0xCMP
Slack is way different than that. Yes you can set DnD but the point of slack
is that all messages aren't necessary to watch all the time. You should have
settings to only be notified on your name/channel/everyone and a few key
words.

While I think it will be hated at some point (we all blame our tools rather
than our selves), not sure it'll be for what the author says.

Power of slack is in async public conversations with little friction and
unified view/interface/features/etc. It's not really about saving time over
all. It's about having clearer conversations and those savings over time of
understanding better. Can't tell you how much having the person right there I
could clarify right away and get answer was so much nicer than having to send
a whole email which would feel like a waste (from UI and UX of email) so I'd
need to get enough questions things to mention for it to be worth it.

------
natrius
The pressure described in this article is the pressure of the stream. Email
has this problem too: there are time-sensitive discussions happening, and your
brain knows that there might be a cost to missing something.

Seize opportunities to take conversations out of the stream. I do this by
maintaining an internal blog that's just a Google doc linked to other Google
docs. If there's an idea or a plan that is important, I summarize the Slack
conversation and flesh it out in a document, then put the document in the
stream. The document has its own commenting system that avoids the stream: you
can discuss any point in the conversation no matter what time you're jumping
in. The individual documents are discoverable because they all link back to
the doc that functions as the index page for the "blog."

It's a better way to think collectively. Someone should build a product around
it.

------
dinht
I don't hate group chat, it's just the kind of thing I won't use for work,
because of the blurry context of every group chat at work.

People will try their best to be professional in work chat, they comment on
ideas, share their thoughts about someone else work, and so on. But it's chat,
I mean, it's CHAT! We all know that chat culture built up from the AOL era (or
Yahoo in Asia..). One of a sudden, someone will have a casual comment about
it, and then someone else, and then the whole group became casual. And then of
course, there is the whole thing of scrolling back to get the context of what
people are discussing.

Then teams make rules in chat for things to be in order. But well, if you can
make people function strictly in chat, why don't just force them to a video
meeting?

During the last month, this the only use case I have for group chat: "Let's
lunch"

------
gerbilly
It's not so much an issue of technology, but of control. If you can turn off
your phone/chatroom/email whenever you like, and without consequences, then
it's wonderful.

But if someone else dictates your availability on these platforms, then it
becomes burdensome, even stressful.

And there can also be normative pressure. If most of your colleagues have no
problem remaining available at all hours, then you will be expected to as
well.

Sometimes I feel like workers are in a race to the bottom to see who can give
up most of their personal time.

------
toupeira
I've been thinking about how to have more dynamic wikis for sharing knowledge
in a company, something like a document on Google Drive encourages much more
active participation. There are some projects going in this direction of
having real-time wikis like Rizzoma and Kune (based on Apache Wave), but it
seems group-chat solutions are growing features (long-term archiving, full-
text search, tagging) to fill a similar need. I'm trying out Rocket.Chat next,
it seems to be the most full-featured Open Source Slack clone available at the
moment.

~~~
metasean
I have to admit, I miss Google Wave!

At the time Wave came out, I and another co-worker 'grokked' it and regularly
found increasing more awesome uses for it. Soon others in the office were
equally enamored. Even my mother enjoyed it! (My mother has a hate hate
relation with most software.) Yet, I continued to see it dissed and dismissed
by many others, and I never heard of another group that embraced it like we
did.

Thank you for mentioning Rizzoma and Kune. I was unfamiliar with both of them
but will be checking them out.

------
giaour
I hated group chat before it was cool. The last time I used slack, there was
no equivalent of a sender blacklist (or even just a /mute like in IRC).

------
j45
Sounds like the writer didn't use much IRC compared to email.

Manageably using IRC had a lot more benefit and preference to email.

There is no self-filtering, perfectly balancing communication technology for
everyone's use case.

The tool is but one part of how you set it up and commit to using it, and
managing it's use of you.

Group Chat is interesting, and hopefully will segment the type of chain emails
that don't belong in email.

------
tambourine_man
I still love email

------
rl3
Official and robust threaded message support would go a long way towards
making Slack better.

[https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/578575540594020353](https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/578575540594020353)

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jonesb6
It would be an interesting thought experiment to estimate the number of
developer hours spent on chat applications in the past twenty years. It would
be a very large number, and I don't know how i feel about that.

------
skinowski
This really reads like a filler article. And communication in the office
depends on many factors.

The link to the said research on how awesome face-to-face meetings is just
leads to another article written by the same author. Sigh...

------
jtblin
At least you can't get spammed by external companies on group chat which is
one of the reasons people hate emails now.

~~~
daigoba66
Well, technically you could setup internal only email servers and addresses.
In fact, it might even make sense for some companies to go to a whitelist-only
approach for most employees' addresses. Unsolicited content could filter
through a single mailbox.

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nso95
I don't hate email

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xbmcuser
what do you mean soon.

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breakyerself
I will never chat in a "hate group" I am completely opposed to hate groups.

