
Kill Instant Messaging - sewfr
https://dpc.pw/kill-instant-messaging
======
mbell
> IMs occupy this weird spot between face to face conversation and a nice
> well-written email.

IM is great; It occupies the perfect spot where the conversation is real time
but the parties don't have to immediately answer. Having 30 seconds to think
in between each interaction sounds trivial but it has a _massive_ impact on
the quality of the interaction.

~~~
kristianov
Pausing for 30s during verbal conversation is also acceptable. Just saying.

~~~
pjc50
Not really - pauses are uncomfortable and most people will start speaking
again within a few seconds just to fill it. Unless you've interrupted eye
contact and are visibly doing something else, in which case to avoid rudeness
you need to ask them to wait while you do it.

~~~
dijit
> pauses are uncomfortable and most people will start speaking again within a
> few seconds just to fill it.

Unless they’re Finnish.

The Finns are fully comfortable with silence, I envy that trait.

------
kenhwang
I've noticed the people who dislike IM tend to be weaker communicators in
general.

Compared to email, IMs tend to have less context and are generally short and
to the point but otherwise unstructured. There's a pressure to respond
quickly, and part of responding quickly is typing less words. Condensing
thoughts to a minimum number of words is a harder skill than it seems; people
tend to compensate for low quality communication with more words. Then there's
still all the drawbacks of email: typing proficiency, spelling, grammar, and
asynchrony.

Compared to mouth words conversations, IM doesn't have inflection or body
language to help with tone. It's also not as fast as live conversations so
it's easier losing context and easier to get overwhelmed with multiple
conversations happening concurrently.

I personally love IM because it's easier to have multiple simultaneous
conversations with more throughput and less latency than email normally
achieves. I think of IM like async programming, when one conversation gets
blocked, I can work on another. Mouth-to-mouth communication is like a singled
threaded I/O, you're wasting resources (time) when you're blocked, but if
you're not blocked you're more efficient since there's no context switching
(so a heavily one sided conversation/lecture). Email is like multithreading,
context switches are more expensive and the amount of work done per context
switch needs to be big enough for it to be worthwhile. They all have merits
and use cases.

~~~
barrkel
I don't agree at all. I don't like IM because I'm in either of two states
while in a conversation:

* Distracted from my work that requires concentration while someone slowly asks me questions

* Blocked in my work until someone slowly answers my questions

(Yes, these are two sides of the same coin.)

If my work mostly consisted of conversations, it wouldn't be a problem. But my
work doesn't.

IM is slightly better than email for getting people to answer all points, but
an email thread with inline replies would be my overall preference, like in
newsgroups back in the day. However most people nowadays treat email as an
inefficient IM, and only answer the first or last points.

A Google Doc with collaboration in comments is a viable alternative,
especially for something where there's a product (e.g. design or decision)
from the conversation.

~~~
jay_kyburz
This. We use slack at work, but not really as an IM, its more like an easy to
use message board. I have slack closed most of the time and only check in a
few times a day. If somebody has a problem they need an answer too right now,
they can call me.

~~~
rolleiflex
We've actually just built what you're using at work: Slack, but async. It's an
extension of the message board idea, using Reddit-like threads within a Slack
context in place of live chat. The free version is live (it's used as a P2P
message boards): [https://getaether.net](https://getaether.net).

I think you guys solved it pretty well, but in the case you want a dedicated
tool for your workflow, we're currently piloting the private version, happy to
give you access if interesting. (email in profile)

~~~
dijit
On the surface. This sounds like how Microsoft teams is designed. (More of a
message board with comment threads)

Do you know how Aether aims to be different?

~~~
arethuza
Teams has separate chat and the "Teams" functionality you describe -
personally I think I'd prefer these to be more similar so that chats were, in
effect, a team of 2 - but I guess that wouldn't be practical given everything
else that is associated with a Team (groups, SharePoint site etc.).

------
wildrhythms
I understand the sentiment here, but I disagree with the author, mostly the
fact that video/face-to-face requires note taking to refer back to what was
said. The author mentions this offhandedly, but I believe it's one of the
greatest strengths of IM over a video call.

I despise note taking in meetings, it's stressful when people rely on me to
take notes for them, and I end up missing out on the conversation because I'm
trying to condense what was said into notes. Maybe I'm just a bad note taker.

The author seems to be intimidated by "whole team" IM rooms because they're
hard to manage. I agree, they are hard to manage, and I refer to them as the
wild west. But that's the beauty- they're unmanaged, open, anyone can read any
thread (at my employer we use an IM client that supports threading).

The author didn't touch on that, and it's my favorite thing about "whole team"
IM rooms: As opposed to small group emails and meetings, "whole team" IM rooms
are a place where anyone and everyone can benefit from the discussion.

~~~
jay_kyburz
When you're in a meeting taking notes, you don't need to write everything that
was said, you just write the decisions that were made.

When you hear a decision being made you can ask the meeting to stop, reiterate
what you just heard, then write that down.

~~~
ubercow13
It's useful to have everything later though, especially if it's a technical
discussion.

------
z1mm32m4n
One of the appeals of email is asynchronicity—I can compose a well-reasoned
proposal, and give my team time to compose a well reasoned counter-proposal.

But after more than a handful of rounds of this, it breaks down. Long email
threads are impossible, especially ones that I wasn't originally participating
in, but then got cc'd into. There's no easy way to skim and get a summary of
the current state and where the heated bits of the proposal are.

That's why I like Dropbox Paper instead of email for these kinds of
discussions. Threads spin off of a highlighted snippet, so there's always
context to the discussion. Discussion in threads gets resolved, and the doc
gets updated to reflect the decision—this means the doc is always canonical
when someone new first reads it.

Email will never die because it’s so universally versatile. But specifically
for intra-team discussions and decision-making, I'm convinced we can find (and
already have found) better solutions.

------
martamorena
Not sure what exactly the author does, but IM is the absolute life saver in
every developers world. E-Mails are spammy, include too many people, are too
long, take too long to write, get drowned in a sea of useless crap, etc...
Everyone working in a bigger corporation, knows that emails are a major time
sink.

Video calls? Sure, if there is a meeting. But video calls, not matter what
software you use, is a nightmare. The quality is crap, the connection lags and
it never feels anything close to real life interaction...

But most importantly, IM let's you respond on your own time. There is nothing
worse that people talking to you or calling you with a video call while you
are trying to figure out why that statemachine recursed into the 20th method
call and then jumping this way and that way, suddenly jumped the wrong way and
then still produced the correct result while thinking about how it got into
the 20th call in the first place when it should have branche din the 10th
call... You get the picture.

~~~
wildrhythms
This reminds me of the worst part of email: signatures. 5-6 line signatures,
where the signature takes up more space than the actual message. They are a
pollutant of email threads.

~~~
nomadluap
Not to mention those, "This email is confidential..." footers that get auto-
inserted at the bottom of every message.

------
tqi
This reminds me of a Tina Fay quote: “It is an impressively arrogant move to
conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not
good. I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it
doesn’t exist.”

None of the arguments presented are particularly compelling. In particular, I
find the paragraph describing why "IMs don't scale" kind of hilarious, as
someone who has been on too many email threads where a seemingly endless
stream of people are "cc-ed" in. Ultimately, I think every channel has its
strengths and weaknesses, and teams need to figure out for themselves what the
right mix is for their combination of size/personality/needs.

------
dpc_pw
Ha. I'm on Hacker News again! :D

One thing that I'd like to make people pay attention to is the end. "I believe
this would play well with other ways I'd like to organize the teamwork: with
the general focus on agility, asynchronous, independence and ownership. But
more on that another time." This post is a part of (to be written) broader
series of mutually re-enforcing ideas.

Team culture is being built around the communication. In teams where
communication is IM-based, people tend to rely on it, while they consider
email to be for "the slow stuff, that I check once a day". I did work in a
(small, but successful) fully remote startup where the whole communication was
email based. Part of the reason was - everyone were in completely different
timezones. And it just makes people learn to limit the need for synchronous
communication: write better documentation, work more independently, automate
more, etc.

Also - when people don't have to monitor multiple communication channels ...
they monitor email better and tend to respond more often. It is actually not
unusual to get a response in a matter of "30 seconds". When people expect
replies, email is actually as fast as IM - you do realize it is being sent
through the same Internet-tubes, right? :)

Another thing is - people switch to video-chat quicker, to talk something over
quickly in 2 minutes, instead of spending half an hour being distracted and
staring at "Joe is typing ..." back and forth.

BTW. I did work work in a big corp. with tooons and toons of useless emails in
Outlook, and a terrible corporate IM system, that a lot of people didn't even
bother to use. It was just a matter of setting up email filters right. First
and most important was: "if I'm not directly the single person on To field it
goes to some sub-folder". It was still better than eg. working in a medium-
sized startup and using Slack. At least the configuration was in my own hands,
instead of split between arbitrary channels, that often did not make much
sense (too broad, or too narrow, not well defined, redundant, etc, etc.)

Anyway, thanks for all the comments. :)

~~~
djmips
Partly because of your flame bait headline.

------
ares2012
If you are not willing to mute/ignore IMs while focusing they can be
distracting and reduce productivity. However, if you aren't willing to
mute/ignore I think the problem is not with instant messaging but your
personal focus. Any form of communication can interrupt your workflow if you
let it.

~~~
dheera
Except when the people you work with IM you, and if they don't get a response
within 60 seconds they get impatient, visit your desk and bother you.

~~~
msh
Then the problem is not the tools but the people and culture. A tool change
won't fix that.

------
yakattak
While I agree that email is great for asynchronous communication and that
asynchronous communication is a fabulous tool, the author completely ignores
the benefits of IM.

If I have a question for my teammate and they happen to be in a meeting so I
can’t ask them directly, I could email them. Let’s say they’re someone who
checks email maybe once an hour or twice a day... not exactly going to get a
quick response. IM allows me to message them, ask the question, get a response
and move on. Something that needs a quick response doesn’t work great in
either email or a meeting.

That’s one example of a possible benefit to IM. That being said, I think the
issues with IM are cultural. We expect an instantaneous response so it’s “bad”
to leave a message unread for a few hours. I think it comes down to coaching
your teammates what situation warrants what type of communication.

It will never be perfect, we’ll always have these debates but we can educate
each other on the most efficient ways for each other.

~~~
barrkel
This benefit to you is a corresponding disadvantage to the person you're
messaging.

~~~
yakattak
Sometimes, but not exclusively. If I message someone, I don’t expect them to
respond instantly and would be okay if they didn’t. That being said, the
cultural norm is to respond instantly.

I try to let people know that I won’t respond if I’m busy and that I would
expect the same from them. It’s not foolproof but setting that expectation
helps both parties.

------
Grue3
How about kill face to face conversation and replace it with IM chat? IRL
conversations suck. You can't edit what you say, you can't copy paste
technical details into them, speaking is slower than typing and listening is
slower than reading. It's inferior in every way. Just like these 1 hour
conference Youtube videos that can be easily replaced by a convenient PDF
presentation.

------
koenigdavidmj
The IM system I would like to see would be intended to be used like a very
lightweight bug tracker. It would be very thread-heavy, and a toplevel would
correspond one-to-one with a task/bug/question. Obviously you can do all that
with Slack today; the difference is that when a conversation is done, it can
be marked closed and not show up in the view that you see. (Obviously you
would be able to reopen it or find it again with search.)

In other words, the default view is a list of every conversation still
relevant to you and your team, rather than an infinite-scrolling history.

EDIT: Hey, Zulip sounds much like what I want!

------
mmanfrin
Man do I ever fucking disagree. I do not want to have a face to face meeting
or a video call when a 20 second IM chat will suffice. Stop wasting my fucking
time because you want to push your extroversion on everyone.

------
rossdavidh
While I agree with the message, in the sense that I think IM combines the
worst of both worlds, I try not to get too attached to my opinions on how we
should communicate. I rarely have any say in that, and I try not to get worked
up about things I have no control over.

However, it does seem (and the article doesn't stress this but I think it's
important) that there are simply TOO MANY different channels of communication.
Figuring out which channel that communication came through on, in order to
find it, is a problem. Since getting rid of email seems impractical, as does
getting rid of face-to-face, IM seems like the best one to drop.

But again, who care what I think? No one. In this case, I try not even to let
me care, and save my energy for battles I might possibly win.

~~~
z1mm32m4n
> I rarely have any say in that, and I try not to get worked up about things I
> have no control over.

This hasn't been the case in my experience. I joined a new team about a year
ago, and the predominant mode of discussion was Slack + IRL discussions.

Over time, I started writing docs (in Dropbox Paper, but if you want to use
Google Docs feel free) and shepherding conversations to happen in those docs.
@mention people into a thread to ask for their thoughts. Remind people that
you have an ongoing doc to take a look at during standup.

Over time, it's possible to change team norms. But it's a slow process, and
it's important to remain receptive to the experience other teammates are
having too.

------
irjustin
I agree with the author probably to the 75% mark, but not to the full 100%
kill.

One key benefit of IM is being able to be the "next available interrupt". i.e.
if team members have headphones on, we are only allowed to bother each other
through IM which we say, "when you're available..." allowing the other party
to effectively keep their current train of thought until it's complete.

Personally, I actively push conversations either to personal or to email
depending on the situation.

IM is great and fills a particular space, but it's when people hold onto it
too long it becomes a problem.

This can be said for email chains that are too long or face-to-face
conversations that lack notes. Each has their problems, but also their place
and is still useful.

------
wruza
IMs miss one thing badly, for me at least. It is headsup/important signals in
a conversation flow. For now you only can mute your crowded chats and read
miles of irrelevant texts later. But if a loose discussion turned into
something important, there is no mechanism to notify busy participants or
highlight parts of the chat for a later review.

In short, IMs should stop dinging on every message and should have two special
buttons: 1. mark for reading (visual notification + table of marks), 2. wake
everyone up asap (sound). Both should work for past, like “hey, it started
with this message”.

I’m waiting for this separation for years, but never seen it in popular
messengers (in any really).

------
maitredusoi
Ah ah ah ! How can one says that in 2019, and even get listed on HN ?

Couldn't laught so much ...

IM is as useful as any other tools, just in right place (how on earth would
like to have an inbox full of smalltalks ?

I mean you always need a hammer, but not to use with screws ;)

------
rocky1138
I love the idea of going back before IMs more than I'd like the reality, I
think. Actually, I like the idea of no IMs at work (if there is only one small
office) but it would suck to lose long distance friends or nevermet online-
only friends.

Secondarily, the author writes:

> Searching through the history of a Slack room is difficult, and rarely
> useful.

I'm no fan of Slack (IRC uber alles) but I have to hand it to them: their
search, in my experience, has been as good (read: magical) or better than
google. Even for piss poor search terms it comes back with what I was
thinking, not what I was typing. It's really perfect.

~~~
war1025
Must be somewhat dependent on what type of things people talk about. I've
found their search feature cumbersome and hard to use.

I listened to a "How I Built This" podcast about Slack maybe six months ago
and I remember finding it very amusing and unexpected that they view their
"search" feature as one of the main draws for people switching from other chat
apps to Slack. For me, it's always been like trying to find a needle in a
haystack. Maybe because we have a single product and lots of bugs and features
are pretty similar to each other.

~~~
briandear
Those coming from HipChat will vastly understand how good Slack search is.

~~~
war1025
We came from hipchat. Maybe search is just something I'm not very good at.

------
mcnichol
This person clearly never worked in a remote or distributed team.

Different modes of communication for different purposes. Now if you're using
Microsoft teams or Jabber just stop. That's cruel and unusual punishment

~~~
dpc_pw
> This person clearly never worked in a remote or distributed team.

I actually worked 3 years in a 100% remote, international startup, later to
acquired by Nvidia. :P

------
VvR-Ox
This can only be said by someone who doesn't use IM "properly".

IM is: \- asynchronous (vs. f2f or calls) \- multi-format (text, audio, video
or files) \- searchable (vs. f2f, calls and in my case email which is horrible
to archive/search stuff) \- phone-centered (vs. email which is computer-
centered)

I hate to write mails only with my phone, sometimes (e.g. when driving) I
don't want to write a message but speak something instead.

Obviously also the possibility to quickly capture something with your mobile-
camera and share it via IM was not considered. How practical is this scenario
with a computer? Not much.

E-Mail is old technology and nearly no-one adapted it to our present time
(don't know if it's just the protocols used or mainly the apps to interact
with it).

Group chats are also much more pleasant with IM's, the feature to @-mention
users in itself is something I desperately miss from E-Mail (I am talking
about name-suggestions when I type the @ and about notification of that user
that I mentioned him).

It could go on like this but I think there's enough on the table to show that
E-Mail is not an alternative to IM and IM is not useless.

------
paxys
Depends on office culture I guess. To me IM is easily the best of both worlds
rather than worst. I couldn't imagine a productive team without it.

------
nikisweeting
Have you tried Zulip? I feel like it fixes most of the critiques you have
towards IM as it's designed to be primarily used asynchronously.

~~~
Pistos2
(I'm not OP) Zulip is good in theory, but I had two problems with it:

1) they had no [simple] means to install it on an existing server (VPS, what-
have-you). It assumed (required!) that Zulip would be the only thing on
whatever you installed it on. That is, it seemed to assume a container
environment (docker, etc.)

B) The public Zulip instance exposed everyone's email address in plain text,
ready for easy harvesting.

iii) It's hard to alter the inertia of a team or organization of sufficient
size that is already using Slack.

~~~
vishnu_ks
2) This is fixed. If you are running on-prem you can upgrade from master or
wait till the next stable release. [https://zulipchat.com/help/restrict-
visibility-of-email-addr...](https://zulipchat.com/help/restrict-visibility-
of-email-addresses).

3) Zulip do support importing from Slack. [https://zulipchat.com/help/import-
from-slack](https://zulipchat.com/help/import-from-slack). I don't think there
is anything else we can do about this issue.

------
sjy
I'm inclined to agree with the author, but sadly I think that getting a
"little bit of software help" and "maintaining a culture of mindful and
efficient communication" is simply not viable in large enterprises that run on
Outlook. There are plenty of technical projects that have successfully used
mailing lists for decades, and those searchable lists are now valuable
historical records, but I have never seen this implemented successfully in a
team that did not consist primarily of software developers. At every job I've
had, I've built up an organised, searchable and valuable mail archive, and I
know many of my colleagues have done the same thing, only for the archive to
disappear when I change jobs because there is no way of filtering out personal
and confidential material before sharing the archive. At least with Slack you
know that group chats are not implicitly private, and the tools and culture
allow you to send messages that are visible to everyone without expecting them
all to read and respond.

------
roland35
I agree with the author on one on one IMs, but I disagree about chat rooms
like slack. Slack isn't always the best place to save knowledge (I would love
to know what other teams find works!), But I do think it works great for
asking the kind of questions that you aren't sure who may currently have
time/know how to answer! Especially as a new comer on a team.

~~~
briandear
The problems with “places that save knowledge” is that they are chronically
out of date. A cool Slack feature would be to create digests from starred and
tagged posts that everyone can access.

------
makecheck
A big issue with IM is that you rely on the passive “status” string, and:

\- This feature sadly is buggy as hell in some popular implementations. People
can appear “Online” one minute and “Away 2 hours” the next (!?!?), presumably
from bad syncing code.

\- I’ve seen that colleagues vary greatly in their interpretation of status
strings. Some people will ask detailed questions using an IM when I am
_clearly_ “in conference call” or “in meeting” (or some other “of COURSE I’m
busy, damn it!!!” statuses).

Ultimately, the problem with IM is that the “importance” of any given issue
between Person 1 and Person 2 is not the same. This means, if I am really
busy, I would rather be marked “Away” because frankly nothing else (short of
signing off completely) is going to give me the tranquility required to finish
a critical task.

------
osdiab
There are other mediums of digital communication than IM and video chat. Old
school forums are one, more modern things like Twist are another. I really
liked the latter for corporate talk - good balance between organization of
information but more presence than email.

------
kgwxd
When given the right to interrupt someones life (pop-in, phone call, text, IM,
Twitter, Facebook, etc), the sender should have an unrelenting expectation of
being denied without any sense of rejection. That access is a privilege which
should never be abused.

------
JumpCrisscross
As a manager in finance, I hate IM. Lots of persistence around everything you
don’t want recorded ( _e.g._ a banker venting about a difficult client) and
none around what you need. Noisy, messy, informal and an encouragement of
muddied thinking. Given everyone in our industry should be comfortable picking
up the phone and drafting documentation, I usually move to ban IM as soon as I
take the helm of a team.

(It can be okay on the engineering side. But I agree with OP. E-mails force us
to think through our communications, a process which has other benefits. Voice
is instant, effortless and delivers an emotional payload to boot. IM is cruft
in between.)

~~~
toastal
I've grown accustomed to switching on my exploding/disappearing messages when
these topics come up. Every platform needs this for some semblance of privacy.

~~~
vageli
> I've grown accustomed to switching on my exploding/disappearing messages
> when these topics come up. Every platform needs this for some semblance of
> privacy.

In banking in particular, that is a no go (in the US at least).

------
majkinetor
Email is the worst as you can't easily send to 3rd party conversation or
attachments etc nor can non CC-ed person silently follow it. I use emails only
to send people link to forums, docs, apps etc. and almost never to explain
something - anything that needs explaining should be documented on central
place so anybody can see it and follow it even 5 years from now.

Forums should be the norm. They do not have all those IM/email problems. They
are searchable, URLable, public or private, do not require client
infrastructure and so on.

------
Spooky23
Good points, but it ends with the prima-donna “my time is more valuable than
yours” attitude that some technical people adopt.

Email and IM share the issue of poorly transmitting tone and context. If your
rant against IM presents email as the best medium, with in-person/voice as a
secondary if necessary channel, the rant is highlighting a bigger problem and
difficulty to communicate. Modern business is awful at communication.

------
thrower123
A good IM system is automatically archived and end-user searchable, so right
off the bat it is superior to in-person conversations or meetings.

------
dheera
A long time ago I used to have several long-distance friends who I e-mailed
back and forth on a regular basis to update each other of various interesting
things in our lives.

A regular pattern I noticed is that as soon as I added the IM account of any
of them (usually by their request) those well-written long e-mails degenerated
into

"Hey what's up"

"Not much you"

"Not much"

------
vinay_ys
For software developers (engineering+product) these days, most of the deep
communication happens over document review comments (say, in google docs, UX
design tools) or code review comments (in your fav code review tool). Usually,
a meeting is called via a calendar invite which may come via e-mail (but you
never have to actually see the invite email as the invite shows up
automatically in the calendar along with invite message/note - very
important). The meeting itself can be in person or on remote video call. In
between these two, for any casual business (of status update, coordinating
meeting etc) or casual seeking/providing help we have chat in your fav 1-1 or
group messaging app (slack, hangout etc).

I think e-mail is a poor replacement rich authoring and reviewing environments
made for any specific type of document (PRD, Design document, code, UX design
etc) needed in the SDLC workflows.

But nevertheless, writing good e-mail is an important skill – whenever you
have to engage with someone outside of your team or immediately neighboring
team, you cannot just cold call or message them (too intrusive) you will have
to write a formal intro mail and set the context etc. and then bridge into
your more richer workflows.

------
newsgremlin
IM has its purposes like other forms of communication. It's when it is always
the preferred choice of communication for every type and topic of discussion.
Having a phone or face to face conversation with a friend feels like a breath
of fresh air after long periods without.

------
fastball
My issue with this is that most of the emails I get are _not_ thoughtful,
verbose, well-reasoned responses. They're "great thanks" or "next monday at
5pm?". This is where IM shines – when you need to communicate something that
_should_ be brief.

------
jasonkester
It's worth pointing out that email _is_ a form of instant message.

It's one that comes with some sensible expectations of response time. But
there's nothing stopping you from seeing it immediately or replying to it
quickly.

One could build a corporate culture around email usage that was just as insane
as the current Slack distraction culture. Or you could have anything in
between where the two sit now. It's very similar technology. But it comes with
a big advantage of nobody needing to install anything or keep some random
website open 24/7.

Personally, I tend to treat Slack as though it was a poor substitute for
email. I'll check it every once in a while when I have some down time, and I
make sure it can never send me a notification of any description.

Unless, of course, (as I mentioned elsewhere) the current gig is at a shop
that is willing to pay the productivity cost of being able to distract its
developers whenever it wants. In that case, let it bingle away non-stop. Just
don't expect me to get things done very quickly.

------
hprotagonist
At this point the primary advantages of IM is that it is possible to use
securely. Email just isn’t.

~~~
dheera
They aren't that different for most people. Both Gmail and Slack are

* NOT end-to-end encryption

* encrypted from server to client

* full logs hosted on server

They're essentially equally secure.

~~~
hprotagonist
I was thinking more along the lines of signal/imessage/whatsapp/other e2e
messaging applications.

contra email:
[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/06/e-mail_vulner...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/06/e-mail_vulnerab.html)

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tmaly
At my company we have not had IM, but we might get MS teams. I have been
thankful we have not had it for the purpose of focus.

I hate email as much as the author likes it. I prefer to use systems like
Confluence and work asynchronous on a cloud based document.

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tilolebo
What about a mix between IM and recorded voice messages , like whatsapp does?

I find it really practical for having asynchronous conversations: faster than
typing messages, without having to answer right away.

AFAIK Slack & co don't offer this feature.

~~~
Yizahi
Now that's combining the worst of all worlds - now I need to speak (which is
inconvenient by itself) to mute phone, thinking of proper speech in advance,
and it also takes more time than typing. And I don't get "instant" response
benefit of a phone call. No ability to send any data longer than few
characters (no links, no data sets). Disruptive in the office. And if it was
sent via anything non-phone then it is highly possible that quality would be
garbage.

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51Cards
I manage a medium sized team of developers, many of whom often work from home.
IM is our communication lifeline. I couldn't imagine having to phone or email
them 100 times a day, what a nightmare.

~~~
el_memorioso
I can't imagine working at a place where my manager feels it is necessary to
interrupt a developer 100 times a day. When do you expect them to be able and
concentrate for more than a few minutes and actually get something done?

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toomuchequate
What are all levels of communication?

>Urgent- Phone call/in person/contact boss

>Need response within 1 day - IM

>Beyond 1 day- Email

Just a thought, curious if there are any better systems for communication?

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josefrichter
Number of channels set up on day 1 = number of users * 10. Seems to be the
classic case of social (over)engineering in most teams, doesn't it? :-)

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StanislavPetrov
I'm completely the opposite of this guy. I have friends of 25+ years that I
have never had a phone conversation or an email with, but we instant message
all the time (and hang out in person once in a blue moon). He also says:

>In theory, IMs are supposed to be fast (“instant”), but in practice typing
takes enough time, to make instant messages much slower than simply talking.

I'm astonished when I come across anyone in the computer industry that
actually types more slowly than they speak. If anything, speaking is
marginally slower.

~~~
sjy
> If anything, speaking is marginally slower.

I disagree – typing at 100 wpm is exceptionally fast even for tech workers,
and speaking at 150 wpm is normal. Have you ever tried to transcribe a
conversation in real time? It's hard, which is why stenotype machines were
invented to allow trained users to type at over 200 wpm.

~~~
StanislavPetrov
Typing was quite a bit different when stenotype machines were invented. As an
old(er) person who learned to type on a manual typewriter with paper you had
to insert, sheet by sheet, by hand, and use white out to cover up your
mistakes, typing was a whole different ball of wax. Typing back then when you
had to firmly strike each key with the same force to make sure the letter
would print clearly was much slower and more tiring. It would have been
virtually impossible to type as fast as you speak with that equipment. With
modern keyboards and computer its easily attainable.

~~~
sjy
Are you saying that 150 wpm is easily attainable? Because most sources I've
checked (eg. [1]) say that 100 wpm puts you in the top 2% of people who are
interested in fast typing. I think you could spend your whole career hiring
programmers and never meet one who can type 150 wpm, although they do exist
(eg. the top 50 or so users on typeracer.com).

[1] [https://imgur.com/gallery/Vc3bV](https://imgur.com/gallery/Vc3bV)

~~~
StanislavPetrov
I was referring to your claims about the invention of stenography in regards
to the ability to record written speech.

I think its easily attainable for an experienced typist to send instant
messages at the same speed as they would have a verbal conversation (I know it
is for myself and my friends who have had daily IM conversations for the last
25+ years). Perhaps typing is a lost art in the age of smartphones and
tablets.

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Funes-
TL;DR: Offline messaging is incompatible with non-intrusive synchronous
communication.

I think the main problem with modern IM software resides in letting the user
send messages to offline recipients ( _offline_ as in "not actively using the
application"). For modern IM to be "instant" or "synchronous", every user has
to be able of being interrupted at _any_ time by a message sent to them, by
means of intrusive notifications; this means that "being offline" is no longer
an option in modern synchronous communication, so major IM software designers
did away with it altogether--e. g. WhatsApp.

This didn't happen with MSN Messenger pre-2005, for instance. Sending a
message was only possible if both parties were connected at the same time; the
moment the recipient disconnected, the text box got greyed out and the chat
effectively ended. This meant that every user had to deliberately decide to be
available for other people to message them; it also meant that IM was truly
"instant" at all times--except when people left for a few minutes, which
prompted an "away" status on their part; nonetheless, the decision to be
connected had to be consciously taken at some point.

A solution could be designing IM software that respects your time and
attention. This could be achieved by forcing users to actively use the app in
order to receive messages. P2P IM apps like Briar[0] are like that by
definition--it's a "technical-limitation-turned-feature" for me.

[0]: [https://briarproject.org](https://briarproject.org).

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sys_64738
As with all tech, they all have their strengths. Working remotely with a
colleague then it’s great for short queries but that should be no more than a
couple of messages. If you have a conversation that requires half an hour back
and forth on IM, then you should have lifted the phone and gave them a ring.

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muppetman
IM wouldn't be very popular if we agreed with what the author states.

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GoodDreams
When pairing I’m annoyed when a non-urgent IM or email notification pops up
and I lose my pair’s focus. Some folks have their text messages and social
media notifications popping up too, preventing concentration for more than a
few minutes.

~~~
rorykoehler
That's a problem with notifications not IM. On my work machine slack notifs
are on and all other IMs off. On my phone slack is off and all other IMs on.
Email notifs are off everywhere. I process email at the beginning of the day
and end of the day (unless it's related to a timeblock in my calendar) . Clear
delineation of devices, services and roles they play helps to avoid the issue
you describe. Slack also has notification snoozing feature for when I need to
focus.

