
Slack will never replace email - thereyougo
https://medium.com/@dvirbenaroya/why-slack-will-never-replace-email-873a20856716
======
iLemming
Slack also has other problems that have been totally ignored and neglected for
years. One of them is accessibility. The app is impossible to work with
without a mouse. They say it is "keyboard driven" and they keep adding
features that ignore keyboard completely. Have you ever tried to jump to a
thread without using the mouse? Or copy a link to the last message? Or share
it? Or ask Slack to remind about it? Or snooze all notifications? They could
at least put them in the main menu. People with disabilities who rely on
things being in the menu, they can't do any those things. Can you imagine
having to hire someone and they'd be like: "Ah sorry, I have to tell you
something. I cannot use Slack app. I hope that's not a deal breaker". I
wouldn't be surprised if someone sues SlackHQ for being discriminatory.

~~~
throwaway190619
Slack dev here. We've actually fixed quite a few accessibility issues over the
last year or so. There's still a ton to do, but if you haven't used Slack with
a keyboard recently, give it a whirl.

More here: [https://marcozehe.wordpress.com/2016/01/16/status-of-the-
acc...](https://marcozehe.wordpress.com/2016/01/16/status-of-the-
accessibility-of-slack/)

~~~
tanzann
I used recently and it's impossible to use with keyboard only, you can try
yourself.

During duty shifts I was helping our support. The incoming flow of requests
had peaks of ~3-4 situations per minute, all as messages in Slack channel,
needed to be responded in newly created thread each. I've come up with a flow,
but I cannot avoid mouse at all.

Slack just does not have enough key bindings to be used without mouse! Slack
was a bottleneck for me. If you are not willing to invest into UX that's fine
to have gateways for people to use whatever client UI they need. But you just
cannot wear to hats by both removing gateways and avoiding investing into your
client UX. Result is plainly awful.

Nothing personal, I am actually hate using Slack, sad to say that. I will
avoid using Slack in current state at all cost whenever I can.

Good luck to you! Hope you will make your product better!

(edit: formatting, newlines added)

~~~
iLemming
SlackHQ, we are software developers, devops and QA engineers, data scientists
and IT support specialists - we are your biggest user base! When we say it is
not working, please, listen to us. Please, do try using your app without the
mouse and maybe then you will see what we are talking about. It is not a
baseless demand, our companies pay to use your service. If your codebase was
open-sourced we would've fixed this issues ourselves. Please, don't make us
hate you. When you just started you were awesome, but now you are slowly
turning into Atlassian.

------
throwaway66666
My only complaint for Slack (and any instant messaging app), is the sense of
urgency it creates. It has been discussed on HN a lot, but I 've never seen
someone complaint about the fact that you can invite to your organization
people from other orgs. This feature is beloved by product managers. And hated
by everyone else.

See. Before 'Slack', we had 3 channels of communication. 1\. Email (usually
expectation of getting a reply within hours) 2\. Phonecall (reserved for
urgent situations, expecting a reply within... seconds) 3\. Ticket system that
had a little drop-down where you could select urgency. And you would expect a
reply based on the urgency.

If you abused the urgency, we had a way to track that, and let you know.

Today however, Slack's "multiple organizations" feature pretty much shadowed
the above. Now product manager from client org X, will require that you make a
channel called "X-feature Commandos/dream team" then invite everyone involved
on the project. Then they will ALWAYS end up wasting everyone's time for no
reason. "Hey @here, X page is slow can you check it out?". "Sorry guys my bad.
I was under the bay sea riding the Bart! Forgot LTE connections can be
finnicky 100m under water. heh (ultra fast parrot emoji)"

~~~
alrs
If your job is to program, and people are sending you email and slack
messages, you're a chump if you are replying in anything under 24 hours.

~~~
flurdy
And if you don't reply within 24 hour: fired. By me at least. (don't be silly,
I don't have the power to fire anyone anymore).

Yes, expecting a reply by email sooner than e.g. 4 working hours is futile.

But if you work in a team and only communicate once a day then you are not a
team member, you are an ar#eh#le.

If you constantly check your emails and slack and write replies immediately
then yes, we should probably have a chat about your time focus and
productivity. But checking your emails quickly once an hour is common sense.
And where appropriate with a quick receipt response, not a full answer.

And e.g. slack every 15 minutes or half an hour. Perhaps in a Pomodoro break
or similar. (channel dependent)

It would perhaps be a good idea to have a well-known team/department
convention on response times. More asynchronous for email especially if not
internal (hours not days). Quite asynchronous in company-wide public slack
chats, and more responsive but not instant in team irc-like chats.

Whether you program, write content, make sandwiches etc is no excuse to be an
ar#eh#ole.

------
zxcvbn4038
When the Slack sales team came to my employer they pitched it as some sort of
memory store - the reality is that it’s nigh impossible to pick out a specific
bit of information after a couple of months unless you remember who said
something, where they said it, and approximately when. It’s also annoying when
an admin leaves because only the owner can remove their account - not another
admin. I would also say Slack has a very bad habit of forcing new features
down users throats - people have been complaining about threads for years but
there is STILL no way to mute them or disable them. Someone installs an add-in
that makes a lot of noise? Tough cookies to you, your options are to put up
with it or uninstall it, there is no way to mute it. Like people joining you
to new channels? No way to stop that either. Their API is a pain to deal with
in staticly typed languages - you often have to decode a member of a
substructure to discover what the overall type is. So overall I would say it’s
definitely not an e-mail replacement and it’s very heavy handed for IM, there
is definitely room for another product. I would personally prefer something
more akin to IRC or the classic “cb simulators”. The only real challenge today
is working with mobile clients (and challenge is probably too strong a word).

------
playeren
All these complaints about Slack, are strangely reminiscent of all the
complaints about email pre-Slack; "re:re:re:re:re:", cc all the people, 200+
non-relevant emails per day etc etc.

I worry that people are trying fix org culture problems with communication
software, which is unlikely to succeed.

~~~
Kasper99
That's exactly why we need to fix email - not replace it with another app with
more notifications. I agree with Dvir - email's asynchronous nature is what
makes the exact solution for business comms. It's instant, but not invasive,
and doesn't expect an instant reply. Culturally, we need to also respect
people's time. I'm sticking with email.

~~~
playeren
Most of the Slack channels I use are used async, and I only have notifications
on for 2 out of ~15 channels. Good comms culture was much easier to develop
with Slack + [Something for docs] for the teams I have worked with. But I very
much understand that teams are different, and different cultures work
optimally for different teams.

~~~
fogetti
But then what's the point of using Slack? Your scenario describes you could
just use email without downsides.

~~~
playeren
> without downsides

Hmm. Might be true for you.

Slack enabled "De-silo'ing". It became more efficient and convenient to ask a
team, or knowledge group of something, instead of depending on specific
persons. Easier to be flexible about which topics to follow or not. I.e.
normally I don't interact much with the #ops channel, but Bill is on holiday,
so I'm giving it attention this week.

------
xfitm3
Slack is a productivity killer and whatever they are doing next is certain to
be annoying. People ping each other asking questions instead of reading docs.
People have calls instead of figuring it out. Annoying people just can’t
resist the temptation of @here.

It wouldn’t be so bad if I could customize my experience but Slack fights hard
against this. They claim one size fits all, if it’s annoying then it’s a
cultural issue.

You can’t get thousands of people on the same page. Different mindsets should
be fostered, not punished.

~~~
dewey
> Annoying people just can’t resist the temptation of @here

If people keep doing that repeatedly even after being told then you probably
have bigger problems in the company than the messaging app of choice. You can
also just disable it: [https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/115004855143-Set-wh...](https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/115004855143-Set-who-can-notify-a-channel-or-workspace)

> People ping each other asking questions instead of reading docs.

That's not a Slack problem, it always existed on IRC, people tapping you on
the shoulder in the office or on mailing lists and forums.

~~~
fogetti
I never understood people who get annoyed by @here. If you are somewhere where
you don't want to be, and people send a message to you that you don't care
about, you shouldn't be there in the first place. We have many channels in our
company where complete strangers hang out, for example in the engineering
channel like it was a garden party of some sort. You know: just for fun. I
mean WTF is wrong with these people? Why are they in the channel if they are
not interested? When I message with @here I don't give a shit if it annoys
someone or not, as long as the message is completely in line with the
channel's intended purpose.

------
zby
The number one point is to recognize the situation as a conflict of interests
- everyone wants an immediate answer to his burning question, but nobody wants
to be interrupted to answer somebody else questions. For the team as a whole
there is probably some optimal interruption level which is higher than what
the interrupted would set and lower than what the interrupter would choose.
That is why muting and 'urgent' messages don't work - because people would
tend to mute channels too much and on the other hand 'urgent' quickly inflates
and everything starts to be urgent. I think a solution to this could be
"attention budgets". There are many complications of course - there are times
when you don't mind being interrupted and times when you do, and it is taxing
to think about it consciously and set your levels. But I would start from
attention budgets - this would also be a solution to general spam, but
synchronous spam is much worse than asynchronous - so synchronous is a good
place to start.

------
0xCMP
I find things like this funny because Email is often much worse for getting
ideas across and VERY FEW people put their whole idea in an Email and simply
treat it with chat + 6 line signatures. Where I've worked email has simply
been a very poor chat which I could not distinguish "info broadcasts" from
"the server is down" without getting all notifications or none.

We switched to slack in 2014 because 1) it allowed us to notify mindfully for
team-wide and person specific things. 2) it allowed people to have full blown
conversations and keep others up to date on status/problems in channels. And
3) it allowed us to build automation right inline with the communication we
were already doing.

Much of the complaints of slack seem to be from people who work with those who
do not respect how to use it. Spamming @here for everything is the same as
replying-all in email. Or, my personal pet-peeve, creating a new private group
chat for everything making finding the old conversation nearly impossible.

Discord has tons of improvements I've love to see in Slack namely around
groups of channels and role management, but for the most part it seems the
problems with slack are organization's unwillingness to understand it's
purpose and how to best use it not as a pager system for your whims, but
actually as an async communication system.

~~~
Fnoord
> Where I've worked email has simply been a very poor chat which I could not
> distinguish "info broadcasts" from "the server is down" without getting all
> notifications or none

Something like Procmail could provide such feature.

Slack (and Discord) is on the long term worse than e-mail/IRC because it isn't
federated, nor an open protocol, nor FOSS. This means people are forced into a
proprietary, centralized theme park of clients and servers. Its a potential
security hazard to put sensitive data in such software.

Of course, Slack (and Discord) both have their set of advantages as well. The
good news is, its a matter of time before FOSS alternatives catch up and
become good _enough_.

------
raxxorrax
The advent of proprietary communication tools isn't really something I like,
be that slack or discord or other services.

Something tells me that in 10 years neither service will be hip enough to
warrant extensive support. If they were to hold relevant business critical
information, it would need to be archived but will probably just end up being
lost.

That is at least a difference to mail. Also external contacts could be invited
to the appropriate channels, but I don't really see much engagement from these
users if that actually does happen.

------
axaxs
I've already replaced email with Slack. It's not hard, email is really bad.
That said, Slack is sorely lacking here, especially with threads. Slack
"threads" are an awful experience, with replies generally ignored, so people
don't use them. All I'd need is for Slack to treat threads like a real first
class citizens, with a view like HN or Reddit, and I'd be a happy camper.

~~~
karlding
Threads as first class citizens is something that Zulip [0] focuses on, which
makes it much easier to have multiple conversations within the same space. It
also makes it easier to ignore any conversations you don't care about.

This avoids the problem with Slack where some people might use the threading
features, while others ignore it. Personally I'm a huge fan of Zulip, having
used HipChat, Slack, Mattermost, Skype for Business, and Discord in the past.

[0] [http://zulip.org](http://zulip.org)

~~~
austhrow743
Do you know if zulip is useable with only the keyboard?

~~~
rishig
yes, it is. [https://zulipchat.com/help/keyboard-
shortcuts](https://zulipchat.com/help/keyboard-shortcuts) has the list of
keyboard shortcuts.

~~~
austhrow743
thanks!

------
zmmmmm
I just wish the client wasn't so bad. I can't believe that if I send a message
and I'm not connected at that precise instant that it catn't store and forward
the message when I do get connected. In fact, I can't look at any of my slack
messages at all.

Every other IM client, email, basically every communications medium since
about 1998 has been able to do this, but apparently not Slack.

------
throwaway743
Big problem I've seen is behavior in using Some vs email, and the monitoring
capabilities managers have in monitoring either. From my observations, people
use Slack very casually in the sense that they use it like they would any IM
platform to socialize/gossip/vent on a whim while at work, not expecting that
management has access to viewing each and every thread. This has lead to
management playing favorites/politics. In the case of a friend who got a
promotion to management at their employers recently, they had to see many of
their teammates pre promotion get fired due to those teammates venting on
Slack about inefficiencies/incompetencies in management, and management having
read each and every response without those teammates realizing they had
access.

Email still presents this issue, but not at this level of casual
use/expectation of access by management

------
ChrisMarshallNY
I worked for a corporation with a 13- to 14-hour time difference. Also, the
language barrier was significant. When we sent an email, it had to be
translated to Japanese, then the reply often translated back. Slack (or any IM
medium) was 100% worthless for this. It has its place, but it is not a cure-
all.

------
fogetti
Something that I can't seem to find highlighted ever in any discussion about
communication tools (but I acknowledge it was kind of hinted at by the
federated nature of email in this post) is that by using email you have
ultimate and complete control over the information received. I mean in slack
you don't have much chance to download an archive of your messages, mentions
and message threads (although it might be possible,IDK). On the other hand
hosting your own email server (or even by using most of the popular email
providers) you have this option out of the box. And this is more important
then you think. In court for example this might be the decisive factor in your
favour (e.g. having something vs having nothing). But it might be useful in
other disputes too, not only in legal cases.

------
oxfordmale
Slack will never replace email as long as it doesn't have end to end
encryption, a feature Slack has indicated it is not going to deliver anytime
soon due to the "priorities of paying customers".

Personally I hate Slack as it provides too many distractions. Recently I have
starting closing down Slack and only allow myself to check it every half an
hour to improve my attention span and concentration. Slack seems to be a great
tool for product and project managers, however, less so for developers.

It would be great if Slack would allow me to selectively mute certain
channels.For example, the lunch-club channel is only relevant when I am
actually onsite, however, I always want to be kept up to date on critical
production issues.

~~~
monsieurbanana
When you're on a channel, on the top right you have a cogs for "Channel
Settings" where you can find the option to mute that specific channel.

~~~
oxfordmale
Can you also mute certain colleagues ?

------
dang
In case anybody doesn't know: Shift+Esc marks all messages read. Rarely is a
keyboard shortcut so good for one's health.

I got this from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17374500](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17374500)
but there have been other benefactors:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=shift%2Besc%20read&sort=byDate...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=shift%2Besc%20read&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

~~~
mulmen
Sometimes. It's about as reliable as the rest of Slack, which is to say not
very.

------
juskrey
Email is Lindy
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect)

~~~
cpeterso
For those who don't what the Lindy Effect is:

The Lindy effect is a theory that the future life expectancy of some non-
perishable things like a technology or an idea is proportional to their
current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer
remaining life expectancy. Where the Lindy effect applies, mortality rate
_decreases_ with time.

------
flywithdolp
I'm using slack in my office (We also use trello for checklist but Slack for
communication) And I do think it'ss a bad decision for Slack to get into the
email world.

It will open a door for security breaches and in my company we have some
pretty important content on Slack

I also don't want EVERYTHING to be in one place I like the Slack as it is now,
Adding emails to slack aswell will make it a really large platform.

------
znpy
My company dropped slack for Microsoft Teams since it is basically free
(bundled in the office 365 subscription).

Email still rocks all of our inter-branch communications and teams is better.
The only advantage that Slack has over teams is that it works on GNU/Linux...

------
stingrae
The longer I use slack, the more unusable it is. People keep creating small
groups with requests. Once you read a message it is almost impossible to find
unless you remember everyone that was selected to be in the group.

The search is practically useless.

------
sdfhbdf
I agree with the points about the culture problems that are communication
medium agnostic. But the solution that the author of this article suggests is
Spike, their product. I looked at Spike and while I got the gist of what Spike
is for I did not get how does it work. Does it replace G Suite for example? Is
it an email hosting? Or is it a complimentary app for G Suite/O365 users? How
does it integrate? How does it look like when a person not using Spike
receives and email send via Spike? Do they know it comes from Spike?

~~~
Kasper99
that's the point that the writer made - Spike can work with anyone (unlike
other apps like Slack, Teams, Skype, etc.) Spike works with your regular
email, like Gsuite and turns your emails into a chat conversation. The other
person doesn't know you're using Spike - they see a regular email. You can
even create a channel and message with people not on Spike. That's pretty cool
stuff IMO

------
bcp2384
I'm relatively bearish on Slack, but who knows what will happen in 5 years.
Anecdotally I find a lot of people (myself included) have long shifted from
"Slack is the greatest thing ever (e.g. 2015/2016)" to "Slack is more annoying
than email." At the same time, I don't feel like there's been much new outside
of changing the design of their homepage every 3-4 months (can someone explain
why it makes sense to throw design/eng resources on this?) and search is still
terrible.

------
zamalek
I don't think Slack could universally replace email, but it could for some
teams (ubiquitous addresses aside).

One of the teams I work with communicate _solely_ through Slack (and do use it
asynchronously). All the other teams use some combination of email and Slack,
and it wouldn't surprise me if there were teams out there avoiding Slack
altogether.

It's just another tool. The usage depends entirely on the audience.

------
moonhorse
Chinese companies have been relying on instant messenger as the primary
communication channel for a long time. So definitely it works.

~~~
SomeOldThrow
You can also eschew all electronic communication and do things purely in
person—that works too. The valuable question to answer here is how well do
these processes work compared to each other.

------
vmurthy
The article talks about a few great features of e-mail that I totally agree
with: open standards, portability, asynchronicity. While asynchronicity is
achievable with Slack ,I get the feeling that if all of your colleagues are on
synchronous mode and you're the odd one out, it'll create problems in the
company as you can be labeled a slacker (heh!).

------
awkward
For me, Slack has fully replaced email for any time sensitive communication.
Email still exists but only for the following:

\- Company or department wide announcements

\- Welcoming new hires

\- Artifacts from build systems and automated tools

\- Inter-team communications when planning something new

Anything with a real deadline is communicated through slack or skype.

------
benjaminwootton
Slack has replaced 99% of internal emails in our organisation. When pointing
towards other platforms for long lived content, email just doesn’t seem to
have a use case. We still need it for external comms obviously.

------
ga-vu
Probably because they are two different things.... just sayin

------
einpoklum
Uh, why _would_ Slack replace email? Non-sequitur.

~~~
SomeOldThrow
Because of Slack positioning itself like that:
[https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/13/slack-releases-new-
financial...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/13/slack-releases-new-financials-
ahead-of-investor-day.html)

------
SomeOldThrow
Slack: it’s like email, but you can’t find shit.

------
rezeroed
Does no one else use rocketchat?

------
module17
Never say never. Something will definitely replace email.

~~~
SomeOldThrow
The only thing that can replace email is a better email. If we had a version
of IMAP that worked with labels (download a message once regardless of how
it's tagged) + push, email would be usable again. Currently this is only
possible with IMAP with all its flaws OR by giving all your email to a third
party to serve through an API designed for modern email. There are perverse
incentives preventing this from occurring in any widespread fashion, which is
allowing Slack to flourish on the dysfunction of the current communication
ecosystem. If we do have a replacement for email, it's not gonna be from a
for-profit entity.

Anyway, real-time communications are inherently a different beast from async
communications—one is a highly searchable and taggable data store where you're
expected to carefully read and type and form workflows around, and the other
is for essentially war rooms for collaborative real-time work. Pitching slack
as a replacement for email seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of the
product.

