Email is the best method of communication for anything complex. It's asynchronous, long-form, has a historical record, allows threading, you can seamlessly include anyone in the world in the conversation, have shared mailboxes and mailing lists, attach files.
But people are afraid of e-mail. Will anyone ever read my e-mail? When will I get a response? What if I mess up my message? It is unknown, immutable, does not provide instant gratification. I want everything NOW. So Slack was created to poorly reinvent e-mail, but with instant gratification and emoji buttons.
I really love open source mailing lists. Every once in a while I'll go skim over some I'm subscribed to and see what's been going on. If I ask a question I usually get an answer within a day or two. The archives provide searchable record/context for everything. I can even review patches and comments on patches, and see the history of all the e-mails before/after it, whereas GitHub PRs are little islands unto themselves. Best of all, it's all stored offline, and I can use any client I want.
It's sad that technological progress means 'things got more advanced', and not 'things got better'.
Email is extremely bad for a whole lot of things though. Anything where the questioner doesn't know what they don't know. There can be a tendency to spend like a half hour composing an initial email in cases where the whole exchange would be resolved in under 5 minutes in real time, with better knowledge transfer. And the questioner can't really do it better, they don't know they're in the situation where the answer is going to info dump a whole lot of useful stuff that will completely change their perspective of what they were trying to do.
> Email is the best method of communication for anything complex.
In my experience email is best when audience is less than 5 and have a tightly shared context. I've seen innocuous looking proposals getting out of hand just 'coz people jumped in to respond; multiple threads forming and so on. It gets nightmarish very fast.
I've found a combination of shared docs + meeting to arrive at consensus to work well. A small group of people propose a design/solution in a doc. Share it with wider stake holders get their first round of feedback, incorporate it in the doc and then have one or two in-person meeting(s) to get them all sign-off. Slack could be used to have short conversations but not ideal from what I've experienced.
This is with respect to a a for-profit organisation. Can't speak about open source as I don't have any experience collaborating there.
You're robbing yourself of understanding other people if you just paper over everyone's issues with email as being some sort of fear that prevents them from seeing the obvious superiority of email.
It's a red flag when you're attributing a negative quality to people as the reason why they use or even prefer something. The cure is simple: talk to people and ask them.
Have you ever been CCed into an email thread where 4 people already have been having conversations for days? It's a nightmare. "hello, please check 4 days worth of jibby jabba nonsense and let us include you in this topic with a vague question". And most often, the subject isn't even relevant anymore.
I don't miss email. One of the immediate benefits of Slack is someone can give a notice via Slack and the receiver can callback with an "acknowledged" or "noted".
The callback is very important IMO because things get lost in email all the time. And yet you don't want 5 people to reply "noted".
But people are afraid of e-mail. Will anyone ever read my e-mail? When will I get a response? What if I mess up my message? It is unknown, immutable, does not provide instant gratification. I want everything NOW. So Slack was created to poorly reinvent e-mail, but with instant gratification and emoji buttons.
I really love open source mailing lists. Every once in a while I'll go skim over some I'm subscribed to and see what's been going on. If I ask a question I usually get an answer within a day or two. The archives provide searchable record/context for everything. I can even review patches and comments on patches, and see the history of all the e-mails before/after it, whereas GitHub PRs are little islands unto themselves. Best of all, it's all stored offline, and I can use any client I want.
It's sad that technological progress means 'things got more advanced', and not 'things got better'.