Slack does a good job overall, but I'm glad to see articles like this one challenging the enthusiasm that they've seen of late. I'm starting to share the article's opinion that Slack encourages unthoughtful communication. I do wish the author had spent a little time pointing out some specific product decisions that lead to the kinds of problematic communication they were seeing.

For example, basic product choices like "every message highlights a room for attention" creates, for me, a feeling of "farmville for corporate communications." There's always another channel to click, another few sentences to read. This makes Slack very engaging at first, and makes it highly successful at lodging itself into organizations. And that's great, because Slack's a far sight better than email. But this rapid-fire feel encourages synchronous communications, and everyone quickly learns that @-mentions and DMs get quicker responses. That in turn leads to communicating with individuals instead of teams (or instead of searching issues, or Jira, or a wiki, or whatever). I don't think chat has to be this way; product decisions can encourage a more thoughtful question and answer flow.

I think that Chat may be like product management: the product opinions matter quite a bit, and teams have varying styles, so there's room in the market for several different products. Slack does a great job for a certain communication style, but it's not the only style out there. I hope some competing products with different opinions gain enough traction to keep them honest.