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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

While the tone of the article is maybe a little hyperbolic, I agree with a lot of it. The default setting to be alerted when absolutely anything happens is crazy. And whenever I see someone talking about Slack replacing e-mail as if it's a good thing, I recoil in horror. You can answer e-mails at your own pace, while Slack prioritises instant replies.

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I have to disagree. The problem with email is the signal to noise ratio is too high, because it is globally accessible. Where as Slack is company only. Some things need to be addressed now. With email that would be turning on notifications, but then you get notifications for spam. Slack doesn't have the spam problem. The closest it gets is messages from computers. Those can be controlled or segregated to certain channels.

I think this really just speaks to a need for better email clients - or just better email client configurations.

A good email client for a business might filter all messages from other members of your company into a given folder, and then only notify for messages in that folder. Notifications for any other messages would just be blocked. Heck, don't even show them in the unread count until the user looks for them in particular.

" Where as Slack is company only. "

This problem is easily solved with a filter, no?

> Slack doesn't have the spam problem. The closest it gets is messages from computers. Those can be controlled or segregated to certain channels.

And that's why Slack will not be a replacement for e-mail.

Your life doesn't turn around the company you're currently employed in. Or, at least mine doesn't. Company messages are only a small fraction of important messages I get daily.

(Not to mention that Slack killing e-mail would be a pretty dystopian future, with some single profit-seeking company controlling your primary means of communication.)

> The problem with email is the signal to noise ratio is too high, because it is globally accessible.

If your inbox is deluged with spam from outside the company, you need to filter your e-mail by domain.

Turn off alerts unless you are specifically mentioned or something happens in a channel you deem important.

I dunno.

What I do is simply mute the chatty channels, and go in when I need answers or get invited/DM'd.

Mute is pretty powerful.

You can't mute "@here" notifications though, which is really annoying. We have a slack bot that proxies "@team" to relevant "channel owners" , but the @here is more discoverable/more uniformly usable, so people still use that.

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