Agreed! Tools almost always reflect the flaws of their users — but it’s not to say that the flaws of the tool proper can’t harm a user too. In Slack’s case, I think their notification settings (and the defaults in particular) encourage an always-on culture that can be hard for some corporate cultures to resist.

Regarding public communications — I think that only aggravates the noise/always-on issue, but if that’s your think, you can of course do that on email. See examples from Stripe [0] and Buffer [1]. (Not sure if/how that scales though! Was there a follow-up from these companies?)

[0]: https://stripe.com/blog/email-transparency

[1]: http://joel.is/how-we-handle-team-emails-at-our-startup-defa...