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Comment by sidhanthp | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I never viewed Slack as synchronous. I kept all notifications off, and checked it whenever I had a few minute break or wanted to catch up on our office's conversation.

Slack allowed anyone to contact me by tagging me or @here, so it was obvious when someone wanted it to be synchronous (therefore breaking my communication), but the grand majority of communication was asynchronous unlike email - which does a poor job of differentiating between messages that should (and shouldn't) break attention.

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I work fully remote and that's what I think as well. It's a thing that let's you wait or respond immediately, up to you. That's the major selling point.

Depends on company culture, of course. But my team is also distributed from -8 to + 10 UTC. So nobody is expecting someone who is asleep to write back to them.

Another thing to note is the presence of other sources of communication, like GitLab issues. If you have those you don't always have to ping a live person in sync mode. Often you can just pick up an issue and do it with minimal input.

Hem, plain classic emails offer the very same thing: it's up to you respond quickly or leave the message behind... IMAP IDLE is not exactly a new thing...

As does snail mail.

But I think by now the benefits of a chatroom UX are clearly valued by a lot of people.

Mh, perhaps lot of people who never tried good modern MUA like notmuch-emacs or mu4e or perhaps even mutt&forks of pine&forks...

I still have to find a webui more effective than my notmuch-emacs UI (with, of course, notmuch underneath)...

They mentioned this in the article - "Slack is capable of being both sync and async, though we’ve noticed that there does seem to be some social expectation of a quick response on Slack regardless of how explicitly we state otherwise."

That is the first thing I do when I install a slack client at a new job. Turn off all the notifications. Then I check it when it makes sense for me.

I give team members my phone number and say "text me if you need something ASAP". People don't do that unless it really is important, in my experience.

I really wish they had @ and @-whenever-you-get-to-it tags

Same. I have Slack on my phone but I refuse to enable notifications. I open it when I choose to and respond when I can/if I need to.

At least for me, the whole problem with Slack is how many/how often I get @mentions or DMs, not the other stuff. Sure the other stuff is async, that’s not really the issue at least for me and lots of others

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