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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

When I was at a fully local company, slack was good for conversations where a few people might be actively discussing an issue and then I could come in hours later and skim the history, if it was a channel I felt relevant to be aware of.

But slack was also super easy to use wrongly and drain so much time into. It really helped to declare slack a lossy source of comms. You shall not expect people to read it and you shall not use it as a data store. Important things go into email, wiki, tickets.

On a fully remote team, slack is so important, but all the same rules need to apply.

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Almost agree, but email should also be treated as lossy.

It drives me crazy when people send mass company emails with, for example, new policy or forms attached, and don't post them elsewhere. New hires only see them if someone remembers they exist and forwards them, plus it's impossible to figure out current state without spending a bunch of time playing email archeologist.

Email is generally regarded as the most reliable in my experience.

To the parent's point, how do you get a future employee to receive the information in an email that was sent before they started?

You include it in their onboarding

So now you have to store each email that includes important information in a second place, so that you remember to include it in their onboarding. Why not just post it to the intranet in a well-known location in the first place?

Onboarding does not necessarily have to be email. However, let's not conflate onboarding with regular communication.

Ideally the information goes where it’s supposed to in your permanent knowledge repo. This could be a wiki, a website, etc.

The email is sent as a notification that the content has been added, updated or moved.

Email should ideally serve as a notification system and a lossy communication system where things you want to retain need to be backed up somewhere else.

The nice thing wth email is that being an open eco system there are a lot of integrations that are supported easily.

Right. But too often, as gregmac said, "people send mass company emails with, for example, new policy or forms attached, and don't post them elsewhere". Email should be used for notification and ephemeral communication, and not for information dissemination. In that way it's the same as chat.

An internal NNTP server would work better in that aspect when compared to email.

Exchange has so-called "Public Folders" you could also access through IMAP, but it was more convenient to use and search with Outlook. Conceivably you could make a similar 'public' maibox on a different mail platform, a poor man's newsgroup.

Shameless plug here, but this is exactly why we built Carrot ( OSS / SaaS https://carrot.io/ )

We've been remote founders and employees in numerous distributed startups, and have always found the same issue, the noisy nature of chat/Slack and lossy nature of email necessitates a 3rd place to keep the important decisions, announcements and history of the company.

Lots of companies use wikis and forum software for this, and those can work, but we're betting that a dedicated solution can work better.

I don't know, Github + Basecamp are also used by fully remote teams and they don't focus on realtime chat functionality.

Some kind of tool is necessary for sure, but different tools set a different focus to provide a solution for organization teams and companies.

I guess everyone should find what works best for them.

Agreed. I'm not advocating for slack. I'm more advocating that slack isn't strictly bad like some seem to be saying. It can work. It can also be misused.

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