Kill Instant Messaging

> IMs occupy this weird spot between face to face conversation and a nice well-written email.

IM is great; It occupies the perfect spot where the conversation is real time but the parties don't have to immediately answer. Having 30 seconds to think in between each interaction sounds trivial but it has a _massive_ impact on the quality of the interaction.

I've noticed the people who dislike IM tend to be weaker communicators in general.

Compared to email, IMs tend to have less context and are generally short and to the point but otherwise unstructured. There's a pressure to respond quickly, and part of responding quickly is typing less words. Condensing thoughts to a minimum number of words is a harder skill than it seems; people tend to compensate for low quality communication with more words. Then there's still all the drawbacks of email: typing proficiency, spelling, grammar, and asynchrony.

Compared to mouth words conversations, IM doesn't have inflection or body language to help with tone. It's also not as fast as live conversations so it's easier losing context and easier to get overwhelmed with multiple conversations happening concurrently.

I personally love IM because it's easier to have multiple simultaneous conversations with more throughput and less latency than email normally achieves. I think of IM like async programming, when one conversation gets blocked, I can work on another. Mouth-to-mouth communication is like a singled threaded I/O, you're wasting resources (time) when you're blocked, but if you're not blocked you're more efficient since there's no context switching (so a heavily one sided conversation/lecture). Email is like multithreading, context switches are more expensive and the amount of work done per context switch needs to be big enough for it to be worthwhile. They all have merits and use cases.

I understand the sentiment here, but I disagree with the author, mostly the fact that video/face-to-face requires note taking to refer back to what was said. The author mentions this offhandedly, but I believe it's one of the greatest strengths of IM over a video call.

I despise note taking in meetings, it's stressful when people rely on me to take notes for them, and I end up missing out on the conversation because I'm trying to condense what was said into notes. Maybe I'm just a bad note taker.

The author seems to be intimidated by "whole team" IM rooms because they're hard to manage. I agree, they are hard to manage, and I refer to them as the wild west. But that's the beauty- they're unmanaged, open, anyone can read any thread (at my employer we use an IM client that supports threading).

The author didn't touch on that, and it's my favorite thing about "whole team" IM rooms: As opposed to small group emails and meetings, "whole team" IM rooms are a place where anyone and everyone can benefit from the discussion.

One of the appeals of email is asynchronicity—I can compose a well-reasoned proposal, and give my team time to compose a well reasoned counter-proposal.

But after more than a handful of rounds of this, it breaks down. Long email threads are impossible, especially ones that I wasn't originally participating in, but then got cc'd into. There's no easy way to skim and get a summary of the current state and where the heated bits of the proposal are.

That's why I like Dropbox Paper instead of email for these kinds of discussions. Threads spin off of a highlighted snippet, so there's always context to the discussion. Discussion in threads gets resolved, and the doc gets updated to reflect the decision—this means the doc is always canonical when someone new first reads it.

Email will never die because it’s so universally versatile. But specifically for intra-team discussions and decision-making, I'm convinced we can find (and already have found) better solutions.

Not sure what exactly the author does, but IM is the absolute life saver in every developers world. E-Mails are spammy, include too many people, are too long, take too long to write, get drowned in a sea of useless crap, etc... Everyone working in a bigger corporation, knows that emails are a major time sink.

Video calls? Sure, if there is a meeting. But video calls, not matter what software you use, is a nightmare. The quality is crap, the connection lags and it never feels anything close to real life interaction...

But most importantly, IM let's you respond on your own time. There is nothing worse that people talking to you or calling you with a video call while you are trying to figure out why that statemachine recursed into the 20th method call and then jumping this way and that way, suddenly jumped the wrong way and then still produced the correct result while thinking about how it got into the 20th call in the first place when it should have branche din the 10th call... You get the picture.

This reminds me of a Tina Fay quote: “It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good. I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.”

None of the arguments presented are particularly compelling. In particular, I find the paragraph describing why "IMs don't scale" kind of hilarious, as someone who has been on too many email threads where a seemingly endless stream of people are "cc-ed" in. Ultimately, I think every channel has its strengths and weaknesses, and teams need to figure out for themselves what the right mix is for their combination of size/personality/needs.

Ha. I'm on Hacker News again! :D

One thing that I'd like to make people pay attention to is the end. "I believe this would play well with other ways I'd like to organize the teamwork: with the general focus on agility, asynchronous, independence and ownership. But more on that another time." This post is a part of (to be written) broader series of mutually re-enforcing ideas.

Team culture is being built around the communication. In teams where communication is IM-based, people tend to rely on it, while they consider email to be for "the slow stuff, that I check once a day". I did work in a (small, but successful) fully remote startup where the whole communication was email based. Part of the reason was - everyone were in completely different timezones. And it just makes people learn to limit the need for synchronous communication: write better documentation, work more independently, automate more, etc.

Also - when people don't have to monitor multiple communication channels ... they monitor email better and tend to respond more often. It is actually not unusual to get a response in a matter of "30 seconds". When people expect replies, email is actually as fast as IM - you do realize it is being sent through the same Internet-tubes, right? :)

Another thing is - people switch to video-chat quicker, to talk something over quickly in 2 minutes, instead of spending half an hour being distracted and staring at "Joe is typing ..." back and forth.

BTW. I did work work in a big corp. with tooons and toons of useless emails in Outlook, and a terrible corporate IM system, that a lot of people didn't even bother to use. It was just a matter of setting up email filters right. First and most important was: "if I'm not directly the single person on To field it goes to some sub-folder". It was still better than eg. working in a medium-sized startup and using Slack. At least the configuration was in my own hands, instead of split between arbitrary channels, that often did not make much sense (too broad, or too narrow, not well defined, redundant, etc, etc.)

Anyway, thanks for all the comments. :)

If you are not willing to mute/ignore IMs while focusing they can be distracting and reduce productivity. However, if you aren't willing to mute/ignore I think the problem is not with instant messaging but your personal focus. Any form of communication can interrupt your workflow if you let it.

While I agree that email is great for asynchronous communication and that asynchronous communication is a fabulous tool, the author completely ignores the benefits of IM.

If I have a question for my teammate and they happen to be in a meeting so I can’t ask them directly, I could email them. Let’s say they’re someone who checks email maybe once an hour or twice a day... not exactly going to get a quick response. IM allows me to message them, ask the question, get a response and move on. Something that needs a quick response doesn’t work great in either email or a meeting.

That’s one example of a possible benefit to IM. That being said, I think the issues with IM are cultural. We expect an instantaneous response so it’s “bad” to leave a message unread for a few hours. I think it comes down to coaching your teammates what situation warrants what type of communication.

It will never be perfect, we’ll always have these debates but we can educate each other on the most efficient ways for each other.

How about kill face to face conversation and replace it with IM chat? IRL conversations suck. You can't edit what you say, you can't copy paste technical details into them, speaking is slower than typing and listening is slower than reading. It's inferior in every way. Just like these 1 hour conference Youtube videos that can be easily replaced by a convenient PDF presentation.

The IM system I would like to see would be intended to be used like a very lightweight bug tracker. It would be very thread-heavy, and a toplevel would correspond one-to-one with a task/bug/question. Obviously you can do all that with Slack today; the difference is that when a conversation is done, it can be marked closed and not show up in the view that you see. (Obviously you would be able to reopen it or find it again with search.)

In other words, the default view is a list of every conversation still relevant to you and your team, rather than an infinite-scrolling history.

EDIT: Hey, Zulip sounds much like what I want!

Man do I ever fucking disagree. I do not want to have a face to face meeting or a video call when a 20 second IM chat will suffice. Stop wasting my fucking time because you want to push your extroversion on everyone.

While I agree with the message, in the sense that I think IM combines the worst of both worlds, I try not to get too attached to my opinions on how we should communicate. I rarely have any say in that, and I try not to get worked up about things I have no control over.

However, it does seem (and the article doesn't stress this but I think it's important) that there are simply TOO MANY different channels of communication. Figuring out which channel that communication came through on, in order to find it, is a problem. Since getting rid of email seems impractical, as does getting rid of face-to-face, IM seems like the best one to drop.

But again, who care what I think? No one. In this case, I try not even to let me care, and save my energy for battles I might possibly win.

I agree with the author probably to the 75% mark, but not to the full 100% kill.

One key benefit of IM is being able to be the "next available interrupt". i.e. if team members have headphones on, we are only allowed to bother each other through IM which we say, "when you're available..." allowing the other party to effectively keep their current train of thought until it's complete.

Personally, I actively push conversations either to personal or to email depending on the situation.

IM is great and fills a particular space, but it's when people hold onto it too long it becomes a problem.

This can be said for email chains that are too long or face-to-face conversations that lack notes. Each has their problems, but also their place and is still useful.

IMs miss one thing badly, for me at least. It is headsup/important signals in a conversation flow. For now you only can mute your crowded chats and read miles of irrelevant texts later. But if a loose discussion turned into something important, there is no mechanism to notify busy participants or highlight parts of the chat for a later review.

In short, IMs should stop dinging on every message and should have two special buttons: 1. mark for reading (visual notification + table of marks), 2. wake everyone up asap (sound). Both should work for past, like “hey, it started with this message”.

I’m waiting for this separation for years, but never seen it in popular messengers (in any really).

Ah ah ah ! How can one says that in 2019, and even get listed on HN ?

Couldn't laught so much ...

IM is as useful as any other tools, just in right place (how on earth would like to have an inbox full of smalltalks ?

I mean you always need a hammer, but not to use with screws ;)

I love the idea of going back before IMs more than I'd like the reality, I think. Actually, I like the idea of no IMs at work (if there is only one small office) but it would suck to lose long distance friends or nevermet online-only friends.

Secondarily, the author writes:

> Searching through the history of a Slack room is difficult, and rarely useful.

I'm no fan of Slack (IRC uber alles) but I have to hand it to them: their search, in my experience, has been as good (read: magical) or better than google. Even for piss poor search terms it comes back with what I was thinking, not what I was typing. It's really perfect.

This person clearly never worked in a remote or distributed team.

Different modes of communication for different purposes. Now if you're using Microsoft teams or Jabber just stop. That's cruel and unusual punishment

This can only be said by someone who doesn't use IM "properly".

IM is: - asynchronous (vs. f2f or calls) - multi-format (text, audio, video or files) - searchable (vs. f2f, calls and in my case email which is horrible to archive/search stuff) - phone-centered (vs. email which is computer-centered)

I hate to write mails only with my phone, sometimes (e.g. when driving) I don't want to write a message but speak something instead.

Obviously also the possibility to quickly capture something with your mobile-camera and share it via IM was not considered. How practical is this scenario with a computer? Not much.

E-Mail is old technology and nearly no-one adapted it to our present time (don't know if it's just the protocols used or mainly the apps to interact with it).

Group chats are also much more pleasant with IM's, the feature to @-mention users in itself is something I desperately miss from E-Mail (I am talking about name-suggestions when I type the @ and about notification of that user that I mentioned him).

It could go on like this but I think there's enough on the table to show that E-Mail is not an alternative to IM and IM is not useless.

Depends on office culture I guess. To me IM is easily the best of both worlds rather than worst. I couldn't imagine a productive team without it.

Have you tried Zulip? I feel like it fixes most of the critiques you have towards IM as it's designed to be primarily used asynchronously.

I'm inclined to agree with the author, but sadly I think that getting a "little bit of software help" and "maintaining a culture of mindful and efficient communication" is simply not viable in large enterprises that run on Outlook. There are plenty of technical projects that have successfully used mailing lists for decades, and those searchable lists are now valuable historical records, but I have never seen this implemented successfully in a team that did not consist primarily of software developers. At every job I've had, I've built up an organised, searchable and valuable mail archive, and I know many of my colleagues have done the same thing, only for the archive to disappear when I change jobs because there is no way of filtering out personal and confidential material before sharing the archive. At least with Slack you know that group chats are not implicitly private, and the tools and culture allow you to send messages that are visible to everyone without expecting them all to read and respond.

I agree with the author on one on one IMs, but I disagree about chat rooms like slack. Slack isn't always the best place to save knowledge (I would love to know what other teams find works!), But I do think it works great for asking the kind of questions that you aren't sure who may currently have time/know how to answer! Especially as a new comer on a team.

A big issue with IM is that you rely on the passive “status” string, and:

- This feature sadly is buggy as hell in some popular implementations. People can appear “Online” one minute and “Away 2 hours” the next (!?!?), presumably from bad syncing code.

- I’ve seen that colleagues vary greatly in their interpretation of status strings. Some people will ask detailed questions using an IM when I am clearly “in conference call” or “in meeting” (or some other “of COURSE I’m busy, damn it!!!” statuses).

Ultimately, the problem with IM is that the “importance” of any given issue between Person 1 and Person 2 is not the same. This means, if I am really busy, I would rather be marked “Away” because frankly nothing else (short of signing off completely) is going to give me the tranquility required to finish a critical task.

There are other mediums of digital communication than IM and video chat. Old school forums are one, more modern things like Twist are another. I really liked the latter for corporate talk - good balance between organization of information but more presence than email.

When given the right to interrupt someones life (pop-in, phone call, text, IM, Twitter, Facebook, etc), the sender should have an unrelenting expectation of being denied without any sense of rejection. That access is a privilege which should never be abused.

As a manager in finance, I hate IM. Lots of persistence around everything you don’t want recorded (e.g. a banker venting about a difficult client) and none around what you need. Noisy, messy, informal and an encouragement of muddied thinking. Given everyone in our industry should be comfortable picking up the phone and drafting documentation, I usually move to ban IM as soon as I take the helm of a team.

(It can be okay on the engineering side. But I agree with OP. E-mails force us to think through our communications, a process which has other benefits. Voice is instant, effortless and delivers an emotional payload to boot. IM is cruft in between.)

Email is the worst as you can't easily send to 3rd party conversation or attachments etc nor can non CC-ed person silently follow it. I use emails only to send people link to forums, docs, apps etc. and almost never to explain something - anything that needs explaining should be documented on central place so anybody can see it and follow it even 5 years from now.

Forums should be the norm. They do not have all those IM/email problems. They are searchable, URLable, public or private, do not require client infrastructure and so on.

Good points, but it ends with the prima-donna “my time is more valuable than yours” attitude that some technical people adopt.

Email and IM share the issue of poorly transmitting tone and context. If your rant against IM presents email as the best medium, with in-person/voice as a secondary if necessary channel, the rant is highlighting a bigger problem and difficulty to communicate. Modern business is awful at communication.

A good IM system is automatically archived and end-user searchable, so right off the bat it is superior to in-person conversations or meetings.

A long time ago I used to have several long-distance friends who I e-mailed back and forth on a regular basis to update each other of various interesting things in our lives.

A regular pattern I noticed is that as soon as I added the IM account of any of them (usually by their request) those well-written long e-mails degenerated into

"Hey what's up"

"Not much you"

"Not much"

For software developers (engineering+product) these days, most of the deep communication happens over document review comments (say, in google docs, UX design tools) or code review comments (in your fav code review tool). Usually, a meeting is called via a calendar invite which may come via e-mail (but you never have to actually see the invite email as the invite shows up automatically in the calendar along with invite message/note - very important). The meeting itself can be in person or on remote video call. In between these two, for any casual business (of status update, coordinating meeting etc) or casual seeking/providing help we have chat in your fav 1-1 or group messaging app (slack, hangout etc).

I think e-mail is a poor replacement rich authoring and reviewing environments made for any specific type of document (PRD, Design document, code, UX design etc) needed in the SDLC workflows.

But nevertheless, writing good e-mail is an important skill – whenever you have to engage with someone outside of your team or immediately neighboring team, you cannot just cold call or message them (too intrusive) you will have to write a formal intro mail and set the context etc. and then bridge into your more richer workflows.

IM has its purposes like other forms of communication. It's when it is always the preferred choice of communication for every type and topic of discussion. Having a phone or face to face conversation with a friend feels like a breath of fresh air after long periods without.

My issue with this is that most of the emails I get are not thoughtful, verbose, well-reasoned responses. They're "great thanks" or "next monday at 5pm?". This is where IM shines – when you need to communicate something that should be brief.

It's worth pointing out that email is a form of instant message.

It's one that comes with some sensible expectations of response time. But there's nothing stopping you from seeing it immediately or replying to it quickly.

One could build a corporate culture around email usage that was just as insane as the current Slack distraction culture. Or you could have anything in between where the two sit now. It's very similar technology. But it comes with a big advantage of nobody needing to install anything or keep some random website open 24/7.

Personally, I tend to treat Slack as though it was a poor substitute for email. I'll check it every once in a while when I have some down time, and I make sure it can never send me a notification of any description.

Unless, of course, (as I mentioned elsewhere) the current gig is at a shop that is willing to pay the productivity cost of being able to distract its developers whenever it wants. In that case, let it bingle away non-stop. Just don't expect me to get things done very quickly.

At this point the primary advantages of IM is that it is possible to use securely. Email just isn’t.

At my company we have not had IM, but we might get MS teams. I have been thankful we have not had it for the purpose of focus.

I hate email as much as the author likes it. I prefer to use systems like Confluence and work asynchronous on a cloud based document.

What about a mix between IM and recorded voice messages , like whatsapp does?

I find it really practical for having asynchronous conversations: faster than typing messages, without having to answer right away.

AFAIK Slack & co don't offer this feature.

I manage a medium sized team of developers, many of whom often work from home. IM is our communication lifeline. I couldn't imagine having to phone or email them 100 times a day, what a nightmare.

What are all levels of communication?

>Urgent- Phone call/in person/contact boss

>Need response within 1 day - IM

>Beyond 1 day- Email

Just a thought, curious if there are any better systems for communication?

Number of channels set up on day 1 = number of users * 10. Seems to be the classic case of social (over)engineering in most teams, doesn't it? :-)

I'm completely the opposite of this guy. I have friends of 25+ years that I have never had a phone conversation or an email with, but we instant message all the time (and hang out in person once in a blue moon). He also says:

>In theory, IMs are supposed to be fast (“instant”), but in practice typing takes enough time, to make instant messages much slower than simply talking.

I'm astonished when I come across anyone in the computer industry that actually types more slowly than they speak. If anything, speaking is marginally slower.

TL;DR: Offline messaging is incompatible with non-intrusive synchronous communication.

I think the main problem with modern IM software resides in letting the user send messages to offline recipients (offline as in "not actively using the application"). For modern IM to be "instant" or "synchronous", every user has to be able of being interrupted at any time by a message sent to them, by means of intrusive notifications; this means that "being offline" is no longer an option in modern synchronous communication, so major IM software designers did away with it altogether--e. g. WhatsApp.

This didn't happen with MSN Messenger pre-2005, for instance. Sending a message was only possible if both parties were connected at the same time; the moment the recipient disconnected, the text box got greyed out and the chat effectively ended. This meant that every user had to deliberately decide to be available for other people to message them; it also meant that IM was truly "instant" at all times--except when people left for a few minutes, which prompted an "away" status on their part; nonetheless, the decision to be connected had to be consciously taken at some point.

A solution could be designing IM software that respects your time and attention. This could be achieved by forcing users to actively use the app in order to receive messages. P2P IM apps like Briar[0] are like that by definition--it's a "technical-limitation-turned-feature" for me.

[0]: https://briarproject.org.

As with all tech, they all have their strengths. Working remotely with a colleague then it’s great for short queries but that should be no more than a couple of messages. If you have a conversation that requires half an hour back and forth on IM, then you should have lifted the phone and gave them a ring.

IM wouldn't be very popular if we agreed with what the author states.

When pairing I’m annoyed when a non-urgent IM or email notification pops up and I lose my pair’s focus. Some folks have their text messages and social media notifications popping up too, preventing concentration for more than a few minutes.