Slack Wants to Replace Email. Is That What We Want? | Hacker News Reader

Slack Wants to Replace Email. Is That What We Want?

nytimes.com

88 pointspseudolus135 comments

No, we don't want that. I find Slack to be slow, clumsy, and inefficient. Monolithic services like Slack don't provide the flexibility of federated services like email.

I use a desktop mail client. It's faster, has more powerful search features, works with any email service, I don't need to pay anyone a fee to access my old mail, and I can use it even when I'm offline.

On the other hand I must say Slack is the perfect tool for couples. You can create channels for #restaurantstotry #moviestowatch #hikes and so on, and it is possible to leave notifications on for just that one workspace while turning off literally all other notifications and calls on your phone. The API integrations can also allow you to give each other access to smart locks, thermostats, expense tracking, and other things if you wish.

Or, you could, you know, talk directly to your partner...

I meant as a couples-oriented replacement for WeChat/SMS/FB messenger/WhatsApp that cat organize things better, not a replacement for the real life part

Ah, touche

Trello. Not only can you add upvotes and all, but you can tag things with locations and then get a map view - great for vacation planning.

Bump for Trello. I use it to manage my team (who work remotely) and personal life, too. We use it for vacations, long-tern house projects (gardening, building things, etc.)

I've tried Slack in a few different contexts and have always found that the chat-based interface encouraged users to do just that: chat.

A combo of Trello + email work better for keeping communication focused on the product/project, in my experience.

It would make sense for apple iMessage to integrate said features.

Especially for families that aren't all on Apple.

Their biggest lock-in and I think a reason a large portion of average users don't switch to Android. I know this to be true for both of my siblings, as well as my wife's entire family.

Or we could keep things simple and just have one shared Notes file or Google Doc with separate headers with those hashtags. The above sounds stressful

We use this for now, but with Slack there is the combination of IM with lists and TODO items. The alerts help us note when something is new and updated.

What is interesting to me is how our society is slowly evolving the personal, short-term information storage and retrieval. That is how I view Slack, but without paying for the storage, it's in a sense used only for short-term memory. Not for important things like memories, where Google Docs is for memories and deeper thoughts.

Sounds like this could be solved with good old Post-It notes, but maybe I'm old-fashioned..

You can't stick a post-it note to the fridge from the office. I would agree in spirit though that a todo list would work better, something like Todoist

Interesting, it is true that a simple text box is the easiest, fastest input method making it the most likely to use when in a rush/taking quick notes. I would have gone for something like workflowy (https://workflowy.com/) or dynalist (https://dynalist.io/) but having a single tool for both IM and note taking beats it. You could always have a bot that puts your slack content in those anyway. I shall take inspiration from this.

Which desktop mail client do you recommend? I keep trying to leave g-apps, but the search (and address autocomplete) keeps dragging me back. I'm more than happy to pay for quality, if that makes a difference.

Thunderbird?

I use Thunderbird daily, to manage multiple email accounts, and I love it very much. I wouldn't, though, call its search functionality "good". For simple queries it works so-so, but for anything complex I end up logging into the Gmail or O365 web apps.

This is pretty much my only gripe with it. And for daily use, I dramatically prefer it over webmail.

One other thing that makes me chuckle more than anything... the scam email detection heuristics count cross-domain images to be indicators of scams/phishing. I have two clients who have signature images linked from a different domain, and every message has a red header that warns "THIS MESSAGE MAY BE A SCAM". More than you know, Thunderbird. More than you know.

I love open source as much as the next person but thunderbird is bad, not evolution bad, but bad. If you have hundreds of thousands of email messages from a decade of email it just breaks.

I’m +1 on superhuman but I miss sparrow.

Do you have an invite for Superhuman?

Yeah, definitely miss Sparrow.

I'm actually pretty amazed at how well Thunderbird seems to handle my 5 email accounts with messages going back to 2004. Unless I have to search...

My 12 accounts are spread over a handful of providers, with emails going back to 2006 in some; While I agree thunderbird's search is inferior to gmail's, its global indexer is decent in capabilities and horrible in ux, whereas the "standard" search is horrible in capabilities and speed, but decent in ux.

I use the "expression search" addon, which is perfect as long as you only need to search on metadata; and the global indexer when I do. It's not perfect, but it doesn't make me want to quit in anger, and not even to surrender my privacy to google.

To be honest, Thunderbird isn't the most shining e-mail client. First of all, its UI lacks appeal (for example, it doesn't support viewing conversations in a single page, although you can install a plugin for it). And it is sometimes pretty sluggish (probably because it is made with XULRunner, similar to Electron)

But I still use Thunderbird despite all these problems. It is the only email client that supports both Windows and Linux, supports HTML, and doesn't require you to create an account and connect to a third-party DB to use it (I'm looking at you, Mailspring!)

Superhuman

I wondered what happened to Superhuman earlier today, did they ever ship? Same sign up page and inactive twitter for years.

Seem to be still pushing some small UX features but that's all I know

Built by the creator of Gmail so it'll probably be an invite/referral only thing for 5 years or so..

Mutt.

In all seriousness.

Kmail (or KDE's integrated PIM, Kontact), are GUI alternatives.

Interesting. Nearly 100% of the comments here are negative, perhaps because the title paints things in black and white?

Life before workplace group chats was really painful. We had IRC for those of us who knew how to use it, but it was never going to pass muster in a corporate office. Email was next to meetings as "the worst thing about work" and you were both drowning in it, but never able to get the things you needed over it. 1-1 chat with AIM, etc helped, but then every task went off into the void until those people reported back.

I love slack. We went from Hipchat to Flowdock to Slack over the years and Slack is the one that gets pretty much everything right. I've got channels for every client we work with, and they actually participate. I've got different Slack instances for work, friend groups, my hackerspace, etc. I can flip through and stay up to date on WAY more than I would without it.

And most importantly, people actually use the thing. It's easy, it's on everything, and it gives me the option to ping them or not as needed. Not everything is the same level of urgency.

It doesn't kill mail - mail still has it's place for longer form messages that need more thought and a deeper response, but damn if Slack isn't the right tool for a lot of my jobs.

Slack isn't great. No slack is worse. It still needs some diligence to not get distracted. But overall an improvement.

The nyt is just publishing some bs article right on the heels of slacks announcement.

No.

Slack is ok for chatting and quickly sharing stuff, but not for longer, more thoughtful, drawn out, asynchronous discussions.

I find this varies between people.

I have co-workers with whom I've had fantastic, multiple-day drawn-out asynchronous discussions on Slack.

I have other co-workers for whom this form of communication fails completely.

I'm not sure if this is a learnable skill or if it's down to something fundamental connected to different people's communication styles.

I used to lament there were folks who insisted on talking on the phone, when I needed requirements written down to refer to later. Both approaches have merit at times.

There is definitely an aspect to learn. I have had co-workers who routinely message on Slack, and if they don't get a response within 60 seconds, they get up, go to my desk and bother me -- in the middle of coding. Cumulatively lost likely several months of progress to this.

As much as I've embraced Slack, I just don't see it replacing an entire open protocol, with one proprietary product. If anybody was close to this, it definitely would of been MSN Messenger at one point. Everyone I knew had MSN Messenger, and would check their inbox from the IM client.

Unless we start seeing @slackmail.com or something and they make a very powerful mail client, but I havent see Slack do much period, it's taking how long just to add dark mode into Slack across platforms? I feel like nothing visible is being done by Slack. To be fair it does work, but new things would be nice to see.

I don't think you'll be able to replace the likely massive market share that gmail / hotmail / yahoo has.

There's nothing stopping you using slack for thoughtful drawn our discussions. My experience is that in slack the people who send quickfire messages are the people who send quickfire emails, and the people who send thought emails send thought our slack messages.

The big advantage of slack (to me) is that people use channels, and it avoids the "I mailed X and Z, but forgot to CC y in on this", where people routinely selectively email people when really more people should be aware.

> There's nothing stopping you using slack for thoughtful drawn our discussions.

Nothing but the UI… limited formatting, poor suitability of threads to the purpose, and so on. It’s designed around chat messages.

I don't disagree it's designed for chat but I do disagree with your other points. It supports a subset of markdown which are the important ones (quotes, unformatted, lists) and ignores things like headings and colouring. I like the limited support. I think threads are great - they allow you to have a side discussion based on a single message with context for anyone who has access to the channel they happen in. Compared to those gigantic email chains where you have 3 or 4 groups having differing conversations in the same thread by quoting what they're replying to...

It doesn't matter. It makes synchronous, quick communication easy, so that's what people do. Email forces you to communicate thoughtfully, Slack encourages snap responses.

> Email forces you to communicate thoughtfully,

I wholeheartedly disagree. My inbox is full of emails with subjects and no body, one-line half baked questions, non-responses, incorrect information in a body of correct information that gets lost in the sea of noise, broken formatting that render massive email chains totally unreadable. Often times those massive chains of emails have totally diverged from the initial subject and people on the mail.

The biggest problem with slack being used for thoughtful drawn out discussions is that it's UX around recall (i.e. finding a thoughtful discussion you had before) is not good.

You want to document these discussions. In my experience, Confluence, Google Docs, and email are much easier to find things. Specifically because they have a UI which has a unit per discussion (an email thread, confluence doc, google doc) while Slack is a stream of multiple discussions happening at the same time. As such is it very hard to search and also to separate discussions. Discussions can spread across threads while they tend to stay in the same email thread or Google document.

To give an example, let's say I want to have a discussion on a technical design I created. I would probably either create a Google doc and ask for comments or send out an email. If I ever wanted to refer back to the discussion I just needed to find the unit of discussion. It's relatively easy to find an email or google doc.

In slack there really isn't an equivalent. it's possible you could create a dedicated channel per discussion (although no one does) but even trying to find that channel when you have thousands of channels is much harder. Part of the problem is that search isn't very good in slack, but the larger problem is they don't have any equivalent of a "unit" of discussion.

Oh yea and there's also the whole problem that slack only works well internally but there are lots of thoughtful discussions you need with your team and outside organizations.

Should we get Google Wave back? Not that I remember how it was exactly..

Maybe something that combines Slack and collaborative editing (like Google Docs). It might work if you could just in the middle of the chat switch from discussion to editing a document. This should be somehow integrated experience, happening inside the same tool.

At my current place, that manifests as just linking to a Google Doc in a chat thread and moving the writing over there.

Or a Confluence document in my experience.

Yeah; in my experience Confluence is the de-facto architecture repo.

Fair enough, but off all your communications how much of it falls into this category? 20%? What about for the average Joe/Jane? I'll go out on a limb and say even less.

Email is a walkie-talkie. It's a fax machine. Yes, it still works. But it's sweet spot is getting smaller and smaller.

>Slack is ok for chatting and quickly sharing stuff, but not for longer, more thoughtful, drawn out, asynchronous discussions.

The reality is that in my workplace, it's hard to get longer, more thoughtful, drawn out discussions via email anyway. If I write an email that is more than 2 paragraphs, it very often does not get read. And it almost never gets an equally thoughtful response. I haven't internalized my lesson - I still sometimes write long emails. But 90+% of the times I won't get a response. And when I do, 90+% are going to be 1-2 liners.

Don't get me wrong. I like email and simply don't do chat. My work chat tool used to say something to the effect of "If you're in the building I won't respond. Come to me in person or send me an email". I like email so much that I put in significant effort[1] in making my email experience better.

Now you've given me an idea for my next project. Autorespond to emails that contain less than 130 characters with "Sorry, I prefer well thought out emails, and your email is too short to warrant my attention."

In all seriousness, I probably won't do it - can't think of a way to do it without annoying them. But I do recall an email exchange I had with an old friend, and at one point I sent this email:

> Dear old friend,

> In 3 emails, you wrote a sum total of 12 words.

> For someone as well read as you, please ponder over this. :-)

> You were once insistent on preserving the quality of writing - at least in books and novels, and decried the decline that arose with mass paperback fiction. Do you now complain that tweets are too long?

(He never responded).

[1] http://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-proble...

I'm like you and love long emails. The vast majority of people are more likely to read and respond to short emails though.

I miss newsgroups.

You can pry my email from my cold dead hands.

Why anybody would want an email replacement controlled by a single company is beyond comprehension.

I honestly think it’s just a slow news day.

It's because Slack's IPO is tomorrow

game set match

For the same reasons people wanted an IRC replacement controlled by one company?

We're already well on our way to replacing email with gmail. No guarantees that your self-hosted email server will actually be able to send emails anymore.

What we really want is a simple, federated IM protocol that isn't an overly complicated mess. This leaves out XMPP / Jabber.

AIM and Windows Messenger were probably closest to this... AOL and Microsoft missed a huge opportunity here.

I'm a fan of the matrix protocol. Its still early days...but I'm hopeful for the future.

How easy is it on Slack to contact a person outside of your company? My impression is that it's fairly convoluted compared to email, but we don't use Slack extensively at my org (only for casual internal chats), so I don't know if that's actually the case. I don't see it ever replacing email without a way to conveniently communicate with people in a different workspace.

I think it'd be nice if Slack was setup more like Discord, where users have unique IDs that they can use to contact other people directly.

> How easy is it on Slack to contact a person outside of your company?

in general, contacting arbitrary people outside your org is just not a use case slack supports.

that said, the slack administrator can create certain channels that "bridge" two or more organizations' slacks. this makes it easy to chat with business partners without necessarily giving them access to all the other channels. you can dm these people if the admin chooses to allow it.

So, no, Slack is not replacing email. Most of us have exactly no interest in an email "replacement" where you need the administrator's approval to talk to people outside your organization.

For in-organization email... they might. Outside, no way.

depends what you use email for. it's not gonna work well for corresponding with your grandma, but I personally prefer it for work comms. ymmv.

Technically it works, but the user experience when hanging in multiple Slacks is pretty poor (at least with the desktop client). Easy to miss notifications, switching between Slacks is slow and managing the logins is bit painful.

It is fine, but somehow I always miss messages and alerts...

Also you have to sign into all your Slack workspaces each time you go to a new machine, which is annoying. Discord only requires a single sign in.

I think the author more was suggesting that Slack is going to replace inter-company communication via email. Nowhere in the article does it suggest that Slack will be replacing intra-company communication/email.

I think you swapped your inter and intra: inter means between and intra means within. Slack is aiming to replace intra-company comms

How easy is it via email to contact a person outside of your company? Do people actually answer emails from random strangers? Seems like an easy way to become a phishing or social engineering victim.

Slack is a very interesting thing to compete with – I do have some personal experience with that, our product having been squarely aimed at this exact underserved space between email and Slack.

The core issue is that Slack is useful as a social tool at work, for work, but its main stickiness comes from the fact that it can be a respite from work. This is what the 'fun' is a code word for that is mentioned in all Slack marketing materials.

So if you make a tool that is better at getting people be productive, it ends up being less sticky than Slack. If you make one that is more social, then it gets disqualified by 'serious' purchasing departments as a fun toy that some employees are playing with.

That's a tough one. Ultimately the solution, or at least the way I'm betting my chips, is that you can find a less anxiety-inducing medium of communication to underlie work comms, and make it modern (less JIRA and more Discord) that can be a winning bet.

[!Plug alert from this point on!] An attempt at formulating how that could look is the thing I'm working on. It's the private version of https://getaether.net for companies, in private beta.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20194320

My favorite comment: https://twitter.com/cabel/status/703383420286578688

"Slack is amazing it totally replaced my e-mail inbox!!!!

secretly now has 95 separate inboxes"

Perhaps a minor quibble, but I think this sentence is a little bit misleading: "The company says it has 88,000 paying customers — a sliver of a sliver of the world’s desk-and-phone-bound office workers, and fewer than work full-time at, for example, Google’s parent company, Alphabet."

I'm fairly sure that by their definition, a "customer" would be a single paying entity. AKA a company. Which itself might have many thousands of users in it. I guarantee that Slack has FAR more than 88k USERS on paid accounts. And users is the correct number if you're going to compare it against "the world’s desk-and-phone-bound office workers" or the number of employees at Alphabet.

not minor quibble. that is a significant issue.

The article says 10M daily active users.

Right, so they had better data (though I think that includes free accounts), yet they chose to use something misleading in the intro to the article.

Email doesnt take 1GB+ of RAM when running.

You clearly haven't used Outlook for Mac

Not OP but I haven’t either, because I don’t need to. Email is client agnostic.

If all you want Slack for is for IRC style conversations then there are lots of tiny Slack clients. My favorite being wee-slack that I use every day.

I swear people complain about Slack being bloated like the majority of us aren't using Chrome, Firefox, Outlook, VS Code, Atom, IntelliJ all day. This is something that at best is a mild annoyance to people outside HN. There's zero business value in developing desktop software that is lightweight because if people are willing to pay $5/user/month for it they're willing to give their employees computers capable of running it.

We're in a forum of hackers -- we're supposed to feel smugly superior about our 500kb terminal Slack clients that have a built-in lisp interpreters.

Replacing email completely is an arduous task, if not impossible. You can replace email for internal communications, via apps like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Groups etc, there still needs to be an email interface with everyone else outside the company. Everything is so tied to email, such as it being a primary identifier and login for most websites.

Having said that, email is becoming less and less relevant for communications. Businesses are relying more on other forms of asynchronous messaging like on-site chat, SMS, WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, Facebook Messenger, Push messaging, conversational support platforms, etc to communicate with their customers.

I think apps like Slack will continue to be more effective and popular vs email for internal use, while email will remain king for external communications.

Slack's ok as long as you silence all notifications and leave/mute all semi-important channels.

Does it matter what Slack wants? People tend to use what THEY want.

Slack is useful for solving problems, it is not useful for managing dynamics. It encourages a kind of public performance among non-technical people, and creates the situation for a kind of callout culture where you can apply pressure by creating a public paper trail.

It's great for small teams, but it does not scale. It rapidly becomes twitter with your bosses and co-workers, where almost nothing being said is worth saying, and anything worth saying shouldn't be said there.

I work for a Fortune 100 company and we don't use Slack, but we do use email. I think step one for slack to replace email is to get a larger market share.

I feel like hn lives in parallel world from me. I hate business email, and slack has cut out 99% of it. Whenever someone forwards me 30 message thread with message "can you do this" I wanna punch them in the face.

Perhaps this thread self selected people who misinterpreted the title. Email is still OK for newsletters, transactional messages, receipts, spam or from business - something very official.

How would Slack make this human behavior different?

Slack threads are much easier to follow.

But big corps still could improve of how they misuse slack (first - stop creating millions of channels).

Our team just recently switched from Slack to Twist.. precisely because Slack doesn't feel like a good replacement for email. It has support for threaded conversations but it feels like an afterthought and doesn't fit well into our workflow of "discuss something in a thread, archive it when it's resolved"

Slack is good because it does one thing really well. That's organizing group chats amongst coworkers. That isn't monolithic, the FANG approach of having you enter their environment to use a single product like Hangout is monolithic. Rival services get in the way with this OS-styled approach, when really internet utilities should be following the same focus that unix did. Most people don't like to feel locked into one companies' suite of applications. This industry is far to complicated for that approach. That's also why Slack won't replace email. We already use email addresses as our internet mailbox, where all our accounts are linked. Email is the most professional way of electronically sending someone a message period. Slack may of gone public, but that seems to be far beyond their reach.

I see organizations using emails like they were only for alerts and becoming so many and so unread and backed up, you simply don't care about unread anymore at all. That's why google has to do the contextual meaning of them and bring them to your attention with AI. Slack or anything slack-like, makes things more inline to how we work with people, at least from what I experience and no AI needed to duct tape its shortcomings.

This makes me think that phones should be disrupted, in terms of using phone numbers. Calls are spammed now just like email. We need a permission-based phone system like slack where only people that we know can contact us. Wait nm that's dumb, we already have the internet and you can call someone through slack video already.

For us at least, email had also become this.

I have zero interest in something that isn't federated and portable. I want to own all my correspondence and if some provider is not meeting my needs, I want to be able to take advantage of DNS to move to another provider transparently to the people that want to contact me.

There's been thousands of attempts to replace email already. What makes this one any different?

Their extra high price for IRC (:

It's not the effort as much as the market. Email is relatively slow (i.e., async) and that's less and less appropriate for more and more ppl's expectations.

Slack is real-time SMS. I don't think it's really a matter of replacing email as much as email's sweet spot is naturally shrinking in the market.

No, Slack is annoying and a rip off.

I don't see much benefit from slack over IRC, but definitely over mail.

mail threads are horrible, it's impossible to sort incoming by topic, quoting in replies is quirky, I can't bookmark mails well (at least not when forced to use outlook) and people abuse it as a to-do list making them forget anything that is not a mail...

I really like the forced threads in this one other slack competitor though (forgot which), there everything is a thread by default.

What I recommend for slack: star all persons and channels that are important, mute any channel with bots, notications only for mentions, occasionally go DND and edjucate people that they can overide it DND with a PM.

If you need to have it as a to-do: use the star function on messages.

As someone who likes email and irc...

What’s the point of slack? What’s the appeal? Honest question!

Because it's like IRC, but way easier for the average non-technical user to set up and use.

I have ran my own private IRC server before and frankly, it's a pain. There are lots of solutions to common problems (like using IRC bouncers) but it is just complicated enough to make products like Slack a superior user experience.

It is pretty easy to get grandma up and running on Slack. It is much more difficult to get her to use IRC.

* You can use it in a web browser.

* File sharing's pretty dang good.

* Client supports tons of bells & whistles like inline file preview. And emoji and anigifs and all that stuff which, love them or hate them, most people love.

* Pretty good multi-device notification.

* Pretty good notification settings that, set anywhere, work seamlessly with the above on all your devices.

* The client(s) may be janky thanks to the underlying tech, but the design is rarely janky-feeling.

* Search that's not half bad.

* Pretty good interface for ad-hoc private 1 on 1 or multiparty rooms.

* You can sign your org up online for free to try it out and have all the above, no configuring anything, no setting up bouncers, no persistent daemons per user on any server anywhere. No server at all, for you. Just a web form, and you're off to the races.

* Tons of 3rd party integrations with setup processes often little more complicated than the original Slack signup, if even that hard. Pointy, clicky, maybe a copy-paste, and you're getting Jira notifications in a channel (ugh).

[EDIT] deleted a duplicate bullet point.

Seems like I’m in the tiny minority here, but since adopting Slack at work my emails have basically been reduced to just automated github notifications and the such, or the very rare capital-S-Serious topic threads.

Starring channels I care about and muting everything else, I end up with a way more flexible communication medium where I can still decide when to respond, and do way more things than I could with email (eg edit past messages)

Am I crazy?

I don't even want Slack to replace Irssi and I am what they call a "digital native".

If it isn't important enough for an email, don't write me, come for a Coffee and a chat. If you want to talk with me directly, ask me or call me.

I can imagine organisations where slack would work, but I don't really see the benefits outweighing the potential issues.

Slack would be a lot more bearable if people in my office made using threads a habit.

We have slack advocates at my work that push this line.

The stated intent is to replace email with slack - but now I effectively have 50+ inboxes to check and track.

Multiple threads blow out the number of places I have to check (and consequently mouse-clicking) by at least an order of magnitude.

What features does slack have that a well designed email client could not have?

The need to get lots more attention since they are going to go public soon?

It doesn't get newsletter, recruiter, and salesperson spam.

The ability to share links to conversations. I can link to any message on Slack, in context, going back to the beginning. I can't link to emails: I have to find and forward them to people.

Shameless self-promotion:

https://www.prettyfwd.com

https://www.fwdeveryone.com

Basically the former is like pastebin for email, where you just set when you want the thread to expire and then click a button to get a shareable link behind an unlisted URL. And the latter is the paid version (good for businesses with 10+ employees), where you can share threads within your business so that they're searchable, discoverable, etc.

Here's an example thread I just grabbed from a public mailing list: https://www.prettyfwd.com/t/TzirVw9RSOCPuoIA2C0N-Q/

> I can link to any message on Slack, in context, going back to the beginning. I can't link to emails: I have to find and forward them to people.

This sounds disingenuous.

In order to 'link a message' in Slack, don't you have to find it first?

So the 'find and forward' email problem is half-shared there in either environment.

Forwarding an email is straightforward -- a single keypress in most email clients, then identify the recipient(s), who can be anyone with an email address.

I'm guessing that linking a message on Slack requires the recipients to have previously signed up and provided some personal information to Slack.com?

Yes, linking to messages in Slack only works for other co-workers with access to your Slack instance. I'm thinking in terms of internal-corporate-communication here.

I link to Slack conversations all the time - from other Slack conversations, from JIRA tickets, even from some commit messages.

Threads, history and quoting support. I've never really seen an email client support them all well (usually because someone is using a not-so-good email client and it butchers the formatting)

"well designed email client" is almost a no true scotsman argument. I could certainly imagine an email client better than slack, but I don't know of any that currently exist.

I like slack more for what it doesn't do than what it does. the text formatting options are useful but limited. this means there's no way for people to inflict their horrendous HTML signature on me. in fact they can't use a signature at all unless they manually paste it in. slack doesn't allow arbitrary inline images. random people from outside my organization can't just contact me out of the blue over slack.

Google inbox increased my productivity a whole lot more than slack does. From my point of view it was a holy grail of using email as a productive tool. But it also tied into google reminders and calendar and did a really good job of filtering noise.

Realtime conversations, to begin with (which is the entire reason people use Slack)

And that's a big part of the downside of Slack overuse from my perspective.

Sometimes a real-time conversation is exactly the right thing, but when someone takes the time to be thoughtful and detailed, either everyone else has to pause and wait for them or the conversation will have moved on by the time they finish.

Plus their thoughts may feel like a wall of text because they won't have time to edit down to the brevity that Slack culture encourages, or a quick edit may lead to important accidental semantic errors.

Real-time text chat systems like Slack are great for transient and/or informal conversation, but the rushed pace hinders some types of communication. Slack or a competitor should complement but not replace the other tools.

Email is too open ended of a format with too many options so it is really hard to make something that would be 1-1 comparable. People mail signatures, specially formatted templates and you also receive emails from the outside world.

Slack’s more limited format reduces the amount of things you need to sift through in order to get to the information you need. Unfortunately we humans always seem to catch up with this and your team will turn slack into a firehose of nonsense within 2 months of adopting it.

Slack can replace email for certain things, namely intra-company discussion where you wind up CCing half a dozen people anyway. But I'm not going to start getting receipts or reset my password over slack.

How can your mission be to just replace some arbitrary technology? What matters is that the replacement allows for better outcomes than whatever it replaces. I'm not sure that's the case with Slack.

It's so weird to me that a chat tool is a company about to ipo.

It's a lot more than a chat tool. The API integrations make it sticky and difficult to switch to something else. It's painful to leave Slack for something else after adopting Slack.

I have seen two scenarios in Australia where they're using MSTeams (MS version of slack) exclusively for internal comms and emails are just for external communications....

It seems very doable.

I'm just 26 but I heard countless tools ready to replace emails.

I have a B2B startup and only calling is most effective than emails. I don't see how Slack can replace them.

Want might not be the question. It might be more of an actual __need__ at this point. Email is a fax machine, at best, at this point.

Frankly, I'm still upset that Google botched Wave so badly. I'm not sure if/how it would have translated to a small screen, but I'm pretty sure someone could have figured that out. As it is, almost daily, I'm forced to use email by reasonable and (for the most part) intelligent people. Yes at works, but in too many cases to me it feels like we're using a screwdriver to pound nails.

Slack's frictionless onboarding seems pretty heavily dependent on MX records. So it'd be difficult to decouple Slack from email.

Companies are always trying to replace email. I’ve read this story over and over. What they all have in common is that none succeeded.

It seems you need to have multiple channels. People tend to drift from one means of comms to another - and you need to chase them.

It's as if different people want to use different tools for different tasks or something.

The day I saw what the VP of Tech saw when they logged into Slack was the day I stopped complaining about email.

Slack (and chat-in-general) has replaced email for many things it used to be used for. And we're all better for it. Other things still go over email and slack can't ever touch them. It's called disaggregation. Why does everything have to be "x wants to replace y", "is x the y-killer?", "x will destroy y" etc etc. I wonder who wants to replace clickbait headlines...

For me, Slack is good because it adds fun to the workplace, especially in one too big to chat to all these far flung people

You get to know people you work with before you even met them in person

And you swap gifs and jokes. It just helps built a positive culture I think

What are the upsides of email? Spam?

no lmao no

No.

I also don't want to enable cookies just to read your article, NYT.

Given how expensive Slack is, and given that it's assumably not open source, the answer is an unequivocal "no". I would rather use something open source even if it has only half the functionality.

Betteridge's Law of Headlines[1] definitely applies here.

TL;DR: No.

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[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Yes.

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