Bye
bye.fyi
bye.fyi
Email seems to put my interlocutors in the mindset that results in paragraphs of coherent text that clearly describe an idea. Slack does exactly the opposite.
I receive a lot of one-off Slack messages that border on inscrutable because of lazy spelling/grammar/composition. I then have to engage in a costly conversation to tease out the meaning.
I also receive a lot of Slack messages that border on inscrutable because a 4 or 5 sentence paragraph is delivered one sentence at a time. The messages do not make sense individually, but also do not make sense when read together as a paragraph. People seem incapable of thinking more than one sentence ahead when using Slack. This is particularly bad among the crowd who didn't learn how to use channel-based chat well (e.g., by using IRC).
I get that "hell is other people", but compared to the alternative, email is great. Especially with a good search feature and some basic filters and some auto-replies. And especially compared to modern Slack messaging behaviors.
why (ding)
dont (ding)
you (ding)
like chatting (ding)
? (ding)
...
User has paused notifications if this is urgent click to send one.
< clicks button >
Really? On Sunday September 9791, 1993, you don't get how people still don't know how to properly use async chat? I don't believe you.
But I think that there is a growing set of people that have very particular problem with mail. People that are somewhat public figures, such as podcasters, journalists, YouTubers, app makers and what have you are quite regularly complaining about email. I think this is because they need to keep a public address open towards real people and there is a large power bias. A hundred people can send you a message with a bug report or a correction about stuff you made, it takes them 10 seconds each. But for you to read and answer individually it would take you hours.
I suppose that Hey and other solutions with all the triage and snoozing is for them. Systems like Slack are kind of orthogonal to this.
Honestly, I think the hatred of email is an emotional response to the anxiety people have with interacting with people. Email just compounds this by queuing up every interaction into a list, which is basically like lining up every person who needs your attention into one around-the-block line, and they never go home until you reply or tell them to high-tail it.
The long and short of it is that email fools us into thinking that we have the tools to automate the job of a Personal Assistant/Secretary/Administrator and just get it done ourselves, but most people just find out that we're just doing too much ourselves.
Email is the only communications tool that can communicate between servers that already has the critical mass required to make it useful and not just a cool toy for enthusiasts.
That said the only people I ever email are clients or my girlfriend. Feels bad, man.
If someone publishs his email address it's an invitation to to get in touch. Use it!
It's important to note that siloing users within a proprietary namespace is also part of that UX. As usual, users come to demand what they've been force-fed long enough: so now you have the media complaining about privacy with a tone of learned helplessness while absolutely unable to wrap their heads around federation.
Delta Chat (https://delta.chat/en/) is an interesting project that provides a IM-like experience on top of email infrastructure. However all levels of the stack have become so bloated that it is nigh impossible to release anything that users won't perceive as shoddy without VC-scale funding.
Re: Skype I agree, my parents use Skype, and even though I never use it, if/when I log in there's always someone I haven't spoken to in the better part of a decade, still online as if they've been using it every day since.
Some people just don't care about being considerate, so they don't bother.
It's the same sort of thing as using clean dishes in the break room and not washing them afterward. You save yourself time and effort at the expense of making someone else do it.
Actually, it's probably worse than that. The writer might save 30 seconds at the expense of forcing the reader to spend 5 minutes puzzling out what they meant. Or, if an email has wide distribution, 1 minute saved for the writer might result in wasting 30 seconds for 100 people.
It’s disappointing we are moving away from it.
I recently got an email that said "Congratulations on getting a sabbatical, but we are cancelling all sabbaticals"
And I thought Clippy was a learned lesson.
::Fireworks::
Why can't the desktop version do this?
And they almost got it with the priority tab at the top. Just copy Gmail, it has been far superior since it was introduced, and as history shows Microsoft isn't above replicating other people's work.
- 3-5 fragmented chat messages where I have to search for meaning
- one infinitly long speech message where someone else basically forces you to witness their attempts of focusing their thoughts
- a @-mention in a group timeline where you have to Ctrl+f a smalltalk-filled timeline to figure out what they actually want from you
What I like about email (and letters) is that people have to formulate coherent thoughts if they want something from you. They have to write a subject and that alone pauses them to think about what they want.
Every form of communication that moves the burden of decyphering meaning to the receiver should be avoided IMO.
i still struggle with them though
For work not so much.
The only time a group chat worked was on a low budget film set where I worked as a camera operator, because people only wrote something there when they needed sth.
If you literally just typed out the same words you spoke, the recipient can 1) interpret your message faster and 2) search for it and find it in the future. Removing those two features for marginally faster message composing just seems selfish and a waste of the recipient's time.
If your speech messages are concise and follow a bottom line first approach, this could be okay. After a certain length and complexity the other side will have to take notes. If you are not a clear speaker they will have to relisten and take notes.
Additionally speech is usearchable which could be very bad for the other side as well — imagine someone who has to listen through 10 speech messages to figure out what you said.
My girlfriend once had a manager who loved speech messages as well (I heard some of them). These messages were 15 minutes long, full of chitchat about her live and the workplace and somewhere around minute 9 the three sentences that should have been communicated to my girlfriend appeared.
My girlfriend told me that she wasn't the only person who would just completely ignore these messages with the sentence if it would be important, she would send us an email.
So if one is in a position where one can offload the burden of decyphering and searching for meaning in the words to others, speech messages are certainly comfortable for the sender. Sometimes they are also totally fine (e.g. to loved ones, friends, people where you know they hate reading).
But in most cases you are creating work for others — work multiplied by the number of receivers and number of times they have to listen through your stuff.
Imagine e.g. if you work in IT support and all you get is speech messages. That would be hell.
There definitely was a turning point of sorts in my career when things like Slack became common place. I just cmd-q the app when work is over. The green light is off next to my name. The default assumption of boundaries seems slightly healthier. Send a PM to my username without the green light next to it at 9am on Saturday and you aren't asking me how I didn't see it Monday morning.
As for longer form work discussion, I prefer Github issues or an internal forum. I don't like the privacy of email with work discussion. That's for friends and family. I want all work matters to have an audience in the open.
As for friends and family, there's a place for both email and chat.
FWIW, I only use Slack per se for fun social groups.
It's not time to abandon e-mail, it's finally fixed and here to stay.
I like Bye logo much more than Hey's one
> Questions? Need help? Email us at no-reply@bye.fyi
Honestly it would've been funny even if it wasn't no-reply.
Basically, I've split my inbox into three inboxes with a Gmail native plugin: Needs action, Waiting Reply, Scheduled and the default inbox.
Every other day I will skim through my default inbox and categorize every email in each bucket by applying a star to it. My inbox remains zero most of the time.
I would highly suggest giving this a read.
I say this as someone who vastly prefers email to say, slack.
Search has gotten better, but it's still not great.
Some people expect you to respond immediately, defeating the purpose of asynchronous communication for non important / non blocking matters.
The format (like IRC) encourages multiple fragmented sentences instead of one long, cohesive message.
Slack isn't that bad by itself; it's mostly how people use it compared to say, email.
The creator of this nonsensical satire is an animation studio called Thinko. They do some cool stuff, with tools developed in-house.
If I send you an email right now from my personal domain, I'll show up under unverified, and I'd like to think I'm not spam. Really, I imagine it's simpler to view the verified section as the special inbox, where only priority contacts show up.
Outlook and the like have the sweep feature which makes managing email quite easy. The built in unsubscribe tool works very well.
I think maybe the premise is that people don’t know how to use their existing tools well, but then I don’t have confidence Hey will do a better job. They tried to get me to watch their CEO explain it for 37 minutes.
The other thing I find questionable is how this would work with third-party email clients. Anytime the service tries to ‘reinvent’ email, it ends up breaking standard features, like being able to use your own email client. Look at gmail and how their tags concept translates to e.g. imap
Edit: I assumed DHH was running Hey because he’s been complaining about it so much lately.
They claim it's better at not removing genuine messages which is possible but remains to be tested.
It's a clever parody though; but I don't remember needing JS as much in The Real 1998 (tm).
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/19991013091817/http://amazon.com...
> Today we are thrilled to announce a new solution to an age old problem.
> Overwhelmed by your e-mail inbox? Say HI to BYE
But it's going to be hard to pull people away from the g-suite bundle when the money is going to be at the enterprise level.
Here, that wouldn’t work. Could companies holding a trademark force a company to never create an account with that name?
in any case glad to see hey.com continuing to get more attention
I was so accustomed to the way FIDO conferences used to reply to messages (I guess it is called Usenet Quoting), that I still use it now, and I wish email clients would use it y default, down to the original sender initials.
It’s like people never read JavaScript: The no parts
Most of that page could have been done with image maps, shrugs.
Edit: Don’t downvote me just because I like text.
I will say this, Hey.com is getting some awesome free marketing lately.