Comment by throwawaygh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaygh | Hacker News Reader

I understand that this is art. That said, I don't understand the hate for email. Especially post-Slack.

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.

> I get that "hell is other people", but compared to the alternative, email is great

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.

How is slack at all different from that, then?

I love email because everybody has it. I'd love it if all my clients, friends, colleagues, family members all used the same platform, or that all those platforms could communicate with each other.

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.

I Email a lot of people, Authors of books I like. People writing blogs, maintainers on github.

If someone publishs his email address it's an invitation to to get in touch. Use it!

My personal "scapegoat" for this is Skype. In my timeline, it was the first messenger to grow big among non-techies all over the world (not in the least because of its quite functional voice and video integration.) It basically set the bar for "instant messaging" UX; developers have been building in terms of that paradigm ever since.

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: Delta Chat, I've often wondered if a solution existed like this, because in my eye the "problem" with email is that it's long-form. Nobody wants to compose an email just to send a one or two liner (good morning, what's up, etc). I'll check this out, thanks!

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.

It's inconsiderate of others to write/say things in a way that requires the other person to spend unreasonable amounts of time and effort figuring out what the hell you're talking about.

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.

If I can’t decipher within 30s what the other end wants I just reply with “?”. That usually triggers a summary of what the other end already wrote but this time as one message and understandable

But (ding)

why (ding)

dont (ding)

you (ding)

like chatting (ding)

? (ding)

(ding) Hello can I ask you a question?

...

Hi

This. Just ask your fucking question

This so much. Just ask me the question with a greeting attached. Lots of people seem to want a traditional conversation with back and forth greetings. Many times I reply with the “sure, what’s up?” and not hear back for an hour. Sigh.

https://www.nohello.com/ is a good reply for those "Hi" messages.

I'm slightly annoyed that nohello.com alone doesn't work; you need the www.

(3am) Are you there?

User has paused notifications if this is urgent click to send one.

< clicks button >

I get the point, but it feels very 2015. You can manage notifications with fine granularity now lol. I don’t get how people still don’t know how to properly use async chat.

> I don’t get how people still don’t know how to properly use async chat.

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.

underrated - for a very meta reason

Email is also completely extensible. There is so much easy automation and scripting I have done with email.

It’s disappointing we are moving away from it.

I don't think that everybody hates mail, I don't have majority of problems that were outlined in the (now deleted) 25 problems with mail that was pushed forward by Hey.

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.

I don't hate email. I hate outlook and the shitty way it works with email.

Outlook responds to the first word of an email being "Congratulations" by doing some fireworks animation.

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.

"Congratulations smart ass, you just killed the live server".

::Fireworks::

Web Outlook is better than the desktop crap, because flagging literally means nothing these days. At least online you can pin so important messages bubble to the top.

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.

I hate that self-hosting your mail servers is a huge hassle and will most likely get you on spamfilters even though you haven't spammed anyone.

I don't hate email per se but these days receiving an email usually means someone wants something from you (money, paperwork, or even just a reply) and that's stress inducing. You see your email notifications and sigh 'okay, now who wants what from me again?'

How is that at all different from Slack?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com