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Comment by elric | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the author's crusade against pointless meetings, but their attack on email doesn't sit well with me.

> Avoid email loops. Those have too much overhead, and will divide your audience pretty quickly.

The author recommends "async slack" in a cartoon, but then advises against using email -- which is IMO far superior to "async slack" in every way possible. Mailing lists are severely under valued in corporate environments. They are still a great medium for discussion.

> Create a slack channel instead of the email loop. This will retain the whole conversation in 1 central place.

So will email? With the added benefit of being self hosted, with a great collection of software which works on any and all platforms, which has been around for decades, which can easily be archived, and which will still be accessible decades from now.

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> "email -- which is IMO far superior to "async slack" in every way possible."

You're entitled to your preferences, but "far superior... in every way" is a bit hyperbolic. In practice, with email, usage patterns vary wildly (forward, reply, reply-all, cc, bcc). IME Slack channels are cleaner and provide several benefits. Not just the option for ~realtime / synchronous chat (where email doesn't work at all), but the mechanisms for tagging users and other channels; "pinning" key attachments; all its 3rd party integrations (ie, it's viable as a "hub" for communications and record-keeping thereof)... Don't get me wrong; it's far from perfect, and email -- when used properly -- has substantial strengths. But so does Slack. An open-source, self-hosted Slack clone would be my strong preference.

> An open-source, self-hosted Slack clone would be my strong preference.

Are you suggesting that a non-free, expensive, SaaS, IRC/rocket/mattermost/element/etc clone is not where we should be aiming?

You can "tag" people with email. Lots of people use this highly effective pattern:

FW: Re: FW: Fw: Re: RE: Update on project

hey chrisweekly, what do you think of this?

Regards,

John Doe, MSc, CPA, CMA, TLA,

CISAOO

Big Corp

123 Fake St

Someplace, OT 90210

Phone 2025551234 x364375

Fax 2025553536

Cell 2025553788

Pager 20255522226

Check out our FacedIn page!

[Broken image] [Broken image] [Broken image] [Broken image] [Broken image]

Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.

This message (including any attachments) is confidential and may be privileged. It may be read, copied and used only by the intended recipient. If you have received it in error please contact the sender (by return E-Mail) immediately and delete this message. Any unauthorized use or dissemination of this message in whole or in part is strictly prohibited. Please note that, for organisational reasons, the personal E-Mail address of the sender is not available for matters subject to a deadline.

[Broken image] [Broken image]

---------

[Chain of 92 emails; the important ones are #36 and #73 but you won't figure that out until at least an hour of scrolling]

Don't forget that at least three threads have forked from this because some nimrod clicked Reply instead of Reply All

Hi John --

Please remember that our corporate standard of email etiquette, as referenced in the employee handbook wiki [link], is to inline our responses while removing unrelated content. We've found that method to be very effective for the last thirty years.

Also note that the standard for internal signatures [link] is 2 lines:

NAME OR NICKNAME DEPARTMENT

and that the standard for external signatures is a maximum of four lines [link] with the following recommendation: NAME DEPARTMENT / COMPANY DEPARTMENT CONTACT URL

Finally, I don't know who told you to put all those images and disclaimers in, but Legal advises that you can't discuss confidential info in external emails, so you don't need disclaimers. You don't get privilege unless you work in Legal, either.

Yours,

dsr_ Security

Anyone talking to Legal gets privilege. Not only Legal.

The first thing that Legal says is "You don't communicate privileged information by email. Call me."

Try working in a non IT company. Its IT itself who set up the mile long footer and people will have no idea or no authorization tot change it.

+1, I agree strongly that the "channel" is a powerful UX metaphor and enables better high-throughput communications, and that other modern ideas are expressed in chat applications in a way that's more comfortable to us than they are within email.

I also believe that there's a big gap between traditional text chat and an audio/video meeting, where casual discussion and emotion trade off against calendar space and long periods of captured focus -- so I hope we have progress to make here!

(I posted in a different thread in this submission that I believe in this so strongly that I'm making a product to try to bridge that gap, but I won't muddy things by re-linking it repeatedly.)

+1. Also, chats imply a semi-synchronous conversation, which IMHO is the worst of both worlds. Talking to people 1:1 is disruptive, but at least very efficient. E-mails are slow, but very non-disruptive. Chats are slow, inefficient _and_ almost as disruptive as talking.

You could use them in an async manner I guess, but Slack isn't really made for that, it's clumsy as an e-mail replacement.

Basecamp seems like a good alternative. I can't stand Slack for anything, really. Email is OK, but you can't easily just add someone into a group of old emails automatically. Well, I suppose you could, based on your email service, but yeah. I think this kind of thing is where Basecamp and similar tools really shine.

The problem with an email loop is it has no visibility to newcomers.

If you create a channel for a particular topic, then when someone new joins the team, you can point them to that channel to catch up.

IIUC, Elric is referring to the usage of internal mailing lists, whose archives are (internally) open for anyone.

Each discussion becomes a URL in its own right, and is blazing fast (given it is locally hosted); you can point the thread to the newcomer. I too think this is more effective than any chat "scroll-back" hosted on someone else's infrastructure—it can go down any moment.

You point newcomers at the list archive (mailman or whatever)?

This is the same problem that TFA glosses over.

From the article:

> Having everything searchable makes it super easy for a) newcomers that can simply scroll back, and b) old timers such as me that forget and can also simply scroll back.

The (false) implication being that in the 40 years we've had email, no one's worked out how to archive and index it.

Worse, the disingenuous use of the word 'simply' here.

For some years I've put effort into my comms to avoid the words 'simply', 'just', and similar whenever describing a task I wish upon someone else.

It devalues the time, effort, and complexity that I'm demanding of someone else, by assuming the task I'm pushing onto them is trivial.

In this case, trying to comprehend context, let alone nuance, from an instant interruption log, is a massive cognitive load. Timing / pace is completely lost when reviewing a big wall of short and sharp exchanges between multiple people.

Compare and contrast reading an email thread where people aren't battling to be first / fast - but rather, to be coherent, concise, cogent, and considerate in their correspondence.

> when when someone new joins the team

What happens is that someone new joining the team will not even bother searching thru dozens of channels, they will use the chat system to ask questions instead. Completely failure of knowledge management.

One argument that I could imagine (not sure that I'm supporting it) to prefer slack over mail: usage patterns for a shared email channel are far more individual than for a branded async medium like slack. With mail, some people will do elaborate filtering, others just dump everything in a single inbox. Some will use mail very close to real-time (perhaps even do all their mail hands-off through some Siri/Alexa/whatever voice interface?), others might maximise asynchronicity even to the point of hardcopies. A branded channel will be far more predictable in terms of client UI and usage patterns.

>usage patterns for a shared email channel are far more individual than for a branded async medium like slack

on the other hand this can also be argued as a strength of email (which is what I would do) because different people need different usage patterns to work optimally, by forcing people into a one size fits all solution you will ensure some people will work less well than others.

Just invoke accessibility as an implicit benefit of the multitude of email usage possibilities and slack etc should be almost taboo.

which companies that care so much about accessibility is it that you've been working at?

You're combining "email" and "mailing lists." I totally agree about the value of mailing lists, but well archived mailing lists don't seem to be an option in many companies. Email w/out mailing lists can be a poor experience.

Maybe it depends on the email habits at your office. In mine, the signal-to-noise of email is so low that it's nearly worthless. (If this were an email, it'd probably go to the whole department)

I find that slack channels generally can be less pedantic and people are more likely to ask "dumb" questions they would otherwise not bother with in an email.

Archives do the job, but being able to have a dedicated channel in a tool i'm using for ongoing communication is nice and I find it nice to pin certain posts to the channel for reference or newcomers.

With that said my only arguments for a slack or "async" IM client is generally predicated on it being internal communication.

I guess for the author (and most other people who hasn't participated on usenet or the like), email is understood as "person to person communication through email". As in, not something that involves listserv.

It seems like you agree on the principles but have different favourite tools for the solution?

One upside of using a chat'ty tool is that you don't need to discuss top vs bottom posting ...

I have trouble with both email and/or slack or MS Teams. All are full of notifications, requests, and unintentional spam. But none has a way of identifying which is which. So I'm stuck trying to sort all that out. I can tag them, but that puts a lot of work on me.

I very much agree with you. Even without lists, I found email better because it lets you gather your thoughts and present them coherently.

Nowadays I prefer Zulip, as it's a great fusion of email/lists/IM with various very nice features and usability added.

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