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Comment by martinesko36 | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I work on Emailio (https://emailio.com), a YC company that is a direct competitor to Front. We help you build healthy email habits.

Slack is detrimental to team communication in several ways, and bringing it to email is a mistake imho. Slack combines the stress and urgency of text messaging with the importance of email. Your Slack becomes a Facebook or Twitter feed - another infinite feed that addicts you to some level. Since it's a chat, the conversations are shallow and disorganized. For example, search never worked properly in Slack for me. Furthermore, synchronous communication has proven poor for wellness and work-life balance.

I know Slack just got acquired and its the hot new thing but email is great as it is - its our ways of using it that need to change.

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I haven't looked too deeply into emailio or front, but the solution to me looks a lot more like a mix of reddit and discourse (community/forum) than anything else. I'd love to see something that looks and feels like a forum than IM/chat. Systems like Slack are great for quick collaboration, but not ideal for persisting and disseminating information across diverse/large teams and organizations. I want to go to my messaging platform and see the topics that have been started and the discussions within them. This reduces all of the banter and chatter that endlessly goes one each day that just adds to the noise. I can go on and on, but maybe someday I'll get to see what I'm envisioning come to life.

The best workplace communication tool I used was effectively just a Usenet newsreader. Ie, topic-based threaded shared email. With a good client that shows eg the number of new messages on a thread, or only unreads etc, ie standard email stuff, nothing else comes close IMO to that for efficiency and clarity.

I'd add in IM for quick 1-to-1 chats but that's all.

Usenet doesn't actually have threading. It's just a hueristic hack generated by clients.

That sounds really cool. As a kid I built my own PHP forum system and have great memories from early internet forums. Bringing that to workspace is a really interesting idea. One of my fundamental problems with Slack and any new method of communication is, if you already use email daily do you really want another feed that you have to check? So, combining the workspace forum as a Subreddit or a Discord server, services which people perhaps already use, is a perfect solution! We may try this for Emailio's employees down the line by making a private subreddit. Thanks for the idea!

I Ctrl-F'ed for Twist, made by the team at Todoist, but couldn't find it.

It has a way to go, but I found it the right mix of persistent, long-form discussion and decision making using Threads, and sync communication using Messages. It's the best of both worlds, if you can educate a team to use it properly.

I really wish we could self host Twist. I’d happily pay up for their license.

We have been using http://twist.com for several months and it sounds very close to what you described. You create a thread with a title and a message and replies are threaded.

Is Zulip Chat close to what you have in mind?

I just looked it up briefly and I like the idea of topics, but I think there could be too many and it could become messy quickly. Certainly on the right track though.

It doesn't capture the original questions, but good organizations use a self-hosted internal wiki for this.

FYI - your home page doesn't load properly for users with (e.g. nextdns.io) tracker blocking.

On your point, slack has brought fluidity and lightheartedness to our internal comms. IMHO less demanding than "chat apps" and way better than email chains for internal comms.

Looks totally broken for me. No styles at all and everything is misaligned.

I have NextDNS disabled and still doesn't load properly

> Furthermore, asynchronous communication has proven poor for wellness and worklife balance.

I think you meant "synchronous" here ;)

Can you elaborate? Slack's async feed used to ping me every 5 min and distract me from coding. I also found myself having OCD about going through each and every message that was sent to all channels - very low ROI obsession. I like the slightly higher barrier of having to send emails and refresh your email inbox :)

EDIT - thanks to everyone correcting me on the sync vs async! I fixed it in the original comment.

Synchronous communication typically means something that demands your attention as soon as something is sent. Asynchronous communication is something that typically handled whenever you're ready for it. To put it in programming terms, synchronous communication "blocks" until you deal with it, where as asynchronous doesn't require you to deal with it until you're ready to.

https://www.worldwidelearn.com/education-advisor/questions/s...

https://status.net/articles/synchronous-vs-asynchronous-comm...

This, and ten times.

In my part of the world people will cringe and frown if they heard I am not using WhatsApp. I can understand them, I'd probably do the same thing if I heard someone does not use email. Personally I have trouble and probably mild OCD just to check every emails in my few email accounts, imagine going through all the Whatsapp groups messages. I'd rather voluntarily go to hard labour rather than reading the WhatsApp group messages.

What we need is an email++ with asynchronous nature of email and the convenient but not the intensity of WhatsApp, if that makes sense. Google Wave probably come close but it came earlier than expected and gone as soon as it arrived. Perhaps someone can utilize CRDT/Automerge to make it even better than Wave by going local-first.

I’m confused as well. FWIW, I always disable notifications, have a filter on my email for “you missed this message” emails to go to a separate inbox, only use slack/matter most in the browser, and only open it a few times a day.

I have trained my colleagues and boss to never expect a response right away. We’re also forced to use Skype at work which is a plague because people are lazy and will call about anything and everything without thinking it through. So same thing there, I’ve disabled all sounds, filter notification emails away, set my self to busy all the time, and never answer calls when they come in except it it was agreed upon beforehand (so, like a meeting)

I try and force these incurable skypers to send an email instead: it forces them to really think their stuff through, organize it in a more structured way, and takes me two minutes to answer instead of having a 15 min call that is all over the place.

And I don’t get interrupted while trying to visualize complex things in my head.

> I try and force these incurable skypers to send an email instead: it forces them to really think their stuff through, organize it in a more structured way, and takes me two minutes to answer instead of having a 15 min call that is all over the place.

This is a great way to handle people who jump straight to "let's just do a call, it'll be easier [for me]"

For people who are like this, I will often just say I'm not available for a call for a few hours, and ask them to send me a written message in Slack instead. Most of the time, I am able to just help them async on Slack instead of spending 30min-1hr (x2 since we're both in it) in a call.

In my mental scheme slack is mostly synchronous (people expect a reply, there's a @here thingy to ping everyone, etc) whereas e-mail is asynchronous (people don't expect an immediate reply).

You said "asynchronous communication is detrimental to your health". Since asynchronous=email, I read "email is detrimental to your health". I thought you meant the contrary (slack is detrimental to your health -> synchronous communication is detrimental to your health) so I though it was a mistake.

Wasn't it?

Maybe Teams doesn't work as well for other people as it does for us, but the problem seems to not exist for us on Teams. There's a few things that (accidentally or on purpose) make it work:

Threads/Conversations are the only way to talk in normal team channels. This means that messages are automatically grouped on topic and you can ignore the ones you don't care about. I have never worked with a Slack team that used threads effectively and so you regularly end up reading a load of stuff you don't care about to find the stuff you do care about.

Separation between a Team channel and a chat channel. Chat channels are more like normal Slack conversations - they end up being fairly synchronous. The Team channel is where the more asynchronous stuff goes. We have a strong project convention (almost a rule) to use use a Team channel if more than 2 people are involved. It helps visibility and means that conversations default to async. But if I write a direct message to someone then it's because I want to interrupt and get an answer and so they get pinged.

This means I get pinged a few times a day about things I need (as SW Lead) to deal with, and the rest of the time I can just catch up on threads when I'm waiting for a compilation.

Companies are still launching with iOS/Mac only? Very Silicon Valley of you. Ignoring Windows and Android is just silly these days.

I don't really like Silicon Valley's mentality either, but no need for judgment. I totally feel you, and for us as a very small company we had the choice of either a) building a great native iOS/Mac app or b) Electron that runs everywhere but is ultimately a poor experience. We want to build a sustainable business not fueled by VC money, so our bandwidth is very limited. We decided to go the native route and work with the platforms we are experts on. There's some great Windows/Android clients though!

Fair enough, it's great to have polished apps. But I was going to "request access" until I saw that your service won't be supporting any of the devices I use, so there's one potential customer down the drain. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.

For context, my company (https://prestodoctor.com) has spent tens of thousands of dollars on Front licenses, so I'm not just some random nay-sayer :-)

I am very sorry about that. I will make sure the website clearly states that it's only for Apple devices for now!

I mean I also question the assumption that electron will lead to a poor experience. I'm sure you know the examples everyone cites.

I can't imagine working in a company without any chat tool at all. For me it doesn't matter if it's Slack, Teams, IRC or even Skype but we need something.

Agreed. I see a lot of communication moving into dropbox paper documents, instead of better communication tooling.

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