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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

E-mail is inherently async. Async to the core. Why not just send your async requests as an e-mail so the other person can handle it as they process their inbox?

Slack excels at real-time, interactive communication. It's chat, designed for back-and-forth. Your messages will get scrolled into the backlog if there's a lot of chat while you're away.

The green dot (or the "busy" setting) is great for understanding whether the other person is going to receive your message as a notification at their computer or a push message on their phone. That's highly relevant.

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I don't understand the love of email. It's little pieces of conversations that get sent around in an ad hoc way.

Email doesn't have an easy way to add someone to a thread, or to manage a forked conversation. It's closed and non-discoverable by default.

> Email doesn't have an easy way to add someone to a thread

You add them to the cc list.

> or to manage a forked conversation.

Your email client is at fault there, any decent email manages forked conversations.

> It's closed and non-discoverable by default.

Thats why you have mailing lists which are indexed and searchable. You may see 'closed and non discoverable' as a downside, I do not. Anything that should be discoverable should be on a wiki.

>You add them to the cc list.

I have very minimal experience using email, but doesn't this just add them to a new message as opposed to adding them to old messages?

Yes, in this case you explicitly introduce the reader with context, which is important when you have specific information that may be considered sensitive, or history that is not relevant.

Anyone reading the "to" line can see where the reader was introduced.

I find workplaces that default to closed conversations, and require explicit reading in of new participants, to be poor places to work. It feels like people use connections, being involved in key discussions, and their ability to connect people, as social currency. This is good for them, bad for the rest of the organisation.

I find it great, it saves me from information overload. For 'project' things, these often start on a mailing list and I can go back/search a mailing list if its that important.

I'll be honest to say, most things that is said in any communication medium is a complete waste of time. Having i searchable rather than forcing it on people globally is the only scalable option.

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