I don't read your email threads | Hacker News Reader

I don't read your email threads

loganmarek.com

37 pointsxvok44 comments

> Save a vibe today and send an IM instead of an email thread.

I would rather the email honestly. IMs usually have the expectation that I'm going to respond to you "soon", which is an interruption/distraction. And they don't contain enough information so I have to start going back and forth with the other person.

At least with email, most people recognize that you will respond in your own timing in the next 24-48 hours. With IM I've found that expectation out the window.

Save the distraction. Send an email.

Yeah, the OP is very clearly a poor communicator and wants to push the negative effects of that trait downstream.

Unless it's a close collaborator (we're working on the same project daily and interacts often, as in decisions are taken together), email is a much better medium for conversation.

You could split the difference, there is delta chat an IM client that uses smtp as it's transport layer. https://delta.chat

Want with one hand, shit in the other. See which fills first -- expectations, heh. IM can and will wait. Especially "hi".

Down with ever-expanding threads. I try not to engage with them at all, preferring a briefing that explains why I'm being involved and the change in priority. If dragged in with a simple "see below"; looks messy, best of luck.

Thanks for being unprepared and showing your interest in staying that way. Helps me keep a safe distance.

Some people absolutely do not expect a 24 hour response and will reply all in 30 minutes if you do not acknowledge it. Some of us work support development work that demands you cut all focus on your problem and start to write an email response and break away from what you were already working on.

That sucks... for me, I tend to check email about twice a day... usually at the start of the day, and towards the end of the day. During the day, slack/teams is the way to go.

Aside: I REALLY hate the direction teams has taken more and more... like separating the various chat channels and activity notifications for calendar invites that are months away.

Wish I had meeting invites months away, all mine are “get in here virtually” despite going into the office to “work together in person” and it not changing a darn thing about how I work lol we call each other to work things out whether remote or in person. Nobody wants to walk over to an office and burn 5 to 15 minutes of small talk.

Except for the people who do want to walk over to an office for 5 to 15 minutes of small talk.

I actually miss that the most about being in office. My vision is no longer in a good enough position that I feel safe to drive, though given other people driving, I'm not so sure.

I miss the ad-hoc meetings and lunch with co-workers.

I prefer email as well. Good luck to search in IM for old conversations where you decided something.

Also I have a rule to never answer right away. Have at least 15 minutes cool down, asking person may figured out the answer by themselves. Unless it's my direct manager...

Personally I prefer to be sent a full email thread over a message in chat, because

a) I can ignore it until I have time to look at it

b) You can see who else has already been involved in the conversation - seeing a fellow team member being involved can help avoid falling for situations where someone is trying to work around one of your colleagues who's already told them they can't have what they're asking for.

c) The chat message is from an individual, so you only get their interpretation of what's happening - if there's an email thread then there's going to be multiple people involved, each with their own perspective.

and for a well-written email:

d) Someone spent some time forming and writing down their thoughts, which seems to be an increasingly rare skill these days.

> increasingly skill

This is increasingly ironic :)

Oops, fixed.

What's funny is that the points you raised are the exact things that work for me on Slack, and I've never found it to be an issue. And yes, Slack supports looping people into conversations they didn't previously have access to.

I imagine this is more of a company culture issue than an e-mail vs IM issue.

Is this intentional ragebait? Calling IMs "actual communication" is .... odd. Email all but guarantees more thoughtful replies than IM.

I'll agree that the example of simply tagging someone in a long quoted thread is not the way to go. The sender should have included a summary and an explanation of why the new recipient is suddenly added.

I think maybe it is ragebait, (maybe unintentional). In particular, it is phrased as an argument against email threads in general, but then we have:

> Innocently, you click into the top email. The only text is "[Your Name] see below."

IMO this is bad behavior and it is right to push back. The person forwarding the email should provide context: what’s going on and why am I being included, what’s expected of me here?

If I’m just told to “See Below,” ok, I’ll see it. I’ll interpret that at an FYI for me, no deliverables requested (of course, an FYI might include the information about the needs of somebody who’s ass I need to kiss).

—

The ragebaity thing is to have a general rant against something pretty normal, but to only have an example based on obviously bad behavior. Is that Motte-and-bailey? Not sure, but it doesn’t pass my sniff test.

It reads as straight up intentional ragebait to me.

Especially when they say in the middle they already don't read email threads and use AI to summarize. But they still place a call to action at the end to not send email threads. Why would they want less context to feed their AI?

If mods on high granted the power I would certainly downvote this submission.

Agreed, the original thesis makes sense, but then it sort of goes off on a tangent of don't send any email threads.

If I get tagged on an email like this, I respond with something along the lines of: "what is the intention here? is it an ask or do i need to do something? do I need to be aware of something? please advise". This generally gets me a summary so I know what I am doing.

I'm sure this is a problem in large corporations, but on some days I'd give an arm and leg to receive an actual email instead of the random slack messages with zero context and a builtin social pressure for low latency responses.

This situation is annoying because it means you are being dragged into, and probably have to action, a conversation that has been happening without you for days or weeks (or even months). The solution is to involve the right people in the conversation at the right time. The solution is most certainly not to just send an IM, which will lack all of the context that the email thread contains.

People who think they are too important to read the work emails their colleagues send them are generally awful to work with.

I feel like the problem here is the "see below" part, rather than the email thread part -- that is where the sender has done zero effort to contextualise or summarise the situation or explain why suddenly you are the person to pull into this, and is instead putting the burden on you to do all that work from scratch.

I wish people would make shared white papers for discussions. People basically collaborate on the collected notes and decisions; with modern tools you can have history and attribution easily.

Some threads become difficult to unravel.

Google Wave was ahead of its time (probably still is).

I was LITERALLY thinking of Wave when I wrote that!

The same can be said about Slack threads.

If you’re including someone new into an already running conversation, take the time to write a summary for them and why you’re now involving them in the conversation, and what you expect from them. No, don’t use AI to do it, that’s more offensive than “see below”.

If you generate an AI summary and it's garbage, obviously that's wrong.

But assuming you take the time to make sure it's actually good, this seems like a fine use for an LLM.

No, I want to hear from the person pulling me in what’s actually important, not what the AI decided was important and they thought was close enough. The AI can’t read your mind, why involve another level of abstraction?

Old email threads have saved my bacon at work a lot. IM never has. When I get am IM, have a phone call, or engage in a hallway conversation that is work relevant I type it into an email later and send it to all concerned parties. I have never regretted doing this.

Email threads are useful for context. I much prefer having the email thread to understand what is being asked and why, rather than a lone email from someone (usually a PM or someone non-technical) that attempts to paraphrase the ask--poorly--and gives me a nonsensical request: "AA, please tune the turbo encabulator."

But it's also really helpful when someone at least summarize or reiterates the specific ask to me at the top of the email thread, rather than just CC'ing me on a reply with "+AA". That seems to be more what the author's complaint is about.

I hate chat tools. They're awful for archiving. I'm very apt to just ignore a chat. Send me mail.

A email thread, to me, is much preferable to any IM, unless participants knows to send those IMs in a thread as well.

All the context are in there in the rawest of forms, you a run through them with your eyeballs or have your tools do the summarisation there and then. Most of the IMs I received didn't even quote the original message they were responding to, and I end up spending time jumping up and down the channel or group to get the whole context. Not to mention folks sending me link to a slack, which, depending on the mood of the almighty slack god, can or cannot be opened in the app / current slack session.

But you do you. :)

I honestly love reading them. The fact that I got tagged means something went awry and it's fun seeing HOW that happened. Who misunderstood what or who is missing what context.

Then I can make bunch of people's work life easier by clarifying the state for everyone

So what's the alternative? Being referred to an IM thread where there is still the long history but the discourse is full of short, impulsive messages written in haste? And you are expected to be instantly available to read the thread and respond? Email is better set up for thoughtful, async communication and finding thread by "subject".

What the article doesn't state but implies is when someone sends you an email thread, it should be a standalone message that clarifies the state of things and the ask. And if the reader needs the context of how something got there, they can refer to the thread history.

I will delete a ticket if it has a full thread copied in and "see below" - I don't have time to work out what you want or need, make an effort and ask me / tell me what you need, and be ambiguous about it.

> If an email thread comes in that's longer than a few paragraphs, you're going straight to Copilot.

Not even that. Clearly someone was involved with an issue until I got involved. Whoever involved me need to explain the goal and the issue to me, then I can help. And that's the point. Someone wants MY help, so that SOMEONE needS to help me understand the history of it. And if that SOMEONE is unwilling to put in the time to do that, so why should I?

> IM (Teams, Slack, etc.): Actual communication

lol good luck doing Slack Thread archeology instead then.

(I'm not experienced with Teams but since its Microsoft, it's likely worse.)

IM (if not a dialogue) is best treated as a room full of people. Anything that spans more than two back and forth should better happen somewhere else.

> lol good luck doing Slack Thread archeology instead then.

The OP pretends they're actually placing all info into organized documentation in ... Confluence or something. I suppose in real time as the slack thread develops, because they aren't going to find anything a week later...

> (I'm not experienced with Teams but since its Microsoft, it's likely worse.)

Slack is a paragon of usability compared to Teams.

My guess is no one in the OPs organization remembers email etiquette. In theory with proper quoting you won't need to review all messages in a thread because the most recent one already has all the info.

Tbh i use email style indenting even when replying to Slack messages.

I figured out where the chaotic picture on that post originated - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POT3plx0vBs

i agree but nobody gives a shit about this unless you have the authority to impose this in your own company

Gmail and other consumer services have deliberately dumbed down e-mail experience. No proper quoting, threads by default (instead of single one by one emails), hidden text, subjects. Consumers were not educated to clean unneeded chunks, instead they're just responding above the fold, creating a mess of a read. I still can't stand long unedited emails, recalling old years of FidoNet and GoldEd mail editor - how clean and neat it was, when every Kb was counted! Still cleaning all my in/out emails and hate to text-encode large attachments.

Work is messy. If work was properly organized according to first principles and catering to each extremist taste of the individuals in the group who are looking to minimize theirs efforts, then you will take 10x the time to develop the product and you will loose your market to your messy but working together competition.

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