In some ways, tech progress has been pretty disappointing.
From the chat room you could open instant messages to specific people, and that one-on-one chat eventually became AIM.
For one-on-one messaging, the 3rd party clients were often better, but I don't remember any 3rd party clients for the chat rooms. I only used them from the AOL application itself.
Though maybe it's different because back then, then meant someone I wanted to interact with was now available.
Today, a chat sound means someone I probably don't want to, but am required to, interact with is now available.
The effort that goes into a bulk email is divided by the number of recipients, and therefore its value to me rounds down to zero.
The value of an email that's manually written by management (or an assistant at the direction of management) that goes to all staff or my team is divided by the size of it's distribution list. Higher than zero value.
An email sent to me by a friend or colleague to ask a question or organise a meeting or get together has a high value because I'm the only recipient; it was specifically for me.
We need a method to rank these things, and then we need to personally choose some minimum floor at which notifications will 'ping' on our chosen device.
AIM had lots of delightful sounds. Can't say the same about Slack or Teams.