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Comment by wisidisi | Hacker News Reader

I oppose. Mails are superior in announcing to multiple people. If people want to participate they can in many ways. It is well structured, well documented and offers coherent discourse. Slack/Teams are for just-in-time dynamic, collaborative conversation that are quickly fading and missing out on all the strengths mails have in terms of permanence, archival, search and general quality. Something that totally gets lost in instant messaging like Discord, Teams and such where context is basically non-existant and may be gone completely in minutes.

Remember Google+ ? What lasted was Gmail and barebone simple Mail.

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> Mails are superior in announcing to multiple people

People who are known at time of sending. A slack message can be searched by those joining the team much (much) later, those who move teams, in-house search bots, etc. Mailing lists bridge this gap to some extent, but then you're really not just using email, you're using some kind of external collaboration service. Which undermines the point of "just email".

> > Mails are superior in announcing to multiple people > > People who are known at time of sending. A slack message can be searched by those joining the team much (much) later, those who move teams, in-house search bots, etc.

People use slack search successfully? It's search has to be one of the worst search implementations I have come across. Unless you know the exact wording in the slack message, it is almost always easier to scroll back and find the relevant conversation just from memory. And that says something because the slack engineers in their infinite wisdom (incompetence) decided that messages don't get stored on the client, but get reloaded from the server (wt*!!), so scrolling back to a conversation that happened some days ago becomes an excercise of repeated scroll and wait. Slack is good for instant messaging type conversations (and even for those it quickly becomes annoying because their threads are so crappy), not much else. I wish we would use something else.

How would you search from mail threads you weren't CC'd on?

MS Exchange had sort-of solved that problem with Public Folders. Basically shared email folders across an organization.

The older solution is NNTP/Usenet. I wish we had a modern system like that.

> Mailing lists bridge this gap to some extent, but then you're really not just using email, you're using some kind of external collaboration service. Which undermines the point of "just email".

Mailing lists are just email. They simply add a group archiving system.

thats why online private archives like https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/ exist. for a free version, use groups.google.com

you just use a shared inbox for the team

This assumes said email is properly filtered and doesn't get lost in a sea of work spam. I also assert email is actually terrible at context; unless that is part of an existing thread, or again your filtering/sorting is great, you will often spend at least a paragraph just establishing context.

> It is well structured, well documented and offers coherent discourse.

You must have great coworkers who know how to communicate. I cannot say the same for everyone at my company. Email at many of the places I've worked can quickly devolve on more than 3-5 replies.

Worse than the work email spam at some of my previous jobs was the Slack spam - at least the email spam was work-related. Too many people substitute work for a social life and treat Slack like they’re on a group chat with friends.

> Worse than the work email spam at some of my previous jobs was the Slack spam

It’s annoying if not muted and you need to work. Why not do that?

A workplace with no chat and zero talk would be pretty grim.

If the company Slack doesn't have a #memes channel, I don't want to work there.

There's nothing wrong with social chat on Slack. It just needs to be either in a thread or, better yet, in a dedicated social channel.

Saying people shouldn't have social chat on Slack is like people shouldn't have social chat in the office kitchen because it's part of the same office complex.

And if they did that, I’d have nothing to complain about. That’s never been my experience though with Slack at work.

That’s unfortunate but it’s not a universal trend.

The problem here isn’t Slack, it’s poor Slack etiquette. However you can change etiquette at a company level.

@here I need an update on a ticket

@here were doing some it maintenance over the weekend in the middle of the night on a system no one uses

Google+ dies not because it was a bad product but because google changed strategy and killed it.

Ultimately it’s all subjective - some people prefer email some chat some calls some no comms at all.

If you can communicate well, articulate what you say and want well, and actually read and understand what I write then I will communicate over any medium with you. If not then I’ll have a bad time regardless of medium

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