[wpietri]

I think the "2 decades" thing is relevant here. Most of the products you mention were created before people were almost always physically in contact with an internet-enabled device.

I never used any of those much, but starting using Slack when I joined a company where it was ubiquitous. I never saw anybody care about declaring an away message. People at any point could be busy and might not answer, but they were rarely "away". The culture was just to assume that people were available, and if not that they'd reply when they could.

[proksoup]

100% agreed.

I work for a slack competitor that has away messages, and I'm jealous of Slack's willingness to ignore the old interface patterns and implement the simplest solution possible that makes the most sense for larger group users, new users, ignoring the expectations of the smaller group of users, old-time users.