[amix]

Slack is a great product, but with a wrong communication model. We have for the last three years developed Twist, which focuses on asynchronous communication by default. It includes some of the best features of Slack and email. We currently have about 1000 teams actively using it. Read more of our reasoning here: “Why We’re Betting Against Real-Time Team Messaging” https://blog.doist.com/why-were-betting-against-real-time-te...

[halflings]

Email. You just went back to email.

Like many of the people in the comments of your article, I am struggling to see how this is any different from traditional emails. The only difference is that these conversation threads are public/discoverable, and not only sent to certain people... but most companies already have this (via groups/team mailing lists/confluence/...).

[amix]

We still use email, but not for internal team communication. We have a help article of why Twist is radically different than email https://twist.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003654589-Twi...

[halflings]

I would strongly recommend reading this article:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/discussions-flat-or-threaded/

Flat discussions make much more sense, especially for emails. Gmail and most email clients are focusing on flat discussion threads, which are much easier to follow.

[erikb]

I've read your link and it's unclear to me why I wouldn't want both, relatively slow threaded conversations and quick real-time chat. And also I don't understand why slack+email wouldn't fulfill these needs already.

My personal problem with most of this conversation is that in bigger teams (e.g. 500 people spread through 5-10 countries) it is really the truth that you are left behind if you are not constantly up to date on emails and chat. And it's not just that you are required to read incredible amounts of both, it's also that if you don't interact you are left out of many discussions that are important to your work, while not having a way to opt out of the discussions that are just spam from your tasks' perspective.

Therefore I'd say the problem is not so much the communication medium, but the ability to interact with it en masse. I'm still interacting with each message one-on-one. But usually it would be enough if I could search all emails from my company that are not marked private or confidential for keywords, and get a sorted result back that prioritises based on what topics I'm working on. Basically google search for my company emails/chats, including these that are not addressed to me, preferably with a powerful query language like SQL.

[yason]

> My personal problem with most of this conversation is that > in bigger teams (e.g. 500 people spread through 5-10 > countries) it is really the truth that you are left > behind if you are not constantly up to date on emails > and chat.

That is not a team: that is a department.

You cannot meaningfully follow more than a couple of dozen people at a time, and you cannot deeply interact with maybe at most ten people at time. You also cannot follow more than a handful of subjects with reasonable comprehension: assumedly you work on one or two things full time and that knowledge fills most of your brain anyway. The 500 other people are those from whom you hear summaries from company or department wide meetings once a month or so.

The communication overhead grows exponentially with the number of people. That's why departments form teams of maybe a dozen people and let the managers communicate and filter information back to the team so that the team members can focus on doing what they know best instead of trying to track everything that is happening. You can always talk with specific people when you need to know more about something specific: you don't have to know everything by default.

[mnm1]

What? Slack specifically is asynchronous (unlike traditional irc). Any chat app with full history is asynchronous, even irc if one stays permanently connected to the server and messages are not missed. Do people not get that to have an asynchronous conversation, any tool will work? It's the people's perception of the conversation that needs to change. Email, chat, sms, signal, WhatsApp, Facebook, etc etc etc are all asynchronous. Hell other than voice and video chat, do you even have any examples of synchronous communication? I bet you don't. You're solving a problem that doesn't exist.