[dtech]

But... slack isn't synchronous. At least not any more than email is.

In my team people look at it when they have the time or could use a context switch, and if you need them immediately adding @username send them a notification during business hours.

[letmeinhere]

There are a lot of product design reasons that I could argue encourage more synchronous communication in Slack than in email, but the real proof is in the outcomes. Have you actually been in organizations where the latency expectations for reading and responding to email are equal to or shorter than for Slack? In my experience email correspondence is _much_ slower and long-winded, because people are almost never exchanging them minute by minute and waiting in real time on the thread for the next update.

[matchbok]

Chat is synchronous. Always has been.

[notabee]

No, a meeting or a phone call is synchronous. You can't put a meeting down for 10 minutes, do something, and pick it up later. There is no requirement to answer chat messages immediately unless your organization has ridiculous expectations. Chat is asynchronous like email, but facilitates faster exchange than email.

[lanstin]

With threaded conversations you can keep topics of discussions from getting interlaced. You have to keep reminding people to reply in a thread and have to remind people that slacks value is it is asynchronous. And you have to go back and read the new messages when you do check in. It is swimming against the stream but not impossible.