[boublepop]

Dear gruglife,

I write this comment as a response to your inquiry about the reasons for why people like slack.

Now personally I mostly use Teams, but the system is similar.

The reason I like to use Teams as opposed to e-mail is mostly just the expected process around it.

Please note that I’ve cc’ed your manager, as I talked to him just before and he told me to add him. I’m not trying to seem passive aggressive or cause issues in communication.

Anyways, please come by my desk so we can repeat this entire discussion once again since you likely tuned out after the first paragraph anyway.

And yes IRC does the same, but trying to get an organization to use IRC is like trying to replace word with vim.

Kind regards and all the best, Boublepop

[rolleiflex]

This isn’t the only way email could be. You can remove the whole ‘cc’ aspect, make it work within channels just like Slack, and most of the awkwardness melts away, while you keep the good, async parts.

The reason email is stuffy is that it allows you too granular an ability to choose and modify who gets to see it as a conversation goes on. A simpler concept of a channel goes some way to solve that.

That said, be forewarned: I’m biased, I make a tool that makes email work like Slack. (https://aether.app)

If anything, one thing we’ve noticed using Aether is that it makes people drop ‘Hi Jane’ style heading and signatures at the bottom after a while, naturally.

[robjan]

I think part of this is a cultural issue with older "traditional" companies. I have worked at such a company and, after introducing Slack, people used it in exactly the same way including cc'ing everyone at the end of the message and needlessly escalating every thread if it's not answered immediately.

The annoying thing with Slack is that it's impossible to mute individuals who use it disruptively so I either get all or none of these notifications. It's easy to change people's behaviour in smaller companies but when there are hundreds of people in the workspace it gets tricky.

[notahacker]

@boublepop good day

are you around

can you explain to me how this comm style isn't also annoying pls

?

dropped VOIP call

@channel can anyone else help me with this

[boublepop]

I can’t explain to you why you find it annoying. I honestly don’t. What’s annoying about asking people if they are around? Or asking a question in a channel?

[lol636363]

Maybe in your org people are better communicators. In mine, Slack gets in the way of deep work. Then you turn off notifications and eventually your manager asks you why you are not on Slack.

So you end up reading memes, news, answering same question 100th time, and you realize you are just glorified assembly worker. You are not solving real problems, just making another distraction for your primate family. You are a monkey!

[notahacker]

I mean, apart from anything else it's literally exactly the same issues you were highlighting with email: unnecessary verbiage to warm the discussion up and copying in loads of people indirectly involved, which may or may not be related to internal politics. And the fact the discussion which actually resolves the issue often won't take place in the channel.

With Slack you've got the added irritation of an expectation of real time responses, especially when someone's @mentioning the boss or everyone else in the division a minute after you haven't responded...

[Kinrany]

Is this a parody of something related to Slack? I don't get the joke.

[muzani]

It's a parody of how tiresome emailing is in real world applications.

In an ideal world, you ask someone to do something, they ask you for details, you give them details, it's done.

In a less ideal world, you have busy people, lazy people, and people who have been given unreasonable schedules.

They drop emails, overlook, glance it over. They dread the back and forth long email threads, so they sit and think and procrastinate for an hour before sending a short email like the above.

And what let's say there's three teams involved. One person drops the ball or ignores an email. What next?

That's why you have to cc them. I once had an issue with this guy who I just kept giving him instructions, having meetings, and he still did the wrong things. I brought it up to the boss and he yelled at me and told me I don't know how to work in a team -- I never cc'ed him in these emails.

And I quickly learned that whenever an email cc-ed the boss, things moved, and when it didn't, they'll say okay, but the work would disappear.

Then the obvious solution is to cc every time right? But because of this, every time you cc someone, it implies that you don't trust them to get it done.

Something like Slack just automates this process. You post something in a team channel, it gives a slight-but-not-passive-aggressive pressure. You can send a document and it doesn't get lost (and you can't blame someone for not sending you the documents).

[xenonite]

Yes, it’s a parody of a widely used classic medium.