[atoav]

As somebody who is often said to be right in the age bracket who should like things like these, I think in most cases I'd prefer email over this.

This is why: friction is not always a bad thing. Having to print out that mail twice before putting it into the envelope stops you from sending stupid stuff – it would just not be worth the effort, or you'd reconsider before you bring it to the mail. This means also friction saves you from reading a lot of unconsidered, badly worded and meaningless words, people would just easily write off their chest if it was frictionless.

The lack of friction in messengers is great for friends, family and loved ones – but I'd rather have work collegues either see me in person, call me, open a ticket or write me a nicely worded mail than chatting me up using a messenger at work. This is mostly due to the fact that many people can't keep messengers strictly work related. If you send five mails in a row because you always "forgot something", you look like an idiot. If you do the same in a messenger you will just come away as beeing casual. And the other side ends up having to filter through that mess. The energy you save by the lack of friction is payed by the other side.

[protomyth]

I have a weird observation about the friction of e-mail. I think a high percentage of the friction comes from having to think up a subject. It seems that step, if required, forces some extra thought. It changes things a bit if you don't enforce subjects.

[maps7]

How do you need to think of a subject? You can just copy and paste the main part of an email or use an external reference (Jira issue name etc)

[atoav]

I think this is spot on. The subject alone makes it different

[obeid]

I have a boss who often uses the subject to send a usually short and concise message and leave the email blank.

[nstart]

yes to this a 1000 times! It's amazing how our familiarity with certain interfaces changes our behaviour too. Anything that resembles a chat box and a "hit enter to send" encourages chat like behaviour. No matter whether it's threaded or otherwise. Interfaces like Jira or other software management tools which have ceremony involved before actually creating a task encourage people to think through things fully before hitting create.

I'm a huge advocate of async work especially in remote teams. Every real time chat about an importan decision has felt chaotic as people type message after message adding details and leaving out others which causes this long back and forth between people. The end result is always a mess leaving it to someone to go through it again and summarize information.

Messaging is just a bad format for focused conversations. Ceremony and friction are, like you say, a good thing. The physical parallel to this is sending in a request for a meeting with some details as opposed to just walking up to someone to chat with an idea you just had.

Not to say messaging is bad for everything. But it's definitely not good for calm, slow, focused conversations.

[goatherders]

I'd pay for a slack add-on that gave my folks "message tokens". If they used a token it would send a message to me and then, as soon as I replied, if would open a 3 minute window for us to correspond. Then the window would close and the convo would be over. 3 tokens per day per employee. would cut down on the annoying stuff.

[atoav]

Or, as suggested above, make it look less chatty, add mandatory subject lines.

Thinking up a subject alone focusses the mind.