[jesterson]

This is excellent writeup I could have made, but @bluehatbrit made it much better.

Slack is very distracting. I surprise some people saying I am pushing every meaningful convo out of slack and hopefully one day to completely scrap it and throw away.

Emails are way better since it pushes people to think the problem first, and you'll be surprised how many problems have found solution before "Send" button is pressed.

It's easier to just send something like "Hiyo Mark, hihi! Wazzup?". This is where it gets dangerous to performance and focus.

[bluehatbrit]

I think Slack has a place in communication but it has a really poor balance. It's so easy to create and send a message to a channel and tag a few people. As a result it moves quickly and makes it hard to digest and reply slowly. It's also extremely hard to find things again later, even with the improvements to search.

Back in the days of IRC a lot of people thought lack of history was a "missing feature" but now we have it with Slack I think it was probably the best feature of IRC. When the platform has no memory you're often pushed away from it for anything that's deeper. No one can come along later and find your messages so you know you can't put anything that requires wide visibility or input there.

I'm not going to shill for IRC and say everyone should go back to it or anything, it's not really practical. But that said, I do think Slack has a huge flaw in it's design of making it so easy to send messages and pretend everyone's going to see it.