There's nothing stopping you using slack for thoughtful drawn our discussions. My experience is that in slack the people who send quickfire messages are the people who send quickfire emails, and the people who send thought emails send thought our slack messages.
The big advantage of slack (to me) is that people use channels, and it avoids the "I mailed X and Z, but forgot to CC y in on this", where people routinely selectively email people when really more people should be aware.
The biggest problem with slack being used for thoughtful drawn out discussions is that it's UX around recall (i.e. finding a thoughtful discussion you had before) is not good.
You want to document these discussions. In my experience, Confluence, Google Docs, and email are much easier to find things. Specifically because they have a UI which has a unit per discussion (an email thread, confluence doc, google doc) while Slack is a stream of multiple discussions happening at the same time. As such is it very hard to search and also to separate discussions. Discussions can spread across threads while they tend to stay in the same email thread or Google document.
To give an example, let's say I want to have a discussion on a technical design I created. I would probably either create a Google doc and ask for comments or send out an email. If I ever wanted to refer back to the discussion I just needed to find the unit of discussion. It's relatively easy to find an email or google doc.
In slack there really isn't an equivalent. it's possible you could create a dedicated channel per discussion (although no one does) but even trying to find that channel when you have thousands of channels is much harder. Part of the problem is that search isn't very good in slack, but the larger problem is they don't have any equivalent of a "unit" of discussion.
Oh yea and there's also the whole problem that slack only works well internally but there are lots of thoughtful discussions you need with your team and outside organizations.
I don't disagree it's designed for chat but I do disagree with your other points. It supports a subset of markdown which are the important ones (quotes, unformatted, lists) and ignores things like headings and colouring. I like the limited support. I think threads are great - they allow you to have a side discussion based on a single message with context for anyone who has access to the channel they happen in. Compared to those gigantic email chains where you have 3 or 4 groups having differing conversations in the same thread by quoting what they're replying to...
It doesn't matter. It makes synchronous, quick communication easy, so that's what people do. Email forces you to communicate thoughtfully, Slack encourages snap responses.
I wholeheartedly disagree. My inbox is full of emails with subjects and no body, one-line half baked questions, non-responses, incorrect information in a body of correct information that gets lost in the sea of noise, broken formatting that render massive email chains totally unreadable. Often times those massive chains of emails have totally diverged from the initial subject and people on the mail.
As much as I've embraced Slack, I just don't see it replacing an entire open protocol, with one proprietary product. If anybody was close to this, it definitely would of been MSN Messenger at one point. Everyone I knew had MSN Messenger, and would check their inbox from the IM client.
Unless we start seeing @slackmail.com or something and they make a very powerful mail client, but I havent see Slack do much period, it's taking how long just to add dark mode into Slack across platforms? I feel like nothing visible is being done by Slack. To be fair it does work, but new things would be nice to see.
I don't think you'll be able to replace the likely massive market share that gmail / hotmail / yahoo has.
Should we get Google Wave back? Not that I remember how it was exactly..
Maybe something that combines Slack and collaborative editing (like Google Docs). It might work if you could just in the middle of the chat switch from discussion to editing a document. This should be somehow integrated experience, happening inside the same tool.
I used to lament there were folks who insisted on talking on the phone, when I needed requirements written down to refer to later. Both approaches have merit at times.
There is definitely an aspect to learn. I have had co-workers who routinely message on Slack, and if they don't get a response within 60 seconds, they get up, go to my desk and bother me -- in the middle of coding. Cumulatively lost likely several months of progress to this.
>Slack is ok for chatting and quickly sharing stuff, but not for longer, more thoughtful, drawn out, asynchronous discussions.
The reality is that in my workplace, it's hard to get longer, more thoughtful, drawn out discussions via email anyway. If I write an email that is more than 2 paragraphs, it very often does not get read. And it almost never gets an equally thoughtful response. I haven't internalized my lesson - I still sometimes write long emails. But 90+% of the times I won't get a response. And when I do, 90+% are going to be 1-2 liners.
Don't get me wrong. I like email and simply don't do chat. My work chat tool used to say something to the effect of "If you're in the building I won't respond. Come to me in person or send me an email". I like email so much that I put in significant effort[1] in making my email experience better.
Now you've given me an idea for my next project. Autorespond to emails that contain less than 130 characters with "Sorry, I prefer well thought out emails, and your email is too short to warrant my attention."
In all seriousness, I probably won't do it - can't think of a way to do it without annoying them. But I do recall an email exchange I had with an old friend, and at one point I sent this email:
> Dear old friend,
> In 3 emails, you wrote a sum total of 12 words.
> For someone as well read as you, please ponder over this. :-)
> You were once insistent on preserving the quality of writing - at least in books and novels, and decried the decline that arose with mass paperback fiction. Do you now complain that tweets are too long?
Fair enough, but off all your communications how much of it falls into this category? 20%? What about for the average Joe/Jane? I'll go out on a limb and say even less.
Email is a walkie-talkie. It's a fax machine. Yes, it still works. But it's sweet spot is getting smaller and smaller.
Slack is ok for chatting and quickly sharing stuff, but not for longer, more thoughtful, drawn out, asynchronous discussions.