> They managed to disturb millions of worker to an attention-driven work culture in which everything needs to always be synchronous and immediate.
I experience quite the opposite. With in-person communication, people barge in, demand you drop what you're doing now and answer their question/conversation.
With slack, you can answer them when you need a break or have finished something up.
No, on Slack (or any other similar chat) I can jump in and answer a co-worker that had a question when I'm available, if they are also available they reply and we have a short convo that takes much less time than e-mailing back and forth which usually ends with a "let's talk this in person".
Having realtime chat has saved me countless hours of participating in e-mail threads that end nowhere, at the same time as helping me be less interrupted as I tell people to send me a message first and if it's really urgent to interrupt me.
I don't care about Slack as a company but I'm happy that a IRC-like chat ended up in the mainstream and is useful for my day-to-day.
Not when I have to keep sorting my mailing lists into its own "label/category/folder/whatever your e-mail client calls it" on a sidebar so I can keep track of activity happening in which mailing list.
In Slack or any IRC-like chat I can keep track of the channels that interest me, I keep track of live operations, my team's public channel to see if there are stakeholders having issues with our systems, our private channel for internal team discussions (even more when I'm working from home). The engineering announcement channel to keep track in realtime of changes being performed to other systems or our infrastructure and getting quick status updates.
Yes, e-mail could be used for all of that, it would also make my inbox completely useless.
> Not when I have to keep sorting my mailing lists into its own
There's a field on emails called subject.
Linux kernel is still developed using mailing list, I can imagine only a few things harder than that, still the kernel team manages to work on it just fine, without being in the same physical space.
Channels are just another way of labeling stuff...
> (even more when I'm working from home)
emails have been distributed, async and remote-aware since the 60s.
I'm really genuinely curious to understand why people keep making this point, while that's one of the most irrelevant feature of Slack.
I'm not saying email is perfect, just saying that your points are not a unique feature of slack, anyone of them have existed for decades.
> Yes, e-mail could be used for all of that, it would also make my inbox completely useless.
Just like channels on Slack after a while.
BTW https://www.mattermost.org/ offers the same features Slack offers, but I guess people are not switching because mattermost is not a recognized brand.
Just like people don't buy Nike shoes to ditch them for equally comfortbale but brandless flea market shoes.
Like I have previously said: I have no personal investment in Slack, I couldn't care less if it was Mattermost or whatever.
Unfortunately for us, tech people, business decisions are taken on ease-of-use and other features that we don't tackle when we focus on the technical aspects of products, companies don't want to invest to roll out their own infrastructure, for anything, that is why the cloud is a thing. It's the same with a chat app, if a company can pay another company and offload all of the liability and responsibility to an easy-to-use product, they will do.
I don't know why you are ranting with me. I have used mailing lists before, I have used IRC before and I know what kind of workflows each can improve on my 15 years of career.
E-mails don't cut it, it's not the same ease of use, I don't care if technically I can achieve the same results, the interface and interaction is different and this is enough of an improvement for a product to have its place over another.
Good for the Linux Kernel to keep being developed on a mailing list, the rest of the world doesn't and is better if another tool can improve communication, be it IRC, Mattermost or Slack.
Create a product better than Slack and push it around to solve this problem, don't try to preach this to me, a mere cog in the system that is trying to be productive.
We're working on getting more awareness around Mattermost as an open source Slack-alternative.
We just raised another $50M to invest in our product, on top of $20M we announced 4 months ago. Compared to the $1.2B Slack's raised, it's not that much--but we think dollars in open source can do more.
Our market is enterprise, particularly enterprise DevOps, so there's not as much brand marketing going on.
If Slack were Nike, I think Mattermost would be like the manufacturer of business-style shoes people wear into banks, governmental agencies, manufacturing companies, etc. where sneakers don't typically go.
We want to be just as comfortable and functional as Nikes, but our priority is to make our users and customers look good, and make them successful and build their brand, not promote our brand.
Yes and no, but the problem with (and benefit of) email is that it's a bit more formal. It's like writing a letter vs calling people.
Email threads tend to become illegible messes too, at least in the circles I'm in. Different formatting, different quote styles, and there's one email chain nowadays where the background color turned black so I can't read it without highlighting the text. There's also the thing where it's far too easy to CC people, which, granted, is a thing in Slack as well possibly but it's not yet ingrained in Slack culture in most places to make big group chats with all kinds of managers and only tangentially involved people. A lot of email is written in cover-your-ass mode with excessive formality and CCing a lot of people.
I'll take a direct message anyday when it comes to day to day stuff. I prefer important announcements, events, etc to still be in email though.
I experience quite the opposite. With in-person communication, people barge in, demand you drop what you're doing now and answer their question/conversation.
With slack, you can answer them when you need a break or have finished something up.