I have a coworker who does this, and personally I can't stand it. Everyone else on our work slack can take 30 seconds and think through what they say in advance. There is a certain rhythm and quantity to the slack notifications he generates; I've never said to myself "oh that's <x>" after the third notification in a row and been wrong.
If even a single other person sent messages this way, maybe I'd change my notification settings and see everything much later and less often. But since it's just him, he annoys me on a regular basis with this behavior. Just... don't press enter. Why can't you write the same things, without pressing the button that makes noises on 12 devices miles away every time you stop to think? Why???
I get where you're coming from here. Ideally your co-worker would, when initiating a conversation, write a well formatted preamble that covers everything they need from you.
I have to say however, that this form of paragraph writing behavior is very irritating when you're stuck their numbly waiting for them to proof read their magnum opus. And you can't just leave and go back to what you were working on because in 4 minutes you're going to get interrupted by another dissertation. So you just have to sit there watching "Alice is typing" as it flicks on and off. When you could have been having an active conversation.
The reason the rapid reply behavior happens is to allow you, who is presumed to be actively looking at the person, to read the text as it is being wrote, so that you can formulate your response quicker.
And keep in mind, the situation where you have the attention of a support employee is that time where they are waiting on you.
So if the take away here is anything, it's:
* write well before you have someone's attention
* write fast when you have it
* be respectful of other people time
* be mindful of the effects of your actions
I agree, you shouldn't try to get someone's attention before typing a complete thought. But it's the original attention-seeking message that's the problem, not the complete thought. Maybe what I'm saying is that we use Slack at work almost completely asynchronously?
This same coworker will also "formulate his response quicker" without letting you finish what you're saying in person, too. Then he'll interrupt you to go on some tangentially related rant, and won't stop unless you interrupt him back or he's repeated all the points of his rant three times. So maybe he's just bad at this in general, and it only happens to manifest as too many notification pings in threads and DMs on slack, when they're not really the core problem here.
That guy sounds pretty high energy. For some odd reason our profession has no short supply of people with social... quirks.
BTW. I've been doing some investigation of Zulip since it showed up on hacker news, and I think it is much better optimized for the style of communication you're describing that your team uses. I recommend investigating it.
Chat systems are for rapid typing -- constant flow of communication.
Bbc/email systems are for long-form communications -- slow, methodical and referencable.
Slack and its friends committed the great crime of conflating the two, to produce systems that are never as quick as you'd like, and never as referencable as you'd like, and no one knows how to effectively communicate on it because there is no effective communication unless all parties forcibly drop back to irc
If even a single other person sent messages this way, maybe I'd change my notification settings and see everything much later and less often. But since it's just him, he annoys me on a regular basis with this behavior. Just... don't press enter. Why can't you write the same things, without pressing the button that makes noises on 12 devices miles away every time you stop to think? Why???