Soon You'll Hate Group Chat as Much as You Hate E-mail

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-27/soon-you-ll-hate-group-chat-as-much-as-you-hate-e-mail

by walterbell • 10 years ago

112 58 10 years ago

toupeira• 10 years ago

I've been thinking about how to have more dynamic wikis for sharing knowledge in a company, something like a document on Google Drive encourages much more active participation. There are some projects going in this direction of having real-time wikis like Rizzoma and Kune (based on Apache Wave), but it seems group-chat solutions are growing features (long-term archiving, full-text search, tagging) to fill a similar need. I'm trying out Rocket.Chat next, it seems to be the most full-featured Open Source Slack clone available at the moment.

metasean• 10 years ago

I have to admit, I miss Google Wave!

At the time Wave came out, I and another co-worker 'grokked' it and regularly found increasing more awesome uses for it. Soon others in the office were equally enamored. Even my mother enjoyed it! (My mother has a hate hate relation with most software.) Yet, I continued to see it dissed and dismissed by many others, and I never heard of another group that embraced it like we did.

Thank you for mentioning Rizzoma and Kune. I was unfamiliar with both of them but will be checking them out.

gravity13• 10 years ago

Check out notion too (think it's notion.so). They do a great job with this

intopieces• 10 years ago

The word "Soon" in the headline undermines this author's claim. Email, as claimed in the article, came about in 1987 and was widespread in 1991. There are Slack users younger than email. If Group chat (which itself is not new -- IRC has been around much longer, though its operation is not as slick) is on the same trajectory or even twice as fast, we have plenty of time for the next technology to be developed.

ghaff• 10 years ago

came about in 1987

Well, no. Email dates to about 1971. [1] In the 1987 timeframe, it was widely used within some walled gardens (my company at the time used email extensively within our own network with our proprietary software) and it was doubtless fairly widely used in various corners of the proto-Internet.

My recollection is that 1991 is still pretty early to call it "widely used" among the general public--although the "endless September" was in 1993 so perhaps it was getting close.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Tomlinson

Kluny2• 10 years ago

Slack isn't exactly the first group chat client. Group chat has been a thing at least as long as email.

xbmcuser• 10 years ago

what do you mean soon.

FreedomToCreate• 10 years ago

I already have to mute or turn off slack for periods of time at work because the group chats I am in get out of hand. I also use WeChat and remember a couple of colleagues transforming our event organizing group into a debate about racial standards in America. It makes sharing links easier, but it can be frustrating receiving updates that have nothing to do with you. Unlike email, people know if you are online with Slack, so answers are usually expected right away.

jclulow• 10 years ago

E-mail and mailing lists are still, I think, a good tool for long-form asynchronous communication. For some things, I want the opportunity to think about my broader point for a while before I subject others to it. In response, I want to extend the same courtesy to others; after all, I would like a reasoned reply!

I acknowledge that having Too Much e-mail is terrible and frustrating. But I think this is the same as any other distracting time sink; e.g., agendaless face-to-face meetings, especially if organised on a daily or weekly cadence.

What, for me, is the root cause of the frustration is when I spend so much time feeling very busy, but getting nothing substantial done. This applies to any source of unlimited distractions: e-mail, meetings, chat, or even Twitter.

I think the solution to these problems is partially cultural. It has to be broadly understood that it is just fine to switch off IM and get some work done for a while. It's generally not polite to pounce on people at their desks; doing so over IM can be just as disruptive. Don't expect a response to e-mail as soon as you've hit send, and don't schedule endless meetings unless you've something to discuss.

This is mostly how things are at my workplace these days, and I feel much better as a result. Next up: following less people on Twitter!

babuskov2• 10 years ago

Agreed. When I work, IM is turned off and phone is set to silent. E-mail/Twitter notifications are set to silent at all times. I still find it strange when someone's phone rings and they drop everything (sometimes literally) to answer it ASAP as if the world would end if they had to call back.

Outdoorsman• 10 years ago

Don't expect a response to e-mail as soon as you've hit send, and don't schedule endless meetings unless you've something to discuss.<

Spot on advice...I've mostly done contract and full-stack (retainer) work for almost a decade, but there was a time when I'd be a year to 18 months on a gig...regular meetings even when there were no problems...no clear purpose...people dropping by asking, "did you get my email?", when they'd sent it maybe 10 minutes ago...

That's the pace of life now, apparently--click and swipe and fret, then go home thinking you've done a day's work...heh...

csours• 10 years ago

Well, this is a dumb article. The good stuff is at the very end.

Slack, Google, and Apple all see the possibility of people overdosing on their services. Each offers its own “do not disturb” mode—Slack unveiled its version just last month—a message to fellow chatters that says you’re busy. The features let people read and respond to messages at their leisure, instead of in real time—which sounds a lot like e-mail.

So you can use group chat just like email when you need to, and as group chat when you need to. It's a very common practice (in my experience) to send a few rapid fire emails, and then switch to chat to discuss.

In future Group chat may evolve to be Slow-First, instead of Fast-First: Present an email style interface - no chat context, lots of white space, Subject line, etc. Then if you are both online and the recipient(s) respond quickly, dump the email stream into a chat window.

Or the other way around. When a conversation slows down to less than 1 reply per 5 minutes, it will quietly minimize itself and later archive itself.

robotmlg• 10 years ago

In future Group chat may evolve to be Slow-First, instead of Fast-First: Present an email style interface - no chat context, lots of white space, Subject line, etc. Then if you are both online and the recipient(s) respond quickly, dump the email stream into a chat window.

Wasn't this the one of the central ideas of Google Wave?

babuskov2• 10 years ago

Slack is re-doing Google Wave in such a way that people can understand it ;)

tambourine_man• 10 years ago

I still love email

jtblin• 10 years ago

At least you can't get spammed by external companies on group chat which is one of the reasons people hate emails now.

daigoba66• 10 years ago

Well, technically you could setup internal only email servers and addresses. In fact, it might even make sense for some companies to go to a whitelist-only approach for most employees' addresses. Unsolicited content could filter through a single mailbox.

davidbanham2• 10 years ago

The advantage Slack et al have over email is that the list of people who can reach me through them is limited. Any idiot on the internet can email me, only people we've specifically admitted can Slack me.

The author also seems to exist in a world where group chat is only used for chit chat and cat pictures. If that's the case, You're Doing It Wrong. For me, Slack is the place where we communicate project state, hash out ideas, etc. That's the value.

nroach• 10 years ago

The one vulnerability to this model is integrations. Spam filters have become good enough that I seldom see true spam in my email. It's all the ham - automated garbage, purchase confirmations, and newsletters that I've been opted into that clog up my box.

If Slack admins go crazy on integrations, you can still get a lot of low-value notifications. In our instance, we only run integrations into topic-specific channels (such as a channel for system notifications) so it's manageable.

But I can see that changing as the scope of integrations grow.

davidbanham2• 10 years ago

My other trick is to turn off basically all notifications. The only thing that bloops my devices is a DM or an @mention. Anything else, I pick up when I open the app to specifically look for it. Makes the Github notifications much easier to blast through.

fingerprinter3• 10 years ago

I already hate group chat. For my use case, it's demonstrably worse than email. I imagine for many (possibly the vast majority) this is the case.

The thing is, as I've seen in this, group chat has a "cuteness" to it. Just like IRC back in the day (or today depending on if you still use it), people are much less formal in group chat and there seems to be less expectation of formality. There is cat pictures and funny emoticons. This isn't a tool challenge; both email and group chat can be equally informal and cute. I contend that email /still/ is a better mechanism given the non-realtime nature of it.

But then again, the realtime nature of group chat is what some like. It's precisely what I don't like. I like 1-1 chat quite a bit, though I very quickly default to video in these cases as well (higher fidelity, quicker, less prone to written miscommunication).

Hipchat/Slack/IRC are great for some use cases that require the type of communication (specifically I think of operations, incidents or things along those lines). I feel other general team communication in these mechanisms is, well, overblown. My gut tells me PRs are better for much of what group chat serves, and if not PRs, email/ML are still great. And don't forget getting everyone into a room or video hangout.

I don't particularly like email, but I don't hate it either. I do, however, very much dislike group chat.

dbot• 10 years ago

The objectives of office communication are usually either (1) spreading awareness (of ideas, news, task updates...) or (2) making records. For example, an in-person meeting spreads awareness, and writing minutes creates the records. But not every meeting requires minutes.

If most of your office communication is about spreading awareness, email is pretty terrible. It requires every person to manually handle each individual message. Most users struggle with this badly. It's a huge waste of time when the effects are propagated throughout an office - everyone is receiving and filing exact copies of the same messages. That's the advantage of team chat - it spreads awareness without the mental overhead applied to each worker.

If you need to make a record, email is great. I've found that response expectations are far less affected by the medium (email or team chat) than by the office culture. One is simply easier to manage and respond to.

fingerprinter3• 10 years ago

I don't see the difference in your #1 between email and group chat in spreading awareness other than 1. ease of absorption (email is easier) and 2. ability to respond (again, email is easier). Imagine trying to read backscroll of a chat conversation and then trying to "redo" this in chat vs the same in email. The chances (not saying it doesn't happen, but the likelihood) is higher that you can have an effective email exchange. If you aren't right there for the chat, it's over. Some people love this, some people hate it. It's certainly not efficient for group settings. And dear god, please don't make and announce decisions this way.

It's about shelf life. Both group chats and emails have a shelf life. Emails have a longer shelf life (probably up to 48 hours in responding and staying relevant in many cases) whereas group chat's have shelf lives measured in minutes. Chat is great for quick one off's, maybe even a few key people on hand, but not for extended groups. In fact, it's rather terrible.

Nothing beats meetings with all the right folks, though. Meetings are much better than both group chat or email for spreading awareness. Actually, now that I write this, this might be a use of chat; a virtual meeting via chat. Though, I argue the utility is in having all the parties present and not the protocol.

daxelrod• 10 years ago

I disagree that email is a great record. It only exists in the inboxes of people who received it at the time. Over time, they leave the company or switch roles, and new people no longer have access.

You want forums, or newsgroups, or wikis, or even listservs for any sort of permanence.

vacri• 10 years ago

Group chat also suffers from the same spam issues as email (well, not phishing, but unsolicited). It's particularly bad in Slack, because every message consumes tons of space, even in compact modes (which most people don't use)

  them: put notification X in channel!
  me: okay, but let's keep it targetted and filter for important issues only
  them: you worry too much
  them: since we're doing X notifications, let's do Y! People need to know Y.
  me: okay, it's getting spammy now, need to rein this in
  them: yeah, you're right
  them: so, we're putting Z notifications in now, and expanding X and Y
  me: please, the horror. everyone will move to another channel
  them: but people need to know these things!
  me: does EVERYONE need to know that dev Foo changed status on jira ticket Bar?
  them: you're missing the point
  them: let's add more projects, and we tick this 'send notifications' box, right?
  me: no
  them: sure we do, that's what we do for other projects
  et al.

In short order, a new channel is made for chat to avoid the spam, and the old channel become an unvisited dumping-ground for notifications. Then someone starts 'perhaps if we also put just the important notifications in the new channel'...

pavel_lishin2• 10 years ago

people are much less formal in group chat and there seems to be less expectation of formality. There is cat pictures and funny emoticons

Every company chat system should have at least two rooms - #business and #offtopic. Cutesey garbage goes into #offtopic; business goes to #business.

CodeWriter23• 10 years ago

I tried HipChat for a project last year. It was an improvement over email because all the attachments were right there in the thread. The downside, after several thousand lines of chat, it got difficult to find things. The fact that chat message appear at one size, then expand when the content is downloaded doesn't help. It's hard to read when everything is bouncing around like that. Easier than email, but I still hate it about as much as email.

I've started using Trello and you know what, it's task-oriented paradigm of segmenting chats by breaking them into cards really works. It cuts the noise because each card is a topic. The topics can be rearranged in any logical form you choose. And when a task is done, well you might archive the card but it is essentially discarded from the collective thought stream. Maybe I'll end up hating it just as much as email. I haven't gotten there yet.

giaour• 10 years ago

I hated group chat before it was cool. The last time I used slack, there was no equivalent of a sender blacklist (or even just a /mute like in IRC).

makecheck2• 10 years ago

For me the hard part is keeping information together and going back to it later.

Chat will always be too temporary to compare to more manageable things like E-mail.

Was an entire conversation captured in the comments of a bug report? Was it captured in an E-mail thread? Was it discussed elsewhere? Or more likely, some crazy combination of all possible communication methods...

E-mail is only a problem because no one seems to improve the tools anymore. (Or they get worse.) There is plenty of room to innovate, still. Why, for instance, can I not even edit my E-mail subject lines...must I be forever cursed just because someone chose "Re: " as their entire subject? Also, it's great that E-mail clients usually correctly guess what a thread should be but why can't I manually intervene and make or modify my own threads? Why aren't there literally dozens of more options for rules and filtering?

tootie2• 10 years ago

Like Google Wave?

xorcist2• 10 years ago

Why, for instance, can I not even edit my E-mail subject lines

A bit of a strange thing to say, and give no explanation. I think subject lines have been editable in every email system I've seen during the past 30 years.

makecheck2• 10 years ago

Edit the subject of an E-mail that I receive. That way, it can be made more sensible to me, or categorized more automatically. (I typically use Apple Mail.)

tootie2• 10 years ago

E-mail is great. Group chat is great. People are jerks and no technology can fix that. Slack and HipChat work best if you divvy up channels. One for project team, one for each discipline or interest group, and maybe one just to post gifs and chit chat. You can tune in and out to whatever is relevant. Chat is both clear and precise like email (written not spoken), is asynchronous so you can go to the bathroom between messages, but still more immediate than emails that may go unanswered for days.

jnbiche3• 10 years ago

and maybe one just to post gifs and chit chat.

That's a great idea and would solve at least one of my frustrations with group chat.

ceras• 10 years ago

This is what my group does and I'm very happy with it. Half the team loves the social chat, while the other half of us safely ignore it.

natrius• 10 years ago

The pressure described in this article is the pressure of the stream. Email has this problem too: there are time-sensitive discussions happening, and your brain knows that there might be a cost to missing something.

Seize opportunities to take conversations out of the stream. I do this by maintaining an internal blog that's just a Google doc linked to other Google docs. If there's an idea or a plan that is important, I summarize the Slack conversation and flesh it out in a document, then put the document in the stream. The document has its own commenting system that avoids the stream: you can discuss any point in the conversation no matter what time you're jumping in. The individual documents are discoverable because they all link back to the doc that functions as the index page for the "blog."

It's a better way to think collectively. Someone should build a product around it.

breakyerself• 10 years ago

I will never chat in a "hate group" I am completely opposed to hate groups.

rdiddly• 10 years ago

It's not about the tool. It's about applying knowledge, consideration & discipline in the use of the tool. What you hate is people.

0xCMP• 10 years ago

Slack is way different than that. Yes you can set DnD but the point of slack is that all messages aren't necessary to watch all the time. You should have settings to only be notified on your name/channel/everyone and a few key words.

While I think it will be hated at some point (we all blame our tools rather than our selves), not sure it'll be for what the author says.

Power of slack is in async public conversations with little friction and unified view/interface/features/etc. It's not really about saving time over all. It's about having clearer conversations and those savings over time of understanding better. Can't tell you how much having the person right there I could clarify right away and get answer was so much nicer than having to send a whole email which would feel like a waste (from UI and UX of email) so I'd need to get enough questions things to mention for it to be worth it.

dinht• 10 years ago

I don't hate group chat, it's just the kind of thing I won't use for work, because of the blurry context of every group chat at work.

People will try their best to be professional in work chat, they comment on ideas, share their thoughts about someone else work, and so on. But it's chat, I mean, it's CHAT! We all know that chat culture built up from the AOL era (or Yahoo in Asia..). One of a sudden, someone will have a casual comment about it, and then someone else, and then the whole group became casual. And then of course, there is the whole thing of scrolling back to get the context of what people are discussing.

Then teams make rules in chat for things to be in order. But well, if you can make people function strictly in chat, why don't just force them to a video meeting?

During the last month, this the only use case I have for group chat: "Let's lunch"

j45• 10 years ago

Sounds like the writer didn't use much IRC compared to email.

Manageably using IRC had a lot more benefit and preference to email.

There is no self-filtering, perfectly balancing communication technology for everyone's use case.

The tool is but one part of how you set it up and commit to using it, and managing it's use of you.

Group Chat is interesting, and hopefully will segment the type of chain emails that don't belong in email.

jnbiche3• 10 years ago

I despise group chat. In 2 years, I've gone from mostly enjoying doing remote consulting/freelancing, to mostly hating it, all because most clients now want/require me to participate in non-stop chat sessions on Hipchat, Slack, or their company's internal group chat.

There's very little productive going on in those group chats. Far more socializing than anything else. Memes in particular abound. And the interruptions are constant, driving my productivity to a fraction of what it should be otherwise.

Really, email was great, and 10 years of freelancing taught me to be a very good communicator on email (maybe even over communicating).

Now all that is ruined, and I'm trying (unsuccessfully so far) to bootstrap a software company so I'll no longer have to spend my days chatting about trivial matters on Slack when I have work to do.

freshfey• 10 years ago

And before email, people expected you to be available between 9am and 5pm via phone. I think you just have to clearly communicate that the group chat, in your case, doesn't benefit the working relationship. So it has nothing to do with group chat per se, but more with how you communicate to your freelancing clients, no?

jnbiche3• 10 years ago

And before email, people expected you to be available between 9am and 5pm via phone.

People were vastly more careful about interrupting you via phone, in my experience. The careless way people interrupt on group chat is an extension of the general way people tend to dehumanize others online.

I think you just have to clearly communicate that the group chat, in your case, doesn't benefit the working relationship.

Yes, I've not only said that, but proved it (by being extraordinarily productive during a 2-week "chat free" trial period). But the clients I deal with want me to be on chat, I'm guessing for the same reason that they'd really rather I work in their office. So the managers can monitor the hours I'm "clocked in" (nevermind what I actually accomplish during that time).

Basically, chat lets employers monitor their workers (even contract workers) in the same way that they monitor their workers in the office, by observing "butts in chairs".

ams6110• 10 years ago

If they are requiring this kind of stuff you are not a contractor you are an employee. Ask them to send over a benefits enrollment package.

kilroy123• 10 years ago

Same here man, I feel your pain 100%. I have to sit in their chat room(s) all day long and be available all day their time zone. I also have to do their morning standup via google hangout.

rl3• 10 years ago

Official and robust threaded message support would go a long way towards making Slack better.

https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/578575540594020353

Kluny2• 10 years ago

Um, group chat has been around since 1996 (in my memory) and much longer (in the world at large). It's been annoying the whole time. They key is being able to turn off notifications.

nso95• 10 years ago

I don't hate email

sandworm101• 10 years ago

Am I the only one who doesn't hate email? It's certainly easier than typed memos and postit notes we used to use. And the fact that it is all recorded does seem to stem some of the inane chatter. Email remains my primary means of communicating with clients and I haven't felt any push to get rid of it.

jonesb6• 10 years ago

It would be an interesting thought experiment to estimate the number of developer hours spent on chat applications in the past twenty years. It would be a very large number, and I don't know how i feel about that.

skinowski• 10 years ago

This really reads like a filler article. And communication in the office depends on many factors.

The link to the said research on how awesome face-to-face meetings is just leads to another article written by the same author. Sigh...

gerbilly• 10 years ago

It's not so much an issue of technology, but of control. If you can turn off your phone/chatroom/email whenever you like, and without consequences, then it's wonderful.

But if someone else dictates your availability on these platforms, then it becomes burdensome, even stressful.

And there can also be normative pressure. If most of your colleagues have no problem remaining available at all hours, then you will be expected to as well.

Sometimes I feel like workers are in a race to the bottom to see who can give up most of their personal time.

Soon You'll Hate Group Chat as Much as You Hate E-mail

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