Hacker News Reader

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'...

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.

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.

I disagree with you on both points; I think that it's easier to communicate by blurting out questions into a chatroom, and it's easier to respond in the same.

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.

This is one huge advantage to GMail for business. When I joined a group/company I could go and read the entire engineering@ or bd@ ML (called Google Groups, I believe) from start to finish. I don't know if other email systems do this but it's something I kinda can't live without anymore.

Doesn't help when people send to non-ML or individual emails, but it works wonders for ML and distribution lists.

> Google Groups

Google Groups is basically newsgroups - indeed, I believe the product you use in the business evolved out of Google's old Usenet interface - except you read archived messages in Google Groups over a crummy web interface instead of something with RFC standardized protocols and formats and a variety of high-performance native clients specifically designed for browsing that sort of thing.

That said, the search is better.

Now get off my lawn.

> crummy web interface instead of something with RFC standardized protocols and formats and a variety of high-performance native clients specifically designed for browsing that sort of thing.

This feels like the paradox of the new generation of tech tools. I find the new stuff much more accessible, but much less deep. And that's thinking of Google's web stuff that, on balance, is much better than others'. Search is magical, but I find myself much less productive than I was with some of the old generation email / newsgroup software, in spite of the fact that I've now probably logged more hours using the new stuff. Maybe I'm just less obsessive about really learning the tools as I've gotten older, or maybe the tools just have less depth.

> 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.

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.