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Comment by rococode | Hacker News Reader

How easy is it on Slack to contact a person outside of your company? My impression is that it's fairly convoluted compared to email, but we don't use Slack extensively at my org (only for casual internal chats), so I don't know if that's actually the case. I don't see it ever replacing email without a way to conveniently communicate with people in a different workspace.

I think it'd be nice if Slack was setup more like Discord, where users have unique IDs that they can use to contact other people directly.

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> How easy is it on Slack to contact a person outside of your company?

in general, contacting arbitrary people outside your org is just not a use case slack supports.

that said, the slack administrator can create certain channels that "bridge" two or more organizations' slacks. this makes it easy to chat with business partners without necessarily giving them access to all the other channels. you can dm these people if the admin chooses to allow it.

So, no, Slack is not replacing email. Most of us have exactly no interest in an email "replacement" where you need the administrator's approval to talk to people outside your organization.

For in-organization email... they might. Outside, no way.

depends what you use email for. it's not gonna work well for corresponding with your grandma, but I personally prefer it for work comms. ymmv.

I think the author more was suggesting that Slack is going to replace inter-company communication via email. Nowhere in the article does it suggest that Slack will be replacing intra-company communication/email.

I think you swapped your inter and intra: inter means between and intra means within. Slack is aiming to replace intra-company comms

Also you have to sign into all your Slack workspaces each time you go to a new machine, which is annoying. Discord only requires a single sign in.

Technically it works, but the user experience when hanging in multiple Slacks is pretty poor (at least with the desktop client). Easy to miss notifications, switching between Slacks is slow and managing the logins is bit painful.

It is fine, but somehow I always miss messages and alerts...

How easy is it via email to contact a person outside of your company? Do people actually answer emails from random strangers? Seems like an easy way to become a phishing or social engineering victim.

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