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0 pointspacketlost1y ago0 comments

I hard disagree. Don't have a conversation? Ask someone who does to forward it. Email lets the user control how to organize conversations. Want to stuff a conversation in a folder? Sure. Use tags religiously? Go for it. Have one big pile and rely on full-text search and metadata queries? You bet. Only the last of these is possible with the vast majority of IM platforms because the medium just doesn't allow for any other paradigm.

The fact that there's a subject header alone leads people to both stay on topic and have better thought out messages.

I agree that email threads could have better UX. Part of that is the clients insistence on appending the previous message to every reply. This is completely optional though and should probably be turned off by default for simple replies.

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goosejuice1y ago

That's fine.

Email is really powerful but people simply aren't good at taking advantage of it and it varies by email client. Doing some IT work at a startup made this pretty clear to me. I found Slack was much more intuitive for people.

Both systems rely on the savviness of the users for the best experience and I just think email is losing the UX war. Given how terrible people seem to be at communicating I think it's a pretty important factor to consider.

packetlostOP1y ago

I think this could reasonably be addressed, and several startups have. The trouble is that the default email clients (gmail, outlook, etc.) don't really try to make it any better.

I've also generally had the opposite experience, a huge amount of business offices live and breath in email (mostly Outlook, but I'm sure it varies). Startups tend to run fast and lean, but as soon as you have some threshold of people, email is king.

goosejuice1y ago

We used outlook and slack. Business primarily operated via outlook as most communication was unsurprisingly external. Most but not all internal was slack.

I'm not hating on email, it has a lot of good properties and still serves a purpose. Every office appears to have some kind anti-slack vigilante. It's really not that bad.

Sylamore1y ago

Email has the stigma of all the junk/grey mail, spam and scam attempts that come in via it - people want to not have to filter through as much of that and for the most part these chat apps solve that problem.

It doesn't help that Outlook's search capabilities have gotten effectively useless - I can type in search terms that I'm literally looking at in my inbox and have it return no results, or have it return dozens of hits without the search terms involved at all. I don't have that problem with Slack or Teams.

However, I think you are right overall on email being better overall for what people end up using chat apps for.

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goosejuice1y ago

That's fine.

packetlostOP1y ago

I think this could reasonably be addressed, and several startups have. The trouble is that the default email clients (gmail, outlook, etc.) don't really try to make it any better.

goosejuice1y ago

We used outlook and slack. Business primarily operated via outlook as most communication was unsurprisingly external. Most but not all internal was slack.

I'm not hating on email, it has a lot of good properties and still serves a purpose. Every office appears to have some kind anti-slack vigilante. It's really not that bad.

Sylamore1y ago

However, I think you are right overall on email being better overall for what people end up using chat apps for.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse