Google, microsoft, apple, amazon, netflix etc. were all *built* using email.
I don't see why all of a sudden people think that it's low bandwidth.
Not to mention that basically every scientific breakthrough achieved since 1995 was achieved using email as the *only* form of communication (other than physical letters here and there).
They used the tool that was available at that time. I am sure they use internal chat apps as well in today's environment.
I really don't want to try to promote Slack as 'one tool to rule them all' or advocate for its features, but it definitely more bandwidth than email. Not sure have you received any of the long quoted emails recently, I have, and it can be a nightmare (and ridiculous that an email client from a USD 3 trillion dollar company cannot render it properly).
Given that Slack has integrations with various tools (incident reporting, various bots, feed submissions, apps of all sorts), video/voice chats, file storage, rich messages, advanced notifications, and, most importantly, seamless communications with clients using it, it is just a tool that has replaced so many different tools.
Sure, it is not perfect, and many other tools offer same things as Slack, this pricing situation is ridiculous, but there is a reason why nearly every single startup or a team formed in the last decade uses it or its equivalent.
It is not indented to cover all possible usages out there, and in academia I could see email working better than Slack, but as we are on the topic of Hack Club, it would be hard to argue it would exist in this form without Slack-like tools.
I agree that people like Slack. $CRM did pay over 27B USD for it!
I just think it's a case of people not knowing what they want.
> They used the tool that was available at that time. I am sure they use internal chat apps as well in today's environment.
Surprisingly, Google for example uses email + real time chat today.
All communication of value, meaning thoughtful "actual" exchange of ideas happens over email. Chat is has auto disappear so it's not used for anything which remains on record, it's for small quick asks. There might be a googler in this thread who could give us more insight.
> Given that Slack has integrations with various tools (incident reporting, various bots, feed submissions, apps of all sorts), video/voice chats, file storage, rich messages, advanced notifications, and, most importantly, seamless communications with clients using it, it is just a tool that has replaced so many different tools.
I hear you on the integrations.
There is no shortage of tools which plug into email too though.
If the integration doesn't exist, it's typically trivial to set it up since email is just plain text.
> Not sure have you received any of the long quoted emails recently, I have, and it can be a nightmare (and ridiculous that an email client from a USD 3 trillion dollar company cannot render it properly).
For sure! and it sucks. That is why I promote email heavily for *internal* communications where the community itself enforces rules to keep the mailing list sane. That tends to happen organically in most open source mailing lists.
> Given that Slack has integrations with various tools (incident reporting, various bots, feed submissions, apps of all sorts), video/voice chats, file storage, rich messages, advanced notifications, and, most importantly, seamless communications with clients using it, it is just a tool that has replaced so many different tools.
There are few tools which are not integrated to email. But I hear you, if you like working in a monolith that makes sense. I like using the best tools for each piece. Best real time chat, best video chat platform, best asynchronous com, best file storage solution etc.
Mailing lists, just switch to mailing lists with a web archive for internal discussions. You can have a chat with messages which auto-delete every 30 days for quick discussions (we use the talk chat from nextcloud - not great but does what we need).
All of our real discussions are sent to a mailing list with a web archive (like lkml.org, except private). That way we can still reference precise messages easily. It has been working great for us.
This type of contribution is so incredibly both tone deaf and unempathetic, I wonder if you understand even how incredibly selfish the attitude is? Especially in using the word “just”. “Just” do this incredibly complex switch, which is utterly unsuitable to your users and how they work together, and which doesn’t actually solve your problem at hand since the article is about something else.
You give zero thoughts as to how the people affected are actually using the tool, why they would be in need of real time communication rather than delayed clunky messages, or even who the actual audience is.
Even with the absolute best reading of intentions I can give to your comment, I can only imagine you wrote it to make some microsubset of people still using mailing lists feel better about their choice and validated in one of the ever rarer advantages there are to using email as primary communication.
Either that or you don’t actually know what Slack is. But then why comment?
I'm sorry that you read my comment as "tone deaf". It was not my intention.
> This type of contribution is so incredibly both tone deaf and unempathetic, I wonder if you understand even how incredibly selfish the attitude is? Especially in using the word “just”.
I don't see how a comment which proposes a solution to the problem at hand can be "selfish".
I am the owner of a small business myself and am well aware of what switching tools requires. I'm also sorry that you think that modern tools like Slack or Mattermost for that matter improve communication over what email provides; then again that is obviously a matter of opinion.
> “Just” do this incredibly complex switch, which is utterly unsuitable to your users and how they work together, and which doesn’t actually solve your problem at hand since the article is about something else.
The article is about a simple yet painful problem. I am proposing a solution, I don't see how my comment is not pertinent. As for my use of the word "just", simple does not mean easy.
> Even with the absolute best reading of intentions I can give to your comment, I can only imagine you wrote it to make some microsubset of people still using mailing lists feel better about their choice and validated in one of the ever rarer advantages there are to using email as primary communication.
>
> Either that or you don’t actually know what Slack is. But then why comment?
False dichotomy. I truly believe that mailing lists are a great way to collaborate. Especially given the case that data ownership is now even more important to the author of the post.
Slack/Mattermost try to combine real-time chat with asynchronous information exchange. I think that that is not a great way to work, this is close enough to what I think of these solutions to [link to](https://basecamp.com/guides/group-chat-problems). Not only that but your data will always be locked away in their non-standard format.
Moreover, I emailed the author (good thing this "clunky" system exists), and offered help with a potential switch to using email. Thank you nonetheless for taking my comment into consideration. I can only hope it was more useful for other readers than it was for you.
Why does everyone seem to think straight away of portable devices.
I would get this for my main desktop monitor.
Seems like a great way to be able to do work and only work.
I would get this for my laptop screen and plug in my existing colour monitor.
In this parallel universe, I can afford the flagship laptop with the latest and greatest CPU and ample RAM because I have saved big on getting the 4x3 1600x1200 screen instead of the 4K AMOLED colour screen. I also get to eek out extra battery life big-time since the laptop goes into suspend e-reader style so I don't even know.
On the train the laptop works fine with nobody wanting to steal my PC. If I really need colour, I just pull out my mobile phone.
But there will never be the market for that. Monochrome LCDs went at the start of the century since everyone just wants colour. It is the same on desktop where, like yourself, I would really want one and be prepared to buy one even though I would have never tried f.lux.
The video did not make predictions about the future, it just presented the current reality at the time. I think it is still a good introduction to set the right expectations when encountering this technology.
Maybe. However there is fundamental physics in play and so it is likely someone (not me!) can tell you the most efficiency we get from that system. I'd be curious what those people say.
If you find yourself building a file format - you should read this page carefully and make sure that you have very good arguments which support why it does not apply to you.
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