I have a memory that in the early days of Slack, a big part of the marketing was around the idea that it could replace email. Or if not all email, then email between co-workers at the same organization. I feel like they backed off that messaging at some point, and my guess was that it turns out that, while Slack is a pretty damn good product and very helpful to teams, it doesn’t actually provably reduce email all that much, so there is probably better messaging to be had.

A new blog from Ali Rayl and Johnny Rodgers about those early days of Slack confirms the email angle. I’m going to quote a huge chunk of text here, but it’s because it’s kind of perfect fodder for this blog:

The basic idea was to replace email inside a company. Email had become the primary means of communication for most workplaces in the 90s and 00s. Everyone had it. Everyone knew how to use it. Companies had built elaborate workflows around it.

It was also terrible for organizational communication. Email splintered company messages into thousands of inboxes, giving each individual a partial view. Email threads that started with one topic rapidly sprouted tangential topics without a clear way to distinguish the different threads of the conversation. Reply-all chains bludgeoned recipients with high-noise, low-signal replies to sort through. 

Each email required an elaborate ceremony to compose. The sender must choose the recipients, compose a Subject line, issue a salutation, provide context on the matter at hand, ask their question or issue their instructions, close with a parting goodbye, and sign off. They could then optionally add attachments to be sent along with the email. Though — humans being humans — this step was often forgotten, requiring a hasty follow-up email with its own context and apology.

The “cc” (carbon copy) function of email offered a way for people to loop in anyone who might need to know, adding to the deluge of messages. cc’s sneaky partner “bcc” (blind carbon copy) let senders hide context about who could see it, breeding all sorts of communication anti-patterns.

A new employee at an email-based company arrived to an empty inbox, without any history or context to orient them to their role. Existing employees might search through their own inboxes to forward conversations and try to fill in the gaps. When the new person had a question, she might wonder who to ask – and if she guessed wrong she might wait hours or days to find the person with an answer.

People had become addicted to and dependent upon email. They hated the attention it required but were stuck without an alternative. Companies kept investing in policies and additional software to try to (unsuccessfully) fix their use of email.

It all seems to make so much sense when said like that. It almost reads like well honed marketing copy. You can say it’s horrible for communication, but that doesn’t make it so. You can say it “splinters” communication into partial views, but like, we all don’t need to be privy to every other conversation that happens at work. You can make it sound laborious to craft an email, but c’mon, really is it? Is it so much harder than crafting a DM? You can say that copying people is some design mistake that leads to signal vs. noise ratio problems, or you could just manage your email like a professional.

Certainly email isn’t perfect, but to pitch a well-designed private chat room the perfect alternative to email feels like a bit much. It’s just different! Of course real-time has distinct advantages. Of course open conversations are sometimes ideal. I’m a Slack fan (and Discord as well, as they are really quite similar, and any other tool that facilitates team chat). But the kinda email is dead tends to fall flat with me since it’s so clearly not true. For one, Slack is expensive and invite based and obviously I don’t share a Slack with everyone on the internet. The fact that anyone on the internet can email me, to me, is a huge strength of email.

That blog post was a cool look at Slack history, and Slack did sell for 27.7 billion and is still doing great, so like, well played.

To this day Slack has a “Slack vs. Email” landing page. And despite the clickbaity headlines, it’s a more measured and likable take. Email isn’t chat. Fair. A big ass searchable archive of an entire company chatting over years and years is useful. Fair. When Slack becomes a home base, notifications and integrations and such become extra useful. Fair. They also have some documentation pages that make other fair points (e.g. emoji responses replacing one-line emails. fair.)

There is some irony to Slack’s messaging of making communication lighter weight and better and faster, when it’s become rather common to think of Slack as heavy, busy, and hard to find what you need. Brian Loving recently:

Slack replaced email for many of us, turning what used to be a slow, confusing mess of threads into something easy and lightweight. It replaced the verbose and hyper-formal culture of email drafting into a group chat where chiming in is as simple as pressing enter.

But this shift came with a cost: as the friction to share fell, the quantity of shared things skyrocketed. As quantity skyrocketed, it became harder to find the signal in the noise. It gave us the tools to think out loud in front of hundreds of people, molding incomplete thoughts and ideas one push notification at a time.

If you ask anyone today what they dislike about Slack, their reply is inevitably some variation of: “It’s too damn noisy.”

Personally, at my main company CodePen, admittedly there is very little co-worker to co-worker email. There is lots of support email. There is lots of business dealings over email. But not so much company chatter. That’s in Slack, and there isn’t so many of us that Slack is every particularly overwhelming. We are a very code-focused company though, so GitHub is a big home base for us. And our planning, meetings, documentation and more tends to be in Notion. So if there is anything confusing about our setup, it’s that it’s sometimes hard to know if the best place to post some complete thought is best on Notion, Slack, GitHub, or Email. And as big of an email fan as I am, for internal discussion, it’s generally probably Slack (and then has to move out of there if it’s important enough).