I even think it's bad for generalized communication (ie. Slack/Teams/Discord/etc.) that isn't completely throwaway. Email is better in every single way for anything that might ever be relevant to review again or be filtered due to too much going on.
I have never had any issue finding information in slack with history going back nearly a decade. The only issue I have with Slack is a people problem where most communication is siloed in private channels and DMs.
Email threads are incredibly hard to follow though. The UX is rough and it shows.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In Slack people don't even consistently use threads, because they are not forced to, so conversations are strewn all over the place, interleaved with one another. Slack has no model of a discussion in the first place.
Anything that needs to be filtered for viewing again pretty much needs version control. Email largely fails at that, as hard as other correspondence systems. That said, we have common workflows that use email to build reviewed artifacts.
People love complaining about the email workflow of git, but it is demonstrably better than any chat program for what it is doing.
I don't think I agree with this. Sure, many things should be versioned, but I don't think most correspondence requires it, which is emails primarily purpose.
Agreed if it is correspondence that we are talking about. So, agreed I'm probably too strong that anything needing filtering and such is bad.
I'm thinking of things that are assembled. The correspondence that went into the assembly is largely of historical interest, but not necessarily one of current use.
