With Slack Connect Now you can send anyone a DM. So Long, Work-Life Balance

“When someone opens their phone,” said Frank Protocol, “When they connect with their friends, they click on Facebook or WhatsApp. If they connect with someone they work with, regardless of where that person works, they have to click on Slack. (Note the comparison to social media here.)

Slack users and experts often refer to the application as an email killer, and a feature like Slack Connect looks like it would be another nail in the email chest. Probably not. I’m not saying this because email is good—I currently have over 23,000 unread emails, and while it’s not a humble brag, it’s a cry for help – but because Slack chats and email still have such fundamental differences.

David Heinemeier Hansson, who founded Ruby on Rails, co-founded the productivity software company Basecamp, and rarely misses an opportunity to praise the benefits of Basecamp’s email product. . Email is asynchronous, deliberate. Email is a protocol. You will not lose your contact book by changing systems. Everyone has email. “

Perhaps the worst thing about something like Slack chat is that it is “yet another platform,” says Heinemeier Hansson. “The last thing the world needs is yet another proprietary protocol that pegs a social chart to one company.”

The structure of email can support a more considerate experience (especially in a pandemic). But pants or texts can also be considered. So the most important question is perhaps whether Slack Connect is good for that to chat, and what a good chat application in 2021 is. The first and perhaps most obvious characteristic of a good chat app is an airtight approach to privacy and security. Slack does not provide end-to-end encryption; organizations cannot currently be verified as official companies on the platform, which seems more important now that people from other organizations can send messages; and, well, there’s the first snafu to allow people to send potentially malicious message attachments in DM requests. Sorry folks: Employers can read your Slack DMs, despite how private they may seem.

The next consideration is what kind of communication the chat actually enables. Slack’s cascade of real-time updates, threading features, programmable bots, and even the smorgasbord of emojis and GIFs are as much part of the app’s appeal as possible distractions. Microsoft’s Office apps are vegetables; Slack is candy. But candy isn’t necessarily good for you, of course. Anne Helen Peterson, a former media studies researcher who now writes a Substack newsletter on Internet culture, has commented in the past that Slack has become a way to LARP our jobs – that’s live-action role-playing – and is one of many work apps that contribute to the “slipping” between our work and private lives.