Slack Forgets How Bad We Are at Communicating

Why does everyone want to own messaging when people are so obviously bad at it?

Photo: Muhammed Abiodun/Unsplash

The key to a powerful messaging system is not just the tools to let you manage contacts and chat in a clear, concise way. We need flourishes like:

• Emoji
• Animoji
• Preprogrammed responses
• Reactions

And we apparently need to break down every wall both outside and within messaging systems so we can all communicate with everyone all the time.

Facebook, for example, has been doing it across all their homegrown and acquired apps, making one giant messaging subsystem across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.

Slack, one of the most important business messaging and process systems, decided last year that it would be cool if every single paying Slack customer could direct message any other customer on the vast system. With Slack Connect, an Instacart programmer could message the marketing lead at Robinhood, or someone in Dropbox human resources could touch base with an e-commerce expert at Shopify.

Humans prove time and again that they are terrible communicators, especially when they’re…