Great thoughts. Remote companies are async by nature, and Slack goes against that. It means that people need to be always on to get the benefits of Slack - which is silly, you'd rather focus on actual work and let people get back to you when they're ready to.
> A good alternative to Slack would be a Reddit-like interface with threads and an asynchronous model.
Emails are messy, siloed, opaque. Nobody in a team shares the same version of an email chain. No central source of truth means a high chance of not being on the same page. Emails have so many problems. Feel free to read through our comparison Twist vs Emails: https://medium.com/@hfauq/email-or-twist-why-twist-is-better...
The online presence indicator is one of the problems created by Slack. Using real-time chat is the actual problem, whether it's Slack or Hipchat, or anything alike. Real-time is great sometime, but I don't think you should use it all the time:
- Real-time chat happens quickly — one line at a time — discouraging full, thoughtful conversations.
- Topics are all jumbled together in a channel so it’s nearly impossible to piece together the full conversation.
- Important team knowledge — like what decision did we make and why? — gets buried and lost within hours (even with powerful search).
- The real-time nature of communication excludes anyone who’s not there in the moment it takes place.
- Constant notifications eat into your time and attention.
- Even if you’ve turned off notifications, the fear of missing out on something important keeps pulling you back into the app.
- It slowly creates a culture that prioritizes being available over doing good work.
> A good alternative to Slack would be a Reddit-like interface with threads and an asynchronous model.
You're describing Twist -- twistapp.com.