I like slack, but as a medium, it's very easy to talk past each other. email is similar, where I was just on another thread where some more senior people were cc'd on a drill-down between parties and email threads can quickly become a power struggle if the seniormost person doesn't intervene and tell them to take it offline. All conflict is caused by power vacuums, which are in turn caused by gaps in leadership, imo.

Coming out of hacker IRC culture, I can keep up with anyone, but that puts some very thoughtful people, and therefore the team, at a disadvantage to what makes "good chat." I've seen it become a source of drama precisely because a normal team has a lead who sets the tone, but the equalizing nature of chat has the effect where it can both elevate dumb stuff and diminish important stuff, there's a mean reversion where the medium itself becomes the message. When it's good, it's very efficient, but when it's obligatory, it creates simmering rot in teams. It's amazing to have ideas stand on their own - but when it doesn't present the full person with them, the best ideas are no longer neutral - but rather assigned to our preconceptions about a person behind them, without providing them the tools to set tone in a way of relating.

We have to assume good intentions, but in an org, that's mostly performative, and the necessary altruism to sustain that doesn't scale. The reality of ostensibly flat organizations is that they are constant power struggles to extract value from each other (manage others), based on the ficton that the result is somehow organic leadership that produces authentic buy in and consensus. It's not. The necessary condition for value in a low-information medium like text or chat is shared purpose and aligned incentives. You need trust above all, as without it, text amplifies mistrust. The question of what facilitates that trust is the big hard problem. Anonymity and distance provides some trust in informal networks, as the consequences are limited. Text chats I'm on with friends that are absolutely private have trust that originates in friendship. Trust in on a team or in an organization is the fundamental problem to solve. Who can you trust, and for what? A single hub-spoke leader everyone trusts is the baseline, and the ideal is a complete mesh pattern of trust. Without something on that spectrum, your team is default dead. Low trust chat is lame and harmful. The best companies and teams have a relatively high degree of mutual trust as the result of aligned incentives.

When it goes to shit is when we're forced to pretend to trust each other, and then you get institutional bureaucracy politics, which async and text just amplify. I'm in a place where it seems to do it right, but I've been in places where they don't. Slack's message stats in the admin panel are a pretty good proxy metric for organizational trust, where if you see lower engagement, I'd bet just from that you have a trust deficit on your teams that is going to be a ceiling on the value they create.

If you gave me a company's outlook and slack admin panels, I would be able to tell you in a few minutes where your culture bottlenecks were. What people trust can be easily codified as well, but that's a tangent. Where I have seen Slack succeed is where the team has a basis for trust, and where I have seen it fail and become radioactive is where that trust was undermined because of a power vacuum and people defecting to where they think will prevail. Those are hard conversations becuase a lot of managers and employees personalize and moralize their position as being the effect of their identity, where they have internalized the status without a lot of examination of the practised skills it takes to do it well. Slack and email are neutral, but they are also extremely sensitive to deviations from alignment, where interpersonal conflict happens within the vast imaginations of the participants, and not in the real moment of dealing with another person.