I kind of get why we don’t like this in email, but for SMS and Slack I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reactions. They’re a way to say “I received this and have a positive reaction to it, with no further communication necessary”. Replaces a lot of useless typing I had to do to sound polite when saying “fine, no further comment”. And then getting a notification from the other party acknowledging my acknowledgment… yuck.
When we think about email is that it is really explicit when there is something new to handle. There is a new email.
In Slack there are many channels with individual messages which can have reactions, and those individual messages can turn into threads which provides another place where you now need to actively scan to see if something is relevant to you.
This in general is something that bothers me with group communication that is non-linear. It's extremely hard to keep track of it all, and to catch up. Where do you start reading?
When we talk about email, it's much easier to filter for what is important. If your name is in 'To' or in 'CC' it's important enough.
Sidenote: the company I worked at encouraged people to put the group they're emailing into BCC, which makes discoverability as to which group the email was sent (and thus which group I am a member of) impossible to find out, as that information is purposefully hidden from me. But I digress.
In general I am a huge fan of purposeful communication, i.e. tagging someone when it's for them, vs throwing something out there and see who picks up on it or not.
Not to mention that I've seen cases where people get angry for you not having caught a message on Slack. If I wasn't tagged I might miss it. That's the reality of things if you're in so many channels.
Not to mention that leaving channels was frowned upon, as it is explicitly printed.