Are Group Chat Apps Repeating the Same Mistakes of Email?

Imagine you're in an office and you gather your colleagues in the boardroom to discuss an important project. You lay down the details and then suddenly eight people start talking at once, and no one listens to each other. It's chaos. It's overwhelming.

Welcome to the shiny new world of group chat apps.

The likes of Slack, HipChat and Flowdock are infiltrating workplaces across the world, promising progress in how teams communicate and collaborate. Slack is the market leader, claiming to have more than 500,000 daily active users, enjoying a 33X growth rate in 2015.

But are group chats doing the exact opposite of their intended use and adding more stress instead of alleviating it?

Most of the times, yes, says Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp, the creator behind one of the first chat apps called Campfire, which launched in 2006. For an exec with skin in the game, you'd think he would be bullish on the success of group chat tools, but he has worked in the space long enough to know chat fatigue when he sees it.

"Group chat rooms don't provide any structure for communication," Fried says in an interview. "It's just a conveyor belt to throw out ideas."

If you've used a group chat app at work, you know the challenge: You raise a point in a "room" and then someone else pipes up with another issue unrelated to your comment. A few messages, or lines, pass by with everyone addressing the other issue, but not yours. Someone finally answers your feedback, but it's too late; every staffer has moved onto another topic, and will likely chat away without remembering your point.

Or, worse yet, you lose control of a conversation that was just supposed to focus on one topic. As Fried writes in a Medium post outlining his concerns, "The medium encourages this breakdown since anyone can pop in and step right into any conversation without having the opportunity to get up to speed on the back-story. They may start strong, but conversations rarely get better over chat."

Even worse, the paranoia-inducing FOMO (fear of missing out) rears its head when those notification numbers increase. If your email inbox with hundreds of unread messages built a knot of anxiety in your chest, just wait until you whimper at the thought of replying to the same number of notifications for messages every boss will deem critical.

Fried says chat rooms are "terrible places to make decisions, to hit consensus, for having a thorough conversation." He compares it to a shot clock in basketball, where you have a finite amount of time to reply until the conversation moves on without you.

Fried's sentiments echo what Samuel Hulick wrote in Quartz recently when he decided to "break up" with Slack. "Trying to keep up with the manifold follow-up tasks from the manifold conversations in your teams and channels requires a Skynet-like metapresence that is simply beyond me," he wrote. "With you, the firehose problem has become a hydra-headed monster."

Thing is, too many group chat firms obsess over killing email, says Sean Regan, head of growth at HipChat. He says his company doesn't want its group chat app to overthrow email and help us achieve the pipe-dream of Inbox Zero; rather, they're in it for the long game, and HipChat realizes group chat can complement email.

Regan reminds us that email is used mainly for three things: task management, multi-party editing with threads going back and forth, and sending messages. "If we create another tool that offers another way to send messages, we are repeating the mistakes of email. But we have to improve on email, and that's when we start to solve that problem."

And it all starts and finishes with the product itself, not user behavior. As Fried cogently concludes in his Medium post: "…in the end, if people are exhausted and feeling unable to keep up, it's the tool's fault, not the user's fault. If the design leads to stress, it's a bad design."