Leave me on read

Good morning and happy Monday!

If you use iMessage (or WhatsApp I think?) you are familiar with read receipts. It shows you when a message was read by the recipient. Pretty self explanatory.

The social dynamics created by appending these 10 characters of text to a message is vast. People have felt sad, anxious, worried, disappointed, and frustrated all by confirming someone’s received and at least viewed your message.

So what if we added that to Slack?

Read receipts have debatable utility in casual messaging conversations. Taking that into a work context would be a nightmare. Some of us would stop opening messages, others would start hounding people who leave us on read. Others would be left anxious and nervous, wondering what to do.

There’s a difficult balance to strike when designing a tool that makes communication easy without creating weird social dynamics, and this is not it.

Slack hasn’t added this to their product for good reason and probably never will.

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– Soren