Slack show how long it took to write a message

Slack is in the tech zeitgeist these days. Recently Sam Altman was dunking on Slack and implying he wastes a lot of time reading through updates and responding to messages. As someone who has Slack open over 12 hours a day, I can empathize with people who have a lot of comms coming in. However, I like to think we are fairly productive with how we use communication tools.

One of the most subtly insidious features is that it shows you when someone is typing. This got me thinking, what if there were a follow up that showed you how long it took for someone to write a message? I can see this outing a lot of slow communicators and unfairly rewarding people who write quickly (even if they aren’t putting a lot of thought into what they say).

All that said, I don’t see a world where Slack implements something like this, as it adds a piece of data this is revealing, but not overly helpful. Average response time is an interesting metric, but both unfairly reward people who are fast, not necessarily subtsantive.

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