Communication Treadmill

People pay attention to high value communication channels. These give them information about the job, hobby, etc. Since people pay attention to these channels, they get used more. Eventually they get used for something more borderline or inappropriate for the communication channel. When this happens people stop paying attention to the formerly high value channel and shift to new locations. Eventually the original channel is useless. Rinse and repeat for the new communication channel.

This can also happen when the message is only of interest to a subset of the channel. For example, if you need to notify “everyone on project X” of a truly important message but notify a broader group such as everyone@. Everyone not on project X will learn that everyone@ is unimportant will (rightfully) get ignored.

An example of how this happens:

  • people initially read email to get company info. However lots of junk messages get sent.
  • emails might have the label “important”, “action required”, “must read” — but there are too many of these.
  • people stop paying attention to email and only read Slack
  • but Slack becomes noisy, so now they rely on getting notified.
  • people start using at-here on Slack and thus eliminate the value of the notification.
  • important messages might be “bold” or marked with an “❗”

Another way of thinking about this is that every undesired message by the recipient increases the noise floor of the channel. At some point truly useful messages get lost in the noise.

More generally, the value of a communication channel is defined by its least important message. Every time an unimportant message is sent (defined by the recipient) it lowers the value for the entire channel.

This can be solved in a few ways:

  1. moderation of the channel by someone who relies on the value of the channel
  2. introducing a cost to use the channel

A closely related concept is that of “spammer logic”. The receiver of a message is ultimately the only person that determines the importance of a message. If they opt not to receive the message but the sender sends it anyways they are utilising “spammer logic”.