Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Linen – Make your Slack community Google-searchable

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 60 posts

Re: Show HN: Linen – Make your Slack community Google-searchable

#21

Post by sjtindell »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #16
blue_cookeh wrote: post #6

I love stuff like this. With so many communities congregating on Discord, Slack etc. we lose a lot of valuable information that would previously have been on something publicly searchable like StackOverflow. A lot of OSS has fallen into this pattern and it can be truly infuriating at times.

It's a bit of a negative comment but I sure wish these communities would rediscover forums. They're not all perfect but I am convinced that Discord and Slack are where valuable information goes to get mixed with gifs and memes then die. I guess that won't happen until someone starts hosting discourse for free. Awesome that Linen is trying to build a different future though.

They are real time forums and way more. Just without search, like the other poster mentioned.

Re: Show HN: Linen – Make your Slack community Google-searchable

#23

Post by Mezzie »

cheeseblubber wrote: post #7
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #5

Can you see yourself offering a migration path off of Slack in the future? Your interface is much more accessible not just to Google, but also to this human. I would love to have an option to migrate off Slack with continuity.

Thanks! Not sure of the migration path off of Slack at least in the near term since there is a lot of pull in to Slack since most people in professional setting already is familiar with the UX. I do think there is something there for a layer on top of Slack or Discord where information gets moved. I want to explore making this tool available for internal teams once I have more features around productivity like relate…

Speaking as somebody who somehow gets roped into doing internal knowledge management work, something like this would be great, particularly with the features you're suggesting. I would actively campaign for us to use Linen depending on the price. It's not what I would use if I were building things from the ground up, but going into an org with years of Slack messages + an ongoing Slack culture, it would be fantastic.

Re: Show HN: Linen – Make your Slack community Google-searchable

#24

Post by mellosouls »

How does this handle privacy? Assuming these Slack conversations were originally in private communities, I'm scratching my head a bit that they are now appearing in Google results.

I'm guessing that essentially it is up to the Slack admin to ensure all participants have agreed to their conversations being made available to the world?

Re: Show HN: Linen – Make your Slack community Google-searchable

#26

Post by cheeseblubber »

mellosouls wrote: post #24

How does this handle privacy? Assuming these Slack conversations were originally in private communities, I'm scratching my head a bit that they are now appearing in Google results. I'm guessing that essentially it is up to the Slack admin to ensure all participants have agreed to their conversations being made available to the world?

All of the communities on Linen right now are open to the public to join through a public url. Linen isn't designed for private communities right now unless it evolves to be more like a productivity too that helps with related questions, summarization and search.

At the moment most people who come in to these Slack channels kind of treat it like Stackoverflow or customer support for technical tools.

Re: Show HN: Linen – Make your Slack community Google-searchable

#29

Post by mellosouls »

cheeseblubber wrote: post #26
mellosouls wrote: post #24

How does this handle privacy? Assuming these Slack conversations were originally in private communities, I'm scratching my head a bit that they are now appearing in Google results. I'm guessing that essentially it is up to the Slack admin to ensure all participants have agreed to their conversations being made available to the world?

All of the communities on Linen right now are open to the public to join through a public url. Linen isn't designed for private communities right now unless it evolves to be more like a productivity too that helps with related questions, summarization and search. At the moment most people who come in to these Slack channels kind of treat it like Stackoverflow or customer support for technical tools.

Thanks for the reply. I understand that the join link is public, but it's essentially a gate, the community behind which is private.

At the moment most people who come in to these Slack channels kind of treat it like Stackoverflow or customer support for technical tools

For the most part they will assume a conversation limited to members of the community they have joined.

Re: Show HN: Linen – Make your Slack community Google-searchable

#30

Post by cheeseblubber »

mellosouls wrote: post #29
cheeseblubber wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the communities on Linen right now are open to the public to join through a public url. Linen isn't designed for private communities right now unless it evolves to be more like a productivity too that helps with related questions, summarization and search. At the moment most people who come in to these Slack channels kind of treat it like Stackoverflow or customer support for technical tools.

Thanks for the reply. I understand that the join link is public, but it's essentially a gate, the community behind which is private. At the moment most people who come in to these Slack channels kind of treat it like Stackoverflow or customer support for technical tools For the most part they will assume a conversation limited to members of the community they have joined.

I see what you mean. Right now it is up to the communities/admin to explain that these conversations are public. I plan on building some tooling like a Slack bot that sends an alert to users who join a community letting them know the conversations are public.

Other solutions I have considered is only syncing specific channels and making it explicit that Linen is making these conversation public. Definitely a gray area right now and would love any suggestions around this.

Post reply on HN