Their "new" approach sounds suspiciously like a mailing list: asynchronous communication for a group that supports threads of communication.
I would liken it to a newsgroup more then a mailing list, but they are very similar.
Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging
41–50 of 220 posts
Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging
#42Congrats on finding a real problem and building something to solve it. You're about to fight an uphill battle.
Here's my feedback (from someone who currently leads the leads of 7 remote engineering teams):
• Not knowing if someone is available and if they will get back to you soon is very very bad for many conversations. For example, when you have a C-level asking for rapid turn around on something that needs to be done by someone multiple levels away from you.
• In remote teams, sometimes people disappear (e.g. car accident or civil unrest in a random country), and if you have no way to know, you'll eventually get fed up.
• The feeling of cohesiveness that comes from having realtime conversations, brainstorms and other collaboration is very important to managers (especially in remote teams) and convincing them that realtime talk is not a good default is going to be quite hard.
• As a result you will never be their default communication channel - at most you'll be the place they discuss bigger problems. But because you're not the default, you'll get destroyed by slack, who is the default. Most times people use the tool at hand that they are most familiar with, not the best tool for the job. I would encourage you to write a slack bot that reminds people to use you & helps them easily experience value from your product without you having to win the default spot.
• Finally, most people will have serious difficulty seeing the difference between your product and other product management tools that allow commenting in detail on issues being discussed.
Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging
#43I like it. I've been thinking for a while that old-school forums are actually fundamentally superior to chatrooms for sharing important information and having in depth discussions. In my opinion the chat model is simply bad for effectively distributing useful information because it disappears in the noise. Perhaps what's needed is a combination of the forum-style threaded conversation model for information sharing an…
> old-school forums
Most open source projects still use mailing lists, which are even better than forums in that everyone can read and write emails in whatever client they prefer.
And yes, it's far better than chat for serious discussions, with a global group of people. You don't want to exclude the Americans from important decisions when everyone in Europe is awake and on the chat in the morning, and vice versa.
I think both systems have their places - if I have a quick question, chat is usually better. For longer more serious discussions, perhaps with code included, email wins.
Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging
#44so how is the end solution different/better than email?
Easier to give / remove participants and automatically give them access to previous messages in the thread, without having to quote all previous messages just to give some context.
I need to give this another look, but isn't that what a Google Group provides?
Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging
#45I like it. I've been thinking for a while that old-school forums are actually fundamentally superior to chatrooms for sharing important information and having in depth discussions. In my opinion the chat model is simply bad for effectively distributing useful information because it disappears in the noise. Perhaps what's needed is a combination of the forum-style threaded conversation model for information sharing an…
I used to think that too and even began to write something like that. But what happens if something important accidentally is discussed on the chat? Right, someone has to move it to the sticky "forum" part of the app. That is complicated.
I'm sure it's not dead simple, but that doesn't mean it's worse by any stretch.
On further thought I wonder how much of the problem I have with slack and similar services (of which I actually tangentially happen to work on one) is more of a problem with process and expectations than anything else.
1. You are expected to be on chat, otherwise you suffer the appearance of not working - counter-productive since you are now subject to distracting notifications. If do-not-disturb settings and turning off notifications wasn't frowned upon this might be less of an issue.
2. Important information should be distributed through a more persistent second channel, email or a web-viewable email-list may actually be suitable.
Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging
#46One interesting challenge with this real-time vs. async communication challenge is that different job roles have different needs. At my company, most of our employees have been on the customer service side until recently, and Slack is great for them. Almost everything they need to talk about is urgent (even if it's not important) and temporary. They rarely have long-lasting high-level conversations.
Now we're starting to hire more developers and I'm realizing how disruptive it is for them to be pulled into Slack conversations all the time. So I've started using email more for communicating with the devs, and that seems to work reasonably well.
The questions I have are: (a) is it possible to have a single communication tool that handles both real-time and async properly and (b) does that even matter? Maybe email+Slack is a perfectly fine solution. Either way, it's obvious that only using Slack isn't a viable option.
Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging
#47I like it. I've been thinking for a while that old-school forums are actually fundamentally superior to chatrooms for sharing important information and having in depth discussions. In my opinion the chat model is simply bad for effectively distributing useful information because it disappears in the noise. Perhaps what's needed is a combination of the forum-style threaded conversation model for information sharing an…
> old-school forums Most open source projects still use mailing lists, which are even better than forums in that everyone can read and write emails in whatever client they prefer. And yes, it's far better than chat for serious discussions, with a global group of people. You don't want to exclude the Americans from important decisions when everyone in Europe is awake and on the chat in the morning, and vice versa. I t…
Generally I've found that any forum project that also doesn't include reply-by-email functionality is a waste of time.
Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging
#48I like it. I've been thinking for a while that old-school forums are actually fundamentally superior to chatrooms for sharing important information and having in depth discussions. In my opinion the chat model is simply bad for effectively distributing useful information because it disappears in the noise. Perhaps what's needed is a combination of the forum-style threaded conversation model for information sharing an…
> old-school forums Most open source projects still use mailing lists, which are even better than forums in that everyone can read and write emails in whatever client they prefer. And yes, it's far better than chat for serious discussions, with a global group of people. You don't want to exclude the Americans from important decisions when everyone in Europe is awake and on the chat in the morning, and vice versa. I t…
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Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like you kind of ended up with e-mail :)
I would like to see a meaningful discussion of the tipping points between various forms of communication. ie: Phone call when you need immediate, high-bandwith dialog; IM when want to chat, but don't need instant responses; email when you want persistent communications, etc Those are very brief, single faceted views, and there are a lot more factors.
And then there is Google Docs for persistent, collaborative communications.
Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging
#50 I am the poster of this (and as you can see, I am an old HN user -- almost ten years here!)
I'll be answering your questions. Thanks for the support!