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Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

blog.doist.com

111–120 of 220 posts

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#111
Yup, this guy gets it. Slack and other real-time messaging apps should be treated as a phone call or a knock on the door; an intentional interruption for something important enough to warrant a real time conversation.

Everything else should be handled through email, to allow people to consider and tailor their responses, to allow others to be added to the conversation through a CC: of a single focused thread, and to provide a directly searchable historical record of conversations.

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#112
post #40

I cant help but draw parallels between this and NNTP. This is essentially a really nice skin over newgroups, and thats not a bad thing at all. We have seen just how successful a modern UX can be on a old protocol with slack providing a UX to IRC. It is funny that we are slowly reworking the tools of the early computing community in slick modern ways. It is also interesting that we as a community have completely sold…

This seems like a real missed opportunity to build on systems that already work. I'd love to see these open systems like nntp come back. I hope someone puts in the effort to make them competitive in the modern technology world.

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#113
post #63
post #11

A small, but impactful design choice we made in creating Twist was to leave out the online presence indicator. I imagine you could address this in Slack by just having everyone set themselves to 'Away' by default. One of the things that I've found useful in Slack is turning off the "Someone is typing" message (the option is in the Display Options). I used to wait for someone to post if I knew a message was coming. No…

The online presence indicator is one of the problems created by Slack. Using real-time chat is the actual problem, whether it's Slack or Hipchat, or anything alike. Real-time is great sometime, but I don't think you should use it all the time: - Real-time chat happens quickly — one line at a time — discouraging full, thoughtful conversations. - Topics are all jumbled together in a channel so it’s nearly impossible to…

Sounds like a personnel issue more than a chat client problem.

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#114
post #40

I cant help but draw parallels between this and NNTP. This is essentially a really nice skin over newgroups, and thats not a bad thing at all. We have seen just how successful a modern UX can be on a old protocol with slack providing a UX to IRC. It is funny that we are slowly reworking the tools of the early computing community in slick modern ways. It is also interesting that we as a community have completely sold…

  I cant help but draw parallels between this
  and NNTP. This is essentially a really nice
  skin over newgroups, and thats not a bad
  thing at all.
The people in the D language community[0] came up with just such a thing. The source is on GitHub here[1].

0 - http://forum.dlang.org/

1 - https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never heard of react vs respond. I wonder if you could explain a bit of what it means?

Here's a solid article: https://zenhabits.net/respond/

Never heard of ZenHabits before. Very cool concept and love the minimal design.

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#116

Yup, this guy gets it. Slack and other real-time messaging apps should be treated as a phone call or a knock on the door; an intentional interruption for something important enough to warrant a real time conversation. Everything else should be handled through email, to allow people to consider and tailor their responses, to allow others to be added to the conversation through a CC: of a single focused thread, and to…

FTA:

> Threaded conversations have been at Twist’s core from the beginning.

Maybe depending on the precise job at hand, but I believe everything else should be handled by a usenet server, or equivalent. Usenet revolves around the topics, not the messages.

I was using a local usenet server 19 years ago for holding online design discussions. I haven't found a better mechanism since.

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My smart watch ... spams me mercilessly until I block apps and if I block enough apps I may as well have a cheap dumb watch. Definitely block the spammy apps. It makes a huge different to the smartwatch experience if it's only buzzing for things that really are urgent. Once you tune the notifications, it's actually calming - not only because you're not being interrupted as often, but also because you're not constan…

To me, that doesn't make much sense; the whole point of a smartwatch seems to be making the reading of notifications more efficient and unobtrusive. If you disable all except the rare urgent ones, what's the point of the smartwatch?

Well, personally, I use it to let me know there is an urgent notification.

I've never felt the point was for all my notifications to show up.

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#119
post #43
post #7

I 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…

Mailing lists are close to perfect; one missing feature from mailing list software is the ability to easily reach back in time to discover threads from before one joined a project.

For quick questions and discussions, irc is hard to beat.

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