Live data from Hacker News

Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

blog.doist.com

191–200 of 220 posts

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

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By hiding the ones with unused messages you implicitly tell which ones have new messages because those are the only ones that are visible. It works quite well and enabled me to passively track dozens of channels without being overwhelmed. As to mentions and highlight words, I don't think there's a solution for that for muted channels. When I developed this technique I would have liked targetted mentions, but not @her…

But then if you want to start a conversation in a channel with no unreads, you have to go digging for it.

Command-K

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

#192
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mailing lists are kind of terrible beyond a certain point of complexity. First, they lead to a lot of self-spamming, with internal conversations. Second, if you're not on the thread, you'll never see it. Email depends on enormous duplication of data. And in practice, at large companies, forced expiration is used to control email storage space, in part because of the duplication. So at very minimum, you want something…

> Second, if you're not on the thread, you'll never see it.

This doesn't make any sense. If you're subscribed to a mailing list, you will see everything sent to it.

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

#193
post #123

There is a reason Jedi masters, powerful witches and wizards, ancient wise men and women, and so on tend to be found on isolated mountains, in remote caves, wandering in far away forests, and the like instead of living in the middle of the village with their doors open.

John Carmack (id software, Zenimax, Oculus) used to lock himself in a hotel room for days at a time in order to get work done. I'm curious if he still does it, I'm guessing these days you just need to disconnect from the internet to be distraction-free. No, I’m not taking a vacation. Quite the opposite, in fact. I’m getting a hotel room in a state where I don’t know anyone, so I can do a bunch of research with no dis…

I do this and it works really well for me. Can build out the barebones of a new feature in 3 ish days and bring it back to the team to iterate on for a couple weeks. Speaking of which...is about time for me to do so.

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

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: Workplace Partner @ Job I was cynical about it to begin with, when it was just 'Facebook at Work' but I do believe it addresses a lot of the issues brought up in the blog post and the Workplace team are executing very well. Accounts are completely separate from Facebook, no crossover at all. I don't think it's a Slack killer, as they both solve different problems in different ways, and Workplace is very m…

Sounds pretty decent! Would be interested in trying it if my employer didn't roll its own team chat for this purpose. Maybe Slack should be worried too. They may have a tough road ahead growing into the valuation between Facebook Workplace, Microsoft Teams, Atlassian HipChat and Amazon Chime.

Cisco also has a product called Spark which has integration with their videoconferencing equipment.

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

#195
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the boss throws out the article on a slack channel without any context? Sounds to me like if you want +1's that's what you do. If you want reasoned discussion, there should be an ask from the boss on the channel-toss even if it is a @TheRealmccoy call-out on the posting.

Again, the React v/s Respond conundrum. At hindsight, if you look at a Slack channel, so much information would be found redundant. It is there just because it is so easy to put out there, because of the intrinsic nature of the medium, and it is so because, most of it is reaction. Like, oh this is nice, let's put it out on Slack. While writing an email,when the communication is being initiated, there is sufficient pa…

What makes email inherently better for your React/Respond dichotomy?

What prevents redundancy is searchability. Most email clients are great for that, but Slack's searchability is inherently better than email - if you're not part of a channel (because you weren't on the team at that point), posts can be searched once you do gain access to the channel.

Emails between other team-members excluding you cannot since you will never have access to them.

There are so many times I just link back to a previous answer on the topic and just h/t the original poster. Takes a moment, but is far more definitive.

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

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Using Slack as a one-line-at-a-time chat service is a choice that a user makes. Slack itself doesn't enforce it. Thats like saying you can drive your car with your feet, the car doesn't enforce driving by hands. The point of this post is saying that slack has these shortcoming by the nature of its design. You can make as many arguments as you want defending it, but everything has a design that influences usage.

Thats like saying you can drive your car with your feet, the car doesn't enforce driving by hands. That's a slightly odd analogy, but let's go with it. You're right that you can drive a car in ways that are dangerous, and the car doesn't enforce safe driving. The law is what enforces the way you drive (by punishing you for driving dangerously). This is exactly the same as company rules to ensure Slack is used properl…

Pretty sure the GP doesn't care about the law in the analogy; the design of the car itself impedes your ability to drive with your feet.

In the same way, slack is frictionless to post one-liners; you have to go out of your way to post a multi-liner (and I personally have the constant worry I'll miss the shift and post half-finished in such systems).

It doesn't matter if the law (company) says to drive by hands; you have to be really intent on driving with your feet to get into a car and do such a clearly unnatural thing. It's difficult to imagine someone new getting in and thinking this must be the correct position, because the car does not support it naturally. It can be done, but only while dealing with friction.

Then compare slack to a bbs forum, where people naturally post paragraphs. Not coincidentally, the act of posting has more friction; CLRF is a newline, posting is a button off at the bottom of the page. To get a better ratio of value (writing) to friction, you'll simply have to write more and post less.

The law (company) can enforce unnatural behavior onto its populace, but when the law is unclear or unstated (or ignored) on the particular matter, the natural activity depends on the environment.

And slack is very clearly predisposed to a particular kind of posting.

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

#197
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…

It's called Facebook Workplace. Balance of Messenger for immediate communication, groups for threaded conversations, and feed for discovery.

No, no, no, no. Unsearchable monster. Yes, I need to use it.

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

#198
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usenet news. 1. You enter groups devoted to large topics (like "all company" or "software development" or maybe "Smith Project") 2. You see conversations delimited by subject lines, completely threaded, with full history. 3. You normally reply to a message with another message, quoting or not, and your message is threaded in. 4. The tools are good for showing you what you haven't read yet. 5. You can ignore a topic f…

Wow, I love all these features! You're not saying it: 10. Has open-source implementations, 11. Allows HTML formatting, 12. Has a hierarchy of topics, splitting up topics in a generic way, 13. Is blazingly fast, 14. AND allows referencing specific articles using an URI scheme: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5538 ?

Blazingly again? I wish people stop using words only because it's cool to do so.

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

#199
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I love all these features! You're not saying it: 10. Has open-source implementations, 11. Allows HTML formatting, 12. Has a hierarchy of topics, splitting up topics in a generic way, 13. Is blazingly fast, 14. AND allows referencing specific articles using an URI scheme: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5538 ?

Blazingly again? I wish people stop using words only because it's cool to do so.

I'm a non-native speaker. I'm guessing you're saying the adjective is dated and reading it again it does sound like that. Still, i was trying to say 'faster than the usual fast'

Exorbitantly fast?

Snappy responsive?

Real-time? (Haha)

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

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like the hallmark of a pre-dysfunctional workplace. None of the engineering managers I've worked with wouldn't expect their engineers to drop what they're doing and look at an article. All but one were too busy themselves to be doing that sort of thing. None would want to jeopardize their schedules by distracting their engineers. Most managers aren't trying to be friends with their engineers; they have the…

I cannot relate to the parent post at all. My boss shares content all the time on Slack. People rarely respond, nor is it expected, nor is the lack of expectation communicated, it's just implicit based on the culture. (i.e. "Check this out if you have time") If my boss was sharing content and then my coworkers were "looking over their backs" to see who liked something first or liked something with enough enthusiasm,…

> "Check this out if you have time"

Our boss actually uses e-mail for this purpose, which I find much more appropriate because it matches the "if you have time" bit better than Slack.

Post reply on HN