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If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

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Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#41

Post by AndrewUnmuted »

tspike wrote: post #19
Raphmedia wrote: post #7

I don't know, it is quite easy to search a well indexed chat for keywords in order to find important information.

Yeah, I think the real solution here is: let's make chat permanently archived and searchable. I find it more useful searching through Slack for old conversations around a topic than searching Confluence for the same.

But aren't these both pretty terrible tools or storing information?

Slack is an attempt at legitimizing and organizing stream-of-consciousness. It has short feedback loops and therefore cannot communicate deep research, novel concepts, nor well-cited evidence.

This is the wrong way to bring the tools of the consumer to the enterprise. Nobody asked for this chat tool - Slack is something sold to somebody who doesn't want to worry about something, not somebody who wants to do something well with low attrition.

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#42

Post by k__ »

"Despite the “asychronous” claim, you have to keep a steady eye on it and reply in realtime or the conversation will move on without you."

For me, sync and async communication is a spectrum and chat (as it is used in the majority of companies) is more on the sync half of it.

I'm currently thinking about building a microblogging alternative to Slack, that will be more on the async side, not as much as email though.

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#43

Post by paxys »

throwaway-42808 wrote: post #20
Footkerchief wrote: post #17

Slack has fantastic search. It has good filtering, sorting, and pagination, and has the right degree of fuzziness. I use it on a daily basis to discover the reasoning for things that happened before my time. I've never known anyone else who does this, and I've never understood why.

That's encouraging. I haven't had the same experience yet, but I haven't worked for someone who pays for full search history.

Every Slack plan has full search history, so really you haven't worked for someone who pays for Slack. Like, I get that it is expensive, but it's weird to run your company on a product trial.

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#44

Post by legerdemain »

dumbfounder wrote: post #29
legerdemain wrote: post #25

The problem with "trying it with my team for one sprint" is that I now need to have a long conversation with legal. How will the service provider handle the content (discussions, screenshots, code snippets) that my team will upload? Do our current customer contracts contain any clauses that complicate the use of external discussion sites? In the unlikely event that the service offers the option to host it locally --…

Those emails are only available to the users participating in them, and in some places are automatically deleted after a certain amount of time. The point of TFA is knowledge capture, and email isn't transparent enough for sharing knowledge.

Enter team aliases and topic-based distribution lists.

Adding a distribution list to an email thread is almost exactly like choosing a Slack channel to type into, except you no longer have the mess of needing to share and re-share messages and threads across channels. You can just add multiple distribution lists.

You can also subscribe and unsubscribe from distribution lists and set up filters for them, which is basically like joining and leaving Slack channels based on your interests, except it gives you much more control over what you want to read and when.

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#45

Post by isaacremuant »

Opinionated article that doesn't land in my experience.

Slack search is awesome, allows links with previews, reminders, easy channel creations, bookmarking, threading to allow sub topics...

Better than email for the quick back and forth, better than voice that is harder to schedule and synchronic and doesn't keep records.

If it's really important, you should have a way to keep track besides the "quick communication" but that doesn't mean slack isn't a great tool by default. Just keep an eye on the data deletion policies.

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#46

Post by mumblemumble »

legerdemain wrote: post #25

The problem with "trying it with my team for one sprint" is that I now need to have a long conversation with legal. How will the service provider handle the content (discussions, screenshots, code snippets) that my team will upload? Do our current customer contracts contain any clauses that complicate the use of external discussion sites? In the unlikely event that the service offers the option to host it locally --…

There is really only one fundamental problem with email: its mechanism for managing who takes part in the conversation is all wrong for team communication. The symptoms of this problem are myriad: reply-all storms, cya-by-cc, replying to a 5 month old email rather than starting a new thread, fyi forwards, etc.

Which isn't to say that all the advantages you list for email are not true. They are. It's just that most people will shy away from an otherwise-decent solution if it has terrible UX.

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#48

Post by j4yav »

keiferski wrote: post #5

Despite the “asychronous” claim, you have to keep a steady eye on it and reply in realtime or the conversation will move on without you. Anyone who takes the time to ponder and respond thoughtfully with context and explanation will find that they’re too late. I like the idea of a time-limited channel. You can only reply to it during the meeting, and up to 15 minutes after. Theoretically it would force everyone to com…

I'm building a collaborative, timeboxed collaboration tool called AsyncGo at https://asyncgo.com. We are pre-launch but have a prototype, and if anyone here would like a demo or has any questions I'd be happy to answer.

It's meant to replace chat and meetings with something designed to be connected with at your convenience, and then publishes the decisions and how they were reached to wherever your source of truth is (or we can act as your source of truth).

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#49

Post by munchbunny »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #35
legerdemain wrote: post #25

The problem with "trying it with my team for one sprint" is that I now need to have a long conversation with legal. How will the service provider handle the content (discussions, screenshots, code snippets) that my team will upload? Do our current customer contracts contain any clauses that complicate the use of external discussion sites? In the unlikely event that the service offers the option to host it locally --…

> The real answer is: just fucking use email. I know of at least one large company that forcibly deletes emails older than N months, as part of their legal retention policy. (I'm assuming it means non-retention to limit exposure to lawsuits.) That would be problematic for persistent documentation.

That sounds like a pathological case. How many companies actually do that?

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#50

Post by throw14082020 »

mumblemumble wrote: post #46
legerdemain wrote: post #25

The problem with "trying it with my team for one sprint" is that I now need to have a long conversation with legal. How will the service provider handle the content (discussions, screenshots, code snippets) that my team will upload? Do our current customer contracts contain any clauses that complicate the use of external discussion sites? In the unlikely event that the service offers the option to host it locally --…

There is really only one fundamental problem with email: its mechanism for managing who takes part in the conversation is all wrong for team communication. The symptoms of this problem are myriad: reply-all storms, cya-by-cc, replying to a 5 month old email rather than starting a new thread, fyi forwards, etc. Which isn't to say that all the advantages you list for email are not true. They are. It's just that most pe…

There are many problems with email, not just one. Sure, we have SPF, DKIM, DMARC and S/MIME, but they're not used by most people. Especially the most important one, S/MIME (to encrypt your messages/ keep them private).
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