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

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111–120 of 329 posts

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

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, because it still doesn't give people sufficiently fine-grained control over demands on their attention. I think the ideal is the approach you get with discussion forums: Create a set of boards organized around topics, and place named, threaded conversations within those boards. People can join a board, in which case they will be able to get a list of new conversations related to that board's topic. They c…

What’s the difference between that sort of topics and news groups or mailing lists (with archives)? If I want information on something, subscribe; if I don’t want information, unsubscribe: I can always follow/search the archive (or read digests)

It's a second level of organization/subscription so that you can have more fine-grained control over how much you get spammed.

News groups and mailing lists don't scale super well, in that, when you subscribe, you then get sent everything. Maybe not terrible for the 5-10 emails a day from my kid's playgroup's email list, but absolutely awful for trying to keep up with a team of 100 people.

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

#112

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 --…

I worked at a B2B startup that had chronic problems w/ team members sharing documents in way that our customers thought were insecure. These were some of the biggest companies the world. I asked our biz dev guy who had been trained as a lawyer what to do and he told me to the same thing my accountant does with my taxes: email an encrypted PDF as an attachment and share the password by a separate channel.

There are various services like WireDoc, ShareFile, etc, or even Mozilla's deprecated Firefox Send that canonized this (encrypt on one channel, share the password on a separate channel).

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

#113

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 --…

Is this the part where we pretend your organization doesn’t already use something like a ticketing service, wiki, etc? I find it hard to believe you don’t have any sort of tool to post information already. If it’s true, run.

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

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm willing to bet money that for every company that deletes emails older than some age also deletes Slack messages, and deletes then sooner . I speak as someone who worked for a company where email got archived and then deleted after 6 months, and currently works at a company where everyone only uses Slack, and Slack is purged after 30 days.

Our email has a 90 day retention window, and Slack is permanent. We're the largest in our industry.

Isn't that just a company policy? At some-point, the lawyers will get clued-in and require that even on Slack and other company-wide chat there be a limited retention window!

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

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

All but the last are used by everyone as it is basically impossible for mail to be accepted reliably from an email server that doesn't have those set up correctly.

As for S/MIME, certificates are a pain to deal with for most people and all they really care about is transport-level, not E2E encryption.

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

#116

I can't agree with this essay more. In the early days of the Ethereum community a lot of open coordination was done on reddit and a threaded forum hosted on Vanilla Forums. Initially for privacy and convenience, Skype, gitter, Discord, and Telegram began to take hold, and later became the primary place for open, public discussions and some decision-making as well. Threaded forums were still used but not central. It w…

Thanks for all the work you’ve done for ETH! It has enriched my life greatly, and I am so excited to see where things go post-EIP1559 and 2.0!

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

#117
post #73

I have always thought that Slack is designed to make information go away, and that's why people like it. Email never goes away unless you archive the thread. If you have a bunch of things that are going on, you open your inbox and realize just how behind you are, every time you open it. Slack, conversely, scrolls up and always looks the same. If you miss something, the world moved on without your input, and you feel…

amusingly, my understanding is that the original goal for slack was to be an archive. slack originally stood for: searchable log of all communication and knowledge but then in practice, i saw message retention locked down to 30 days or less, which kinda defeated the point. other modern tools, like trello, also seemed to have gaps when it came to logging/searching/archiving what happened. trello is fantastic for organ…

I don't know of any productivity tool that handles archiving well. You can store done tasks in some way, but all the context is lost. Over time, it's annoying even on a small - individual - scale.

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

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Most Fortune 500 companies have a document retention policy that every employee needs to read the generic training video/documents on when getting hired and agree to. This sets a general policy of deleting documents/emails/etc after $X days. This is really a CYA policy to purge old conversations if a big lawsuit comes down asking for document retention in relation to some scandal, and if its older than $X days you're…

What is CYA in CYA policy?

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

#119
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Fortune 500 companies have a document retention policy that every employee needs to read the generic training video/documents on when getting hired and agree to. This sets a general policy of deleting documents/emails/etc after $X days. This is really a CYA policy to purge old conversations if a big lawsuit comes down asking for document retention in relation to some scandal, and if its older than $X days you're…

What is CYA in CYA policy?

cover your ass.

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

#120
I can find useful discussions from 10 or 20 years ago because they were crawled and archived. IRC, Usenet, web message boards, mailing lists...

Every single discussion happening on Slack or Discord will probably be lost in a year or two and is impossible to find unless you happen to be already aware of it.

Developers should not use these platforms for anything with any value. This is not the way to share information.

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