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

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

#141

Post by silicon2401 » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 9:04 PM UTC

FalconSensei wrote: post #140

jrockway wrote: post #51

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…

> I have always thought that Slack is designed to make information go away, and that's why people like it. I think it's exactly the opposite?[0] People like it because, except for the free plan, you can find anything that was ever discussed. [0]: https://slack.com/pricing

This is exactly why at my org, slack is one of the de-facto sources of truth. And it's awesome. I can often find the solution to a specific, niche problem that someone else discussed 4 years ago in a few seconds. Assuming your org pays for whatever it is that allows full archival, it's a great way to capture org-specific, tribal knowledge that you won't find on google, but that nobody will take the time to add to an internal wiki or something accessible beyond their immediate team.

If you want a chat nightmare, try microsoft teams. That quickly became one of the most painful parts of one of my previous workplaces.

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

#142

Post by silicon2401 » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 9:06 PM UTC

andybak wrote: post #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.

While I enjoy slack at work (not without reservations, but overall I like it), I definitely agree slack/discord are terrible for communities. I can't imagine how much discussion that even I participated in almost 15 years ago is still quickly available, would now be lost to the ether of discord and slack.

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

#143

Post by zug_zug » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 9:07 PM UTC

Communitivity wrote: post #130

I disagree with this article. This is what was said about GMail when it first came out - you need folders, without folders you can't keep organized, etc. Turns out indexing and mechanisms to make use of that indexing (labels, advanced sorts, filters) work better than folders. Persistent chat that can be labelled, indexed, searched and filtered is amazing for work related chats, or any chat that becomes part of a long…

Exactly, I completely reject the premise of this article. In the last hour I searched the "alerts" channel to see how many times our database had high CPU in the last year.

I'm not one to defend slack, but there's nothing inherently temporary about slack. And searchability > manual categorization.

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

#144

Post by Const-me » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 9:07 PM UTC

welterde wrote: post #132

Const-me wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Outlook for 20 years or so, and I generally like it. Lots of features, some of them are borderline unique. For instance, I wonder which e-mail clients allow to create complicated rules that are then running on the mail server as opposed to that client? The necessary conditions are (1) one needs to learn it. Too many features are making UX non-intuitive. (2) fast connection to e-mail server (3) ms exch…

That feature of course needs support server-side, but Thunderbird does have a Sieve add-on (in case sieve is enabled/available on the server). I don't use it myself, since I prefer to edit the sieve filter file directly instead of using a GUI for it, but the option is there.

I prefer to right-click on e-mail and "create rule from message" from context menu. Also, the feature doesn't require any steps to configure, install or enable, it just works out of the box.

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

#145

Post by zxexz » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 9:09 PM UTC

tabbott wrote: post #139

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 --…

Slack and all its clones are based on the chat room model, which structurally has the problem described in this article (and many others for productivity, such as wasting attention). Fundamentally, the chatroom model pioneered by IRC is poor for asynchronous communication because you can't sustain temporally overlapping conversations in a channel. However, you can't "just use email" -- Email's threading model is grea…

Zulip really hits the sweet spot for a communication tool. Especially with large amounts of users communicating across many different threads. The FHIR community "chatroom"[0] is a Zulip server and is indispensable for communication and knowledge building across thousands of users.

[0] https://chat.fhir.org/#

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

#146

Post by thesuitonym » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 9:09 PM UTC

hn_asker wrote: post #101

mumblemumble wrote: post #46

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…

I hate it when I'm emailing someone with a deliberately long response and by the time I send, the thread has already gone on and I have to re-merge it.

The obvious solution here is to not merge the whole thread into your email, instead including only the parts of the message that are directly relevant.

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

#147

Post by jrockway » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 9:10 PM UTC

FalconSensei wrote: post #140

jrockway wrote: post #51

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…

> I have always thought that Slack is designed to make information go away, and that's why people like it. I think it's exactly the opposite?[0] People like it because, except for the free plan, you can find anything that was ever discussed. [0]: https://slack.com/pricing

I have a paid Slack plan and while I can find specific threads where I remember a lot of the details, I've never found anything that I didn't personally participate in.

Overall, I think search is a bad knowledge base management tool. It proves the positive quickly (search for "foo", see "here's how to use foo"), but never lets you prove the absence of documentation (search for "foobar", nothing comes up, search for "foo bar", nothing comes up, search for the previous codename "barbaz", nothing comes up... did you forget something, or is there just no documentation/discussion? you'll never know. the result is that people stop reading documentation.)

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

#148

Post by julianlam » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 9:11 PM UTC

andybak wrote: post #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.

The key here is not the format of communication, since you've listed email chains, chat, and forums in one list.

It's the fact that slack and discord are essentially walled gardens that do not allow for third-party indexing. Therein lies the problem.

If public discord servers were indexable you'd have no issue with it.

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

#149

Post by k__ » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 9:11 PM UTC

Communitivity wrote: post #130

I disagree with this article. This is what was said about GMail when it first came out - you need folders, without folders you can't keep organized, etc. Turns out indexing and mechanisms to make use of that indexing (labels, advanced sorts, filters) work better than folders. Persistent chat that can be labelled, indexed, searched and filtered is amazing for work related chats, or any chat that becomes part of a long…

"as long as people use the tags"

That's the crucial point here.

UIs need to help users to find the appropriate tags, often tagging is either included implicitly, which leads to forgetting or clunky, which leads to aversion.

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

#150

Post by mumblemumble » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 9:13 PM UTC

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #124

mumblemumble wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the solution is exactly the same: create a new mailing list or newsgroup under the sort of circumstances where you’d add a topic to a forum or a channel in a Slack workspace. Open source projects, for example, will have foo-announce, foo-user, foo-devel, etc. Or use digests, mail filters/folders and a convention for tagging message subjects.

So, that's the top level. The 2nd level would be more analogous to individual email threads within those groups.

Once you get down to the individual conversation level, the fine-grained management bits you talk about are not good UX, they're band-aids for dealing with bad UX.