Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

critter.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 329 posts

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

#191

Post by SulfurHexaFluri »

silicon2401 wrote: post #142
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.

This is desirable. I like that my discord conversation will be gone in a few years. They serve little purpose being archived anyway. Old IRC logs are a horrible thing to search for help anyway. Much better just picking a forum/reddit post on the same issue which will be better sorted.

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

#192

Post by wpietri »

I find this somewhat incomprehensible. Why the bias for seeing and archiving everything? The implicit model, which is right there in his title, is "talk", which is not naturally archived.

I've built products just fine using verbal communication nearly exclusively. [1] We don't need to create some sort of panoptic archive of every conversation ever had to get things done. If people miss things, they miss things. We can catch each other up on the parts that truly matter.

Forgetting and repetition can be negative, but they can also be highly positive. We don't have to carry with us the weight of every word ever spoken about a project.

[1] The main exception being index cards with a few words on each. https://williampietri.com/writing/2015/the-big-board/

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

#193

Post by tshaddox »

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'm confused. What are the differences between Slack and email? Both are generally displayed on a relatively small list where new messages eventually cause old messages to be hidden. Those hidden messages are still accessible if you try, both with similar processes (assuming you're using an email client with text search like Gmail).

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

#194

Post by pseudalopex »

gregmac wrote: post #183
jayd16 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And email solves that? Or you are suggesting both chat and email do not solve the issue?

Yes, I'm saying neither chat nor email solve this issue. Email is far worse, in fact, because: * Everyone has a unique view * Unless there are lots of cc-everyone style emails, you might not even have anything to find. (And cc-everyone sucks for 100 other reasons.) * You can't find anything predating the start of your employment The biggest issue with searching both chat and email is the absence of a result doesn't h…

Mailing lists exist.

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

#195

Post by derangedHorse »

SulfurHexaFluri wrote: post #186
a-dub wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Doesn't slack have full history if you pay for it? We use Teams and I regularly find myself searching for stuff I remember I was sent months ago.

It does and today I just learned that there are some companies that don't store all messages sent. Slack works great at my company, I can search for things a year or more back and even write messages to myself as a form of note taking.

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

#196

Post by [deleted] »

SulfurHexaFluri wrote: post #186
a-dub wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Doesn't slack have full history if you pay for it? We use Teams and I regularly find myself searching for stuff I remember I was sent months ago.

[deleted]

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

#197

Post by derangedHorse »

This sounds like it may be a people problem rather than a technology problem. If a problem is moving on without him on a messaging platform I don't know why his teammates wouldn't do the same on an email thread or a github issue. One-liners also don't have to be the norm and I myself have gotten plenty of page long responses when warranted. Channels and threads also work for me when it comes to skimming, and Slack has a solid search feature which manages to make locating things super easy

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

#198

Post by Torn »

bt1a wrote: post #126
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.

I second this, I am actually able to find tons of important communications on Slack that happened years ago at my work. Perhaps it is not well understood by many? I somewhat agree with the author, but what is the alternative to Email or a Chat Application?

A product that does threaded conversations. Yammer did this pretty well, shame it never really took off for businesses

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

#199

Post by swiley »

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…

Idk about the company you work at or projects you watch but most people know how to use mailing lists.

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

#200

Post by kontxt »

This is one reason I built https://kontxt.io for enterprise. It instantly connects people to specific page-parts to have localized conversations directly on the source of internal and external websites and digital documents, so everything is where you need it, when you need it, and anyone that joins later has full context.
Post reply on HN