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

Post by Jommi » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 2:44 AM UTC

nmaleki wrote: post #251

I disagree with the conclusion of the article. Using this logic, one could say that you shouldn't speak about long term projects during voice call meetings. I agree that the quality of conversation drops when speaking over chat, but I would also say that communication increases. In my opinion, the increased communication more than makes up for the decline of message quality. I also feel that the author of this articl…

Post by wryun » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 3:13 AM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #166

tabbott wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We've been using self-hosted Zulip for about 18 months now, and it's exactly what our company needs. I have been recommending it right and left to people who don't need federation in their chat system. If there was a clear gateway to federation -- enabling a Matrix room as a Zulip Stream, for instance -- I would enthusiastically recommend it for everyone.

Post by easton » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 3:35 AM UTC

jcrawfordor wrote: post #128

nobody9999 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm a Thunderbird user, but I don't really think that there's a clear winner in that comparison. Outlook has features that Thunderbird has been missing for over a decade, like reliable send-in-background (and other database operations in background unlike Thunderbird that likes to interrupt you to ask permission) and a far more mature calendar product. A fair point. As someone who has used both Outlook (professional…

I tend to really harp on send-in-background because I view it as a core feature of an MUA, but as far as I know it's still hidden behind an about:config flag in Thunderbird because it has an excessive number of known bugs, and it's been this way for many years. Another ongoing pain with Thunderbird is the inability to switch between HTML and plaintext when composing a message. Outlook lets you do this, in Thunderbird…

Post by KirillPanov » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 3:45 AM UTC

flerchin wrote: post #62

legerdemain wrote: post #54

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.

Post by ZephyrBlu » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 4:02 AM UTC

tharkun__ wrote: post #256

thesuitonym wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that you're just trying to get your software out there, but your modern features that email doesn't support are just wrong. >shared history Not if you have a mailing list, and then going off the record is as easy as removing the mailing list from the CC field. >markdown formatting This is an implementation failure, not really a fundamental problem with email. There is no reason that email clients don't support…

This. I mean I get that there are various different chat or chat/email hybrid solutions nowadays that are competing with each other. Personally though I have nothing to complain about with slack. It has threading. It only has one level threading but that might actually be a good thing because we slack with non tech people too. One thread is sometimes hard for them to grasp. Make that a regular threading model and the…