41–50 of 107 posts
Matrix is even more overwhelming than slack in the same sense that email is more overwhelming than lotus notes. Maybe overwhelming is fine if the use for the tech isn't siloed to solving communication in only one part of their life.
Slack is good for realtime discussions but it's really hard to find a conversation from last week or a popular discussion that I should read.
For any topic that doesn't have to be discussed realtime, I just want a front page sorted Hacker News style based on upvotes and recency.
This will also make it easier to find the context of a decision years down the road.
>I spent nearly 4 years working on Workplace from Meta, so I’m familiar with building in this space. Some VC guy said this is one of the biggest red flags he looks for in a startup. It almost always leads to failure. I dont remember the exact reasons but something like it means the startup doesnt understand fundamental market segment issues and grit required to overcome them.
Sorry, could you clarify? What specifically is the red flag?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminders are the 2.5 option. Scan and postpone until a better time to read.
How do you identify if a message is of the 2.5 variety without first reading it to confirm it is not a 2? You still need to be interrupted to read the message. In my experience reminders have always been a way to manage work and not a way to manage notifications.
The other suggestion to save is a good one, too.
One thing I think Teams does well in this space, and where I feel Slack falls short, is the organisation of channels. With Teams you can put people in... well teams, and each team has channels and other data associated with it. This hierarchy makes it easy for people to keep a multitude of channels and data organised without actually having to do it themselves. Another thing I have to (begrudgingly) concede to Teams…
Teams also has the BEST accessibility (at least for live captioning). I have not used Google Meet or anything, but I'm constantly surprised by the level of sophistication from Teams live captioning and transcripts. You can be watching it "type" in real time. It'll write the wrong word, but several seconds later (as the person has added more context) you see the word, or even sentence completely change to be more on p…
It’s wild that Google, despite being the leader in startup email/business software and literally giving their Slack competitor to everyone for free as part of their Google Business subscription, STILL has such low mindshare in this space that it didn’t even merit a mention in the blog post. (Full disclosure: my company used Google Chat, and I find the integration ecosystem so pitiful that I’m constantly thinking abou…
I sort of want a Hacker News/Reddit style tool for work with upvotes and nested threads. Slack is good for realtime discussions but it's really hard to find a conversation from last week or a popular discussion that I should read. For any topic that doesn't have to be discussed realtime, I just want a front page sorted Hacker News style based on upvotes and recency. This will also make it easier to find the context o…
I think Zulip has the potential to become a dominant solution in this space if they find way to make the UI as appealing as Slack. Zulip offers a new approach on how to structure discussions by threads while still being a chat application with a “linear” flow.
I switched companies which meant moving from Zulip to Slack. I don’t understand why people like Slack or what they like about the UI. Threading is terrible, async catchup is difficult, gif links don’t convert cleanly, group DMs are limited to 8 users then Slack suggests creating a new channel…?!
I've long held the opinion the best chat app is no chat app, i.e. delegate everything to your favorite issue tracker and other forms of knowledge keeping (e.g. Git commits, design documents). Let everything be either fully 'literate' (for lack of a better term: abundant context, complete paragraphs and argumentation, hyperlinking), or fully sync and human (meetings), with no in between other than email, used thinly.…
You can take a look at https://blog.doist.com/async-first/
- people have to write "real messages", with a beginning, middle, and end. Subject line.
- Doesn't suffer from e-mail's "I wasn't on the original to/cc" problem where information is completely silo'd by default
- Messages by default need to be categorized and a bit organized. Less of a firehose
E-mail gets a lot of shit, but from my experience the biggest issue is just the transmission issue. Forums/stuff like Twist solve this nicely, in my opinion.
I think Twist is totally undersold as the future. If only they would put custom emoji (this is, I swear, a blocker for moving to it at $JOB. In a full/mostly remote world, we want ways of expressing at least a bit of company culture!)
Really you want a mix of tools, of course. You want stuff for synchronous discussions, you want recorded minutes/"serious discussions", you want a place where you write up big documentation (Confluence/xWiki etc).... there's not gonna be a single tool that solves it all. And if you have shitty communication culture, all tools are going to be miserable. But there are interesting tools that go beyond "messaging" out there!