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

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

#51

Post by jrockway »

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 the same.

The article is right that the problem is when the information doesn't want to be deleted. Now you have to do extra work. (Specific example; a long time ago, I figured out how to get Github to notify me on Slack when a code review was assigned to me. It is not easy to find in the UI and took me a while to set up. I wrote down the instructions in Slack... and that helped people that were reading it then, but it doesn't help me tell someone how to do it that asks me today. Should have written a runbook!)

Remembering to persist information is always something you have to do, and it's not specific to Slack. Your shell history is useless to your coworkers. Your design discussions is useless to someone that just joined the team today.

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

#52

Post by PaulHoule »

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 --…

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.

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

#54

Post by legerdemain »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #35
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 --…

> The real answer is: just fucking use email. I know of at least one large company that forcibly deletes emails older than N months, as part of their legal retention policy. (I'm assuming it means non-retention to limit exposure to lawsuits.) That would be problematic for persistent documentation.

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.

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

#55

Post by esoterica »

> Thinking one line at a time lowers the quality of the discussion. Knee jerk rapid fire responses become the norm.

I mean, this is also how talking in real life work. Chat is supposed to be the closest written replication of a verbal conversation. Rapid fire back and forth is how many discussions are supposed to happen.

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

#56

Post by throwaway-42808 »

paxys wrote: post #43
throwaway-42808 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's encouraging. I haven't had the same experience yet, but I haven't worked for someone who pays for full search history.

Every Slack plan has full search history, so really you haven't worked for someone who pays for Slack. Like, I get that it is expensive, but it's weird to run your company on a product trial.

Yep :)

It's a weird way to try to save money, imo. Down the line it just leads to confusion and repeat work.

They also underinvest in documentation, with the same result.

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

#57

Post by galkk »

getitstraight wrote: post #13

Better yet, stop using shitware like Slack, Matrix, etc, where all the data is kept locked behind closed doors ("in the cloud") and you can only access it through a 500 MB bloated shitware app that drags your 8 core workstation to a crawl. IRC sucks, but it sure beats the alternative. AIM or other Pidgin-based alternatives wouldn't be too bad either, if you had your own private server with everything logged. Edit, be…

It is like saying "drop windows/mac and use arch linux"

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

#58

Post by fractionalhare »

throw14082020 wrote: post #50
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…

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).

I'm surprised if that's actually true. I would guess that most peoples' personal and work email accounts are managed through providers like Google or Microsoft, which do enforce all of those security protocols.

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

#59

Post by jamespitts »

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 was a difficult era (but a lot of work still moved forward)! There emerged a kind of opacity due to ability to put attention on real-time threads, and IMO sometimes key voices were missing because they could not weigh in effectively.

What changed the dynamic was the introduction of Discourse for the critical https://ethresear.ch discussions (set up by Virgil Griffith), and later https://ethereum-magicians.org (something I worked on). I was pushing for threaded at the time because of experiences I had here on Hacker News, reddit, and Slashdot. The person I collaborated with, Greg Colvin, wanted discussions like the threaded emails he was used to from the IETF and c++ communities.

We each knew from long experiences dealing with coordinating on tech issue remotely that the quality of the message is the medium.

From those successful experiments / re-introductions, many teams then began to adopt and host Discourse instances. Later, DeFi picked it up for their governance / coordination discussions. Of course, real-time never went away, with more gravitating toward Telegram and Discord. But tracing the emerging thinking, hashing out differences on what to do, and re-activating stale discussions improved a lot.

Threaded discussions are a core part of the community and work again.

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

#60

Post by eagsalazar2 »

NationalPark wrote: post #34
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 --…

Email isn't searchable by people who weren't on the threads. In an org that uses IM well (they exist!) the chat system actually becomes sort of like a wiki, except a lot more helpful.

Except you can only find stuff by spelunking with search, hoping you hit on the right set of keywords and then scrolling through a jumbled mess of hits. Wikis are organized and have navigation. Also being at a company that uses email and Slack, I will say it is very very rare that anyone actually uses Slack to search for conversations they weren't in. Email has other weaknesses of course but in general I agree with the point that Slack is actually worse in many use cases.
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