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

https://critter.blog/2021/01/12/if-it-matters-after-today-stop-talking-about-it-in-a-chat-room/

by mcrittenden • 6 years ago

751 312 6 years ago

critter.blog

woah• 6 years ago

How does this differ from spoken conversation?

ISL• 6 years ago

There is never any expectation that spoken conversation might be archived/searchable/linkable-to-others.

lazide• 6 years ago

Additionally in many locations (California), if that conversation is plausibly private (in person, in a hallway that isn't super busy or not in a cafe), it's illegal (albeit not perfectly) for it to be anything but ephemeral.

People can of course reproduce what they think you said in another form, but that is always open for debate and challengeable. For better or worse.

kogir• 6 years ago

Or, discuss in chat but make sure to end with a summary email detailing the relevant decisions. Maybe include a link to the chat so you can find it in the future.

syntheticnature• 6 years ago

Funny thing, I've worked places where emails were deleted after 30 days but Slack was forever.

LinuxBender3• 6 years ago

Your admin can set retention per channel or per organization.

MichaelApproved• 6 years ago

How often does that actually happen?

keiferski• 6 years ago

Despite the “asychronous” claim, you have to keep a steady eye on it and reply in realtime or the conversation will move on without you. Anyone who takes the time to ponder and respond thoughtfully with context and explanation will find that they’re too late.

I like the idea of a time-limited channel. You can only reply to it during the meeting, and up to 15 minutes after. Theoretically it would force everyone to communicate succinctly and not drag meetings on indefinitely over the course of a day.

Alternatively, have a channel that only allows one message per hour. Call it #deep-thought. You’ll really need to think about what to say before you write it down.

Raphmedia2• 6 years ago

"Snapchat"-like, in the workplace.

eli• 6 years ago

There's a Slack plugin for time-limited channels from Postlight https://dashforslack.com/

j4yav2• 6 years ago

I'm building a collaborative, timeboxed collaboration tool called AsyncGo at https://asyncgo.com. We are pre-launch but have a prototype, and if anyone here would like a demo or has any questions I'd be happy to answer.

It's meant to replace chat and meetings with something designed to be connected with at your convenience, and then publishes the decisions and how they were reached to wherever your source of truth is (or we can act as your source of truth).

prionassembly• 6 years ago

The one Discord server I participate in has channels that only allow one message every 15 minutes or so. I think the userbase is roughly divided in two groups: people who are online all the time and people (like me) who check in a few times a day. It's easier to participate in the slowed-down channels.

Raphmedia2• 6 years ago

I don't know, it is quite easy to search a well indexed chat for keywords in order to find important information.

happytoexplain• 6 years ago

Usually - but the cases where this is both well implemented and stores infinite history, or even very long history, is vanishingly rare.

tspike• 6 years ago

Yeah, I think the real solution here is: let's make chat permanently archived and searchable. I find it more useful searching through Slack for old conversations around a topic than searching Confluence for the same.

AndrewUnmuted• 6 years ago

But aren't these both pretty terrible tools or storing information?

Slack is an attempt at legitimizing and organizing stream-of-consciousness. It has short feedback loops and therefore cannot communicate deep research, novel concepts, nor well-cited evidence.

This is the wrong way to bring the tools of the consumer to the enterprise. Nobody asked for this chat tool - Slack is something sold to somebody who doesn't want to worry about something, not somebody who wants to do something well with low attrition.

x86_64Ubuntu• 6 years ago

Sounds like people are trying to asymptotically approach email functionality without actually using email. I do agree that chat stuff has a place, but it seems like the new functionality is just being copy-and-pasted from current email functionality.

omosubi2• 6 years ago

use JIRA as an internal stackoverflow :D

LinuxBender3• 6 years ago

In fact Atlassian have a module for this that plugs into Confluence which looks and feels a lot like SO. Trying to find the module name. It might just be called "Questions". I think this is the one we use [1]

[1] https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1217080/questions-ans...

omosubi2• 6 years ago

that'll only work if the module name also makes confluence search usable

grahamjpark• 6 years ago

If you're into Cal Newport, he's got a new book coming out that seems related:

https://bookshop.org/books/a-world-without-email-reimagining...

u678u3• 6 years ago

Cal Newport has a new book coming out every few weeks. Usually its 90% of the last one with a different target audience. :)

Footkerchief2• 6 years ago

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.

throwaway-428082• 6 years ago

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

paxys• 6 years ago

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.

the_arun2• 6 years ago

Well, Slack search experience could be done better. I prefer to see search results and selected thread with search keyword in the same view. It is annoying to keep going to every thread in the results and going to search bar again if that is not I was looking for.

dpcx• 6 years ago

I have struggled for years to find things that I know exist within Slack. I specifically (as a test) set up my email to forward all mail to a specific address in to Slack (https://slack.com/slack-tips/send-email-to-slack) and found more often than not that Slack could not find something when searching for it.

YMMV, of course. But my mileage was pretty terrible.

Minor49er• 6 years ago

I would do this at my last job, which was very Slack-heavy. I would even bring up any weird dev issues or bits of info that I came across that sometimes only mattered to me at the time, but it turned out to be helpful when I would search for those things months (or even years) later.

My current job has both Basecamp and Slack. Most of the work discussion happens in Basecamp, which is fine. However, the search is pretty awful, so it's hard to get a quick and relevant response back when trying to find out more info about a given setting, feature, piece of code, or whatever else. There's a lot of extra digging involved with Basecamp's search results.

bt1a• 6 years ago

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?

Torn• 6 years ago

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

everyone• 6 years ago

We use Discord, and have 2 channels for each game we're workin' on. 'Updates' and 'Chat'

Announcements you want everyone to see go in 'Updates' So if you finished a feature or are starting work on a feature, or have a doc to show everyone... ... Everyone working on that project will have notifications turned on for the projects 'Updates' channel and will read everything on it.

All general chat about the project and also responding to and chatting about stuff in 'Updates' channel happens in chat channel.

kbrwn• 6 years ago

Chat will become the primary method of communication and will be where most work gets done. Other systems will exist sure eventually hackers will build tools for them to be interfaced with via chat clients. This has been happening for many years. Old people need to get over it and stop writing blog posts that basically sound like anti-email rants from 1998.

skohan• 6 years ago

Maybe I am one of those "old people" but I don't understand how discord is better than more traditional forums or mailing lists for technical discussions. With a mailing list, forum thread, or GitHub issue, I can search and find something relevant to me from years ago. By contrast, discord seems so ephemeral: I have to hope I can be in the same place at the same time as the person who has the information I need. And it's a closed platform, so it's not searchable or indexable the same way as content on the open web. And if discord closes their doors, or changes their TOS in the wrong direction some day it might all just be gone from one day to another. I would be happy to understand why you think chat is a better tool for the job.

legerdemain6• 6 years ago

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 -- who is going to deploy it, configure it, set up security and authn/authz around it?

The real answer is: just fucking use email. Why is email not one of the options suggested in the TFA? It's universally available, durable, allows long-form conversation and thoughtful deliberation, doesn't tell you that "someone is typing," and offers you the luxury of checking it at a set interval only a few times per day.

The way many organizations have collectively abandoned email in favor of instant messaging is a travesty.

emidln• 6 years ago

Many organizations seem to use Outlook/Exchange and configure Exchange to make it difficult to use other mail clients (not enabling imap, not enabling caldav support so that a separate calendar and email client need to be used unless you use exchange, etc). Outlook is truly awful as a mail client and it would make one want to use anything else.

legerdemain6• 6 years ago

So you're saying you'd rather lose all the productivity benefits of a solution that's not instant messaging than use Outlook? Powerful stance!

TheSpiceIsLife2• 6 years ago

Is it really that bad?

I'm just a dumb machine operator that uses Outlook at work, Fastmail for myself, and Gmail because I'm an idiot too, and really can't tell the difference.

Const-me3• 6 years ago

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 exchange on the server, some features only work there.

dumbfounder• 6 years ago

Those emails are only available to the users participating in them, and in some places are automatically deleted after a certain amount of time. The point of TFA is knowledge capture, and email isn't transparent enough for sharing knowledge.

legerdemain6• 6 years ago

Enter team aliases and topic-based distribution lists.

Adding a distribution list to an email thread is almost exactly like choosing a Slack channel to type into, except you no longer have the mess of needing to share and re-share messages and threads across channels. You can just add multiple distribution lists.

You can also subscribe and unsubscribe from distribution lists and set up filters for them, which is basically like joining and leaving Slack channels based on your interests, except it gives you much more control over what you want to read and when.

powersnail• 6 years ago

This gives me an idea. What about setting up an archiving script?

After a archive-worthy discussion in email, you forward the thread to "archivebot@my-company-domain.com". The script will parse the email chain and generate a static web page hosted on a local server.

Alex39173• 6 years ago

We made FWD:Everyone (https://www.fwdeveryone.com) for this exact problem. It works via a Gmail add-on, so you can upload an email thread after it's over without having to grant OAuth access to your inbox. It makes these threads taggable and searchable within your company, and formats them to make them look beautiful.

The advantage over just copying everything to a mailing list is that most conversations aren't worth archiving, so having conversations be opt-in after the fact keeps the signal-to-noise ratio much higher than it would otherwise be.

We're still a very small platform, but since we're completely bootstrapped and grew 34x year-over-year in the past year, we're not going anywhere. :-)

NationalPark3• 6 years ago

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.

eagsalazar2• 6 years ago

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.

harikb• 6 years ago

One cannot search channels one is not part of. Don't forget channels. Not everything happens on #general and #random.

Also, even if I am part of the channel, there is no way I can search and locate what I want without knowing the right keyword to search for. Sure, the information is all there, but that only ads to the frustration. Search interfaces in Slack & all are very limited / too broad.

gregmac3• 6 years ago

If someone told me "that is documented in the chat channel, just search", my response would be "ok. So it's not documented."

Even with the best organization (old content deleted), I don't want to wade through the conversations about it or all the other noise. Chat is temporal, the discussion about something like "should x be updated" is immediately irrelevant after the decision is made.

Footkerchief2• 6 years ago

Mailing lists (aka Google Groups if you're on GSuite) allow retroactive access.

That said, none of my employers have ever made effective use of this. I don't think open communication is an instinct that most people have.

swiley4• 6 years ago

the chat system actually becomes sort of like a wiki

That sounds horrible and very fragile.

africanboy• 6 years ago

Email isn't searchable by people who weren't on the threads

Chats have the same problem: they aren't searchable by people who weren't in them.

meanwhile https://lkml.org/

DoofusOfDeath• 6 years ago

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.

munchbunny• 6 years ago

That sounds like a pathological case. How many companies actually do that?

legerdemain6• 6 years ago

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.

astrobe_• 6 years ago

If they do store persistent documentation in emails, the problem lies somewhere between the chair and the keyboard.

Actually, forced deletion - if users are aware of it of course - is likely to sanitize everyone's practice. Email ain't a backup tool.

That's symptomatic of people doing the most silly things and then blame the failures on their tools.

duckmysick3• 6 years ago

The legal retention policy itself looks persistent. How is it documented?

mumblemumble4• 6 years ago

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 people will shy away from an otherwise-decent solution if it has terrible UX.

throw14082020• 6 years ago

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).

fiddlerwoaroof4• 6 years ago

Some of these are solved by things like a corporate NNTP server or mailing lists, right?

hn_asker• 6 years ago

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.

swiley4• 6 years ago

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

brodie• 6 years ago

I can't speak to how good or effective it is, but the issues you mentioned are, I think, why the rust-lang community communicates through Zulip (instead of email, IRC, etc).

extrememota• 6 years ago

What's wrong with mailing lists?

PaulHoule• 6 years ago

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.

grok222• 6 years ago

There are various services like WireDoc, ShareFile, etc, or even Mozilla's deprecated Firefox Send that canonized this (encrypt on one channel, share the password on a separate channel).

ogre_codes4• 6 years ago

just fucking use email.

I get you. But also:

- Email doesn't retain context very well. If I dig back through my email I might have all of the emails in a thread, or maybe not.

- Likewise, I can't send someone a link to a previous emailed conversation so it makes for poor documentation. I can forward an individual email, but not the comment in context.

- Email is not easy to index or post up for reference. You can't link it from a wiki or other documentation for example.

An internal mailing list with archiving would solve many of these issues and might be the best option, but it's a slightly different solution.

jshier• 6 years ago

Basecamp does this well, especially version 2, which integrated with email. With version 2 you could have topics in Basecamp which you could post directly do or email and it was searchable and linkable. It was even possible to post messages which were optionally emailed to clients, with their response becoming part of the thread history. Really the best of both worlds. Unfortunately they removed the email feature in Basecamp 3 (and my company upgraded) so we can't do that anymore, but older projects retain their history.

StavrosK5• 6 years ago

I've commented this too much in this thread, but it's important: Zulip solves all this, has other advantages and a fast and extremely usable interface.

swiley4• 6 years ago

This is why most replies include quotes.

But yeah for groups you need a mailing list with an archive. It's still better than most IM apps IMO.

jaaron• 6 years ago

Mailing lists is the answer.

- Achievable

- Searchable

- Linkable

- Asynchronous

- Accessible

I like using Slack and we use it heavily with my team, but I agree it has issues.

Meanwhile, we've been using mailing lists for established open source projects for years for all of these reasons.

fulafel• 6 years ago

We have IMAP URLs that address some of this.

baxtr• 6 years ago

I just love well thought out emails. They can provide a lot clarity and be the basis for great discussions.

grumple• 6 years ago

Is this the part where we pretend your organization doesn’t already use something like a ticketing service, wiki, etc? I find it hard to believe you don’t have any sort of tool to post information already. If it’s true, run.

withinboredom• 6 years ago

So, you're worried about this

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?

Yet you suggest using email where it basically goes (or can be coerced to go) across the internet in plain-text where anyone can read it?

dividedbyzero• 6 years ago

For email that conversation probably has taken place already. Also, lots of larger orgs have internal mail servers where this isn't even remotely true.

tabbott• 6 years ago

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 great for asynchronous work, but it is poor for synchronous communication and also doesn't support modern features that make it easier to communicate ideas efficiently (shared history, markdown formatting, image previews, emoji reactions, etc.). It's essential to be able to have (semi)synchronous written conversations with people you're working with, especially if you don't want to spend your days burning out on video calls.

This is why we created Zulip -- it's designed as a real-time communication tool with email's threading model and all the nice features of modern chat apps that email lacks. And the reading user experience is actually a lot better than email, because Zulip provides is designed with the goal of saving time when prioritizing, skimming, reading, and replying to conversations. It's also 100% open source software (not open core!).

zxexz• 6 years ago

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/#

dsr_• 6 years ago

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.

thesuitonym2• 6 years ago

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 markdown, except that nobody has ever wanted it. There was someone who made a utility to switch markdown to regular MIME email, but just as a proof of concept. It works.
Image previews I assume what you mean by this is an inline thumbnail that expands when you click on it? Again, there's nothing about email that prevents it, it's just the way email clients are. That could be fixed
emoji reactions Okay, that's fair, there's no way to do this in email, short of sending a single emoji back. On the other hand, I think everyone would agree that this is more of a nice to have feature, than a necessary one, and one that really only makes sense in the world of quick, back and forth chat programs.

[1] https://begriffs.com/posts/2020-07-16-generating-mime-email....

randallsquared• 6 years ago

From looking at the tour slides, a list of threads in the current chatroom (which Zulip calls "topics") does seem nice. I have often wished I could get Slack's all-new-thread-messages view filtered by channel.

twobitshifter4• 6 years ago

Zulip sounds a lot like a modernized bulletin board/forum. It’s interesting how we keep coming back to the same ideas again and again.

u678u3• 6 years ago

Talk to your lawyer on this too. Our lawyer said emails with the lawyer in the conversation will have client attorney privilege, is not court admissible. I dont know about IM.

dctoedt• 6 years ago

Our lawyer said emails with the lawyer in the conversation will have client attorney privilege, is not court admissible.

That's too-sweeping a statement [0]:

1. Privilege attaches only to communications in the course of seeking legal advice.

2. Privilege is waived — and thus the emails are discoverable by adversaries and admissible in court — if people outside the decision-making group are in the conversation.

3. Privilege doesn't attach if the lawyer is functioning as a business executive or -advisor.

4. Privilege won't apply if the conversation is determined to be part of a crime or fraud.

All that said: If a lawyer is involved in the conversation, then the company's litigation counsel will almost-automatically withhold the emails from being produced to an adversary and will list them on a "privilege log." That will often set up an ancillary court fight over whether the emails should be produced to the adversary. In that ancillary fight, the judge might end up reviewing the emails "in camera," i.e., without the adversary seeing them, to decide whether the privilege applies — and depending on the content of the withheld emails, having the judge read the emails could do as much damage to the company's case as anything.

[0] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/attorney-client-priv...

StavrosK5• 6 years ago

Use Zulip. It solves all the problems that email has and also enables a bunch of other things you never knew you needed, like a sane model for browsing messages.

It can even serve as real-time communication for #random and other such work-adjacent channels.

Aeolun2• 6 years ago

Trying to have sensible conversations in an enterprise email client, where 90% of the messages are just garbage is basically impossible for me.

slykar• 6 years ago

I'm not sure what you mean by the universal availability of the email. It has the same deploy/configure/security issues any other tool has. It's even worse, because you can send email to "outsiders" unless certain rules are in place. The UX is bad and depends on email clients.

bandris• 6 years ago

One problem/feature with email is that that new collagues do not see historical conversations. While the typical chatroom is searchable.

andrenotgiant• 6 years ago

It sounds like the author was mostly thinking about INTERNAL discussion, but I think the real tragedy is in using chat like Slack for your public customer community forum.

Think of all the knowledge and employee-time locked away in the scrollback of a chat based community forum.

Better to have chat for informal community discussion, but when someone asks a question that others in your community might find useful in the future, politely direct them to post it in a more permanent (read: accessible via google search) medium.

Sodman• 6 years ago

My experience so far with companies that operate in this manner, has been something like:

1) Community member asks question.

2A) Answer is already in documentation, which can be easily linked to.

2B) Can be answered in-line, with an action item to add clarification/more details to the docs.

This feels like a pretty scalable solution for the most part. If there are still recurring questions you might want to look at the discoverability/layout of your docs, but usually I've found that other community members start linking each other to docs if the same question comes up again and again.

the_arun2• 6 years ago

I agree with the concern author is expressing. Usually, we do not start conversations leading to a decision/important, but it evolves into useful discussion. Onus is on us to move that convo/thread to GitHub issue & socialize it there. May be that is what author is hinting.

k__2• 6 years ago

"Despite the “asychronous” claim, you have to keep a steady eye on it and reply in realtime or the conversation will move on without you."

For me, sync and async communication is a spectrum and chat (as it is used in the majority of companies) is more on the sync half of it.

I'm currently thinking about building a microblogging alternative to Slack, that will be more on the async side, not as much as email though.

isaacremuant• 6 years ago

Opinionated article that doesn't land in my experience.

Slack search is awesome, allows links with previews, reminders, easy channel creations, bookmarking, threading to allow sub topics...

Better than email for the quick back and forth, better than voice that is harder to schedule and synchronic and doesn't keep records.

If it's really important, you should have a way to keep track besides the "quick communication" but that doesn't mean slack isn't a great tool by default. Just keep an eye on the data deletion policies.

jrockway2• 6 years ago

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.

GekkePrutser4• 6 years ago

Well, a real paid slack instance doesn't go away. All the public free slacks do.. The whole fact that Slack charges a lot for the privilege of keeping history beyond a couple of months, proves that it's worth a lot to many people.

ogre_codes4• 6 years ago

Yes, but as gmail has illustrated, that just shifts the problem. Where before your problem was "It got deleted". Now the problem is search pulls up too many things.

Slack seems to be even worse because unlike email, you don't really have subjects or thread beginnings, just continual flow of chatter.

a-dub2• 6 years ago

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 organizing "what needs do", "who do", and "when done"... but in my experience is pretty terrible for "what happened" and "why". this is fine i think at smaller scales, but once complexity starts to scale up, it can be a nightmare. it's hard enough fighting issue hysteresis (reoccurring issues and bugs that drag on for years) when there's good historical views and explanations.

TeMPOraL• 6 years ago

I don't know of any productivity tool that handles archiving well. You can store done tasks in some way, but all the context is lost. Over time, it's annoying even on a small - individual - scale.

SulfurHexaFluri3• 6 years ago

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.

ketzo• 6 years ago

From my experience, the mark of a well-run Slack is the ability to find old, valuable information. You're right that it's not always easy, but you can get a LOT further with 1) well-defined channels 2) good use of pinning 3) good use of "saving" messages for yourself.

It helps that Slack's search is actually pretty good imo, and usually quite fast.

But yeah -- it can't be your only tool. If you don't have a better system for long-form documentation, you're gonna lose a lot of important stuff.

FalconSensei• 6 years ago

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

silicon24013• 6 years ago

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.

jrockway2• 6 years ago

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.)

tshaddox• 6 years ago

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).

barrkel2• 6 years ago

Corporate Slack retention is typically measured in days, while email retention is measured in years.

NoodleIncident• 6 years ago

My experience with Slack is the opposite. Scanning through my list of channels, I'll see some channel I don't recognize, and it will still be pinned at the top unread message 4 months ago when someone added me for some reason.

nitwit005• 6 years ago

The rule should be the same as meetings, which is that if something important is decided, some document or wiki page should get updated.

It's never the case that everyone who might need to know is in a meeting. You might hire someone next week.

esoterica• 6 years ago

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.

jamespitts3• 6 years ago

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.

zionic• 6 years ago

Thanks for all the work you’ve done for ETH! It has enriched my life greatly, and I am so excited to see where things go post-EIP1559 and 2.0!

jamespitts3• 6 years ago

You're welcome! I've only played a small part in this amazing phenomenon, mainly DevOps and community-organizing. But it has been amazing to do anything to help.

j4yav2• 6 years ago

Hey James, I'm building something along the same lines (I don't mean to be too spammy, so there's a link in my profile). It sounds a lot like what you're describing, but is being built from the ground up with this use case in mind.

If nothing else I'd love to hear your feedback on what the most important features were and how you'd see a product like this evolving.

jamespitts3• 6 years ago

I should also add two more important pieces to this:

1. In-person meetings and real-time calls have been a major part of the work. There is an agenda and very good notes are taken during these sessions (https://github.com/ethereum/pm). The calls have been essential for coordinating in a more formal setting and to get a feel for when consensus is achieved on a particular topic or proposal.

What threaded forums later added was the ability for others to get involved in the discussion, particularly those who are not core developers or not able to attend.

2. Another important medium has been GitHub issues (e.g. https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/2315). Proposals are submitted as a PR and, earlier in the evolution of the governance process, many people would comment on them. These were not ideal due the flat nature of the format.

What generally changed on GitHub issues in recent years was the encouraging of commenters to go to an external forum thread (https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/2315#issuecomment-63...), leaving editors and authors to work out structural and other basic issues about a proposal in GitHub PR comments.

jadell• 6 years ago

Alternatively, in a tool that allows multiple channels, create a channel for the specific issue and invite the relevant people into it.

The problem in the essay isn't chat rooms, it's having ONE chat room for all discussions. Branch off into another chat/channel and title that channel for the specific issue being discussed.

lxe• 6 years ago

Slack has a search function that works pretty darn well. Conversations or context never get really lost. I wish we used it more.

blakeburch• 6 years ago

When we were first growing our team out remotely, we really tried to emphasize this style of thinking. All decisions and larger discussions would need to be written down so the conversation could be easily referenced for long-term context - we chose Threads for this purpose. Any quick questions or one-off communication could live in Slack. Any documentation needed to live in Notion.

Over time, our usage of Threads quickly decreased. If decisions needed to be made, we had a meeting to cover it. Meetings always had a few days notice with a written agenda and problem context so that everyone could think through their ideas beforehand. The end of a meeting usually resulted in a decision, which would then get documented in Notion for posterity. The documented decisions and reasoning would be circulated for approval by everyone that was a part of that meeting to verify that nothing of importance was missed. Once everyone approved, the decision was locked in.

As our process developed, we found that the need for written back-and-forth on decisions was less necessary. Instead, when we identified that an issue needed to be solved, we identified the key components of the problem, gave everyone some thinking time, and knocked it out over the course of a call. We rarely need to revisit the decisions since we write out the reasoning afterwards.

I still love the concept of having a tool specifically for asynchronous discussion. However, I think these tools assume that the conversation is the important part when in reality, the only part that matters is the decision and the reasoning. If you can get your team to document those, you'll be just fine.

ve55• 6 years ago

I have noticed a similiar issue when I was searching for technical support with some applications, and eventually I had to make a Discord account, join a given server on it, and then search its backlog to find my answer.

The server was 'public' in that anyone could join it, but it will not be indexed by search engines, so I can't imagine how many other people were unable to find the solutions to their problems because they were spoken in a chat room and never posted on the 'public' Internet. Given the scale at which services like this operate (soon to be billions of users), this is a pretty big problem.

GekkePrutser4• 6 years ago

I have to agree with this. When we started using MS Teams, it worked really well to replace person to person chats, email etc..

But since it's become commonplace, it's become a crapbucket of stuff that I can't find anything back in. I have too many channels, too many teams (and you can't opt in to channels like you can on Slack, you have to join them all). And the search function is even worse than Outlook's. It's all just too unstructured. Even if I search for someone's name plus a keyword I know it's there it can't find it back for me.

Such an app (not just Teams) is just not the right tool for everything related to communication, even though Microsoft is pushing it as exactly that.

A forum though is too '2000' for me. I would see more in a managed wiki, provided people can stomach working in a structured way. Enforcing that will be an issue but it will result in a beautiful oracle of information. I've seen it happen before (and I've seen it fail many more times, sadly).

relaytheurgency• 6 years ago

I definitely agree with this. The one thing that I hoped would prove useful from these programs vs IRC was the idea of a persistent, searchable, history. However my experience has been not great. Searching history often just brings up unrelated snippets of conversations I didn't have any interst in, in channels I never chatted in. It's just more clutter.

mongol• 6 years ago

Can a chat platform be built on SMTP, and what would be the implications of that? Has that been done? I think email has so many things going for it, and I wonder to what extent it has been rejected as a platform because it is too open.

cxr• 6 years ago

Delta Chat

https://delta.chat

nwsm• 6 years ago

Conveniently Teams has both chat and threads.

have_faith2• 6 years ago

I think part of the problem is not all conversations are obviously 'short and shallow' or 'long and broad'. What starts out casual might unearth something that needs going into deeper, and going in deep on something might not have results worth documenting yet.

To me this points out a gap in our software for knowledge archival. The closest concept Slack has is "pinning" a message to a channel, which has very limited use for this. Really what you want is to be able to have a conversation with someone in any manner (casual or formal meeting) and be able to easily extract the conclusions and decisions made into a different location, ideally through an easily discoverable UI in the software already being used.

In an ideal world my chat software has knowledge of the projects I'm working on (through some protocol to something else that acts as a source of truth) and I can select a message/file upload in chat and tell it to archive it against a project. It can easily fill in the details for me about who made this decision and when. Ability to effortlessly organise information arising from a connversation should a priority I think, this might remove the need for having seperate software depending on how "deep" you think a conversation is going to be.

fwip• 6 years ago

I know that AI is a pile of buzzwords, but.... is this something we could train AI to do reasonably well? A flow like "click button and highlight conversation start/end" and it picks out the relevant messages and tries to generate a set of takeaways? (and allows user to edit them before saving).

have_faith2• 6 years ago

AI (or some primitive concept of...) could be useful in some aspect, perhaps for sugggesting tags or categories the information looks like it could belong to. Actually extracting the "facts and takeaways" sounds very hard but then I'm not a linguist so maybe there are methods.

notacoward• 6 years ago

This is one of the things that drove me nuts at my last company. I had been remote all along, which meant I was left out of many discussions. Chat was my lifeline, because it was the only thing both I and others on the team used. When everyone went remote, we had an opportunity to make a change for the better, but instead nothing at all changed. Meetings were done via video chat instead of in person, but they were just as un-findable and ephemeral as before. If you mapped out the lines of communication before and after, there'd be no difference. In person vs. online matters far less IMO than ephemeral and closed vs. open and permanent.

The irony is that the company happens to be the world's largest platform for easily findable/joinable permanently archived conversations. Go figure.

indymike2• 6 years ago

This argument has been going on for decades. Chat vs. threaded discussion vs. email. The best one for me is where the people I need to communicate are listening. The hard part is getting everyone to listen in the same place. It doesn't matter how good the UX is, if you need the CEO in the chat and she only does email, then email it is.

ajuc• 6 years ago

The funny thing is - it's easier to search and look at context in discord than in outlook or on wiki.

andybak4• 6 years ago

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.

silicon24013• 6 years ago

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.

SulfurHexaFluri3• 6 years ago

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.

julianlam• 6 years ago

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.

andybak4• 6 years ago

I would still have some issues. I do find IRC archives much, much less valuable than more structured sources.

But I'm picking my battles at this point in time. And the lack of indexing is the most critical flaw and one I think is immensely damaging to technical communities on those platforms.

Communitivity2• 6 years ago

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 running context.

We do this where I work, and it works well, mostly - as long as people use the tags.

zug_zug• 6 years ago

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.

jodrellblank2• 6 years ago

That doesn't seem enough to reject the premise of the article, which explicitly calls out that chats are great for both "Low-stakes status updates" and "Swarming around red alerts or outages", a high CPU alert that was just a notification is the former, a high CPU alert that people discussed and fixed is the latter.

Also, your "database", singular? Was the answer something like 10 times? Would that scale?

k__2• 6 years ago

"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.

1penny42cents2• 6 years ago

The sheer volume of information that Chat holds makes it hard to search. The noise to signal ratio is higher than on channels with lower throughout (e.g. documentation products). Chat doesn't let you send one message and craft it over time, like a mission statement, proposal, or architecture guide. It has a fundamentally different character.

pixl972• 6 years ago

And some chats are worse than others. Teams does this so poorly it brings my battlestation to its knees trying to do simple text search.

mbreese• 6 years ago

I don't know about that. There are a few large differences between chat and email, so it's not a great comparison.

1) length -- most emails are significantly longer than any single chat message

2) context -- email threads are saved (and indexed) in the context of their thread.

With chat, you really don't get ether, so it's significantly more difficult. You can never really know what a message is a reply to. Responses can come fast or slow. Individual channels can have multiple conversations happening, if not simultaneously, then at least over time.

as long as people use the tags

I mean, that's the difficulty with any system... getting people to use it. If your team can be disciplined about the tags, then I'm glad that works for you. I not sure it would work well in many other contexts.

I've tried a few different options over the years, from archiving/indexing IRC chat logs, to bug trackers, to wikis, to email, to Slack, to Notion, etc...

Almost anything can work if you're disciplined. My problem has always been getting the rest of the team on board.

Communitivity2• 6 years ago

These are great points, though I disagree with all of them as reasons to prefer email over chat.

1) length -- most emails are significantly longer than any single chat message

Agreed. The beauty of a chat, rather than an email thread, is that each message contains (or should) a single point. Which means the chat thread is more of a sequence of the following kinds of responses: Yes, and; Yes, but; No, and further; No, but. This makes for a better conversation, and makes it easier to process. How many times have you asked two questions in an email, only to have someone respond to just the last one?

2) context -- email threads are saved (and indexed) in the context of their thread. With chat, you really don't get ether, so it's significantly more difficult. You can never really know what a message is a reply to...

This is a matter of implementation, not technical capability. A decent context is achieved through proper use of tags and chronological ordering. Better threading can be achieved through a protocol implementation of a reply-id capability, which most chat systems have (XMPP, Discord, etc.), coupled with GUI presentation of messages in a threaded view.

...Responses can come fast or slow... True of any asynchronous channel, email or chat.
Individual channels can have multiple conversations happening, if not simultaneously, then at least over time.

I see this as a feature, not a bug. With tagging a chat message can be part of several different conversations at the same time, even across channels. Which conversation you are presented with depends on which tag you are viewing.

I mean, that's the difficulty with any system... getting people to use it. If your team can be disciplined about the tags, then I'm glad that works for you. I not sure it would work well in many other contexts.

In my experience, this is often the biggest hurdle in implementing any revolutionary system (as opposed to evolutionary) that makes a big change in how people do things. For messaging, there are systems with a reminder feature similar to most email client's behavior when there's no subject. For instance, "This message has no tags. Messages are required to have at least one tag, and should have between 2 and 7".

You need management to force the issue though. An approach I've used in the past is to find a competitor or two using the technology, and use business/financial FOMO as a motivator.

Also, if you do a typo in an email..it's there forever. A typo in a chat can be fixed in many systems.

In a desire to be fair, I will add two reasons to use email:

1) If you are doing CYA. Email can't be changed, and is routed through a number of servers, possibly leaving log fingerprints. Email also has bcc. Anything that is important you can bcc to a second friendly party to prove you sent it, or to a personal email account (do this with trade secrets, or heaven forbid - classified - and you should get what you deserve, and I don't mean in a good way). If you want a paper trail, don't use chat.

2) If you are sending a document. Most businesses have virus scanners built into their email server software. A document is typically sent, retrieved, and saved somewhere. Though, if a document will be referenced often by many, neither chat nor email are best. Use a wiki, or something similar.

biztos• 6 years ago

It’s probably an unpopular opinion, but the best online technical discussions I’ve ever seen in a company were done in Bugzilla.

Every bug or feature request was a ticket. Tickets sometimes had quite long discussions.

The advantages were:

* Permanent, so you thought about what you wrote.

* Public, same effect.

* Sequential, so it was very rare for people to reply over each other.

* Goal-oriented, you wanted to move towards resolution, which was then archived forever.

* Opt-in for following, so you had some control over your attention.

* Available, so you could search and see old attachments etc etc.

* Safe, Local, easily self-hosted and backed up.

* Customizable, e.g. easy linking to the repo even if you change repos.

The more things moved to various forms of the all-consuming Jirapoly, the attention sink of Slack, the anarchy of mail+chat, the less useful and (importantly) the less productive these conversations became.

u678u3• 6 years ago

Nice I haven't seem bugzilla for a while now, it looks good maybe we can use to replace Jira. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/home

jayd162• 6 years ago

I think an interesting difference between chat clients like Slack and email is this.

With email every user must organize a single firehose of an inbox. Chat channels area already a default compartmentalization but beyond that, chat services default to shared organizational structures like channels and threads.

In email each user must manage the conversations themselves through labels or what have you. In successful chat systems, you can passively benefit from the organization of others. Mailing lists help but aren't enough in their current, aging incarnation.

It might be possible to disrupt the email space by recognizing and adopting these UX differences.

ajsharp• 6 years ago

There's a great rule of thumb for workplace communication mediums I saw long ago. It was something like this:

- Email: Not urgent. Expected response: ~1 day. - Chat: Somewhat urgent. Expected response: < 1 hour. - Text: Shit is on fire. Expected response: Immediate.

Building on the points OP makes re the problems thinking one line at a time in chat, in this little mental model there's a whole lot of daylight between email and chat. And there's lots of problems with email that make it not a great communication medium for semi-urgent things.

My sense is that we need a better primitive inside chat platforms to differentiate between "this is important and we need to have this discussion now" and something closer to email-ish pace.

pottertheotter• 6 years ago

That's an interesting perspective. To me, if it's urgent, better be a phone call. I definitely don't see a text as urgent.

nicktorba• 6 years ago

There really needs to be some sort of mix between chat and a collaborative note-taking app.

How can we transform chats into a reasonable, permanent reference materials?

Maybe it would be possible to build a slack-bot that could identify which part of these threads are the most important, and even move them to a more permanent storage.

Or, slack channels could add functionality to allow users to vote for which messages are most pertinent, or should be moved to longer-term storage or a featured position for everyone.

I think there is probably value in these rapid fire IM's, but I feel the Mike's (the author's) pain. I skip over threads everyday because reading them never feels worth it.

1penny42cents2• 6 years ago

This article describes the problem with "hot" channels, like Slack or Zoom. Their information throughout is so high that it's hard to hold onto anything. That high throughout also makes them valuable for quick syncs and personal conversation. We run into trouble when we try to make it do more than it was built for.

"Cold" channels (e.g. documents, tickets) are where important information should go. A single piece of information can be developed and solidified over time. Cold channels are easier to search, easier to catch up on, and easier to onboard.

The problem is not with any one channel, but that we expect one channel to handle all types of information.

mullingitover• 6 years ago

Slack isn't a bunch of chat rooms, it's a database disguised as a bunch of chat rooms. I've never had a problem pulling up some random conversation from three years ago as long as I remember the general topic.

In that regard it's no different than using email, everything is indexed and you're just searching a different database.

danShumway• 6 years ago

I’m not saying live chat is useless. It’s great at some things:
- Quick answers to quick questions
- Low-stakes status updates
- Swarming around red alerts or outages

Well OK, but the problem is that sometimes those things also matter after today. So in practice, it often does end up being better to just save everything in an indexable form, because you can't realistically decide in advance to every conversation whether or not it's going to be important. You can pretend to, you can put every conversation you're going to have in one of those bins -- but you'll just be pretending, you're not going to get the prediction right every time.

The second problem is that sometimes conversations fluctuate and change form, and it is not uncommon to have a good long-form conversation that needs to occasionally dip into quick questions and status updates. When the boundaries between your chat environments are too rigid, you can have the same productivity losses because people delay having important conversations or just avoid them entirely. This kind of categorization of communication often ignores that communication is extremely fluid. You can change between longform training and technical discussion, quick status updates and questions, and even affirmation multiple times during the same conversation.

Most people on HN already understand how much harm context switching and interruptions can be for productivity in programming. But the same can also be true in communication. If you're in the middle of a chat and there's a clear opportunity in-line with what you're already talking about to explain something or reach a decision, you are basically imposing a giant context switch if you say, "well, no, don't talk about it. Let's all schedule a meeting." Or even if you just say, "keep it in your head until you get back to your desk and then email me."

Sometimes that interruption is warranted, and sometimes it costs a lot of focus/productivity for very little gain. It's situational.

I'm not sure it's wise to have binary rules about how and where people on your team should communicate. A lot of the advice I see around team organization and management ends up being generally good advice but taken to the extreme, where it wraps back around to being a barrier to actually getting stuff done. Encouraging people to use email for longform technical discussion is a good idea, but I suspect that trying to make some kind of policy about may be a bad idea for most orgs.

wpietri5• 6 years ago

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/

hbosch• 6 years ago

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.

Somewhat harder to do now that we are all WFH.

pixl972• 6 years ago

Talk was not naturally archived in the past, but I would not assume that today. There is no longer anything that is an intimate object, pretty much anything can have a microphone and some type of wireless connection. Is your desk phone at the office listening to you even though it's on the hook? Technically it can. What about your smart TV?

xpe3• 6 years ago

It seems you disagree, which is fine. But that is very different from the blog post being incomprehensible.

wpietri5• 6 years ago

I understand the words just fine. It's the motivation I find incomprehensible. In particular:

If you go on vacation [...] Often your only option is to declare chat room bankruptcy which means missing out on important discussions and big decisions.

So what? That's what vacations are for. The whole point is to miss things. It's good for both the person and the organization to miss things. "The graveyards are full of indispensable men."

There's some unstated motivation behind the post. But whatever it is makes no sense to me. The options I can think of fall in a range from absurd to self-defeating.

m_eiman• 6 years ago

In my reading the point of the post is that it's important to have a record of the important things (like why did we decide to do X, or to do it in this specific way), and that putting such discussion in the same context as things that aren't important to record makes it very hard to filter out the important bits later on if needed.

So they advocate for putting the important information in a separate context, that also allows for more thoughtful conversations.

wpietri5• 6 years ago

That's a plausible interpretation, but the notion that "important=anything that matters for longer than 1 day" still makes no sense to me. And I also disagree that it's a priori important to have a record of important things. It's nearly tautological, and even if it weren't, there are some strong embedded assumptions about how to build software that at best need close examination.

barbs• 6 years ago

I think the basis of the article is that a lot of people use Slack as a storage of sorts for things that should be archived. That certainly aligns with my experience - I've worked in teams where I've asked for a document or credentials for something and have been told "It's on Slack, search for it".

derangedHorse2• 6 years ago

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

kontxt• 6 years ago

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.

pkrumins• 6 years ago

Twist (https://twist.com) solves this problem entirely. Instead of chat rooms where everyone chats about everything, it organizes discussions around tasks. Each task gets its own chat room. When you work on task X, you chat in task X's chat room. If you work on multiple tasks, you have multiple rooms, one per task. When you come back to a task, you just open the task's room and continue where you finished. When the task is finished, that conversation is pretty much over. It's a get things done product. No useless chatting and conversations don't overlap. Go use Twist!

asimjalis• 6 years ago

Biggest use case for using chat rooms for technical discussions: I can search through archives a year later and find valuable nuggets of information.

saadalem• 6 years ago

So there is no knowledge hub inside these companies or what ?

zmmmmm• 6 years ago

This is actually about half of the business plan for companies like Slack. They want you to start using it on the basis it is ephemeral and then end up forced into paying for it because its just impossible for people to self-enforce that behaviour and not put information in there that needs to be retained.

hawktheslayer• 6 years ago

I like the concept of declaring bankruptcy on chats. I've done this on email more times than I'd like to admit.

jodrellblank2• 6 years ago

I dislike the concept; take Anki the spaced repetition learning system as an example for comparison: you add in some flashcards around a topic you want to learn and remember, and it prompts you to work through the cards you are most likely to forget. One failure mode is that you don't bother checking it for a few days, and suddenly there's a ton of cards to work through and it's overwhelming and you don't want to or can't spare the time, the next day there's even more they pile up until you "declare bankruptcy" on them.

But your memory doesn't magically work better after declaring bankruptcy, if you imagine Anki is approximately correct about when you'll forget things then /not/ going through those cards means forgetting things you said you wanted to remember. That's a fundamental problem that should be addressed - you desire to remember more things than you have space in your life to sustainably commit to. Reset and restart is one way forward, but it's not a way out; presumably some of the things you wanted to remember are more important than others, and you're leaving it completely to chance which survive the reset and restart. If none are important then don't restart. If it's only for fun and that's not fun, it's not working well.

To bring it back to email, the idea is "if I declare bankruptcy, the important things will come back again eventually". Things other people think are important will come back - using other people's brains to track the tasks which aren't good at that and are busy with other things - while throwing out the computer which is extremely good at record keeping - so good it's showing you the overwhelming amount of information you /actually have/ personally requested, or organisationally been subscribed to. If it's too much for one brain then it's too much. If it's too much irrelevant or redundant, then the organisation systems or tools are broken.

If the response to that is to throw it all out and reset then it stays being too much, too irrelevent, too broken, indefinitely, for everyone. It's covering over the symptoms to avoid addressing the sickness. It's a trip to the ER to have your stomach pumped so you can go back to binge drinking from the firehose instead of going to rehab and making difficult changes, it's a part of our hoarding culture that's so widely supported in this thread, a part of the obesity crisis, information addiction, and panic in the face of mortality, and all those unrelated (but related really) things.

"If I just do everything, know everything, have everything, eat everything, keep records of everything, I'll maximise my life experiences and save myself from {unspecified future horror {eventually death}}".

There's an amount of work an employee can reasonably, practically, pragmatically do, and computer systems we have developed which are /completely incapable/ of helping us track and prioritise that, but /absolutely fantastic/ and overwhelming us with nonsense trivia and redundant messaging noise and tasks nobody is going to do that are socially unable to be dropped but are actually going to be kicked down the road until they don't matter. It's an awful system we've built where "declaring bankruptcy" on the messages we (individually or collectively) have to be involved in is a consideration at all. But if that is the way forward, it shouldn't be a guilty pleasure that you don't want to admit; evolution has an aggressive reaper function to cull all but the most fit, if we're going to adopt that, we should wholeheartedly do it openly and enthusiastically - any job which isn't worth remembering by brain can be wiped off the system after X days, no harm no foul. The combination of "too much" and "archived forever" is killer in the bad way.

(How many people have left their jobs just to trigger this reaper function? If it was overwhelming the employee, the next employee won't have to deal with it, fresh start for both leaver and position).

njharman• 6 years ago

I thought this was going to be about personal InfoSec ala Parler.

sli• 6 years ago

Teams trying to enforce conversation threading in a (semi-)recent update pretty much put a halt to me and my coworkers using Teams for anything but voice for our morning sprints. Trying to follow even slow conversations in Teams is just way too much work, we instead chat on Telegram where chat works, you know, normally.

Luckily we were never in the habit of tracking anything through chat, we stick to our issue tracker, but I can absolutely imagine the frustration we'd have felt after that change had we relied more heavily on chat.

sam1r• 6 years ago

Okay, but what about real time search history? That’s not mentioned as a key. feature in the article.

That’s the whole point of not worrying about these lines without sufficient thought.

Being able to query the past instanteously via live chats is vital.

I see live transcripts via iMessage and live chats as a huge benefit — your thoughts in real time, basically, shared externally without energy wasted verbally.

One of my biggest regrets is not pro-actively hitting aim support right before mass account deletion post mortem acquisition by Verizon.

Imagine scrolling back in time to your high school chats— one can easily use that context to go back in time like Mac OS time machine.

Put all of those time stamps in whatever format (t, chat service, message) on a visual calendar and you’ll be able to do much more with your data. Including attachments.

paulryanrogers• 6 years ago

My hope is most of my youthful chats have been forever destroyed. It's not a season I'd like to revisit.

grimgrin• 6 years ago

hitting aim support for what? afaik they weren’t holding onto aim chats. tho my memory is fuzzy here

generalk• 6 years ago

The way I've always heard this is:

If it's important, it needs to have a URL.

Your issue tracker works, assuming you're not constantly changing your tracker. SharePoint may work but is super clunky for this purpose. Confluence or Notion or something work just fine.

Email doesn't work by itself. With some mailing-list interface on top it may, but that seems like you're stretching a bit. IM/IRC/Slack/whatever chat also don't work for this purpose.

I always think: if I want to put a link to this project's design docs, maybe some meeting notes, so new hires can come up to speed on what we're trying to do, I want it to be a URL that makes some kind of human sense, and I want the format to be conducive to communicating the right details.

barrkel2• 6 years ago

Slack messages all have URLs. They work both in the browser (once you're authenticated) and in the clients.

kumarvvr2• 6 years ago

I really hope the word e-mail is replaced with something else (like 'memo') and a new paradigm is introduced around the concept of offline discussions, like forum board or stack-overflow.

The purpose of such a system would be to save discussions and understandings in discussions for a long term.

I read Stack Overflow threads now and have a pretty good idea about the thought process from problem -> approaches -> solution, including solutions or approaches that were rejected.

Real-time chat is not a replacement of a meeting, because meetings have substantial outcomes and key decisions taken, that are usually recorded as Minutes of Meeting / Meeting notes.

cowpig• 6 years ago

I actually think Zulip is an exception to this, because its Stream>Topic hierarchy encourages organized conversations.

At my org, we consider Zulip to be an archive of sorts, and make an effort (a small one, because Zulip's UX makes it natural) to organize our communication such that it serves as a source of information for a future date.

I wrote a whole article about this a while back:

https://monadical.com/posts/how-to-make-remote-work-part-two...

nmaleki• 6 years ago

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 article is focused on Slack and Teams. Teams or a poorly implemented slack group can feel very disorganized, so I can see how the author came to the conclusion that they did.

I disagree with the notion that "live chat is for the things that can get lost." If the chat platform you're using has advance search features, announcement channels, and message pinning you can easily find information you're looking for and, in my personal experience, this is usually faster than searching through emails. Despite their major privacy concerns, Discord has an amazing search implementation that I wish more developers would take inspiration from.

Perhaps my view is influenced in part by my young age and by the culture of the company I work for, but I've always felt that people around me waste valuable time formulating emails to try to capture all edge cases of the reply. And usually this doesn't work, so multiple follow up emails over the course of an hour or even multiple hours are needed for something that could have been solved over text chat in mere minutes.

Jommi• 6 years ago

200% agree. First time I've ever really felt young on HN before. People still waste time with internal email?

kumarvvr2• 6 years ago

advance search features

These are only useful if the chat content is suitable for search. Searching human conversation is much different from searching content crafted for long term usage.

Also, there is the problem of what to search for. Many meaningful discussions may be lost in conversations that do not explicitly mention the topic but build upon the context.

Great many ideas can be expressed in a few words and these may not be searchable.

ChrisMarshallNY• 6 years ago

I’ve never been much of a fan of realtime chats.

Heck, I even had a personal policy of never scheduling regular meetings (they all needed to be “as-needed”).

However, I worked for a Japanese company, so regular meetings were a part of my life; whether or not I liked it.

I prefer “store and forward” communication (email is the classic form). Working for a Japanese company actually helped, there, as it was damn near impossible to have realtime chats with Tokyo.

If I use Slack that way, I do miss stuff in noisy channels, but I’ve learned to live with it (so have people I work with).

mkr-hn• 6 years ago

I forget which podcast it was on, but Automattic's CEO (Matt Mullenweg) talked about how they use blogs internally for much of their communication, so there's a huge searchable archive of information back to the early days of the company. People occasionally write posts to collect useful information that's fallen too deep.

It was probably either in his interview[0] on The Knowledge Project or a recent episode of his own podcast[1]. Probably the former since the latter usually focuses on what other people are doing instead of his own company.

[0] https://fs.blog/knowledge-project/matt-mullenweg/

[1] https://distributed.blog/podcast/

aheckler• 6 years ago

We call the internal blogs "P2s". You can make one yourself even. :) https://wordpress.com/p2/

angry_octet• 6 years ago

I haven't yet seen anything better than NNTP (the protocol of Usenet) and a decent news client, which used to mean tin on Unix and MT-NewsWatcher on MacOS. We used to have patches and CVS commit messages on code review groups and fork discussions seamlessly into dev groups. Mailing list email to NNTP gateways allowed ready collab with workers outside the group. Common NFS share allowed easy joint work without huge amount of code & build duplication. And it was possible to just grep every message in the News spool.

This was much better than Slack + github + email + Confluence + Teams + file shares + SharePoint -- no one knows where anything is or which chat system a conversation was on. Searching Slack is a fool's errand.

I attribute the failures of these systems to be their reliance on the pattern of centralised SQL+httpd+templated crud+js vs federated standardized exchange+text.

In modern web apps the client is embedded in the app by its very nature, and so the proprietary nature of each system makes community contribution impossible.

kazinator3• 6 years ago

Rule of thumb: If a discussion will matter after today, don’t have it in a chat room. Check out Discourse, Twist, Carrot, Threads, Basecamp, Flarum, or heck even GitHub issues.

I see; anything but e-mail! Gotcha.

kazinator3• 6 years ago

Didn't notice the article author encourages people to e-mail him, right from the blog page. :)

xyst• 6 years ago

Not really related to the article but at my work they are testing deployment of 3 different systems. They were deployed at different times so X was first then followed by Y about 1 year later, then finally Z ~6 months after deployment of Y. Z is expected to be fully adopted and Y and X will be phased out, eventually.

Depending on when the person joined they tend to have a proclivity towards a specific chat application. The oldest person on the group used X almost exclusively. The newer group members tended to use Y and Z apps.

So you would get pings from all of these apps and the points describes in the article are amplified times three.

In order to reclaim some sort of sanity, I decided to just log off from X and Y chat platforms and only use Z. I figured if that person really wanted to get ahold of me then they would figure it out themselves that I only use Z. Also I did send out e-mails and set statuses on X and Y indicating my preference for Z.

I would say thus far it is a success. Haven’t had any complaints for the past 6 months :)

harrisonjackson• 6 years ago

I feel like most of these arguments can be made about in person meetings, too. Decision making needs to be documented somewhere regardless of the medium the conversation took place in.

Live chat could maybe be a good place for that to happen but then someone needs to transfer that information into a tool designed for it. Just like you would if you had a meeting in a physical office.

Now if the argument you want to make is that live chat is a bad place for those discussions to be had then that is different. Having worked at multiple fully-remote orgs with team members across many timezones and working different schedules I can agree live chat is not a great place for decision making to happen either.

We use RFCs for async decision making when live chat, zooms, or in-person meetings aren't possible. It is slower since you are often waiting for a response until the next day, but I also find that the waiting time can be quite productive for other tasks and gives everyone more time to think about an issue.

andi999• 6 years ago

Why today?

shp0ngle• 6 years ago

Slack is for low effort stuff, while e-mail is for never-ending barrage of status updates and notifications from all the systems you use.

...what is for important stuff then

danielovichdk• 6 years ago

To me or seems that the author is more frustrated with how his team communicates during a sprint than the tool being used.

If you need to discuss something in thorough detail in a sprint, which is on the sprint backlog, it is done during refinement.

If a discussion is about a work item/pbi/user story it is discussed not in Slack or Teams, but under the item's discussion board. Jira, base amp and azure DevOps all support this.

The symptoms of poor communication or following a proces cannot be deslt with be changing from Slack to email.

People needs to be educated it seems as where communication must go.

Emails are not for work items under a sprint. Imo. Neither is Slack. You don't discuss wotk items in a chat, you do that in it's appropiate platform where the item livets.

Slack is not email. Should not be used as such. Slack is for "hey, where is that vacation spreadsheet" and not "should this feature be with bootstrap or vanilla HTML?"

The latter is work. It is discussed where work lives. Work does not live in Slack.

Good luck

kingludite2• 6 years ago

I don't know what to call it but some kind of training course, a spec or some other conditioning seems needed to get the best out of email. If the participants know 10 basic things like how and where to insert their responses and do not add 100 graphical signatures to each mail it gets 1000 times more wonderful and enjoyable. Long form doesn't become all that desirable that way. (It seems forums played a major role teaching how to quote to and gmail did a good job making it impossible.) Even on HN we rarely see quotation go on for more than one level.

<- your comment never goes here

> > > person 1 original message paragraph 1
> > person 2 first response to paragraph 1
> person 1 response to person 2 first response
person 2 response to 1's response

<- your comment goes here (the context is still paragraph 1, anything about this goes here not some place else)

> > > person 1 original message paragraph 2
> > person 2 response to paragraph 2
> person 1 response to above
person 3 response to above

<- your comment about p2 goes here

> > person 2 elaborates
> 1 responds
3 responds

<- your comment on p2's elaboration goes here

<- if it cant fit the 3 previous topics it goes here.

twobitshifter4• 6 years ago

Interestingly, outlook supports changing colors to help with inline replies and putting your name at the start of your online reply. I am the only person I have ever seen use that feature. Outlook.com no longer has the option.

kevsim• 6 years ago

In my previous job I battled this a lot. While I really like slack in general, no one likes it when things fall through the cracks or important people miss out.

It actually bothered me enough that I quit my job and made Kitemaker (YC W21) which automatically watches slack conversations for mentions of work items and links them together. This linkage lets people working on something that there are discussions going on about it in Slack. You have your persistent place for writing things down (in Kitemaker) and can still use Slack. We have lots of plans for making it even more frictionless. Also works with Discord.

https://kitemaker.co

weeboid• 6 years ago

You can create a specific room for a scoped discourse or dialectic.

dionian• 6 years ago

Anyone who takes the time to ponder and respond thoughtfully with context and explanation will find that they’re too late.

I think this is a reasonable point, however, is this really a problem with the medium itself?

daneel_w• 6 years ago

And if it matters after today, don't send it as an SMS, don't send it as an e-mail, don't talk about it over the phone, and if it matters that someone knows you went out to meet this or that person, don't bring your phone with you.

kazinator3• 6 years ago

I tried to follow the course using the backcountry map, but due to some Slack in the GPS, I ended up Discoursed. I fell, badly twisting my ankle, and was not able to Github and walk. Thus stranded in the middle of nowhere, I peered into my backpack. I only one Carrot left to eat, and to my utter dismay, I had left the Flarum gun at the Basecamp. Luckily, my cellphone's data connection somehow worked well enough that my E-mail client was able to clear the SOS message of the outbox after some 23 retries.

jonathanburke• 6 years ago

At Automattic we have not been using email for the past dozen years for internal communications. We replace email with WordPress.com/P2 plus IRC (moved on to Slack).

In our internal P2s we count 1 million posts (that might have been emails), 2.6 million comments (that might have been email replies) across 1,100 P2s (that might have been email silos).

We are active on Slack, but decisions are made on asynch P2s which are the source of truth.

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

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