Realizing the dream of good workplace software

https://www.campsite.com/blog/realizing-the-dream-of-good-workplace-software

by monkey_slap • 2 years ago

33 28 2 years ago

I have to say, Facebook at work was probably the best thing I ever used for collaboration and knowledge sharing. It was so much better than slack, I never understood why people wanted this chat style for group communication.

monkey_slap6• 2 years ago

I worked at Facebook for 5 years and agree. Though the culture was a big driver too. It’s not like switching to Workplace will magically transform company culture.

disgruntledphd22• 2 years ago

Yeah, me three (I was also there 5 years oddly. Do you enjoy being a traitor, incidentally?).

But I think that the big learning from trying to roll Workplace out to other companies is that it was the FB culture that made it work.

It's also worth noting that even though internal-FB stuff in core FB was absolutely bonkers, it definitely contributed to community formation, as you'd end up seeing that your XFN peeps hobbies/kids etc, so there was a loss there.

Although speaking as someone in EMEA, it was totally, totally worth it.

Already__Taken• 2 years ago

rip Google wave

The author having to post the right content to the right channel dooms all IMO.

it's all good and well having a web design thread/channel etc but nothing stops someone posting their kids photos except moderation.

curious to see what embracing that is like and only allowing users to post to 1 channel but they can only read an organized contextual threaded steam.

crabmusket• 2 years ago

I've recently started using Zulip a lot more after the Changelog podcast soft migrated their community from Slack to Zulip. I've also been following along with Zulip's official dev group, and some other community groups.

And it's really good.

I don't mind Slack at work at my fairly small company. It's definitely a distraction, but only a fairly small one.

But coming back to a community chat after a day or three of not paying attention, having that index of topics with new messages, lets me triage what I'm interested in, get up to date on those chats only, and "mark as read" the rest.

ykonstant• 2 years ago

My old smartphone (Samsung galaxy A5) struggles to load heavy webpages (it is fine with HN); with Zulip, it gives up completely. Zulip never loads on my phone. Frustrating, since Zulip is where the Lean community decided to be.

aetherspawn• 2 years ago

Is MS Teams channels really so bad that we’d pay $16/mo per user for something else?

brainzap• 2 years ago

yes

pards• 2 years ago

Yes. It'd be worth paying $16/mo to opt out of MS Teams.

Although, it's as much about the culture of the companies that use MS Teams as it is about the software itself.

_se• 2 years ago

No, and you also shouldn't hire people that think that a company's culture is dictated by which chat app they use. Very stupid.

llamaimperative2• 2 years ago

“Dictated” no, “highly influenced by,” yes. It’s insane someone could think otherwise.

If your organization communicated by carrier pigeon, it’d make some types of organizations and cultures and solutions possible while precluding others.

Obviously communication methods influence organizations :|

We switched to Campsite and our mode of thinking changed immediately. Suddenly we were able to have long-lived, complex conversations. Which is important to us as a company that has to solve complex problems over long periods of time.

beAbU• 2 years ago

Tell me you've never used Teams without telling me you've never used Teams.

loco5niner• 2 years ago

I use Teams on a daily basis and it's fine. That said I've never really used any other chat software for a similar purpose so have nothing to compare it to.

cuddlybacon• 2 years ago

I use Teams on the daily, and think it is a legit question.

On the one hand, the app crashes at least once a day. On the other, haven't seen this issue of distracting notifications or important discussions being drowned out by chatter. Those are constantly brought up with Slack.

hu3• 2 years ago

I use Teams, Google Meet and Zoom on a daily basis in my current projects.

For me Google Meet is superior, then Zoom 2nd and Teams 3rd.

BUT, all of them are fine. You won't catch me complaining about any.

drcongo3• 2 years ago

As someone who absolutely despises what Slack has become, runs an agency, and holds the purchasing power at work, I imagine I'm the target audience for this product. I read this post while nodding along sagely, posted the link in our Slack, then went and looked at the pricing. Campfire is apparently almost triple the cost of Slack. Does it offer triple the value? The product features page suggests not, and even if I'm the one with the purchasing power in this company, I'd still need to get personal buy-in from a lot of people to pull that trigger. It's a shame, but this seems wildly overpriced to me. The article includes this line...

It kills me every time we lose a customer saying “we hate Slack and Campsite app is amazing. We just can’t deal with the switching costs right now.”

Honestly, if this was priced anywhere near what Slack is, absolutely nobody would be saying that to you. They'd be switching and giving you money. You can effectively translate that to “we hate Slack and Campsite app is amazing. We just can’t justify tripling our costs right now.”

monkey_slap6• 2 years ago

Really appreciate the feedback, thank you

drcongo3• 2 years ago

You're welcome. 45 minutes later I'm still thinking about Campsite because I hate Slack so much, so I really hope I'm wrong and it takes off for you.

llamaimperative2• 2 years ago

I’m a very active Campsite user (for the Campsite team, hi this is Ethan!)

I don’t think Campsite is overpriced at all. It functions as our internal wiki, our chat, and our video conferencing solution.

It makes asynchronous work actually functional, so to me this comes down to: if you want a high-functioning asynchronous team, Campsite is WELL worth the cost. If you just want to “replace Slack” for unknown (?) reasons or to just try something new (?) then yeah, it’s overpriced.

The integration of docs (or more generically long-lived evergreen content, b/c I’m not sure Docs are the right abstraction), calls w/ AI features integrated, posts, and DMs all together is huge. A lot of synergies to be had by having all of these things in a combined system that supports bidirectional linking between all of them.

sureglymop• 2 years ago

The repeated use of "I couldn't agree more" confused me a little bit. Besides, you probably could have agreed more, no?

HereBeBeasties• 2 years ago

fibery.io all day long :-)

It now has a thread view so you can replace tools like Slack with it, and entity-grouped notifications, so you can easily catch up on things if you are away for a few days. Plus it does a much better job of proper knowledge management, with references, proper relations, build a domain model of your business, per-entity and linked-entity permission models if you need that, etc. etc.

It provides integrations for existing tools, so migrating to it is much less big bang (sync in your JIRA tickets, Linear, Slack conversations, etc.).

Two-panel nested views on entities make navigating through status on task boards, projects, etc. a joy. You can build automations (create a new Slack channel and invite the assignees to it when I make an Incident, add a 'priority' labels when certain people comment or certain keywords are used", etc.).

Add meeting minutes, automatically convert the follow-up bullet points in those into Tasks for people and assign them, without ever leaving the same single page view.

You can use it a bit like e-mail, and a bit like JIRA, and a bit like Slack. And you can pick and choose those "bit like"s to best fit your needs.

We haven't completely replaced Slack with Fibery, but we've moved most of our more intentional communication into it. We no longer feel we need to "complete Slack" to catch up on the state of the world.

We love Fibery and are very happy customers. ♥ It's great.

Realizing the dream of good workplace software

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