11 ms·

I wish slack would concentrate on making the app more productive for teams to work together remotely. We can type fast enough, in fact, hackernews tells me I'm

I wish slack would concentrate on making the app more productive for teams to work together remotely. We can type fast enough, in fact, hackernews tells me I'm typing too fast. The problem is organizing and collecting the information and ensuring it is useful later, rather than just during the 5 minutes. Let users break a chat message out into a threaded discussion for example. We already have plenty of voice and video chat options, we can just pick up a phone. Those things are ephemeral. Text is forever. Let's keep more of that so we can use it to further the business objectives.

rtpg 11y ago
I think that storing data in Slack is a bit of an antipattern. I'll avoid saying "You should" beacuse everyone's workflow is different, but: I like to treat Slack like e-mail. I'm also a fan of GTD(Getting Things Done), and a pretty big part of that (and things like Inbox Zero) is that _you don't leave important stuff in your inbox_. If there's some info in slack that will be valuable for more than 15 minutes, it's likely that it belongs somewhere else! When dealing with bugs, I copy the chat (well, a link to the chat) into a card in Trello. Same for basically any request that requires me to do something. I do use Slack reminders for calendar-based events. I treat Slack like I treat talking to a person in real life. If I don't write it down, I'll likely forget it, so I better write it somewhere (not in Slack) quickly. You can probably accomplish some of this with pins inside Slack, but I've never accomplished it. I think that this is one of those intractable problems where, because people work differently together and in individual workflows, it's hard to solve the "long-term coordination" problem without bogging down the "short-term coordination" problem. Anyways, text is forever, but so are newspapers on microfilm. But we still make history books.
- porker 11y ago
  A great point, but saving from Slack isn't the most straightforward. It's not as brainless as "Select text & hit 'Save to Evernote'" which I do in my web browsers. I've resorted to screenshots a few times, to keep the richness of the messages. > If I don't write it down, I'll likely forget it, so I better write it somewhere (not in Slack) quickly. Where do you write it?
  - nannal 11y ago
    for me: keep usually.
  - rtpg 11y ago
    My philosophy on this is "don't be afraid." It's all 1s and 0s to the machine when you're digital, so it's OK to dump 10 paragraphs into certain text boxes. If you want to do something, you can usually do it! A lot of programs let you paste images in directly nowadays. If you're OK with having links to chats instead of the chat text itself, you can click the timestamps in a Slack chat to get a permalink . Sometimes I just copy the entire chat and paste it into Trello. Which leads to "where". Most things I end up with are small tasks like bugfixes. Actionable tasks for the immediate. As much of that goes into Trello as possible. I'm not afraid of making multi-paragraph cards that copy the chat verbatim either (it's all 1s and 0s, right). I also do the whole "screenshot" thing too. Take a screenshot and also paste it right into Trello. Some stuff is important in the immediate but I'll throw away later. Temporary notes for things like user support. I use OS X's Notes app, which is basically notepad with tabs (I would likely use Notepad++ on Windows to accomplish this). It's all temporary notes, but still nice because it doesn't scroll up as other people start talking. If I have something like a long-term reference, I try really hard to find a good place for it on a case-by-case basis. Usually that involves writing a text file (markdown) and putting it into Dropbox. On OS X I use LightPaper (a great little app), on Android I use Draft[1] (iOS has a thing called Drafts). Both apps are set up to point to the same folder, so I have these references on my phone too. I also use text files for journaling what I'm trying to accomplish. For example, at work I'm working with a system that will physically mail documents back to me, so I wrote down exactly my operations so that when the docs get back to me I know what I did: Sent two pdfs (located in Documents) on invoice `weFFEA123231`. One is Letter size instead of A4, another is A3 size. Also sending Invoice `weFFEA123232` with just the letter-size page(`2015.pdf`). A "user space unit" in PDF is 1/72nd of an inch. Sometimes this log dead-ends, most recent entry: For compressor and source maps, thing that's likely needed is to rewrite the JS compressor. An easy solution would be ----- I also use my calendar! I'll also just paste random stuff into my calendar for information I'll need at a certain event (for example reservation confirmation numbers). This veered slightly off topic but tl;dr is: Trello for tasks, Notes for temp notes, LightPaper for reference+journaling, Calendar for time-sensitive information. [1]: http://www.mvilla.it/draft/ http://www.mvilla.it/draft/
- dreamfactory2 11y ago
  not sure if they changed course, but slack has been talking about becoming the hub for all business comms and files and eating into ms office/google apps
  - dexterdog 11y ago
    Which likely means they'll start favoring their apps which will be the end of many people using slack. I don't want to see that.
- dorfsmay 11y ago
  > I treat Slack like I treat talking to a person Exactly! A channel is just like a meeting room, you can expect me to constantly follow more than one or two channels, for the others, @channel or @myusername.
- sciurus 11y ago
  For some ideas on how to automate the cross-referencing that you're describing, see https://stackstorm.com/2016/01/29/unifying-disparate-applications-one-system/ https://stackstorm.com/2016/01/29/unifying-disparate-applica...
mbrock 11y ago
What are the options for development team discussion boards? We have GitHub Issues, but they're not a discussion forum... the GitHub wiki, which nobody likes to use for anything except info they don't have any other place for... and Slack, which is too synchronous and spammy to be a place for calm, longer-term discussions... Any interesting contenders? Perhaps something aimed at remote async teams?
- darkr 11y ago
  Discourse?
  - mbrock 11y ago
    Yeah, that might be the best option.
- s_kilk 11y ago
  Funnily enough, I've been toying with the idea of building a new service, something like a weird fusion of Github and Reddit, for exactly this use-case. It feels like there should be a good solution for dev-team (or even OSS community) discussion baked into the project hosting solution. The only thing holding me back is that it looks like a huge undertaking.
  - mbrock 11y ago
    Yay for weird fusions. The internet is just a big collaboration machine and existing tools are calcified clichés. When me and my brother worked on a project, we set up our browser home pages to show a CGI gadget that grepped (well, ag'd) the source code, and commit log, for @-mentions and XXX comments. This way we could talk asynchronously inside the coding process, e.g. // @dbrock do you know a better way to do this? That was ridiculously simple to build but very effective. So I'm a fan of this linking between code and communication, and encourage you to keep experimenting!
    - s_kilk 11y ago
      Thanks! I'm envisioning a github/gitlab alike source hosting service, but with the UI and UX tuned towards enabling discussion and collaboration. Sort of trying to get to Github's original motto of "Social Coding". Put more emphasis on the social and human aspect than on tweaking the product for enterprise sales. The basic idea would be to have a reddit-style threaded discussion available from any point in the repository: the repo itself, a commit, a branch, a tag, and to have easy hyper-linking between those objects. Good search would help too. Will keep experimenting.
mintplant 11y ago
> Let users break a chat message out into a threaded discussion for example. Zulip does this, and you can host it on premises. https://zulip.org/ https://zulip.org/
- nannal 11y ago
  Threaded chat is great, but would you trade slacks integrations for threaded chat? Really that is slacks advantage as far as I can see.
porker 11y ago
> Let users break a chat message out into a threaded discussion for example. Threaded chat would be awesome! In 'noisy' public Slacks the conversations are impossible to follow. Sure IRC had the same problem, but it wasn't used as a general replacement for forums in the way Slack is.
- mateuszf 11y ago
  Flowdock supports that - https://www.flowdock.com/features https://www.flowdock.com/features Our team was using it, but since then we moved to Slack as it became the company standard.
rl3 11y ago
Threaded discussion support is basically the thing that's been holding Slack back from complete world domination, and for some reason they're taking forever to do it: https://mobile.twitter.com/slackhq/status/578575540594020353 https://mobile.twitter.com/slackhq/status/578575540594020353
- distances 11y ago
  I can't understand how Slack became so popular without threading. I find that absolutely crucial for a group chat now that I've got used to it. The same goes for Gitter, fwiw. They've promised threading too a while ago: https://github.com/gitterHQ/gitter/issues/741 https://github.com/gitterHQ/gitter/issues/741
- my5thaccount 11y ago
  The fact that they are ignoring this is a very bad sign. It's way easier to do and hasn't been done well and instead they are doing something really hard that people can already do easily outside the system. They've shifted their focus from their customers needs to beating the competition and it will their downfall.
  - rl3 11y ago
    Threaded discussion support is a major feature their competition touts, so arguably by adding it Slack would be crushing their competitors and serving their customers at the same time.
wwkeyboard 11y ago
> threaded discussion for example this would be supper annoying for the way some of our busiest slackers use slack
Kiro 11y ago
Discord users probably disagree with you. (If you don't know Discord is basically Slack + voice, it even looks the same, and is exploding right now.)
vram22 11y ago
>We already have plenty of voice and video chat options Can you name some good ones? Like to try them out.
- my5thaccount 11y ago
  Lots of different instant messengers like skype. Google chat, facetime, just the regular old phone. Video conferencing tools. Even screen sharing systems like gotomeeting. It's a solved problem mostly, but hard to do technically, so that's why it concerns me that Slack is trying to do it when there are lots of things no one does well and slack isn't addressing those. This is a bad sign for slack, IMO.
  - vram22 11y ago
    I do know about Skype, Google Hangouts, and videoconferencing tools like Webex, GotoMeeting, etc. And have used enterprise videoconferencing tools in companies where I worked earlier, and Skype and Google Hangouts. But there are issues with both of the latter at times (e.g the recent thread about Skype issues on Linux), hence my question, which was more about other (new) ones, and only for voice and video chat, not screen sharing or text chat (which work fine with many providers), really. But thanks for the answer. I've tried out a few of the new WebRTC sites like appear.in and some others, but they seem to be alpha level. Not tried them a lot though. Has anyone tried Firefox Hello, which was mentioned in the recent thread about Skype issues on Linux? Is it alive? Going to try it with someone soon, if it is alive, but interested in hearing others' experiences.

rtpg 11y ago

I think that storing data in Slack is a bit of an antipattern. I'll avoid saying "You should" beacuse everyone's workflow is different, but: I like to treat Slack like e-mail. I'm also a fan of GTD(Getting Things Done), and a pretty big part of that (and things like Inbox Zero) is that _you don't leave important stuff in your inbox_. If there's some info in slack that will be valuable for more than 15 minutes, it's likely that it belongs somewhere else! When dealing with bugs, I copy the chat (well, a link to the chat) into a card in Trello. Same for basically any request that requires me to do something. I do use Slack reminders for calendar-based events. I treat Slack like I treat talking to a person in real life. If I don't write it down, I'll likely forget it, so I better write it somewhere (not in Slack) quickly. You can probably accomplish some of this with pins inside Slack, but I've never accomplished it. I think that this is one of those intractable problems where, because people work differently together and in individual workflows, it's hard to solve the "long-term coordination" problem without bogging down the "short-term coordination" problem. Anyways, text is forever, but so are newspapers on microfilm. But we still make history books.

porker 11y ago
A great point, but saving from Slack isn't the most straightforward. It's not as brainless as "Select text & hit 'Save to Evernote'" which I do in my web browsers. I've resorted to screenshots a few times, to keep the richness of the messages. > If I don't write it down, I'll likely forget it, so I better write it somewhere (not in Slack) quickly. Where do you write it?
- nannal 11y ago
  for me: keep usually.
- rtpg 11y ago
  My philosophy on this is "don't be afraid." It's all 1s and 0s to the machine when you're digital, so it's OK to dump 10 paragraphs into certain text boxes. If you want to do something, you can usually do it! A lot of programs let you paste images in directly nowadays. If you're OK with having links to chats instead of the chat text itself, you can click the timestamps in a Slack chat to get a permalink . Sometimes I just copy the entire chat and paste it into Trello. Which leads to "where". Most things I end up with are small tasks like bugfixes. Actionable tasks for the immediate. As much of that goes into Trello as possible. I'm not afraid of making multi-paragraph cards that copy the chat verbatim either (it's all 1s and 0s, right). I also do the whole "screenshot" thing too. Take a screenshot and also paste it right into Trello. Some stuff is important in the immediate but I'll throw away later. Temporary notes for things like user support. I use OS X's Notes app, which is basically notepad with tabs (I would likely use Notepad++ on Windows to accomplish this). It's all temporary notes, but still nice because it doesn't scroll up as other people start talking. If I have something like a long-term reference, I try really hard to find a good place for it on a case-by-case basis. Usually that involves writing a text file (markdown) and putting it into Dropbox. On OS X I use LightPaper (a great little app), on Android I use Draft[1] (iOS has a thing called Drafts). Both apps are set up to point to the same folder, so I have these references on my phone too. I also use text files for journaling what I'm trying to accomplish. For example, at work I'm working with a system that will physically mail documents back to me, so I wrote down exactly my operations so that when the docs get back to me I know what I did: Sent two pdfs (located in Documents) on invoice `weFFEA123231`. One is Letter size instead of A4, another is A3 size. Also sending Invoice `weFFEA123232` with just the letter-size page(`2015.pdf`). A "user space unit" in PDF is 1/72nd of an inch. Sometimes this log dead-ends, most recent entry: For compressor and source maps, thing that's likely needed is to rewrite the JS compressor. An easy solution would be ----- I also use my calendar! I'll also just paste random stuff into my calendar for information I'll need at a certain event (for example reservation confirmation numbers). This veered slightly off topic but tl;dr is: Trello for tasks, Notes for temp notes, LightPaper for reference+journaling, Calendar for time-sensitive information. [1]: http://www.mvilla.it/draft/ http://www.mvilla.it/draft/
dreamfactory2 11y ago
not sure if they changed course, but slack has been talking about becoming the hub for all business comms and files and eating into ms office/google apps
- dexterdog 11y ago
  Which likely means they'll start favoring their apps which will be the end of many people using slack. I don't want to see that.
dorfsmay 11y ago
> I treat Slack like I treat talking to a person Exactly! A channel is just like a meeting room, you can expect me to constantly follow more than one or two channels, for the others, @channel or @myusername.
sciurus 11y ago
For some ideas on how to automate the cross-referencing that you're describing, see https://stackstorm.com/2016/01/29/unifying-disparate-applications-one-system/ https://stackstorm.com/2016/01/29/unifying-disparate-applica...

mbrock 11y ago

What are the options for development team discussion boards? We have GitHub Issues, but they're not a discussion forum... the GitHub wiki, which nobody likes to use for anything except info they don't have any other place for... and Slack, which is too synchronous and spammy to be a place for calm, longer-term discussions... Any interesting contenders? Perhaps something aimed at remote async teams?

darkr 11y ago
Discourse?
- mbrock 11y ago
  Yeah, that might be the best option.
s_kilk 11y ago
Funnily enough, I've been toying with the idea of building a new service, something like a weird fusion of Github and Reddit, for exactly this use-case. It feels like there should be a good solution for dev-team (or even OSS community) discussion baked into the project hosting solution. The only thing holding me back is that it looks like a huge undertaking.
- mbrock 11y ago
  Yay for weird fusions. The internet is just a big collaboration machine and existing tools are calcified clichés. When me and my brother worked on a project, we set up our browser home pages to show a CGI gadget that grepped (well, ag'd) the source code, and commit log, for @-mentions and XXX comments. This way we could talk asynchronously inside the coding process, e.g. // @dbrock do you know a better way to do this? That was ridiculously simple to build but very effective. So I'm a fan of this linking between code and communication, and encourage you to keep experimenting!
  - s_kilk 11y ago
    Thanks! I'm envisioning a github/gitlab alike source hosting service, but with the UI and UX tuned towards enabling discussion and collaboration. Sort of trying to get to Github's original motto of "Social Coding". Put more emphasis on the social and human aspect than on tweaking the product for enterprise sales. The basic idea would be to have a reddit-style threaded discussion available from any point in the repository: the repo itself, a commit, a branch, a tag, and to have easy hyper-linking between those objects. Good search would help too. Will keep experimenting.

mintplant 11y ago

> Let users break a chat message out into a threaded discussion for example. Zulip does this, and you can host it on premises. https://zulip.org/ https://zulip.org/

nannal 11y ago
Threaded chat is great, but would you trade slacks integrations for threaded chat? Really that is slacks advantage as far as I can see.

porker 11y ago

> Let users break a chat message out into a threaded discussion for example. Threaded chat would be awesome! In 'noisy' public Slacks the conversations are impossible to follow. Sure IRC had the same problem, but it wasn't used as a general replacement for forums in the way Slack is.

mateuszf 11y ago
Flowdock supports that - https://www.flowdock.com/features https://www.flowdock.com/features Our team was using it, but since then we moved to Slack as it became the company standard.

rl3 11y ago

Threaded discussion support is basically the thing that's been holding Slack back from complete world domination, and for some reason they're taking forever to do it: https://mobile.twitter.com/slackhq/status/578575540594020353 https://mobile.twitter.com/slackhq/status/578575540594020353

distances 11y ago
I can't understand how Slack became so popular without threading. I find that absolutely crucial for a group chat now that I've got used to it. The same goes for Gitter, fwiw. They've promised threading too a while ago: https://github.com/gitterHQ/gitter/issues/741 https://github.com/gitterHQ/gitter/issues/741
my5thaccount 11y ago
The fact that they are ignoring this is a very bad sign. It's way easier to do and hasn't been done well and instead they are doing something really hard that people can already do easily outside the system. They've shifted their focus from their customers needs to beating the competition and it will their downfall.
- rl3 11y ago
  Threaded discussion support is a major feature their competition touts, so arguably by adding it Slack would be crushing their competitors and serving their customers at the same time.

wwkeyboard 11y ago

> threaded discussion for example this would be supper annoying for the way some of our busiest slackers use slack

Kiro 11y ago

Discord users probably disagree with you. (If you don't know Discord is basically Slack + voice, it even looks the same, and is exploding right now.)

vram22 11y ago

>We already have plenty of voice and video chat options Can you name some good ones? Like to try them out.

my5thaccount 11y ago
Lots of different instant messengers like skype. Google chat, facetime, just the regular old phone. Video conferencing tools. Even screen sharing systems like gotomeeting. It's a solved problem mostly, but hard to do technically, so that's why it concerns me that Slack is trying to do it when there are lots of things no one does well and slack isn't addressing those. This is a bad sign for slack, IMO.
- vram22 11y ago
  I do know about Skype, Google Hangouts, and videoconferencing tools like Webex, GotoMeeting, etc. And have used enterprise videoconferencing tools in companies where I worked earlier, and Skype and Google Hangouts. But there are issues with both of the latter at times (e.g the recent thread about Skype issues on Linux), hence my question, which was more about other (new) ones, and only for voice and video chat, not screen sharing or text chat (which work fine with many providers), really. But thanks for the answer. I've tried out a few of the new WebRTC sites like appear.in and some others, but they seem to be alpha level. Not tried them a lot though. Has anyone tried Firefox Hello, which was mentioned in the recent thread about Skype issues on Linux? Is it alive? Going to try it with someone soon, if it is alive, but interested in hearing others' experiences.