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Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging
- fiatjaf 9y agoThis is correct.
- jwildeboer 9y agoTL;DR they made a modernised version of an nntp client and server ;-)
- akhilcacharya 9y agoI mean, isn't Dropbox just prettier rsync?
- josephg 9y agoAnd Slack is a modern version of IRC :) It keep being surprised by how much a fresh coat of CSS and a mobile app can reinvigorate these old ideas. Who knew how important adding gifs and emoticons would be?
- kuon 9y agoAdd gif to HN you will realize how great it will become! (please don't)
- detaro 9y agoI'd say history access/logging by default, easy sign-up, easy management/configuration are all way more important reasons. Someone very likely could have gotten all that working as a good product based on IRC, but they didn't. (I use IRC a lot more than Slack, but my requirements are not the same as those of a company adopting Slack)
- tvaughan 9y agohttps://grove.io/ https://grove.io/
- detaro 9y agoOh interesting, wasn't aware that was a thing. Sad they didn't make it.
- dav 9y agoExactly! Sounds like Usenet.
- peatmoss 9y agoalt.religion.slack > slack Jokes aside, the article did hit the nail on the head in its critique of realtime comms. That said, there was always a subset of any team that seemed to have cold feet / anxiety / or other resistance to writing the longer-form messages of newsgroups. I think if I had to pick between shallow, but broadly used comms, and slow but heterogeneously used comms, I'd still pick the latter.
- pqs 9y agoI agree with you. I can't believe that they even wrote a new app when they could just have installed mailman, or any other mailing list server, or even a news server. If I were to create a company I would create mailing lists for discussion and a wiki for consolidation of knowledge. In my humble opinion, there is no need for new fancy apps. The tools are there. What does the new app they created provide that cannot be done with the tools I mentionned? I feel old. I'm 36 years old and I see too many articles of people discovering stuff we discussed at length in the 90s. This IRC vs Usenet discussion is an old one.
- georgeecollins 9y agoThis makes a good point that Slack can sometimes just be a better hamster wheel for time wasting. I have seen it work well as an emergency channel, where dev's could quickly share info if a live app was having a problem. But at the same place, the most lively channel was an exchange of GIFs.
- joneholland 9y agoSo you built Basecamp?
- mkohlmyr 9y agoI like it. I've been thinking for a while that old-school forums are actually fundamentally superior to chatrooms for sharing important information and having in depth discussions. In my opinion the chat model is simply bad for effectively distributing useful information because it disappears in the noise. Perhaps what's needed is a combination of the forum-style threaded conversation model for information sharing and work conversations and a chat room which is explicitly for the water-cooler stuff, so that people don't have to be always-on (and constantly interrupted). It should be safe to turn off when you need to focus.
- ryanmarsh 9y agoI disagree. It takes all kinds. There isn't one right way for people who work together to communicate. Real time messaging solves a specific set of needs but is not the end-all be-all. Threaded more thoughtful forum style communication is important too, it's much better than email for that sort of thing. Email is also important for what it's best at. Work communication isn't a technology problem as much as it's a human problem. Just off the top of my head here are a few types of communication that need to happen at work. In modern work we can assume not everyone can be in the same physical space. * solve an important problem right now * find consensus on a complicated problem where opinions vary and emotions run strong * info everyone needs to be aware of now * info only a few people need to be aware of now * info that might be of use within some time horizon for few or all * relationship/trust building (small talk, gossip) don't dismiss the value of this one
- underwater 9y agoIt's called Facebook Workplace. Balance of Messenger for immediate communication, groups for threaded conversations, and feed for discovery.
- mkohlmyr 9y agoI don't think I've really heard much about that product since the announcement. Is it good? And are accounts tied to Facebook proper? That would turn me off completely.
- jasonkester 9y agoI worked at a Slack shop for several years, and share the author's opinion. I can't think of any five minute period during my entire tenure where the Slack tab didn't have a little red circle telling me that I absolutely needed to check it right this second. There was no way to filter notifications beyond "Everything", so that little bubble would go up every time anybody in the company pressed a key. And heaven forbid somebody typed "Good morning, @channel" (which happened 20 times per morning per timezone), because then you'd get the dreaded Red Exclamation Mark in the tab. I can't fathom how anybody would have been able to work if they had gone as far as allowing notifications to be turned on and make noises at them every time Slack thought something Important Enough To Interrupt You had happened.
- smileysteve 9y agoHalf of my team has audio notifications on and nobody seems to n read the @channel warning.
- twobyfour 9y agoMore granular controls really would fix this problem. For instance, per-channel settings to have the channel highlighted in the sidebar when it has new messages, but without badging the tab/dock. That way you could reserve the badges for the channels you really need to monitor closely, but not have to check every single other channel explicitly to see if there are new messages.
- mikepurvis 9y agoMan, that would be amazing. It would be sweet if there was a third party slack notifier that could do that kind of thing. Basically you just run the notifier and quit the main slack app, until the notifier tells you to pull it up. Then you interact with it, and when you're done, quit it again.
- dasil003 9y agoTake a look at the Channel List under Preferences -> Advanced to only show unreads, then combine that with individually muted channels. That's how I have most channels set up so I can passively aware of activity with badges.
- onion2k 9y agoA small, but impactful design choice we made in creating Twist was to leave out the online presence indicator. I imagine you could address this in Slack by just having everyone set themselves to 'Away' by default. One of the things that I've found useful in Slack is turning off the "Someone is typing" message (the option is in the Display Options). I used to wait for someone to post if I knew a message was coming. Now I can drop in and out of a channel more easily. Similarly, I've muted almost all the channels I'm in so now I only need to check if someone notifies me. The point I'm making is that Slack doesn't necessarily work the way you want right away, and that you might need address a few cultural problems with the way your team uses it. You need to think about how your team communicates, consider why people do annoying things in it, and come up with solutions that work. At the most extreme that might be writing a competitor product but for most companies there just needs to be a little more tolerance of people not answering immediately and a little consideration that gifs can be unhelpful.
- amelius 9y agoIt sounds like you kind of ended up with e-mail :)
- csours 9y agoI would like to see a meaningful discussion of the tipping points between various forms of communication. ie: Phone call when you need immediate, high-bandwith dialog; IM when want to chat, but don't need instant responses; email when you want persistent communications, etc Those are very brief, single faceted views, and there are a lot more factors.
- hamandcheese 9y ago> But in reality, even I couldn’t keep track of all the conversations that were happening at the company. Nor should you, really. Imagine trying to do that in an office-based organization! Slack, to me, is a bit like our digital office space. You can also use highlight words to ensure you don't miss any discussion on topics you're particularly interested in. We have a guy who worked a lot with our billing, and he is magically always present whenever anyone says "refund".
- bambax 9y agoJust went through Startup School that uses Mattermost, which seems to be a Slack clone (not sure since I never used Slack). It didn't seem to work well. Since all members of all groups were from all over the world and rarely shared a timezone, no conversation could really take place in real time. And since there are no threads or topics or anything, it's almost impossible to go back to something that was said a while ago. I think a subreddit would have worked much better.
- kawfey 9y agoMy company is looking at using Mattermost, but I have the same qualms, since it honestly won't be much better (if not worse) than using our standard enterprise Lync/Skype for IM. We have an internal reddit-like forum with a "like" model (no dislike/downvote) but it isn't utilized to make work happen. Email is still the way to go...which to my understanding, that's essentially exactly what doist has recreated.
- flanbiscuit 9y ago> I think a subreddit would have worked much better. I'm so used to the reddit and hacker news style that I'd also prefer this as well. This Twist App looks too much like another email inbox[1] to me and that puts me off it. Maybe they could offer ways of changing the UI. [1] https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1000/1*zI94S5XizoB4WickRL_PlQ.png https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1000/1*zI94S5XizoB4WickR...
- it33 9y agoHi @bambax, Mattermost team here, Appreciate your feedback. The Mattermost instance at Startup School does offer threads, if you either click the "Reply" arrow when you hover over a message or go to the "[...]" menu and select "Reply". If it wasn't easy to discover, that's 100% our fault and we'll see what we can to do make it more prominent in the tutorial and in other ways. Definitely agree threads are crucial to go back to topics in early discussions. We've had them since 2015 and for people using them, they become kind of indispensable. Maybe give it a try? Would love to hear your thoughts in the Mattermost feedback channel.
- 9y ago
- robbiemitchell 9y agoWe have seen many of these challenges over the years and set out to build something to help manage your team's incoming requests — directly in Slack. We find it's most used for internal assistance (one team supporting many) or as a way for B2B companies to provide support to their top customers. The goal is to help your team be available and responsive without compromising productivity. To achieve this, incoming requests to a particular team are collected in a "feed" channel. The notifications ping specific people on rotation or on a sequence (according to rules) until claimed, the conversations are explicitly resolved with a "closed" action. We provide assistance for things like inserting knowledge base and template responses, and tagging the conversation. Integrations via Zapier mean a conversation can easily turn into an Asana task, Github issue, etc. If you're struggling to manage the chaos, give it a shot and see whether it helps. http://frame.ai/beta/ http://frame.ai/beta/
- yiiii 9y agoGoogle Wave?
- tehlike 9y agoCame here to say this. Google wave was a pretty good attempt at fixing this. Maybe it was ahead of its time.
- mrisoli 9y agoMaybe Google Wave was targeted at the wrong segment? I believe it was used as a general communications tool, not specifically for business.
- tehlike 9y agohard to say - i was mostly using it to communicate with opensource developers on nhibernate (iirc, long time ago). I think you are right though, most of the features are things you'd use more for business. Also considering how widely google docs is used, it makes sense. PS: I am a google employee.
- SonicSoul 9y agoso how is the end solution different/better than email?
- rvschuilenburg 9y agoEasier to give / remove participants and automatically give them access to previous messages in the thread, without having to quote all previous messages just to give some context.
- djklanac 9y agoI need to give this another look, but isn't that what a Google Group provides?
- hfauq 9y agoFull comparison with email on this 3-min article: https://medium.com/@hfauq/email-or-twist-why-twist-is-better-dad08f39c646 https://medium.com/@hfauq/email-or-twist-why-twist-is-better... TLDR: emails are messy, siloed, opaque, not easily shared
- pcarolan 9y agoApple took a step in the right direction with the do not disturb feature in the Notifications bar. When I don't want to be bothered, I turn it on, when I want to be chatty I turn it off. The next step should be apps that are aware of your do not disturb state and update your presence (as an option) when it's set. Then, I want a timer so I can get blasted with updates every 25 minutes like Pomodoro timer.
- d0m 9y agoI like it. Basically the design choice was to focus on threads within channels, instead of simply channels. Slack has that thread feature but I never use it because it's hard to follow. I guess slack could copy them and have a "text mode" and a "thread mode", easily being able to switch between both, and then the threads will be much more useful.
- rovek 9y agoThis looks like a great tool, particularly the ground-up focus on threading and giving teams more options. As with its competitors, it can still easily become just another distraction when people use it wrong. It's easy to see how you could design a "process" around using something like Slack to achieve the same experience and if you don't design a "process" for using Twist then it will suck just as much. We tried to heavily use channels in HipChat as a threading and noise-avoidance mechanism, it worked well but we often ended up with a lot of channels with the same people in; at which point discipline becomes stressed.
- computerex 9y agoReminds me of Gitter.
- phaed 9y agoHow so? Gitter is just like Slack.
- elipollak 9y agoReally nice post. We've suffered similar challenges using slack with our remote team and switched to Basecamp, which has been much better. What's your sense of how Twist and Basecamp compare?
- amix 9y agoTwist is just about communication. Basecamp has a bit of everything, but it isn't particularly good at any of the things. We wanted to create a product that just does one thing really well (and that's team communication).
- gedrap 9y agoI think that Slack (or any other IM client for work, really) is just a tool, not a solution. Meaning that it requires some organization and thought, rather than installing and hoping for the best. At least to some extent (i.e. have no idea about companies with hundreds of engineers online), it works. Equally important it is to acknowledge what is suitable for doing on IM and what is not. If you want to discuss some large changes, sure, IM is a bad place. Conversation will probably get interrupted, derailed, etc. That's where, in my opinion, things like Google Docs or plain simple GH Issues shine. The format forces into better thought out, longer messages. For other things, you need to organize the chat rooms. If you have 10+ people and 2 chat rooms (I think slack defaults to #general and #random) then yes, sounds bad. But instead having quite a few chat rooms with <10 people each might work out well. Even having multiple rooms with the same people can be good to separate different topics of conversation. "Always on", I believe, comes not from the IM itself but from the culture of the company. I know places where everything is e-mail only and people constantly refresh it. Equally, IM is mostly ghost town outside working hours at other places. And Slack has decent notification settings to make sure that you don't go crazy. So, IM has it's place and provides value if you are willing to make it work. It's just not a 'it just works' solution, which is hardly surprising.
- dwheeler 9y agoTheir "new" approach sounds suspiciously like a mailing list: asynchronous communication for a group that supports threads of communication.
- dkhenry 9y agoI would liken it to a newsgroup more then a mailing list, but they are very similar.
- dkhenry 9y agoI cant help but draw parallels between this and NNTP. This is essentially a really nice skin over newgroups, and thats not a bad thing at all. We have seen just how successful a modern UX can be on a old protocol with slack providing a UX to IRC. It is funny that we are slowly reworking the tools of the early computing community in slick modern ways. It is also interesting that we as a community have completely sold out federated independent operators with a common standards defined protocol for soloed tooling.
- sevengraff 9y agoThis seems like a real missed opportunity to build on systems that already work. I'd love to see these open systems like nntp come back. I hope someone puts in the effort to make them competitive in the modern technology world.
- AdieuToLogic 9y agoI cant help but draw parallels between this and NNTP. This is essentially a really nice skin over newgroups, and thats not a bad thing at all. The people in the D language community[0] came up with just such a thing. The source is on GitHub here[1]. 0 - http://forum.dlang.org/ http://forum.dlang.org/ 1 - https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed
- _lex 9y agoCongrats on finding a real problem and building something to solve it. You're about to fight an uphill battle. Here's my feedback (from someone who currently leads the leads of 7 remote engineering teams): • Not knowing if someone is available and if they will get back to you soon is very very bad for many conversations. For example, when you have a C-level asking for rapid turn around on something that needs to be done by someone multiple levels away from you. • In remote teams, sometimes people disappear (e.g. car accident or civil unrest in a random country), and if you have no way to know, you'll eventually get fed up. • The feeling of cohesiveness that comes from having realtime conversations, brainstorms and other collaboration is very important to managers (especially in remote teams) and convincing them that realtime talk is not a good default is going to be quite hard. • As a result you will never be their default communication channel - at most you'll be the place they discuss bigger problems. But because you're not the default, you'll get destroyed by slack, who is the default. Most times people use the tool at hand that they are most familiar with, not the best tool for the job. I would encourage you to write a slack bot that reminds people to use you & helps them easily experience value from your product without you having to win the default spot. • Finally, most people will have serious difficulty seeing the difference between your product and other product management tools that allow commenting in detail on issues being discussed.
- the_bear 9y agoOne interesting challenge with this real-time vs. async communication challenge is that different job roles have different needs. At my company, most of our employees have been on the customer service side until recently, and Slack is great for them. Almost everything they need to talk about is urgent (even if it's not important) and temporary. They rarely have long-lasting high-level conversations. Now we're starting to hire more developers and I'm realizing how disruptive it is for them to be pulled into Slack conversations all the time. So I've started using email more for communicating with the devs, and that seems to work reasonably well. The questions I have are: (a) is it possible to have a single communication tool that handles both real-time and async properly and (b) does that even matter? Maybe email+Slack is a perfectly fine solution. Either way, it's obvious that only using Slack isn't a viable option.
- tmail21 9y agoI don't believe that one should try to create a single tool that covers both synchronous and asynchronous. Their UX is too different. It seems to me a better idea to create an asynchronous deep collaboration tool and integrate it with synchronous tools like Slack. The bigger question to me is what should an asynchronous deep collaboration tool do (if anything) beyond first-class threads. In my mind the opportunity lies on three dimensions 1) Bringing updatable content and structure to threads. This makes threads vastly more useful for real collaboration (not just communication). 2) Making "catchup" much more efficient as this is the main problem with email. If you think of one of the most successful asynchronous collaboration approaches, it's source control like git. The key thing that these tools to is make changes "diffable". That allows users to work at completely different points in time and still easily "catchup" with what's changed. 3) Allow regular users to easily convert unstructured one-off threads to semi-structured template threads. This naturally and gently moves teams to greater process-orientation.
- amix 9y agoI am the poster of this (and as you can see, I am an old HN user -- almost ten years here!) I'll be answering your questions. Thanks for the support!
- amix 9y agoPlease also note that Twist will have a full and open API. You can see a draft here: https://doist.github.io/Twist-API/ https://doist.github.io/Twist-API/
- deadmik3 9y agopretty much our whole company uses irc for real-time communication, and I don't see that going away any time soon. it's lightweight and does what you need it to
- TheRealmccoy 9y agoThe biggest drawback of a real time communication tool like Slack is the React v/s Respond conundrum. Productive communication and teamwork requires that we respond, rather than react. What happens specifically with tools like Slack which start off as demi-official tool and then transcend to official is that, one gets into the habit of reacting, instead of responding. I have personally seen this "fastest finger first" played, almost always. There has been tons of literature written on reacting v/s responding and I need not dwell into it. Another aspect is that there is no exit, once Slack is the primary communication tool. One is forced to use it, otherwise you are like an outcast and people more often tend to take it as a signal that the person is on its way out and hence moved away from Slack. Rest of the drawbacks is documented in the article.
- mediocrejoker 9y agoI have never heard of react vs respond. I wonder if you could explain a bit of what it means?
- ChristianBundy 9y agoHere's a solid article: https://zenhabits.net/respond/ https://zenhabits.net/respond/
- TheRealmccoy 9y agothanks so ever much!
- asenna 9y agoNever heard of ZenHabits before. Very cool concept and love the minimal design.
- TheRealmccoy 9y agoEvent: Your boss shares an article on @channel at Slack. Reaction:: Since our boss has posted it and you don't want to be seemed a second rung player and the one who is NOT on her/his toes, you jump on the keyboard and first "Like/Thumbs Up" that post and then comment for the heck of it, something like "Wow", Amazing", "Insightful". Then you look over your back ie, to see how many others have commented before you, and if you hardly see any, then you pat yourself on the back and consider the day to have been well spent. Response:: You read the article once and decide whether it concerns you or to be discarded. If it concerns you, you read it once more, may be twice and take relevant notes. Then you decide, whether you should discuss this over an email to your boss, or a personal meeting would be more appropriate. And thus, you draft an email or ask for 10 mins of private time with your boss.
- lewisjoe 9y agoCurious question: Isn't this an already solved problem? I've been using plain old emails and quiet free of all the problems of real-time messaging. "Thread-first communication" - We have it. Email threads. I've been using Zoho Mail. It's one step ahead and has modern concepts like streams/commenting and sharing built around emails. Very useful. "Truly transparent conversations" - What this means is, the knowledge has to be highly searchable. Also, not all threads have to be public. With emails, you can either broadcast an email company wide or you can opt to pull in relevant users into a conversation. Makes a lot of sense to not broadcast everything company-wide, isn't it? More importantly, emails are easily searchable. Once received, I'm confident that it's going to sit there in my inbox forever, without worrying if it's going to be deleted later by someone who has authority. "Leaving out the online presence indicator" - Exactly. Emails. Maybe there's some more important key aspects that the product's covering up for me. As for me, I guess emails are simply good enough!
- hfauq 9y agoEmails are messy, siloed, opaque. Nobody in a team shares the same version of an email chain. No central source of truth means a high chance of not being on the same page. Emails have so many problems. Feel free to read through our comparison Twist vs Emails: https://medium.com/@hfauq/email-or-twist-why-twist-is-better-dad08f39c646 https://medium.com/@hfauq/email-or-twist-why-twist-is-better...
- ngrilly 9y agoI just read your link on Medium. It presents good arguments in favor of Twist versus email. What about comparing Twist to something like Discourse or Usenet forums?
- mdekkers 9y agoMy first thought when I saw https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1000/1*zI94S5XizoB4WickRL_PlQ.png https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1000/1*zI94S5XizoB4WickR... was "looks like email"
- leepowers 9y ago
- nottorp 9y agoAll you need is a little self discipline, not a special app. Turn off notifications, check your messages when you're taking a break, do not attempt to chat real time. The only actually useful feature of this app seems to be that it's thread oriented, but you can mitigate that with enough irc (okay, Slack these days) channels as well.
- cntlzw 9y agoExactly. You just need to establish some ground rules on how things are to be done. Most tools are just tools. You need to define some workflow to go with it, otherwise you don't get any benefit or upset people.
- majewsky 9y agoDepends on how the team uses it. When I'm @-mentioned in Slack, it's usually because a system that I maintain is failing or doing weird things, and that's something that I should react to quickly. It's therefore not really an option to turn off notifications (not for @-mentions, at least).
- nchammas 9y agoThis post reminds me of a similar one by the CEO of Basecamp giving his take on the problems with group chat and their solution to those problems. https://m.signalvnoise.com/is-group-chat-making-you-sweat-744659addf7d https://m.signalvnoise.com/is-group-chat-making-you-sweat-74... > Group chat is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda.
- sergiosgc 9y agoI don't think the fundamental problem is one of sync vs async communication. Of course synchronous communication is a flow killer, and of course having it as a team-wide or company-wide means of communication aggravates its problems. The async nature just makes it worse, as it has more bandwidth, and consumes more brain bandwidth as a result of more content than email and wider distribution than email. The problem lies between unstructured and structured information. The problem is one of process vs flying by the seat of your pants. Ideally, you want processes for every repeatable action, and more flexible means of communication for new events that need to be handled quickly by those empowered to solve them. However, every repeatable process starts as an one-off event: Customer requests for the same actions pile up until the moment you realize your app needs a new feature; Faults occur and get solved up until you realize you need to engineer a solution that prevents or automatically fixes them; Internal processes get lost and hang until you decide to redefine the internal workflow. What is missing is a simple way of moving unstructured communication (sync and async), onto structured communication. Chats should end up as feature requests, bug reports, documentation or some other permanent medium that fits into the process. If the unstructured->structured bridge is solved, you don't have to monitor chats (or mailing lists, or forums). If they result in something meaningful, they will appear in the structured, process-oriented flow. Monitor that, and get involved in chats where you are directly mentioned. (and skip all gif chats, really)
- tmail21 9y agoThese are some great points. You might want to check out https://tmail21.com https://tmail21.com. We built this around what we called Deep Collaboration (a riff on Deep Work). We built it to be Thread First AND have a thread-first inbox as well. However, more importantly we realized that just thread-first is not sufficient. We saw three major problems with synchronous solutions like Slack and asynchronous solutions like email. 1) Lack of support for updatable content 2) Lack of support for easily moving from unstructured to structured content. 3) Difficulty catching up So we added the notion of Updateable "Sections" to threads (in addition to conventional attachments). These "Sections" come in various types, some of which lend themselves to making your thread structured. 1) Text 2) Form (structured) 3) Task List 4) Checklist (process) 5) Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc. This allows one to create threads that have structured content. However, this still doesn't solve the "one-off" problem you described. So, we made it easy to take any thread and make it a "Template" that can be easily instantiated. This allows one to naturally to evolve towards lightweight processes starting from regular threads. For example, here is one of the "industry solutions" pages which gives ideas for structured threads in a particular industry (in this case Manufacturing and Logistics) https://tmail21.com/solutions/industries/manufacturing-and-logistics/ https://tmail21.com/solutions/industries/manufacturing-and-l... Lastly for the "difficulty catching up" problem, we took inspiration from the way git et al are built and decided to make "diffs" central to the catchup metaphor. We're talking not only diffs for Text, but also for Task Lists, Grids, Checklists, Forms and other "Sections". We hope to make communication and collaboration significantly more productive. Would love to get any HN feedback. ps) We integrate with Slack to marry their synchronous model with our asynchronous model.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kodablah 9y agoI have often considered setting up a local Reddit instance for my company for these very reasons. Has anyone done this with success? I also considered creating some biz comm software myself, but only jotted down some ideas[0] 0 - https://bitbucket.org/snippets/cretz/Xopoj/retzle-conceptual https://bitbucket.org/snippets/cretz/Xopoj/retzle-conceptual
- keybits 9y agoWhere I work we've started using private categories on a Discourse instance for conversations that are 'too big for Slack'. This works really well since Discourse has a selection of notification options (RSS feeds, email, Slack etc), keeps track of discussions well, has great search and has social features such as 'liking' posts. Bonus points for being open source.
- lylo 9y agoI would agree. I tried Twist and it's a really usable app, lovely UI design as you'd expect from the Doist team. But for our 60+ product and engineering team, Discourse does a great job of handling asynchronous threaded discussion – and we can host it on AWS for $20/mo for unlimited users. I'm struggling to see the advantage (UI aside) of Twist at this stage.
- jhallenworld 9y agoAs an ex-IBMer with 10 years of dealing with Sametime, I find this discussion amusing. Just think of Slack but with 300,000+ in your team. Sametime was a big part of IBM culture. IBMs work from home policy was tied up with it. At work means you are online and responsive to Sametime. A typical meeting involves people sitting in a conference room Sametiming comments to each other about the speaker. One nice thing about Sametime is that you chat history is in XML files on your computer. This allows you to use grep to find past information. IBM started to use Slack when I left. On the one hand this allows you to collaborate with people outside IBM, but downside is you need both tools running. Slack for the cool kids, Sametime for the old guys. My new job is giving me a new experience- video conferences using Google Hangouts. Many times with googlers on the Google bus.
- k__ 9y agoThe last company I worked for had an IBM fanboy as CEO who wanted to do all internal communication with IBM tools. Domino, Notes, Sametime. I think these were the worst tools I ever had to use in my whole career. Even after they rewrote the UI with Eclipse later.
- jhallenworld 9y agoYeah, Notes is basically written in the Lotus 123 spreadsheet scripting language :-) Eclipse just made it worse. Obligatory http://www.ihatelotusnotes.com/ http://www.ihatelotusnotes.com/ The one positive comment I can make is that you did end up with a unified enterprise-wide set of collaboration tools. Oh there was a new tool I hated before IBM decided to get on the git bandwagon: Rational Team Concert- project management and source control tied into one. Imagine having to start a giant 500 MB Java application to "git checkout". (In fact the project management part was OK, just using it for source control was horrible).
- compuguy 9y agoClearCase I think (I have not used rational team concert) infinitely worse than RTC.
- seanhandley 9y agoHere's how I prefer to use Slack: 1) Turn off notifications (except @mentions or DMs). 2) Code uninterrupted. 3) Check in when I'm taking a break. 4) Profit. Our company culture is such that Slack is mostly for notifications from our toolset, so that probably helps. Also, we're small (< 20).
- dmartinez 9y agoFrom reading the top comments, an interesting conclusion is that messaging apps like Slack do not have drawbacks due to technical problems, but due to cultural problems. These problems can be mitigated in a work environment where you can enforce cultural mores, but in a social environment (like within a group of friends or some other non-work related community) this becomes more challenging. There is probably room in the market for a messaging app that prioritizes reaction communication and suggests that more thoughtful communication take place in a more permanent project management tool.
- ryanackley 9y agoHow is Twist (the product they announce in this post) much different from email? Besides not using open protocols? Don't get me wrong, it looks like a beautifully designed email client. There are some interesting features here but it seems like you could do this all using existing email features. Am I wrong? The choice of asynchronhous vs. synchronous is a false dichotomy. Development teams I have been on use a combination of both since forever. Before Slack/Hipchat there was XMPP/Jabber before that was IRC. It must be business people binging on the glory of synchronous communication then having a hangover. In my experience this has never been an issue.
- tzakrajs 9y agoI see Slack as being real time and asynchronous because the contents of your conversation remain resident in the chat and there is no expectation that you respond immediately.
- ryanbrunner 9y agoI think in practice Slack becomes a far less effective tool the more asynchronous it becomes. If a room is even halfway active, a post from a few days ago is more or less lost to history and a conversation that takes place over a few days is almost impossible to follow.
- RandomOpinion 9y agoYup, this guy gets it. Slack and other real-time messaging apps should be treated as a phone call or a knock on the door; an intentional interruption for something important enough to warrant a real time conversation. Everything else should be handled through email, to allow people to consider and tailor their responses, to allow others to be added to the conversation through a CC: of a single focused thread, and to provide a directly searchable historical record of conversations.
- kitd 9y agoFTA: > Threaded conversations have been at Twist’s core from the beginning. Maybe depending on the precise job at hand, but I believe everything else should be handled by a usenet server, or equivalent. Usenet revolves around the topics, not the messages. I was using a local usenet server 19 years ago for holding online design discussions. I haven't found a better mechanism since.
- sleepychu 9y ago> Unlimited file storage for the team For 3.90/mo charged per annum? How do you offer that?
- wazoox 9y agoIn the early naughties, my company used an ultra-powerful tool that allows real-time discussion, archives conversation, allows search, sharing gifs.... An NNTP server.
- tzs 9y agoThere is a reason Jedi masters, powerful witches and wizards, ancient wise men and women, and so on tend to be found on isolated mountains, in remote caves, wandering in far away forests, and the like instead of living in the middle of the village with their doors open.
- nougatine 9y agoHow are fictional characters and entities even remotely relevant to the article?
- keville 9y agoEmail generally offers one more control over one's own workflow, and perhaps the opportunity to be a bit more focused, in an otherwise constantly-connected environment. Code wizards need time on the lonely mountain to learn new spells.
- milesvp 9y agoI think he's trying to imply that the stereotype exists for a reason, that deep thinking requires isolation from distraction. For a more concrete example, you can look to what Richard Hamming had to say about the topic. He noticed a similar phenomenon at bell labs, where there was a difference big difference between people who worked with their doors open, and those who worked with them closed. The door closed people were much more productive than the closed door people. Of course, he noticed there was a tradeoff there, and saw that the closed door people tended to not be as relevant years later as the open door people. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Hamming https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Hamming
- bluedino 9y agoJohn Carmack (id software, Zenimax, Oculus) used to lock himself in a hotel room for days at a time in order to get work done. I'm curious if he still does it, I'm guessing these days you just need to disconnect from the internet to be distraction-free. No, I’m not taking a vacation. Quite the opposite, in fact. I’m getting a hotel room in a state where I don’t know anyone, so I can do a bunch of research with no distractions. I bought a new computer specifically for this purpose - A Dolch portable pentium-II system. The significant thing is that it has full length PCI slots, so I was able to put an Evans & Sutherland OpenGL accelerator in it (not enough room for an intergraph Realizm, though), and still drive the internal LCD screen. It works out pretty well, but I’m sure there will be conventional laptops with good 3D acceleration available later this year. This will be an interesting experiment for me. I have always wondered how much of my time that isn’t at peak productivity is a necessary rest break, and how much of it is just wasted.
- flavor8 9y agoI'd like to see: a) Built in reminders (I don't want to sign up to todoist also) b) Post formatting c) Ability to mute threads d) Polls?
- tckr 9y agoThis reminds me very much of a classical forum. I wonder what the key differences to Discourse is and why they chose to built an entirely new project.
- misterbowfinger 9y ago> In theory, everyone on the team had access to all the communication that happened in public channels. But in reality, even I couldn’t keep track of all the conversations that were happening at the company. Whoever happened to be connected at the time could follow along and be involved in the decision-making. Everyone else might not even be aware that the conversation happened at all. This sounds really creepy
- skMed 9y agoSo basically a forum? Knowledge Management is a broad topic and it's hilarious seeing the same solutions brought up again and again. I have all this persistent information! New people need to get up to speed fast - where do I put it? Cue the Wiki fad. I have to get things done and elicit quick feedback ASAP! Cue the Chat fad. I want async communication so I'm not bogged down all the time! Email and Forums. There's a time and place for all of these.
- beat 9y agoI read this criticism and I think of my initial reaction to Slack - wtf are you doing a chat app? Aren't there a million options already? I was not the only person with this reaction. I was very, very wrong.
- alexkavon 9y agoYes this will forever be the case and engineers should get over the fact that solutions will forever rotate and be reintroduced. This is due to several possibilities: software ages, becomes unmaintained, company goes out of business, becomes too bloated, etc. There are also trends and fads to consider, such as social media. There is also human habits to consider. Not everyone knows about or is signed up for slack and uses it. They may eventually find out or not.
- balladeer 9y agoUntil a firm starts enforcing a tool like Slack as the default mode of communication organization wide; and worse still if you are expected to be, or kind of, always on.
- mrisoli 9y agoSlack reminds me of my school years, I grew up as cell phones became commonplace. We've always had chat software, but mostly we talked to each other during breaks or after school using our desktop computers. Then cell phones became normal, and SMS was normal, later on, it was chat apps, social media. Things sped up by a factor of a billion. All of the sudden we have entire conversations happening as the teacher is lecturing, people are making weekend plans, gossiping, bullying, relationships are forming and falling apart in minutes time. Honestly, I can't even imagine what hell school must be now that everyone has social media and ephemeral messaging everywhere. And I believe Slack did a little bit of this to the workplace, we've always had chat apps, but it was always a little bit to the side, but Slack integrated it with our work tools, now we have all these notifications from services bundled in the same software that offers you public channels, private channels, private groups and direct messaging, there is a whole new level of communication going on both on and off the record. In some workplaces, I felt like it was school all over again.
- milesvp 9y agoYeah, I cry for my young children. I have no idea how to prepare them for the hell that is the always connected life. I have no idea how to teach them, that most of it is noise, and that being purposely unavailable is essential for mental health, let alone productivity, even if it feels like you've missed vital social interactions while away. Maybe it'll work itself out, and they'll naturally adapt. I just suspect it's totally antithetical to the human condition to constantly be available to respond to people, and psychologically we're not adapted to fight the urge.
- pesto88 9y agoI would say the amount / frequency of interaction depends on the team you work on. If you work on larger features that require quiet time, then a real-time chatting app can be quite annoying. My team tends to release lots of small features very often, so fast communication is important.
- unabst 9y agoThe problem with Slack and the like is that it's communication based, not work based. The problem with Todoist and Wunderlist and the like is that it's work based, not communication based. Slack is awesome at communicating. But it has no checklist, no todo, no collaboration tools that fulfill most needs. They're all half baked. Wunderlist has checklists and todos and can be used to track collaboration efforts by linking Google Docs or Sheets to a task for example, but communication is still horrible. It's nowhere close to being a main communications channel. So most end up using a combination of apps. But this is also one of the greatest detriments to productivity. Having to juggle apps.
- tertius 9y agoIt looks like this is about a new app from the Todoist guys, not Todoist specifically. Disclaimer: I love and use Todoist religiously and agree that it's not great at collaboration.
- ferentchak 9y agoI was building an app that worked like this on top of Flowdock when I used to work for Rally. Fully integrated work management communication application. If you have a small collaborative team it was awesomely powerful we had used it on the team that built it for about 6 months before the project got cut. If someone wants a tester or feedback on something they are building I'd love to help. I badly miss that thing :(
- guftagu 9y agoHave you tried Fleep? It seems to be exactly what you want
- compuguy 9y agoI like the service, but having a self-hosted option would be a big plus.
- dmccunney 9y agoThis is an example of why I flatly refused to install an IM client at a former employer who wanted IT staff connected and instantly available. (The issue was laid to rest in a conference call when a co-worker said "The nice thing about Dennis is that if he's at his desk, he answers the phone on the first ring. If he's not at his desk, you won't get hin in IM, either!" Bless him. He got it.) The sort of stuff I did was mostly not user facing, since I was admin for the nix boxes, and not usually supporting Windows on the desktop. The things I did tended to require peace, quiet, and extended concentration to make sure I understood the problem and had created a working solution that wouldn't blow up in someone's face. The underlying problem is that computers are good at multi-tasking, and humans aren't. When a computer is handling multiple concurrent tasks, and an interrupt comes in, it must save its place in what it's doing at the moment, handle the interrupt, then go back to the saved place and continue where it left off. It's stack processing, computers are designed to do it well, and are generally fast enough that the user thinks the computer is only doing the task she's working on. The overhead isn't apparent. Humans aren't good at stack processing. I've seen papers from years back indicating the average developer can handle 5-7 parallel tracks at a time, and beyond that, things get lost. Stuff getting lost because the developer was trying to keep track of too many things were highly fertile sources of bugs. And humans aren't anywhere near as fast as computers. Conceptually, you do the same thing as a computer - you are working on a task and get interrupted. You must save your place in what you're doing, handle the interruption, and resume where you left off. There is significant overhead there, and if you get interrupted enough, you spend most of your time stack processing instead of actually working on tasks. You get the equivalent of old time mainframe "death by thrashing", where the mainframe was spending more time context switching than actually doing work. Some of us are better at multi-tasking than others, but I think all of us over-estimate how good we actually are. I've advised folks elsewhere to try an experiment - work on one task at a time, and continue till it's completed, instead of juggling multiple concurrent tasks. I'm willing to bet the amount of work you actually get done will jump. What confuses me is why the shop in the article thought that sort of real time communication was a good idea in the first place. >Dennis