8 ms·
Is group chat making you sweat? (2016)
- rkda 9y agoLink to the old Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11239614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11239614
- tyingq 9y agoThis resonated well with me. I've always preferred email to chat, for many of the reasons cited in the article. The trouble is, it's too far to the right. Some people don't respond for days. So we have tools with instant response expectations, and ones with variable expectations. Nothing with clear "within a day" expectations. Email used to be that way, until too many peed in that pool.
- lloeki 9y ago> Nothing with clear "within a day" expectations. Email used to be that way, until too many peed in that pool. Slack, then Mattermost, solved that for us. Our email inboxes became crowded with banter, notifications, as well as info that should be tracked in a centralised place. It was a mess because email became a kitchen sink. So now we use GitLab for most of the serious "this better be tracked" stuff, Mattermost both for the off- and on-topic live chat, and email takes back its natural place when interacting with third parties (those we didn't onboard on GitLab), reply-soon-enough, and notifications (including GitLab ones, which thus covers "reply-soon-enough+should-be-tracked" in a seamless way). The key point is having the three tools together, personally configured as each user sees fit WRT notifications, allows for each tool to blend with each other over the gradient of possible use cases.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago> Nothing with clear "within a day" expectations. Email used to be that way, until too many peed in that pool. This is pretty much purely a social issue, and should be set by the management / work culture directly. Nobody can force you to reply to an e-mail any more than they can force you to reply to a Slack message. Because in private, I try to push as much communication as possible through e-mail exactly so that I don't have to reply to anyone within 24 hours if I don't feel like it.
- tyingq 9y agoUnfortunately, it spans farther than inside the company. There's suppliers, outside counsel, partners, customers, etc. Voice for that sort of thing is dying too, because people either disable, or don't check voice mail.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoI'm in an enterprise environment; the death of voice is greatly exaggerated. Voicemails? Not dead, just moved to text transcription delivered to my email from unified messaging.
- tyingq 9y agoNot dead for you. Too many of my colleagues and customers ignore it for me to use it. I can't keep track of which ones still listen to them. Edit: Yes, it's a people issue . Wasn't trying to frame it as a tech one. We've ended up with two paths, reply now (slack, other IM, sms) or reply/maybe/never (email/voice). For people reasons, as you say. There have been some attempts to use tech to solve it. Google's inbox, for example, might have helped unclutter so you could see what was important.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoJust as easy for them to ignore emails, IMs, or Slack messages. It's not a tech issue, it's a people issue.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoFWIW, in my country voicemail was probably dead on arrival. I'm yet to know someone who actually relied on them and treated them as anything more than an annoyance (if someone calls you and gets redirected to voicemail, they usually disconnect, but sometimes that leaves an "emtpy" message which you'll get later notified about). About the only use of voicemail I've ever experienced is that in American movies (protagonist listening to their voicemail backlog on their landline seems to be a common trope).
- simplehuman 9y agoSlack is great when used as modern irc. But many teams try to replace email, issue tracker, ci, deploy all into slack and it becomes too much. People in our company made all these integrations to paste back emojis into GitHub comments, to create a new ci run and all sorts of things. Honestly, It was all very irritating to be in love with a tool this way. Sort of like forcing emacs to do everything (peace be upon emacs). Thankfully it all came to a head when the buggy deploy bot made a broken deploy and we started using it just for plain chat and moved to free plan because we didn't want history on purpose.
- hasenj 9y agoSounds a lot like a shared command line.
- susw 9y agoTwitch does development.
- hasenj 9y agoIs that some kind of a meme?
- TeMPOraL 9y agoIn a way. Started probably with "Twitch Plays Pokemon", "Twich Plays/Does X" means thousands and thousands of people trying to simultaneously control a single-user game or application, with the whole thing being live-streamed.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoJust "Twitch does text editor key-bindings" would probably be enough to occupy all programmer time until the death of the human race.
- odonnellryan 9y agoSlack as an issue tracker is the dumbest thing. Yeah history is actually cool, because you can forget to track, but it's too easy to say "oh it is in history search for it" ... ok./
- harryf 9y agoAgree with the problems Jason identifies but not convinced by the solution: his suggestions basically rely on the crowd to "get it right" (or on draconian management to enforce rules). I'd rather see something built from the ground up to get it right. Hiri for example ( https://www.hiri.com https://www.hiri.com ) tries this for email - https://www.google.ch/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2016/06/07/hiri/amp/ https://www.google.ch/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2016/06/07/hiri/a... - the product even includes features to rate colleagues emails and help them improve. By contrast I'm pretty sure if we could review Slacks internal documentation we'd find it's been built to be addictive by design: its intended purpose is to consume every second and minute you give it because that drives its growth and success.
- csydas 9y agoI'm not convinced that there is meant to be an addictive design flow to Slack so much as it just facilitates familiar environments in a workplace environment. A lot of people treat Slack like a gussied up IRC client, and type and act just like they did when they were in their teens on IRC. Some enforcement of a culture is necessary or else it will devolve into people just spamming gifs and pictures, always with "okay guys, last one" tacked on as the person is looking for the next gif to post. The idea of communication feedback as noted in Hiri is interesting, but I'm not sure it works well with a more spontaneous and instant communication medium like Slack; chat lets you do off-the-cuff responses. Sometimes it's a curt-but-true "check the documentation", other times it's a longer but quickly made wall of text. Likewise, typically we write differently when there's a larger audience than we do with it's just an email back and forth with a colleague; at my last job, I definitely took a different approach talking to my student employees who were there to learn than I did with my colleagues who should already have some foundational knowledge of the topic at hand. I forget where it was said first, but anything you measure will impel a person to optimize his score on that metric. (taken from Harvard Business Review) Competing and/or contradictory metrics can cause a lot of difficulty in a chat environment like Slack which I think is meant to foster more spontanaeity than it is a specific style of communication. It is important to curb bad spontanaeity (e.g., aforementioned gif shitposting), but outside of general "avoid this" rules, too many and you start to make people feel nervous or unwilling to participate, especially since the weight of feedback is pretty great to many people; just look at how self-censoring "Likes" make people.
- burgerdev 9y agoSorry for being off-topic, but does anyone know why those medium-based sites like signalvnoise, hackernoon, etc. all look super broken on Chrome?
- simplehuman 9y agoBroken in what way?
- Freak_NL 9y agoAre you running anti-tracker extensions? I am seeing the same thing in Firefox with Privacy Badger running. Apparently these kind of pages need images and other resources from medium.com, which is being detected as a potential tracker. Chalk it up to defective website design.
- burgerdev 9y agoThanks, that seems to be the problem indeed.
- fwn 9y agoIf you blocked medium.com to be usable for third party sites, all medium blogs under custom domains lack some resources.
- edlucas 9y agoI run into the same problem in Chrome, using Privacy Badger. However, the Mercury Reader extension does a great job reformatting the page for readability.
- greggman 9y agoThis makes me curious, is group chat ever a win? Specifically the Slack variety where everyone or almost everyone is logged in and therefore any post by any person has the possibility of distracting everyone. It seems like something more like personally messaging would solve the immediacy problem. Open a PM (Slack, FB Messenger, Hangouts), add the people you want to include in the discussion, start the conversation. Only those people are notified, if more needed to be added they can be added. That would seem like it would prevent more of the constant distraction part.
- theshrike79 9y agoYou only do that when you want EXACTLY those people to hear it - akin to booking a conference room to discuss something with a certain closed group. Talking on a channel is more like talking aloud in a team room with one or two people, the other people are allowed to overhear and join if they have some input. Or they can put on their headphones or tell the noisy people to get a room or shut up. With a team chat system you can just disable the notifications when you don't want to be disturbed and read the backlog afterwards (if you're so inclined). No need to tell anyone specifically to stfu. You can also be invited to the discussion with an @mention and you can immediately read the previous comments and join in without anyone having to spend 5-10 minutes re-explaining everything to you.
- marcosdumay 9y ago> Talking on a channel is more like talking aloud in a team room with one or two people That's annoying enough on the real world. When an application not only makes it the default, but makes sure you are placed in a bunched of noisy rooms at the same time, it's bad. There's no reason for "room" notifications to be enabled by default on any application.
- benji-york 9y agoFor a distributed team, group chat can fulfill important culture-building and team cohesion functions.
- chrisan 9y ago
- keithpeter 9y agoQuote from OA "But the reality is that tools encourage specific behaviors. A product is a series of design decisions with a specific outcome in mind. Yes, you can use tools as they weren’t intended, but most people follow the patterns suggested by the design." Reminded me of "our writing tools are also working on our thoughts". Our brains are pretty plastic and will adapt to 'the rules of the game' and I imagine that these days, those rules are defined by the affordances provided by the software.
- malkia 9y agoSorry bit off-topic, but this caught my attention since english is my 2nd language... So I'm thinking that "Does group chat make you sweat?" sounds a bit better than "Is group chat making you sweat", but what about the meaning? (Haven't read the article yet)
- superplussed 9y agoThe "Is group chat making you sweat" is using a verb form "continuous aspect" which not all languages have. It's more of a feeling of being in the middle of the situation, where "Does group chat make you sweat" is being asked before or after the activity. It's more of a subtle, stylistic choice though and the title could have been named with either of these sentences.
- malkia 9y agoThank you! Looks like I'm still n00b @ english!
- spookyuser 9y agoI know this is directed at slack but I've noticed the same thing on whatsapp, where, in my circles - anytime there's a `thing` involving more than two people it will become a whatsapp group chat before some people even kown they're involved in the `thing`. You can easily rack up dozens of whatsapp groups and even though they might not be business oriented they make me sweat socially for most of the reasons listed in the article. That's just the tip of the iceberg though, since it seems like an almost natural instinct, at this point, to make a whatsapp group chat for everything. School group projects are also added to whatsapp groups and with these everything the author has listed is true. Probably even to a greater extent. In one project I did a couple years ago our group never met physically for 99% of the tasks, all the meetings we needed to have happened over group chat - bearing all the problems listed in the article. I know for a fact that the resulting work was diminished because of this. Yet, people seem almost enthusiastic about transferring work to whatsapp.
- ldp01 9y agoI find it hard to accept that this is a real problem... Managing a business using only group chat just sounds incompetent. Even when I get together with a couple of buddies to do a project we will use a combination of communication/collaboration tools. Even in my office I've never met anyone with a problem flipping between the correct communication technology for whatever task. We switch pretty seamlessly between, * Email (with Outlook's calendar feature for organising meetings). * Face to face meetings, (formal/informal, presentations, etc) * Instant Messaging for time wasting but also for quick answers too. Almost always 1-on-1. * Telephone for awkward but super useful communication with field crew. * Atlassian's Jira. This is a recent addition and directly addresses many of the flaws of using email for coordinating projects. There are probably heaps of similar solutions out there, but I am enjoying this one. The more channels the better!