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Agree 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 manag

by harryf 9y ago

Agree 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 ago
I'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.
- harryf 9y ago
  I wonder if Slack usage feedback is a valid case for bots e.g. for a chat that's suddenly very active involving multiple parties the bot might ask "I see this is a hot discussion? Should I invite you all to a video conference to discuss it?"

by harryf 9y ago

csydas 9y ago

I'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.

harryf 9y ago
I wonder if Slack usage feedback is a valid case for bots e.g. for a chat that's suddenly very active involving multiple parties the bot might ask "I see this is a hot discussion? Should I invite you all to a video conference to discuss it?"