11 ms·

Now we have Slack, Discord, Gitter, Microsoft Teams, and Atlassian Stride. I'm not sure when chat rooms became a business tool. Personally, I find myself distr

Now we have Slack, Discord, Gitter, Microsoft Teams, and Atlassian Stride. I'm not sure when chat rooms became a business tool. Personally, I find myself distracted more than anything from all the notifications these apps cause, I get less done. I have to be sure to quit every chat app and put my phone in "do not disturb" to disconnect and focus, and then I get coworkers mad that I'm not online. At least with email I could take a while to reply without anyone blinking an eye.

chuckdries 9y ago
Well stride kind of handles that with focus mode. I think most people are aware that sometimes you need to disconnect to focus.
ewams 9y ago
I mute every channel I am in except for the private channel of my team.
- shangxiao 9y ago
  I mute everything except for direct notifications in Slack. I advise team members this and if they want my immediate attention that have to tag me.
lin_lin 9y ago
Cisco Spark too. Yes, I echo your concerns about having some "reply" time. Particularly since so many of my co-workers are all too eager to install these on their phones and use them outside of the work-place (i.e. always available to some degree). I absolutely refuse to install the apps, that's my line in the sand!
- brightball 9y ago
  I'm on call a lot, otherwise I'd be right with you.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
odiroot 9y ago
Mattermost, Rocketchat, ... ?
moolcool 9y ago
I wish people used IRC instead of all of these proprietary tools. I don't love the Slack client, xchat is much better.
- bamboozled 9y ago
  Agreed, there is little that Slack gives me IRC doesn't, a good client and I'm set.
  - lghh 9y ago
    Not having to manage a server, better history searching, better ux for less technical users, better user metadata, voice and video calling, and lots of other things. I prefer IRC, but the benefits for a business should be pretty clear for anyone not extremely stuck on seeming like the cool IRC guy in the office.
    - wlesieutre 9y ago
      Better multi-device support is huge. And history existing when you come back from not being connected. There are IRC solutions to this but IIRC it's something silly like a client that stays connected 24/7 to manage your user, then another client that connects to that client for your actual interface.
      - kuschku 9y ago
        Yes, Quassel and IRCCloud are exactly such solutions. But that always has to happen in such distributed systems, Matrix has the same – your home node actually connects to the Matrix network, and you connect to that. Even on XMPP you end up running an XMPP server somewhere which connects via federation to the actual network, and your clients just connect to that server.
    - jjrh 9y ago
      > Not having to manage a server Seems odd you would want to have you're internal company discussions hosted on a server outside your control. It's especially relevant to companies outside the USA who might not want to have their data under US law. I wouldn't recommend IRC for office communication. XMPP is probably the better tool.
erikb 9y ago
A common discussion I have with other developers. For a developer I'd say I'm a little more people minded than average, and a lot more big picture success oriented. And in both regards your personal productivity doesn't really matter. The biggest problem in software development is actually not per-coder-performance but that the right things get solved, and that the solution are actually good and quickly finished. Think about how much time you wasted using a colleagues API that simply wasn't designed well, at least for your usecase. So, if more information means you are working on the right things, and that you understand your users better, and therefore make your tools more intiutive and usable, a hit to your performance, even 50%, is not a problem. The funny thing is from a big picture perspective sometimes it would be good if some developers would just reduce their code output, without providing anything else, because it would help keep all other developers in the loop.
- mlevental 9y ago
  very insightful. thank you.
- morinted 9y ago
  You're right, but most communication to solve big issues for me do not come from chat apps, but that's also affected by the fact that the company I work for doesn't have remote workers.
- ahuth 9y ago
  Well said!
- shadowmint 9y ago
  This is well said... although I think its unlikely to be a popular opinion with people at a personal level, but I hope the people who find themselves disagreeing take a moment to reflect on it. While I think it's fair to say these sorts of applications do disrupt people and reduce their productivity, I'm certain that they help focus team efforts in a way that meetings just don't. You can't split off 3 members of the team and have an important technical discussion during a meeting (or if you can, your project manager / meeting organizer isn't doing their job). You can't come back later and see exactly what it is you said that you'd do after a meeting. You can't tell a bot to create a bunch of tickets or what the current status of a system is. If you find that your chat apps are not providing you with any value, maybe you're using them for stupid purposes like sharing funny pictures & this mornings cool tech blog post, or you're subscribed to the support channel, or your team is treating them like a social hang out space. It's not that its a bad tool; its that you're using it wrong.
intopieces 9y ago
And Amazon Chime :)
dleslie 9y ago
Discord is more in line with TeamSpeak and Mumble; being that it's targeting gamers.
- eduren 9y ago
  You're correct that there's a lot more overlap with the gamer space, but that's not limiting them right now or in the future. They'd be wise to court other communication needs. Anecdotally, I really enjoy the Reactiflux discord server/group: https://www.reactiflux.com/ https://www.reactiflux.com/
- scrollaway 9y ago
  We use Discord for all communications at my company, including now our video chats. We are fully remote and Discord is so much better than Hangouts it's not even funny. I've also transferred all my skype and hangouts contact lists into Discord. It's a lovely tool, lock in be damned.
  - dleslie 9y ago
    How is Discord on Linux?
    - dylz 9y ago
      Mostly the same, since every client is a chromium wrapper for a web page.
    - solidr53 9y ago
      Its built with electron, so identical besides maybe font rendering etc.
    - scrollaway 9y ago
      Excellent, save screenshare which is currently broken on the Discord desktop client (but works fine in web browser). I use Linux exclusively, I wouldn't be propping discord up if it weren't :)
  - ngrilly 9y ago
jlebrech 9y ago
i'd prefer a cubicle when the only visits are of people you like and people who need to work with you.
vesak 9y ago
> Now we have Slack, Discord, Gitter, Microsoft Teams, and Atlassian Stride. I'm looking forward to Matrix eating all of their lunches. There absolutely no reason to have competing standards in this space. A horrible duplication of effort.
- the_watcher 9y ago
  Can't resist referring to the relevant xkcd here: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
  - notheguyouthink 9y ago
    In all fairness, only one of the (here) spoken applications are actually open, and able to even remotely be referred to as a competing standard. That comic would be more applicable if we were all debating XMPP vs Matrix.
- edgan 9y ago
  I tried Matrix. For me it clearly lost on usability.
  - Arathorn 9y ago
    We're working on that :)
  - zanny 9y ago
    Matrix is a protocol. You can implement it with any client you want with any usability profile you want it to have. Unless you mean the protocol itself is flawed?
- athenot 9y ago
  I like the decentralized aspect of Matrix. But when I go to the home page, I'm greeted with this copy: Matrix needs you! We are facing a funding crisis. UPDATE: The situation has changed and our need is more urgent even than before. This doesn't send a very positive signal to larger companies considering this platform.
cordite 9y ago
There was this one thing called hipchat.. by Atlassian right?
- lucisferre 9y ago
  They acquired it. I'm wondering if Stride came directly from that or was built separately.
  - jschulenklopper 9y ago
    This is literally in the first paragraph: "Atlassian, the company behind popular tools like Jira, Trello and Bitbucket, has also long offered a team communications service in the form of HipChat. Over the last few years, Slack has had an outsize influence on this space, though, and the Atlassian team decided to go back to the drawing board and see what its take on a Slack-like team workplace communication service would look like. The result is Stride, which is launching today." It says "back to the drawing board".
amrrs 9y ago
I think the point is not chat rooms business, it's everyone's deep down burning desire to replace emails with something but homo sapiens working in corporate haven't figured this out yet, not because there are not sophisticated tools but because they are not flexible! http://venturehacks.com/articles/no-email-at-angellist http://venturehacks.com/articles/no-email-at-angellist
dharma1 9y ago
matrix.org/riot.im (if you want open source protocol and client. it also has bridges to most others)
- VoiceOfWisdom 9y ago
  Past that, the user experience is great. Easy to get signed up and messaging.
- synicalx 9y ago
  I'd like to try Matrix, but I can't get past the Jimmy Wales style begging that greets me on their home page.
  - Arathorn 9y ago
    This is pretty perverse - strangely enough we're not begging voluntarily or through greed. I'm not sure the fact that we need to pay our rent should turn you off the protocol...
    - synicalx 9y ago
      It's not the fact that you need to "pay rent", it's your approach to doing it. As it stands now, I actually quite like the sound of Matrix on paper but I can't present it to my CTO as an alternative to our current comms platform if the first thing he's going to see is begging - it makes it look like the project is dying. There's obviously a smart team behind this, and the protocol obviously has a lot of potential - I'm positive there are other ways you could fund this.
tmail21 9y ago
The issue is that these chat apps are inherently distracting. They work well for tight synchronous communication in small coherent groups. You might want to check out https://tmail21.com https://tmail21.com which was built from scratch for Deep Collaboration and Deep Work. Disclaimer: I'm part of the TMail21 team.
ChemicalWarfare 9y ago
I'm only familiar with Slack from that list but I'm assuming other IM apps work in a similar fashion in terms of being able to fine-tune the level of notifications you're getting. Also, I'd take Slack convo over someone coming over to my desk to pull me into a whiteboarding session.
sailfast 9y ago
Working remotely, these tools are critical for communication (even focused communication, with periods of disconnection) as well as building some semblance of culture. In an office, you may not need it as much but it's definitely useful, especially with APIs and other commands integrated. As for notifications - that comes down to personal preferences and team norms. Disconnecting / setting do not disturb (which I notice is an explicit mode in this app) is important. People should know when to get a hold of you, how best to escalate, etc so you can do your best work.
- exotree 9y ago
  Yes. For those who have worked remote before these tools, it's like night and day experience.
hellofunk 9y ago
> I'm not sure when chat rooms became a business tool. IRC has been around for decades and is often used for the same purposes that I now use Slack for with various open source communities. Before slack, it was IRC for many years.
mdekkers 9y ago
I get coworkers mad that I'm not online. That is a team management problem, not a tools problem.
epicide 9y ago
And before Slack there was Skype, Lync/Office Communicator, IRC, AIM, XMPP, Hangouts, and email. It's not like having a lot of chat platforms is a new thing. > I'm not sure when chat rooms became a business tool. As soon as somebody figured out they could use something other than email lists to send messages to people in a business setting. If people get mad at you for not being available, then it has nothing to do with which, if any, chat apps you use. It's a disagreement in expectations.
- Danihan 9y ago
  Why won't anyone else use ICQ for business with me
  - jetsnoc 9y ago
    Look me up, 575061. =)
    - hatchoo 9y ago
      Funny how folks still remember their ICQ. Mine is 952050
- compuguy 9y ago
  Add Sametime to that list, ugh.
Karunamon 9y ago
Personally, I find myself distracted more than anything from all the notifications these apps cause, I get less done. Then set your notifications and coworker's expectations appropriately. Chat tools can't fix bad culture.
yaseer 9y ago
There is a 'Focus' mode; built into the app, which provides a summary after you come out of it. Seems like a neat feature - if it became the norm across app apps, it may solve the concentration problem.
Insanity 9y ago
I do not consider Discord to belong in that space. it is aimed at gamers and not productivity at work in that sense it is more like steam and xfire. other than that I completely agree, but it still beats people coming over to your desk every few minutes and asking questions for which you need to stop your music and drop everything immediatly.
- Kiro 9y ago
  Many companies and open source communities have migrated from Slack to Discord. How is it different, aside from marketing and playful copy?
  - Insanity 9y ago
    marketing is it really. I am not sure if I could sell a tool where I am working when it states it is for gamers. But maybe my marketing skills are just not up to the task. I use both in a very similar way though.
  - eridius 9y ago
    Feature set. Slack has a bazillion integrations with different services. Discord's integrations are mostly focused around game streaming. Slack lets you use a different email and identity for each team. Discord gives you a single unified identity that you use everywhere and doesn't even expose email. Slack has customizable data retention policies. I'm pretty sure Discord doesn't, but I don't actually know what limits it even places on message history. Discord lets you block people (which makes sense for a social group). Slack very intentionally doesn't support blocking or ignoring (because it's for business communications; if you're being harassed, that's an HR issue, employees should not be able to simply ignore each other). And of course there's more, like SSO, user provisioning, custom user groups, guaranteed uptime, etc. Don't get me wrong, Discord is great. But it's not really the right tool for companies. The only reason a company should use Discord instead of Slack (or Stride or whatever else) is because they're cheap and don't want to pay for their business communication tool.
baddox 9y ago
I'm basically the opposite. I cannot stand email for day-to-day work discussion, because there is effectively no way to distinguish messages by priority or time-sensitivity. Email sits in the horrible middle road between synchronous (like a phone call) or asynchronous (like a physical mailed letter). I think email works well (and seems to be designed) for the latter use case, but at work there may be an expectation of prompt responses. For me, Slack and similar work really well for small companies or teams (20 or less). I haven't experienced work chat in a larger company or team, so I could see it getting messy. As for people getting mad at you for going offline to buckle down and get work done, that seems like a business culture issue that isn't going to be any better at the same company if they got rid of work chat.
- andrewfong 9y ago
  > effectively no way to distinguish messages by priority or time-sensitivity How do you do that with Slack?
  - baddox 9y ago
    Slack messages that notify you (mentions and DMs) should be for time-sensitive things. Obviously that can still be abused, but I think the social expectations are much clearer than when a team uses email for everything.
    - ethnic_throw 9y ago
      > but I think the social expectations are much clearer than when a team uses email for everything. In my experience, this is typically the expectation to respond immediately regardless of the query. Nope.
  - __MatrixMan__ 9y ago
    Channel -> [gear icon] -> mute Alternatively: Channel -> [gear icon] -> Notification Preferences -> Just mentions
- m_fayer 9y ago
inthewoods 9y ago
And you're leaving off Flock.com (Slack clone) and Google Hangouts (whenever that emerges in its new form).
- briandear 9y ago
  Flock? That product built by the billionaire that wanted to change the world by creating a Slack clone?
  - inthewoods 9y ago
    Yes that Flock
gremlinsinc 9y ago
Curious do you work in-office, or remotely? Being on a remote team, without slack we'd be a lot more disjointed without having chat. We have some business folk who insist to chat through email, and it always ends in a very convoluted chain with 15 people in...and it's horrible....
- 0xbear 9y ago
  On Slack it's always a huge chain and 15 people on it, and it's not broken down by conversation. And it demands immediate attention to boot.
taude 9y ago
I actually have a computer that's just my "work" machine. By work, I only have the tools on it for my deep, focused worth, whether it's writing, or coding, experimenting, etc... All my messaging is on a different machine. (This setup isn't for everyone.)
taude 9y ago
Don't forget about Mattermost. I work in fin-tech and we've been evaluating Mattermost because of on-Prem.
- compuguy 9y ago
  Rocket.chat is also on-prem as well.
bluelu 9y ago
There is also google hangouts chat
__MatrixMan__ 9y ago
Of those I only use Slack, so I can't speak for the rest of them, but isn't the whole point that you can silence channels that you're not interested in at that moment? Otherwise you might as well use AOL Instant Messenger. It is the absence of that feature that causes me to ignore e-mail.
adenner 9y ago
and IRC
compuguy 9y ago
You forgot Rocket.Chat.
jjrh 9y ago
Chat is a business tool because they are a middle ground between email which a delay is expected and a phone call which is immediate and disruptive. Chat is supposed to be for quick questions, group discussions, alerts, etc. Turn off notifications for chit chat and have your client only notify when someone says your name in the chat room. Most protocols/clients have a 'DND' status you can use (coworkers respecting that is another matter). Most clients allow you to tailor the notifications in a way that works for you - ie the 'URGENT' channel notifies you but 'Off topic' channel doesn't. Messages from Bill don't alert you but messages from the boss and Juliet do.
madeofpalk 9y ago
Turn notifications off then.
dxbydt 9y ago
Slack, Discord, Gitter, Microsoft Teams, and Atlassian Stride aren't just "chat rooms". They are essentially hosts for programmatic bots. Imagine a newly hired developer posts a question on Stride about some feature-request/bug for a product. A chatbot smartly intercepts this question, posts a response linking to the precise jira ticket that addresses this feature request, when it was closed & who worked on it last. This exists. Imagine the savings in cost & time. New developer posts a question - hey how should I implement this feature in xyz language ? Bot intercepts, posts a response connecting to the API docs of xyz, or better yet, posts a code snippet from stack overflow implementing the algo in xyz. Imagine how much $$$ that saves in onboarding & training costs. This exists too. Maybe the Atlassian Stride chatbot will have more meangingful jira webhooks that the Slack chatbot won't. This is really a next-gen NLP+AI play. Nobody cares about the actual chat per-se - Chat is just a QA platform, and superior QA bots indistinguishable from human are one of the primary goals of AI.
- benjlang 9y ago
  Totally agree with you. We're integrating our ticketing system into chat apps (e.g. Slack) with a similar workflow as you described. http://askspoke.com/ http://askspoke.com/
emmelaich 9y ago
Also Jabber. From Cisco, it integrates nicely with your Cisco phone. i.e. you can play voice messages, make calls. Otherwise it's probably less featureful than the ones you mention.
brongondwana 9y ago
You might be interested in Topicbox, which we (FastMail) have built for precisely this reason. We use Slack for our real-time comms, but we still used mailing lists for more thoughtful discussion and documenting decisions, so we made mailing lists unsucky: https://www.topicbox.com/ https://www.topicbox.com/ It's still in soft-launch at the moment while we finish off a couple of key features that we identified in beta.
kevinSuttle 9y ago
They're a a foot in the door to chat ops, which leads to customer buying the best integrated tools with said chat app: the same companies that make the ops tools.
whipoodle 9y ago
I wouldn't describe them as "chat rooms" exactly, because they have direct messaging and audio/video calls, etc. They are generalized communication tools geared towards synchronous communication. Email is async. Without defending Slack (because I have reservations about it too), your coworkers should stop being mad you're not online, that isn't Slack's fault.

chuckdries 9y ago

Well stride kind of handles that with focus mode. I think most people are aware that sometimes you need to disconnect to focus.

ewams 9y ago

I mute every channel I am in except for the private channel of my team.

shangxiao 9y ago
I mute everything except for direct notifications in Slack. I advise team members this and if they want my immediate attention that have to tag me.

lin_lin 9y ago

Cisco Spark too. Yes, I echo your concerns about having some "reply" time. Particularly since so many of my co-workers are all too eager to install these on their phones and use them outside of the work-place (i.e. always available to some degree). I absolutely refuse to install the apps, that's my line in the sand!

brightball 9y ago
I'm on call a lot, otherwise I'd be right with you.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

odiroot 9y ago

Mattermost, Rocketchat, ... ?

moolcool 9y ago

I wish people used IRC instead of all of these proprietary tools. I don't love the Slack client, xchat is much better.

bamboozled 9y ago
Agreed, there is little that Slack gives me IRC doesn't, a good client and I'm set.
- lghh 9y ago
  Not having to manage a server, better history searching, better ux for less technical users, better user metadata, voice and video calling, and lots of other things. I prefer IRC, but the benefits for a business should be pretty clear for anyone not extremely stuck on seeming like the cool IRC guy in the office.
  - wlesieutre 9y ago
    Better multi-device support is huge. And history existing when you come back from not being connected. There are IRC solutions to this but IIRC it's something silly like a client that stays connected 24/7 to manage your user, then another client that connects to that client for your actual interface.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      Yes, Quassel and IRCCloud are exactly such solutions. But that always has to happen in such distributed systems, Matrix has the same – your home node actually connects to the Matrix network, and you connect to that. Even on XMPP you end up running an XMPP server somewhere which connects via federation to the actual network, and your clients just connect to that server.
  - jjrh 9y ago
    > Not having to manage a server Seems odd you would want to have you're internal company discussions hosted on a server outside your control. It's especially relevant to companies outside the USA who might not want to have their data under US law. I wouldn't recommend IRC for office communication. XMPP is probably the better tool.

erikb 9y ago

A common discussion I have with other developers. For a developer I'd say I'm a little more people minded than average, and a lot more big picture success oriented. And in both regards your personal productivity doesn't really matter. The biggest problem in software development is actually not per-coder-performance but that the right things get solved, and that the solution are actually good and quickly finished. Think about how much time you wasted using a colleagues API that simply wasn't designed well, at least for your usecase. So, if more information means you are working on the right things, and that you understand your users better, and therefore make your tools more intiutive and usable, a hit to your performance, even 50%, is not a problem. The funny thing is from a big picture perspective sometimes it would be good if some developers would just reduce their code output, without providing anything else, because it would help keep all other developers in the loop.

mlevental 9y ago
very insightful. thank you.
morinted 9y ago
You're right, but most communication to solve big issues for me do not come from chat apps, but that's also affected by the fact that the company I work for doesn't have remote workers.
ahuth 9y ago
Well said!
shadowmint 9y ago
This is well said... although I think its unlikely to be a popular opinion with people at a personal level, but I hope the people who find themselves disagreeing take a moment to reflect on it. While I think it's fair to say these sorts of applications do disrupt people and reduce their productivity, I'm certain that they help focus team efforts in a way that meetings just don't. You can't split off 3 members of the team and have an important technical discussion during a meeting (or if you can, your project manager / meeting organizer isn't doing their job). You can't come back later and see exactly what it is you said that you'd do after a meeting. You can't tell a bot to create a bunch of tickets or what the current status of a system is. If you find that your chat apps are not providing you with any value, maybe you're using them for stupid purposes like sharing funny pictures & this mornings cool tech blog post, or you're subscribed to the support channel, or your team is treating them like a social hang out space. It's not that its a bad tool; its that you're using it wrong.

intopieces 9y ago

And Amazon Chime :)

dleslie 9y ago

Discord is more in line with TeamSpeak and Mumble; being that it's targeting gamers.

eduren 9y ago
You're correct that there's a lot more overlap with the gamer space, but that's not limiting them right now or in the future. They'd be wise to court other communication needs. Anecdotally, I really enjoy the Reactiflux discord server/group: https://www.reactiflux.com/ https://www.reactiflux.com/
scrollaway 9y ago
We use Discord for all communications at my company, including now our video chats. We are fully remote and Discord is so much better than Hangouts it's not even funny. I've also transferred all my skype and hangouts contact lists into Discord. It's a lovely tool, lock in be damned.
- dleslie 9y ago
  How is Discord on Linux?
  - dylz 9y ago
    Mostly the same, since every client is a chromium wrapper for a web page.
  - solidr53 9y ago
    Its built with electron, so identical besides maybe font rendering etc.
  - scrollaway 9y ago
    Excellent, save screenshare which is currently broken on the Discord desktop client (but works fine in web browser). I use Linux exclusively, I wouldn't be propping discord up if it weren't :)
- ngrilly 9y ago

jlebrech 9y ago

i'd prefer a cubicle when the only visits are of people you like and people who need to work with you.

vesak 9y ago

> Now we have Slack, Discord, Gitter, Microsoft Teams, and Atlassian Stride. I'm looking forward to Matrix eating all of their lunches. There absolutely no reason to have competing standards in this space. A horrible duplication of effort.

the_watcher 9y ago
Can't resist referring to the relevant xkcd here: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- notheguyouthink 9y ago
  In all fairness, only one of the (here) spoken applications are actually open, and able to even remotely be referred to as a competing standard. That comic would be more applicable if we were all debating XMPP vs Matrix.
edgan 9y ago
I tried Matrix. For me it clearly lost on usability.
- Arathorn 9y ago
  We're working on that :)
- zanny 9y ago
  Matrix is a protocol. You can implement it with any client you want with any usability profile you want it to have. Unless you mean the protocol itself is flawed?
athenot 9y ago
I like the decentralized aspect of Matrix. But when I go to the home page, I'm greeted with this copy: Matrix needs you! We are facing a funding crisis. UPDATE: The situation has changed and our need is more urgent even than before. This doesn't send a very positive signal to larger companies considering this platform.

cordite 9y ago

There was this one thing called hipchat.. by Atlassian right?

lucisferre 9y ago
They acquired it. I'm wondering if Stride came directly from that or was built separately.
- jschulenklopper 9y ago
  This is literally in the first paragraph: "Atlassian, the company behind popular tools like Jira, Trello and Bitbucket, has also long offered a team communications service in the form of HipChat. Over the last few years, Slack has had an outsize influence on this space, though, and the Atlassian team decided to go back to the drawing board and see what its take on a Slack-like team workplace communication service would look like. The result is Stride, which is launching today." It says "back to the drawing board".

amrrs 9y ago

I think the point is not chat rooms business, it's everyone's deep down burning desire to replace emails with something but homo sapiens working in corporate haven't figured this out yet, not because there are not sophisticated tools but because they are not flexible! http://venturehacks.com/articles/no-email-at-angellist http://venturehacks.com/articles/no-email-at-angellist

dharma1 9y ago

matrix.org/riot.im (if you want open source protocol and client. it also has bridges to most others)

VoiceOfWisdom 9y ago
Past that, the user experience is great. Easy to get signed up and messaging.
synicalx 9y ago
I'd like to try Matrix, but I can't get past the Jimmy Wales style begging that greets me on their home page.
- Arathorn 9y ago
  This is pretty perverse - strangely enough we're not begging voluntarily or through greed. I'm not sure the fact that we need to pay our rent should turn you off the protocol...
  - synicalx 9y ago
    It's not the fact that you need to "pay rent", it's your approach to doing it. As it stands now, I actually quite like the sound of Matrix on paper but I can't present it to my CTO as an alternative to our current comms platform if the first thing he's going to see is begging - it makes it look like the project is dying. There's obviously a smart team behind this, and the protocol obviously has a lot of potential - I'm positive there are other ways you could fund this.

tmail21 9y ago

The issue is that these chat apps are inherently distracting. They work well for tight synchronous communication in small coherent groups. You might want to check out https://tmail21.com https://tmail21.com which was built from scratch for Deep Collaboration and Deep Work. Disclaimer: I'm part of the TMail21 team.

ChemicalWarfare 9y ago

I'm only familiar with Slack from that list but I'm assuming other IM apps work in a similar fashion in terms of being able to fine-tune the level of notifications you're getting. Also, I'd take Slack convo over someone coming over to my desk to pull me into a whiteboarding session.

sailfast 9y ago

Working remotely, these tools are critical for communication (even focused communication, with periods of disconnection) as well as building some semblance of culture. In an office, you may not need it as much but it's definitely useful, especially with APIs and other commands integrated. As for notifications - that comes down to personal preferences and team norms. Disconnecting / setting do not disturb (which I notice is an explicit mode in this app) is important. People should know when to get a hold of you, how best to escalate, etc so you can do your best work.

exotree 9y ago
Yes. For those who have worked remote before these tools, it's like night and day experience.

hellofunk 9y ago

> I'm not sure when chat rooms became a business tool. IRC has been around for decades and is often used for the same purposes that I now use Slack for with various open source communities. Before slack, it was IRC for many years.

mdekkers 9y ago

I get coworkers mad that I'm not online. That is a team management problem, not a tools problem.

epicide 9y ago

And before Slack there was Skype, Lync/Office Communicator, IRC, AIM, XMPP, Hangouts, and email. It's not like having a lot of chat platforms is a new thing. > I'm not sure when chat rooms became a business tool. As soon as somebody figured out they could use something other than email lists to send messages to people in a business setting. If people get mad at you for not being available, then it has nothing to do with which, if any, chat apps you use. It's a disagreement in expectations.

Danihan 9y ago
Why won't anyone else use ICQ for business with me
- jetsnoc 9y ago
  Look me up, 575061. =)
  - hatchoo 9y ago
    Funny how folks still remember their ICQ. Mine is 952050
compuguy 9y ago
Add Sametime to that list, ugh.

Karunamon 9y ago

Personally, I find myself distracted more than anything from all the notifications these apps cause, I get less done. Then set your notifications and coworker's expectations appropriately. Chat tools can't fix bad culture.

yaseer 9y ago

There is a 'Focus' mode; built into the app, which provides a summary after you come out of it. Seems like a neat feature - if it became the norm across app apps, it may solve the concentration problem.

Insanity 9y ago

I do not consider Discord to belong in that space. it is aimed at gamers and not productivity at work in that sense it is more like steam and xfire. other than that I completely agree, but it still beats people coming over to your desk every few minutes and asking questions for which you need to stop your music and drop everything immediatly.

Kiro 9y ago
Many companies and open source communities have migrated from Slack to Discord. How is it different, aside from marketing and playful copy?
- Insanity 9y ago
  marketing is it really. I am not sure if I could sell a tool where I am working when it states it is for gamers. But maybe my marketing skills are just not up to the task. I use both in a very similar way though.
- eridius 9y ago
  Feature set. Slack has a bazillion integrations with different services. Discord's integrations are mostly focused around game streaming. Slack lets you use a different email and identity for each team. Discord gives you a single unified identity that you use everywhere and doesn't even expose email. Slack has customizable data retention policies. I'm pretty sure Discord doesn't, but I don't actually know what limits it even places on message history. Discord lets you block people (which makes sense for a social group). Slack very intentionally doesn't support blocking or ignoring (because it's for business communications; if you're being harassed, that's an HR issue, employees should not be able to simply ignore each other). And of course there's more, like SSO, user provisioning, custom user groups, guaranteed uptime, etc. Don't get me wrong, Discord is great. But it's not really the right tool for companies. The only reason a company should use Discord instead of Slack (or Stride or whatever else) is because they're cheap and don't want to pay for their business communication tool.

baddox 9y ago

I'm basically the opposite. I cannot stand email for day-to-day work discussion, because there is effectively no way to distinguish messages by priority or time-sensitivity. Email sits in the horrible middle road between synchronous (like a phone call) or asynchronous (like a physical mailed letter). I think email works well (and seems to be designed) for the latter use case, but at work there may be an expectation of prompt responses. For me, Slack and similar work really well for small companies or teams (20 or less). I haven't experienced work chat in a larger company or team, so I could see it getting messy. As for people getting mad at you for going offline to buckle down and get work done, that seems like a business culture issue that isn't going to be any better at the same company if they got rid of work chat.

andrewfong 9y ago
> effectively no way to distinguish messages by priority or time-sensitivity How do you do that with Slack?
- baddox 9y ago
  Slack messages that notify you (mentions and DMs) should be for time-sensitive things. Obviously that can still be abused, but I think the social expectations are much clearer than when a team uses email for everything.
  - ethnic_throw 9y ago
    > but I think the social expectations are much clearer than when a team uses email for everything. In my experience, this is typically the expectation to respond immediately regardless of the query. Nope.
- __MatrixMan__ 9y ago
  Channel -> [gear icon] -> mute Alternatively: Channel -> [gear icon] -> Notification Preferences -> Just mentions
m_fayer 9y ago

inthewoods 9y ago

And you're leaving off Flock.com (Slack clone) and Google Hangouts (whenever that emerges in its new form).

briandear 9y ago
Flock? That product built by the billionaire that wanted to change the world by creating a Slack clone?
- inthewoods 9y ago
  Yes that Flock

gremlinsinc 9y ago

Curious do you work in-office, or remotely? Being on a remote team, without slack we'd be a lot more disjointed without having chat. We have some business folk who insist to chat through email, and it always ends in a very convoluted chain with 15 people in...and it's horrible....

0xbear 9y ago
On Slack it's always a huge chain and 15 people on it, and it's not broken down by conversation. And it demands immediate attention to boot.

taude 9y ago

I actually have a computer that's just my "work" machine. By work, I only have the tools on it for my deep, focused worth, whether it's writing, or coding, experimenting, etc... All my messaging is on a different machine. (This setup isn't for everyone.)

taude 9y ago

Don't forget about Mattermost. I work in fin-tech and we've been evaluating Mattermost because of on-Prem.

compuguy 9y ago
Rocket.chat is also on-prem as well.

bluelu 9y ago

There is also google hangouts chat

__MatrixMan__ 9y ago

Of those I only use Slack, so I can't speak for the rest of them, but isn't the whole point that you can silence channels that you're not interested in at that moment? Otherwise you might as well use AOL Instant Messenger. It is the absence of that feature that causes me to ignore e-mail.

adenner 9y ago

and IRC

compuguy 9y ago

You forgot Rocket.Chat.

jjrh 9y ago

Chat is a business tool because they are a middle ground between email which a delay is expected and a phone call which is immediate and disruptive. Chat is supposed to be for quick questions, group discussions, alerts, etc. Turn off notifications for chit chat and have your client only notify when someone says your name in the chat room. Most protocols/clients have a 'DND' status you can use (coworkers respecting that is another matter). Most clients allow you to tailor the notifications in a way that works for you - ie the 'URGENT' channel notifies you but 'Off topic' channel doesn't. Messages from Bill don't alert you but messages from the boss and Juliet do.

madeofpalk 9y ago

Turn notifications off then.

dxbydt 9y ago

Slack, Discord, Gitter, Microsoft Teams, and Atlassian Stride aren't just "chat rooms". They are essentially hosts for programmatic bots. Imagine a newly hired developer posts a question on Stride about some feature-request/bug for a product. A chatbot smartly intercepts this question, posts a response linking to the precise jira ticket that addresses this feature request, when it was closed & who worked on it last. This exists. Imagine the savings in cost & time. New developer posts a question - hey how should I implement this feature in xyz language ? Bot intercepts, posts a response connecting to the API docs of xyz, or better yet, posts a code snippet from stack overflow implementing the algo in xyz. Imagine how much $$$ that saves in onboarding & training costs. This exists too. Maybe the Atlassian Stride chatbot will have more meangingful jira webhooks that the Slack chatbot won't. This is really a next-gen NLP+AI play. Nobody cares about the actual chat per-se - Chat is just a QA platform, and superior QA bots indistinguishable from human are one of the primary goals of AI.

benjlang 9y ago
Totally agree with you. We're integrating our ticketing system into chat apps (e.g. Slack) with a similar workflow as you described. http://askspoke.com/ http://askspoke.com/

emmelaich 9y ago

Also Jabber. From Cisco, it integrates nicely with your Cisco phone. i.e. you can play voice messages, make calls. Otherwise it's probably less featureful than the ones you mention.

brongondwana 9y ago

You might be interested in Topicbox, which we (FastMail) have built for precisely this reason. We use Slack for our real-time comms, but we still used mailing lists for more thoughtful discussion and documenting decisions, so we made mailing lists unsucky: https://www.topicbox.com/ https://www.topicbox.com/ It's still in soft-launch at the moment while we finish off a couple of key features that we identified in beta.

kevinSuttle 9y ago

They're a a foot in the door to chat ops, which leads to customer buying the best integrated tools with said chat app: the same companies that make the ops tools.

whipoodle 9y ago

I wouldn't describe them as "chat rooms" exactly, because they have direct messaging and audio/video calls, etc. They are generalized communication tools geared towards synchronous communication. Email is async. Without defending Slack (because I have reservations about it too), your coworkers should stop being mad you're not online, that isn't Slack's fault.