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Why do people use chat services? They want responses. Getting responses is what Slack and Discord are optimized for and why they've gained adoption. The chat

by T-hawk 7y ago

Why do people use chat services? They want responses. Getting responses is what Slack and Discord are optimized for and why they've gained adoption. The chat services enable responses, by making it low friction, by giving the feel of being informal and real-time in a way that email and forums don't. They also enable asynchronous responses by being persistent, that your message won't go lost and unseen by a moment without network connectivity, unlike IRC. They also enable responses by being cross-platform and device-independent, unlike SMS. They also enable responses by centralizing account control of who participates, so users can join a ready-made group organized by an administrator, unlike say Facebook messaging. Users seek maximal interaction. The Slack/Discord model achieves this by supporting both synchronous and asynchronous responses. The former requires an informal real-time interface, the latter requires persistence. That's what came together on these services that hadn't before.

mcguire 7y ago
Out of curiosity, when you log into slack/discord in the morning, do you scroll back through the log to see if there are any unanswered questions that you can answer?
- acemarke 7y ago
  I'm an admin in the Reactiflux server on Discord [0]. We currently show somewhere around 30K users who have joined, although that's _after_ having done a couple purges of inactive accounts over time. I used to routinely go back through the day's discussions in #general and #need-help whenever I got home from work, and yes, reply to questions that had been asked 8-10 hours earlier. But, Reactiflux has become too high-volume for me to be able to do that. That said, I still will scroll back in some of the lower-volume channels to see what came up. So yeah, having chat persistence is an incredibly nice feature, and I can't imagine doing without it. [0] https://www.reactiflux.com https://www.reactiflux.com
  - mirkules 7y ago
    This is exactly the functionality of forums, for example Stack Overflow (and many others before SO). I guess the only real advantage of Slack is that it's both real-time and persistent. That said, is that advantage really worth millions of dollars, or is it just clever marketing?
    - acemarke 7y ago
      Yeah, there really is a significant difference in usage between forums and chat channels. Chat channels give immediate and interactive feedback. When someone asks a question in Reactiflux, they frequently get an answer within minutes, if not seconds, and we can iterate on asking for details quickly if needed. The downside is that multiple simultaneous conversations in the same channels quickly become hard to handle, questions can get missed if they're not answered right away, and we do see a lot of the same questions over and over. I know the Spectrum folks have emphasized the searchability of their site as a major selling point, both from Google indexing pages and the ability to search for existing threads. I won't say they're completely wrong, but at the same time, my experience is that newbies in particular won't actually search for existing answers - they just want to ask and have someone answer directly.
- Dayshine 7y ago
  Yes, because I provide support for my library in a discord channel. I scroll back and check for reported bugs and any problems people had that weren't resolved by others. "They should just ask on a forum/github/stackoverflow" you might say. Ok, but they won't, they'll just stop using my library instead. Forums require too much risk. Spend 20 minutes crafting a question, never get a response. Github and Stackoverflow are far too complicated for the average user. What's an issue? What's a template? What's a minimal reproducible example? They just want to know what error code 501 means...

by T-hawk 7y ago

mcguire 7y ago

Out of curiosity, when you log into slack/discord in the morning, do you scroll back through the log to see if there are any unanswered questions that you can answer?

acemarke 7y ago
I'm an admin in the Reactiflux server on Discord [0]. We currently show somewhere around 30K users who have joined, although that's _after_ having done a couple purges of inactive accounts over time. I used to routinely go back through the day's discussions in #general and #need-help whenever I got home from work, and yes, reply to questions that had been asked 8-10 hours earlier. But, Reactiflux has become too high-volume for me to be able to do that. That said, I still will scroll back in some of the lower-volume channels to see what came up. So yeah, having chat persistence is an incredibly nice feature, and I can't imagine doing without it. [0] https://www.reactiflux.com https://www.reactiflux.com
- mirkules 7y ago
  This is exactly the functionality of forums, for example Stack Overflow (and many others before SO). I guess the only real advantage of Slack is that it's both real-time and persistent. That said, is that advantage really worth millions of dollars, or is it just clever marketing?
  - acemarke 7y ago
    Yeah, there really is a significant difference in usage between forums and chat channels. Chat channels give immediate and interactive feedback. When someone asks a question in Reactiflux, they frequently get an answer within minutes, if not seconds, and we can iterate on asking for details quickly if needed. The downside is that multiple simultaneous conversations in the same channels quickly become hard to handle, questions can get missed if they're not answered right away, and we do see a lot of the same questions over and over. I know the Spectrum folks have emphasized the searchability of their site as a major selling point, both from Google indexing pages and the ability to search for existing threads. I won't say they're completely wrong, but at the same time, my experience is that newbies in particular won't actually search for existing answers - they just want to ask and have someone answer directly.
Dayshine 7y ago
Yes, because I provide support for my library in a discord channel. I scroll back and check for reported bugs and any problems people had that weren't resolved by others. "They should just ask on a forum/github/stackoverflow" you might say. Ok, but they won't, they'll just stop using my library instead. Forums require too much risk. Spend 20 minutes crafting a question, never get a response. Github and Stackoverflow are far too complicated for the average user. What's an issue? What's a template? What's a minimal reproducible example? They just want to know what error code 501 means...