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the pitch for Roam imo is that the #1 challenge of modern business is scaling communications. All large companies have dysfunctional communication and if we can

the pitch for Roam imo is that the #1 challenge of modern business is scaling communications. All large companies have dysfunctional communication and if we can get a 10x improvement here that would translate to getting the same amount of work done with 10x fewer people which is a whole layer of middle management just gone. Or alternatively you can continue to barely keep it together at 10x greater scale.

The_Colonel 7y ago
> the pitch for Roam imo is that the #1 challenge of modern business is scaling communications I completely agree with this, but I think it's naive to think this is fixable by some tool. Scaling communication is just innately hard problem - the most efficient you can get with communication is if you can keep everything inside one brain, next best thing if you have one colleague with whom you talk all day, then it's still quite OK in a small team, then you get multiple small teams, then multiple departments, located in multiple locations, continents etc. There can be tools and processes to make this a bit more efficient but you won't remove this problem short of doing some sort of telepathic brain interconnect. And existing tools (like confluence etc) are already getting getting quite close to the local optimum, of course you can improve upon them, but nowhere near the claimed 10x improvement ... that's just bullshit marketing talk.
- fulafel 7y ago
  Confluence is light years away from the potential of this kind of tool I think, well over 10x. And there's a superlinear payoff with really good tools, because of network effects both in amount of users and the quality/quantity/timeliness of information that good tools attract.
  - The_Colonel 7y ago
    I work with large knowledge bases daily and the choke points just aren't in the tools - it's the humans. People generally suck at writing - they often have very incomplete/skewed information, write only from their own perspective and are not that heavily invested in having great knowledge base (as opposed to solving their own immediate problem). True domain experts who understand things typically don't have the time (and/or skill) to write good documents. Documents don't get updated or in better case there's a series of "patch" documents describing the changes but not the complete future state. I don't see how these major issues can be fixed by technology. This could be largely mitigated by organizational changes - hiring dedicated technical writers / "knowledge managers", but that's just a cost center for companies so it essentially never happens.
    - fulafel 7y ago
      I suspect there are a lot of different user bases and we're not thinking about the same one. There are existing organisations and institutions where people want to find tools like these and are excited about the prospect, for example expert organisations where cooperation and single shraed information base in a project is very valuable and the users are good at writing & collaboration, used to real-time tools with fine grained tight knit collaboration like Google Docs / Slack. Techology can grease the wheels and provide multipliers for motivated users, sometimes very large multipliers, but of course not every person is suited for it.

The_Colonel 7y ago

> the pitch for Roam imo is that the #1 challenge of modern business is scaling communications I completely agree with this, but I think it's naive to think this is fixable by some tool. Scaling communication is just innately hard problem - the most efficient you can get with communication is if you can keep everything inside one brain, next best thing if you have one colleague with whom you talk all day, then it's still quite OK in a small team, then you get multiple small teams, then multiple departments, located in multiple locations, continents etc. There can be tools and processes to make this a bit more efficient but you won't remove this problem short of doing some sort of telepathic brain interconnect. And existing tools (like confluence etc) are already getting getting quite close to the local optimum, of course you can improve upon them, but nowhere near the claimed 10x improvement ... that's just bullshit marketing talk.

fulafel 7y ago
Confluence is light years away from the potential of this kind of tool I think, well over 10x. And there's a superlinear payoff with really good tools, because of network effects both in amount of users and the quality/quantity/timeliness of information that good tools attract.
- The_Colonel 7y ago
  I work with large knowledge bases daily and the choke points just aren't in the tools - it's the humans. People generally suck at writing - they often have very incomplete/skewed information, write only from their own perspective and are not that heavily invested in having great knowledge base (as opposed to solving their own immediate problem). True domain experts who understand things typically don't have the time (and/or skill) to write good documents. Documents don't get updated or in better case there's a series of "patch" documents describing the changes but not the complete future state. I don't see how these major issues can be fixed by technology. This could be largely mitigated by organizational changes - hiring dedicated technical writers / "knowledge managers", but that's just a cost center for companies so it essentially never happens.
  - fulafel 7y ago
    I suspect there are a lot of different user bases and we're not thinking about the same one. There are existing organisations and institutions where people want to find tools like these and are excited about the prospect, for example expert organisations where cooperation and single shraed information base in a project is very valuable and the users are good at writing & collaboration, used to real-time tools with fine grained tight knit collaboration like Google Docs / Slack. Techology can grease the wheels and provide multipliers for motivated users, sometimes very large multipliers, but of course not every person is suited for it.