4 ms·

People think I am insane but I often think forums would be way better than Slack or Teams for company collaboration.

bombcar 4y ago
Forums are so much better for threaded conversations than anything else it’s amazing. All our modern tools are chat based with some thread support hacked in.
- ddejohn 4y ago
  I actually don't like how forums deal with threaded conversations (at least in the forums I still use). I do like being able to quote and multi-quote, but I also like being able to collapse comment trees and only read top-level comments as my default reading flow. I only dig into comment trees when I'm interested in the discussion. Forum posts (again, on the types of forums I use) are just chronological posts (and only with quotes if the responder bothered to add them), and it can be difficult to filter out cruft. I guess I'm conflating a few different things here. I like threading on Slack. It has its own issues, but I prefer it to a straight message stream. I like how Discord does message replies because it automatically links back to the replied message with a preview of what's being replied to. I like forums for the search-ability and multi-quoting and subforums.
  - vouaobrasil 4y ago
    Check out DPreview.com. They have threaded view done right. It's much better than this forum for threads because you can see a hierarchical index of all posts, whereas popular threads here only have the first thread easily visible if it's really long and by the time the discussion gets into past depth 3 it's usually quite boring here.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Forums work best when there’s a community that curates things into threads and sub forums when necessary. If they’re basically used as an infinitely long chat record they’re not as strong (though the archiving is inherently better there).
- Aeolun 4y ago
  Teams is some form of hilariously awful forum first.
quickthrower2 4y ago
I think you are same! Great idea. A forum is going to be way more searchable. If you want realtime notifications that was solved 50 or more years ago with email or say 20 ish years ago with RSS. For this reason I prefer JIRA comments with @-ed colleagues over slack which provides the context and async communication. An ephemeral slack-like (snapchat for teams!) might be useful for the remote equivalent of talking which is also ephemeral. Knowing that the conversation will be lost and will be interruptive should move most stuff on the forum. ATC style short radio-style communications might be interesting for this too. “Dan please check broken build. Out” But yeah there is a lot of cultural bias towards slack like chat systems and at large companies changing that would be like trying to switch away from active directory: unplausable!
- ddejohn 4y ago
  I've been thinking about "ephemeral Slack" the last few weeks after a flurry of posts about Slack and workplace communication. I love the idea. I use Slack a lot for technical discussions with my peers. I've noticed that I seem to be the only person in our department that translates these discussions into Confluence/GitHub documentation. I'd be very interested to see if an "ephemeral Slack" would force us to be better about documenting our discoveries/decisions/designs etc. It (Confluence) is something everybody at the company complains about, yet few actually attempt to maintain/improve. Don't get me wrong, Confluence deserves the hate, but we don't have alternatives and, surprisingly I find Confluence a lot nicer to use than trying to search Slack when I run into an issue (provided I know where to look in Confluence, another problem in itself). I was bummed when StackOverflow got rid of their teams feature, I had always wanted to try that out. I would 100% be on board with a forum for all long-form and persisted communication. Ideal world: ephemeral chat for day-to-day, forum for persisted comms and institutional documentation, and zero email.
  - rzzzt 4y ago
    You get ephemeral Slack if you stay on the free version. The message limit keeps everyone on their toes.
zx8080 4y ago
Things change when company grows and decides at some moment to limit the number of days to store Slack conversations. After that phpbb-style forum suddenly becomes way more interesting than before.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sithadmin 4y ago
We had an amazing internal 'social media' site at VMware that was basically used like an old-school forum (Socialcast), but then the legal department nuked everything older than ~1 year old, obliterating a huge and beneficial source of org knowledge and more or less ruining the use case (you usually could find an answer for anything you needed, or figure out who to talk to about it if not). VMware acquired the software company that created the software, failed to market it, and it's only extant as a shadow of itself internally.

Forums are so much better for threaded conversations than anything else it’s amazing. All our modern tools are chat based with some thread support hacked in.

ddejohn 4y ago
I actually don't like how forums deal with threaded conversations (at least in the forums I still use). I do like being able to quote and multi-quote, but I also like being able to collapse comment trees and only read top-level comments as my default reading flow. I only dig into comment trees when I'm interested in the discussion. Forum posts (again, on the types of forums I use) are just chronological posts (and only with quotes if the responder bothered to add them), and it can be difficult to filter out cruft. I guess I'm conflating a few different things here. I like threading on Slack. It has its own issues, but I prefer it to a straight message stream. I like how Discord does message replies because it automatically links back to the replied message with a preview of what's being replied to. I like forums for the search-ability and multi-quoting and subforums.
- vouaobrasil 4y ago
  Check out DPreview.com. They have threaded view done right. It's much better than this forum for threads because you can see a hierarchical index of all posts, whereas popular threads here only have the first thread easily visible if it's really long and by the time the discussion gets into past depth 3 it's usually quite boring here.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Forums work best when there’s a community that curates things into threads and sub forums when necessary. If they’re basically used as an infinitely long chat record they’re not as strong (though the archiving is inherently better there).
Aeolun 4y ago
Teams is some form of hilariously awful forum first.

quickthrower2 4y ago

I think you are same! Great idea. A forum is going to be way more searchable. If you want realtime notifications that was solved 50 or more years ago with email or say 20 ish years ago with RSS. For this reason I prefer JIRA comments with @-ed colleagues over slack which provides the context and async communication. An ephemeral slack-like (snapchat for teams!) might be useful for the remote equivalent of talking which is also ephemeral. Knowing that the conversation will be lost and will be interruptive should move most stuff on the forum. ATC style short radio-style communications might be interesting for this too. “Dan please check broken build. Out” But yeah there is a lot of cultural bias towards slack like chat systems and at large companies changing that would be like trying to switch away from active directory: unplausable!

ddejohn 4y ago
I've been thinking about "ephemeral Slack" the last few weeks after a flurry of posts about Slack and workplace communication. I love the idea. I use Slack a lot for technical discussions with my peers. I've noticed that I seem to be the only person in our department that translates these discussions into Confluence/GitHub documentation. I'd be very interested to see if an "ephemeral Slack" would force us to be better about documenting our discoveries/decisions/designs etc. It (Confluence) is something everybody at the company complains about, yet few actually attempt to maintain/improve. Don't get me wrong, Confluence deserves the hate, but we don't have alternatives and, surprisingly I find Confluence a lot nicer to use than trying to search Slack when I run into an issue (provided I know where to look in Confluence, another problem in itself). I was bummed when StackOverflow got rid of their teams feature, I had always wanted to try that out. I would 100% be on board with a forum for all long-form and persisted communication. Ideal world: ephemeral chat for day-to-day, forum for persisted comms and institutional documentation, and zero email.
- rzzzt 4y ago
  You get ephemeral Slack if you stay on the free version. The message limit keeps everyone on their toes.

zx8080 4y ago

Things change when company grows and decides at some moment to limit the number of days to store Slack conversations. After that phpbb-style forum suddenly becomes way more interesting than before.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

sithadmin 4y ago

We had an amazing internal 'social media' site at VMware that was basically used like an old-school forum (Socialcast), but then the legal department nuked everything older than ~1 year old, obliterating a huge and beneficial source of org knowledge and more or less ruining the use case (you usually could find an answer for anything you needed, or figure out who to talk to about it if not). VMware acquired the software company that created the software, failed to market it, and it's only extant as a shadow of itself internally.