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> In CQ2, there's no mess of unorganised comments — create threads inside threads so that each thread stays on topic and organised. Wish this could work, but m

by lpapez 2y ago

> In CQ2, there's no mess of unorganised comments — create threads inside threads so that each thread stays on topic and organised. Wish this could work, but my experience is that getting people to use even the first layer of threads is very difficult, especially non-technical people. IMO most often complex discussions will devolve into a "let's just jump on a quick call to settle this", for better or worse. The feature I am looking forward to the most in comminication apps is having a machine learning model listen to those "quick calls", generate summary and action items and post them right back in the thread. You get the benefits of both worlds that way.

zbentley 2y ago
> getting people to use even the first layer of threads is very difficult, especially non-technical people I've found that as well. I wonder why that is--many times I've been working with someone who is extremely intelligent and methodical as an individual, but structured communication totally breaks down as soon threads enter the picture. Interestingly, this sometimes even happens verbally (at work, when doing tech support on either side of the phone, at feedback discussions with artists/writers, when talking with friends): some folks really do not like "zeroing in" on specific sub-discussion items, talking them out, then moving on or going back to the bigger picture. Instead, they like to jump around or "chroot" the discussion to whatever the most recent topic of interest is. Anecdotally, it's very much a "two kinds of people" situation, but I don't know what the common factor is (and again, I don't think this is a skill/bad-faith issue; these are smart and reasonable people. They just ... don't think in trees or stacks).
- James_K 2y ago
  For the verbal phenomenon, I think that is just a symptom of human brain function. Only a small amount of processing is conscious verbalisation, so you will need to talk about new things while your subconscious processes other ones. As for online, I think the idea of threads is obviously antithetical to the concept of linear discussion. When you organise things as a tree, you present the many branches as though each is a valid target for a new entry. If you want things to be discussed linearly, you must present that discussion linearly. This linear discussion is feasible only in text, as you have time to think something over before verbalising it.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Because nested threads get so deep into the weeds that the eyes start to glaze over. I liked the old Joel on Software boards. No threads, messages posted sequentially as they are created. If you want to quote, do it manually. I feel like discussion stayed on topic or at least evolved sensibly, there were no deep tangents on pedantic matters that pushed the rest of the messages off the bottom of the page. Edit: here's a post where Joel talks about the design of his forums. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/03/03/building-communities-with-software/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/03/03/building-communiti... I think there's a lot of good sense in there, if you are too young to remember, the JoS forums were the "Hacker News" of their time, a place where programmers and other people involved in software businesses had online discussions about a number of interesting things. Those forums were even simpler than HN is -- no threads, no replies to individual posts. You could read comments in linear order, and post your comment after scrolling to the bottom. That's it.
  - amadeuspagel 2y ago
    Interesting essay, but there must be a limit to how these ideas scale, otherwise StackOverflow wouldn't be such a mess.
- OJFord 2y ago
  Because, in Slack for example, the post new top-level message box is right there! The most prominent affordable for replying results in it appearing at the top-level. If the 'Message #whatever' input was hidden behind '+ New post' then there would be a much clearer push into threads. In my experience (and my own doing) threads are more likely to be used if there's other conversation happening too, or another unrelated message has already followed; otherwise if it's quiet people are quite likely to reply at top-level and I don't think anyone can blame them. (I don't even really have a problem with it personally, as long as someone doesn't then reply in thread ignoring the top-level discussion about it, which does confuse things.)
jijijijij 2y ago
Although technically tempting, I think most people don't want to have a transcript/recording of person to person calls, especially in a work context. Even if you aim for "just" an AI summary, there has to be a recording, there has to be a transcript somewhere. Do you trust in the promise of deletion? Self-censorship, preference and knowledge falsification come to mind. People behave differently when there is no expectation of privacy, when they know they're observed. Apart from employment consequences, social alienation and mental health impact, panopticism may negatively affect creativity and innovation, when people behave less impulsive and more agreeable. In my practical experience, (local) transcription also tends to be anything, but instant, if you don't allocate significant compute to the task. So your summary may not be available for some time after the call ended. You may need to cognitively backtrack quite a bit to confirm plausibility/"correctness" of the AI production. Management will love it, everyone else will grow to hate it. For me, at least, private personal talks/calls are the last bastion of interpersonal bonding and social relief in the modern (remote) work environment.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  A different angle: cutting private personal talks and interpersonal bonding can help a lot in remote environments. It might feel paradoxal, but as there's little context on each other's private life in the first place, private talk stays limited and trite (basically close to grocery lane small talk) For instance imagine having a call for reworking a service and the other side starts asking what you did during the weekend, which happens to be medical follow up for your kids on the spectrum. Either you start explaining all your life, or you just cut it down and deal with the purpose of the meeting. There's of course a ton of personal preference, some people thrive in grocery lane talks. I just wouldn't expect most people to be so.
  - jijijijij 2y ago
    Luckily I managed to avoid socially alienated work environments so far. I actually enjoy working even. I presume the vast majority of humans needs and enjoys social warmth, and a personal connection. You can escalate almost any conversation out of grocery lane talk with one or two questions, so your experience is maybe a bit on you, too. Also don't shun chitchat, there is subtext, belonging and trust building encoded. It's an offer and a compliment. Apart from basic needs, this also creates an environment more resilient to worker exploitation.
epolanski 2y ago
> IMO most often complex discussions will devolve into a "let's just jump on a quick call to settle this", for better or worse. The issue then isn't about communication but decision making. Complex topics, for the reasons listed in the linked blog post, should not end up in "let's settle this over a talk". I personally, to this date, consider moderated vBulletin/phpBB-like forums the highest form of long term communication online. There are active discussion threads on many forums I follow that are decades old.
wmf 2y ago
In that situation you need trained human scribes/editors/facilitators who convert people's unstructured blathering into the proper form for the tool.
klabb3 2y ago
> getting people to use even the first layer of threads is very difficult Partly a UX problem. In slack and discord, the default is to send unstructured message to the whole chat - with a big text box and send button at the bottom. The reply-to-break-out-a-thread option is more obscure. This could be solved by simple UX rearrangement and emphasis. Creating a new thread could have some more friction, for instance, by requiring a title or simply having a button to open the text box.
epalm 2y ago
> getting people to use even the first layer of threads is very difficult, especially non-technical people Indeed. We use Google Chat which is roughly a Slack clone in terms of structure. A discussion will start at the root level, and then branch into a thread after a few comments, but some users will miss this and continue to use the root level, which of course gets mixed into unrelated comments. It’s easy to create a mess, and it’s even worse when a discussion has multiple threads. This “thread-based” style of space/channel was forced upon Google Chat users late last year. Prior to that, we had the option of “topic-based” channels, where every discussion had its own thread and there was no root level. Any reply to a topic would bump the topic into view. These were great for some use cases (one topic for each software issue, one topic for each support case, etc), and were easy to understand for non-technical people, because you could explain it like “each topic is like an email chain”. We got into the habit of summarizing the first comment of each topic, which always remained visible, so you could browse the list of discussions, again, much like email. Anything that you can relate to email is great for the non-tech crowd.

by lpapez 2y ago

zbentley 2y ago

> getting people to use even the first layer of threads is very difficult, especially non-technical people I've found that as well. I wonder why that is--many times I've been working with someone who is extremely intelligent and methodical as an individual, but structured communication totally breaks down as soon threads enter the picture. Interestingly, this sometimes even happens verbally (at work, when doing tech support on either side of the phone, at feedback discussions with artists/writers, when talking with friends): some folks really do not like "zeroing in" on specific sub-discussion items, talking them out, then moving on or going back to the bigger picture. Instead, they like to jump around or "chroot" the discussion to whatever the most recent topic of interest is. Anecdotally, it's very much a "two kinds of people" situation, but I don't know what the common factor is (and again, I don't think this is a skill/bad-faith issue; these are smart and reasonable people. They just ... don't think in trees or stacks).

James_K 2y ago
For the verbal phenomenon, I think that is just a symptom of human brain function. Only a small amount of processing is conscious verbalisation, so you will need to talk about new things while your subconscious processes other ones. As for online, I think the idea of threads is obviously antithetical to the concept of linear discussion. When you organise things as a tree, you present the many branches as though each is a valid target for a new entry. If you want things to be discussed linearly, you must present that discussion linearly. This linear discussion is feasible only in text, as you have time to think something over before verbalising it.
SoftTalker 2y ago
Because nested threads get so deep into the weeds that the eyes start to glaze over. I liked the old Joel on Software boards. No threads, messages posted sequentially as they are created. If you want to quote, do it manually. I feel like discussion stayed on topic or at least evolved sensibly, there were no deep tangents on pedantic matters that pushed the rest of the messages off the bottom of the page. Edit: here's a post where Joel talks about the design of his forums. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/03/03/building-communities-with-software/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/03/03/building-communiti... I think there's a lot of good sense in there, if you are too young to remember, the JoS forums were the "Hacker News" of their time, a place where programmers and other people involved in software businesses had online discussions about a number of interesting things. Those forums were even simpler than HN is -- no threads, no replies to individual posts. You could read comments in linear order, and post your comment after scrolling to the bottom. That's it.
- amadeuspagel 2y ago
  Interesting essay, but there must be a limit to how these ideas scale, otherwise StackOverflow wouldn't be such a mess.
OJFord 2y ago
Because, in Slack for example, the post new top-level message box is right there! The most prominent affordable for replying results in it appearing at the top-level. If the 'Message #whatever' input was hidden behind '+ New post' then there would be a much clearer push into threads. In my experience (and my own doing) threads are more likely to be used if there's other conversation happening too, or another unrelated message has already followed; otherwise if it's quiet people are quite likely to reply at top-level and I don't think anyone can blame them. (I don't even really have a problem with it personally, as long as someone doesn't then reply in thread ignoring the top-level discussion about it, which does confuse things.)

jijijijij 2y ago

Although technically tempting, I think most people don't want to have a transcript/recording of person to person calls, especially in a work context. Even if you aim for "just" an AI summary, there has to be a recording, there has to be a transcript somewhere. Do you trust in the promise of deletion? Self-censorship, preference and knowledge falsification come to mind. People behave differently when there is no expectation of privacy, when they know they're observed. Apart from employment consequences, social alienation and mental health impact, panopticism may negatively affect creativity and innovation, when people behave less impulsive and more agreeable. In my practical experience, (local) transcription also tends to be anything, but instant, if you don't allocate significant compute to the task. So your summary may not be available for some time after the call ended. You may need to cognitively backtrack quite a bit to confirm plausibility/"correctness" of the AI production. Management will love it, everyone else will grow to hate it. For me, at least, private personal talks/calls are the last bastion of interpersonal bonding and social relief in the modern (remote) work environment.

makeitdouble 2y ago
A different angle: cutting private personal talks and interpersonal bonding can help a lot in remote environments. It might feel paradoxal, but as there's little context on each other's private life in the first place, private talk stays limited and trite (basically close to grocery lane small talk) For instance imagine having a call for reworking a service and the other side starts asking what you did during the weekend, which happens to be medical follow up for your kids on the spectrum. Either you start explaining all your life, or you just cut it down and deal with the purpose of the meeting. There's of course a ton of personal preference, some people thrive in grocery lane talks. I just wouldn't expect most people to be so.
- jijijijij 2y ago
  Luckily I managed to avoid socially alienated work environments so far. I actually enjoy working even. I presume the vast majority of humans needs and enjoys social warmth, and a personal connection. You can escalate almost any conversation out of grocery lane talk with one or two questions, so your experience is maybe a bit on you, too. Also don't shun chitchat, there is subtext, belonging and trust building encoded. It's an offer and a compliment. Apart from basic needs, this also creates an environment more resilient to worker exploitation.

epolanski 2y ago

> IMO most often complex discussions will devolve into a "let's just jump on a quick call to settle this", for better or worse. The issue then isn't about communication but decision making. Complex topics, for the reasons listed in the linked blog post, should not end up in "let's settle this over a talk". I personally, to this date, consider moderated vBulletin/phpBB-like forums the highest form of long term communication online. There are active discussion threads on many forums I follow that are decades old.

wmf 2y ago

In that situation you need trained human scribes/editors/facilitators who convert people's unstructured blathering into the proper form for the tool.

klabb3 2y ago

> getting people to use even the first layer of threads is very difficult Partly a UX problem. In slack and discord, the default is to send unstructured message to the whole chat - with a big text box and send button at the bottom. The reply-to-break-out-a-thread option is more obscure. This could be solved by simple UX rearrangement and emphasis. Creating a new thread could have some more friction, for instance, by requiring a title or simply having a button to open the text box.

epalm 2y ago

> getting people to use even the first layer of threads is very difficult, especially non-technical people Indeed. We use Google Chat which is roughly a Slack clone in terms of structure. A discussion will start at the root level, and then branch into a thread after a few comments, but some users will miss this and continue to use the root level, which of course gets mixed into unrelated comments. It’s easy to create a mess, and it’s even worse when a discussion has multiple threads. This “thread-based” style of space/channel was forced upon Google Chat users late last year. Prior to that, we had the option of “topic-based” channels, where every discussion had its own thread and there was no root level. Any reply to a topic would bump the topic into view. These were great for some use cases (one topic for each software issue, one topic for each support case, etc), and were easy to understand for non-technical people, because you could explain it like “each topic is like an email chain”. We got into the habit of summarizing the first comment of each topic, which always remained visible, so you could browse the list of discussions, again, much like email. Anything that you can relate to email is great for the non-tech crowd.