Show HN: Bot to steer discussions from Slack to Discourse
medium.dgraph.io
medium.dgraph.io
That's really impressive and cool.
Being an old Usenet fart, I have some problems with Discoure's linear discussion threads (I don't have that problem with twitter's similar structure though).
But I guess if you can keep people on topic and open up new threads for discussions that get side-tracked, it can be a really cool tool.
Do we know if this is something Discourse might support in a future version?
Traditional forums have other issues, but longform discussion among multiple people over periods of time is possible.
"Putting aside Usenet as a relic and artifact of the past, [...]"
I think this is a crucial sentence for the whole post. He brushes aside the probably best example for a threading model. He never asks the questions "why did it work on Usenet?", "why didn't/doesn't it work on the browser?", and "could we make it work in the browser?".
Most of his arguments concern wrong UI designs for a threaded model. For example "you are talking to everyone". The argument that the reply button leads people to reply to the wrong message is completely refuted by reddit. It's just that the location of the reply button has to be carefully chosen and on reddit they have done it right. There's one reply button for the thread and one on every message.
I usually can accept opinionated design decisions but in the case of discourse, they implemented a half-assed solution. You can expand replies in discussions but then you can't drill down and expand the replies to those replies.
Most replies are written in the quick-reply box (no parent) because they are responding to what is being said in the last X posts. Assuming orphan posts are top-level replies to the topic is nonsensical, and you can verify this by toggling on threaded-view on forums that support it.
The next best thing is to just link the upstream post from a post that quoted/replied to another, which is what Discourse and traditional forums already do.
Exactly. The issue that many discussions on Reddit turn into one-on-one discussion is because of this. You can easily see new replies to your comments but not for other new comments.
The HN has the same issue but it doesn't seem to be so extreme. Maybe many people have site enhancements scripts installed? There are various browser addons for Reddit that highlight new comments since the last visit but it would of course be much better, if this were a standard feature.
We have policies that dictate what types of conversations belong in Slack and what types of conversations don't. If something requires a person's input, they are summoned to Slack via a mention. Otherwise, it's widely understood and accepted that Slack is primarily for Q&A, collaboration, sharing of cool finds, and what we classify as "general chat."
Other than that, we also have meetings (both in person and via remote session/conference) for more important topics and decisions. The results of those meetings are communicated to the team via email (which everyone is expected to check twice per day).
If you try to use Slack for everything, it will fail for you. That holds true for any tool.
But, it goes beyond that. We also realized that Slack wasn't a productivity enhancer, it was a bonding catalyst. And realizing that helped us steer conversations away from Slack.
In other words, Slack for us is the equivalent of what would be considered water cooler talk.
I'd be interested to understand what you ran into in more detail.
I like to think of Discourse as the "long term memories" in Pixar's Inside Out. You ship stuff there as you need to. A mixture of mostly short term and sometimes long term memories is a sane and manageable arrangement for most humans.
In the original post from the AgileBits team quoted at the top, that team tried Basecamp, which to me seems to do a good job of separating thoughtful/long-form discussion from chat, along with the weekend-pause feature.
I'm planning to take this bot for a spin today. Aside from that, it's just great to hear there are other companies feeling the same pains as we are.
With Wisemonk keeping us accountable, we're now able to tackle the negatives of Slack; so eager to learn your experiences.
One team member going away from Slack is bad for the member and for the team. If everyone else participates and you're on the sideline, then you're an oddball and not a team player.
For it to be effective, the whole team has to willingly move away from it.
I find the amount of work one can practically achieve in a day to be a good limiter of how much people will be kept out of the loop if they are not actively engaging in their email (or whatever system people use). The reality is, no matter how fast you think you're moving, it's not that fast.
The point was that, if all of your team members are having a conversation, but you're not, you'd feel left out. Of course, you might not care, but a lot of people who feel they're active part of the team do; and discourse allows us to do that very well.
Could anyone who uses both trello and discourse care to comment about the difference in experience?
In fact, it's pretty common for us to create Trello cards out of discussion at discuss.dgraph.io.
Also note that we keep our Slack only for general chit chat. As soon as something becomes more "structured", we switch it to Discourse. We also actively encourage people to just create topics there instead of bringing it on Slack in the first place.
I've seen a growing number of people actively moving away from Slack or complaining about it due to these issues. How can Slack fix that? Close off an API to stop hiving off users? Well the explicit intent of this approach is to use both tools so it doesn't seem like they lose much.
Either way; I'd argue that a rational company would look at why it's customers were doing these things and then either a) add that feature to the product or b) let things alone.
Slightly different if it's an "export your Slack chat to A.N.Competitor".
Their potential killing of the APIs won't affect if I use Sikuli to automate it.
The only way you'd be able to detect that is by measuring the amount of ms between clicks. And that's defeatable by adding in a random range of 0-300 ms per click. And send the data to a private IRC room. Node-Red can easily handle the data from there.
Now, it looks just like a human.
That said, Twitter and Slack are very different beasts. There is not nearly the same network effect to keep teams from switching to a competitor... except to the extent that 3rd party products integrate with Slack's API...
A bold claim that requires quite a bit of evidence, in addition to evidence that the alternative (FOSS) is not harmful.