Comment by rishig | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rishig | Hacker News Reader

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Got it, thanks for the concrete examples.

I think the short answer is that there is some learning curve to using Zulip, but once that's done, sending messages like that takes essentially the same amount of time it would in another product.

The actual extra actions are:

* up to one extra keystroke to open the compose box

* typing a subject line like "projector C13"

You wouldn't have to search for a topic to send a message like that; you would just start a new topic. And "what's up w/ the projector in C13?? I have a meeting" would still be a perfectly fine Zulip message.

And then on the receiving end, you actually save a bunch of time.

* There's a simple keyboard shortcut ('n') to see the message that just came in.

* The fact that there's a subject line means that everyone sees "projector C13" and decides if they're a person that can respond to that, even if they aren't caught up on the rest of the channel.

* If someone does respond, you can see that they responded to your message, and not to some other conversation that's going on in the channel. That makes it easier to keep an eye on the conversation while the rest of you is improvising a solution.

> I think the short answer is that there is some learning curve to using Zulip, but once that's done, sending messages like that takes essentially the same amount of time it would in another product.

The thing I don't get here is you have two competing claims/goals, both of which I could buy in isolation and in fact agree are perfectly reasonable goals, but both of which actively contradict & fight against each other. On one hand you believe it'd take the same amount of time as before if people would only learn to use the system as designed (which I'll take at face value here), but on the other hand you say "the medium correspondingly encourages more multi-line, thoughtful posts". Writing more thoughtful messages and coming up with subject lines by definition requires more time... how can it not?

I agree that on the benchmark of time-to-send-a-message, Zulip is slightly slower than Slack, which is in turn slower than just putting the whole company in a WhatsApp group.

But the end goal is not sending messages, the end goal is getting the person who knows about the projector to see your message and respond, for you to see that response, etc.

In a moderately sized company, Slack is better than the WhatsApp solution, since you can direct the message at roughly the correct set of people, by spending the extra time to choose a channel. In turn, those people are more likely to get the message in time to act on it, because the message won't be buried under tons of messages meant for other people in the company.

Zulip takes that a step further, by adding subject lines to messages. The same tradeoff applies.

I think in the end the question really is how much more work it is to add the extra signal. The best case would be you could send messages like in WhatsApp (no subject line, and every message goes to the entire company), and read messages like in Zulip (subject lines, and with channels limiting audience). For both Zulip and Slack, the premise is that we can drive down the cost of adding the extra signal to low enough.

I'd like to respond to another point you raise, in addition to what rishig said (which I agree with):

> you say "the medium correspondingly encourages more multi-line, thoughtful posts". Writing more thoughtful messages and coming up with subject lines by definition requires more time... how can it not?

I think the key here is that you can write more multi-line, thoughtful posts, and they come through and sustain a real conversation much better than they do on Slack or IRC. But when that's not what's called for, you can also write super-quick short messages too.

For example, a few months ago the Zulip developers gathered in one place for a week to hack together. We had a stream (~channel) for the event, and one frequent topic in it was "schedule". A lot of the messages there were like "@all dinner's ready" -- dashed off on a phone, notifying everyone in the group, so a lot like sending to a WhatsApp group.

But other messages on the same topic were things like the next day's schedule or some detailed logistics, sent from a laptop with a real keyboard. It was helpful to have those details in the same thread as context above the quick right-now updates.

Other topics contained a variety of side discussions, some consisting of quick short messages ("found an X, who lost it?"), others detailed and thoughtful. A lot of those would have been lost in the noise in a Slack channel or a WhatsApp group, or would have added noise to make the other conversations hard to follow, or both.

And it was extremely helpful that all of the above was in the same system that we use all the time for in-depth technical discussion and other collaboration.

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