Hacker News Reader

Comment by kohanz | Hacker News Reader

It's an interesting idea, but I have a tough time with the premise that people will choose to record a video of themselves for everyday asynchronous communication rather than type a message. There are situations were video or audio deliver more value than text, but what are those situations and are they enough to become a team's main mode of communication? I'm skeptical.

View on HN

Like you I would never think of using this but then I asked my kids and they looked at me quite as a benevolent advanced alien race might look down upon us: there there old man, no wonder your world is so tedious...no one writes their ideas down anymore...video, poor soul, is the only way we do things now.

I suppose I did something long ago when my parents told me to write home and I said they could use my PC and modem and use compuserve.

Sigh.

> there there old man, no wonder your world is so tedious...no one writes their ideas down anymore...video, poor soul, is the only way we do things now.

I inadvertently read that phrase with the voice of Gina from Brooklyn 99 (Maybe because I've been binging that show). Here in Mexico a lot of people almost exclusively communicate with each other (ab)using Whatsapp audio messages and I get so angry when somebody sends me an audio message. Just type!

I know exactly the sort of person who would send me a video instead of a text message, and I am glad that (right now) they can't.

You can type a message and not work at the same time, or you can record yourself whilst writing code / doing other tasks as ideas come alive as you speak. I think it's beneficial. I guess it depends on who is using it and how. There's always that one person who hates any tools the company provides to attempt to aide productivity.

Not enough to be the _main_ mode of communication, but definitely an important part of my team’s remote communications. I run www.gradientmetrics.com, and we’re a (very small) distributed team. We often do screencasts with voiceovers to show how we’re thinking of implementing something, what we think the outline of the deliverable should be, etc., etc. This can be _a lot_ easier to do with a video screencast than it is to type out. We typically do this either with a QuickTime screencast or with the person recording a solo Zoom conference with screen share, and uploading to Vimeo. If there was something that cut that workflow down and had some other features, we’d consider it.

Screencasts for the reasons you give can be very helpful with the right kind of people for this sort of scenario.

I gave up sending them to one person (who sadly needed them the most) as I'd got to the stage of having to ask he view them twice so he didn't mindlessly re-ask the exact same questions that were clearly answered in the video!

This was my initial reaction - it feels a little bit like the option to send short voice messages via iMessage on iPhone, rather than typing. I've never used that feature because it doesn't seem to offer the same convenience factors that text messages offer - especially the ability to compose and consume them in any environment, irrespective of noise (or quiet), companions, and location. Kind of one step forwards, two steps back.

None of this is insurmountable, but I wonder if it will cause inertia in experimentation and uptake?

Good luck, either way - love the initiative the founder has shown. :)

Agreed about "main mode of communication", but training and onboarding come to mind as strong use cases. (shrug)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com