We built a Slack emulator to demo our chatbot | Hacker News Reader

We built a Slack emulator to demo our chatbot

karmabot.chat

35 pointskulesh28 comments

Not sure how I feel about the product itself. Giving "karma" to your coworkers and having a leaderboard feels a bit Black Mirror Nosedive-esque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)

Are these kinds of things actually good for corporate culture?

As a manager I find it horrifying. At its core it is the gamification of office politics.

And must surely lead to groupthink and conformity. The consequences of disagreeing might be at the end of the quarter a manager is looking at your low score and wondering if you should be cut.

Any company looking to adopt this should only do so after carefully looking at high quality peer reviewed studies on the outcomes of this kind of social credit system.

Exactly. I bet there will be ‘upvote cartels’ where people agree to upvote each other and downvote everyone else to get ahead. A game theoretic analysis of this would be interesting.

Reminds me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_assessment

I think this is really risky. Some companies have the concept of peer-awarded bonuses, and these can work sometimes, but they often just create a "game" and a whole load of hidden politics.

I would suggest that most companies should be very careful about introducing peer bonuses, let alone something like this.

I would also suggest that much of the benefits of this product (increased recognition) could come from a combination of: thumbs-up or similar reactions to Slack messages, a channel to call out nice things people did (we have #values where we call out people living our company values), and a space for these deeds to be recognised such as at company all-hands meetings (we have a "thank yous and well dones" section in ours each week).

They introduced truqu at work. Don't know what to think about that either. We need to give 12 likes over 3 months.

almost as bad as peer reviews

The interactive tour on our website at https://karmabot.chat/#demo (desktop only) is pretty cool. It looks good and can do a lot:

- It executes bot's commands

- Emulates Slack interface with channels, conversations and all

- Generates dummy data on the spot

- Supports multiple languages

Sharing a semi-long read with some code bits. Please feel free to ask any questions. Thanks!

P.S.: Got Mictrosoft Teams demo too: http://karmabot.chat/ms/#demo

It doesn't escape input from the user.

Will check on that, thanks

Slack is distracting enough as it is without having to send and reply to karma requests like this. Would negatively effect my view of a workplace employing a bot like this

I actually had an idea for a sort of opposite slackbot: It would sit in all channels and keep track of the messages sent by each person. Then it could calculate how many man hours each person's messages had caused others to spend reading them. It could give you weekly feedback, and encourage you to focus your communication, and avoid spacing it out, but handling things in concentrated bursts, so you don't keep re-distracting people. Maybe it could even have weekly leaderboards with the people that managed to communicate the least disruptively with their colleagues.

Or it could be used as yet another metric of which people are willing to spend a bit of time to help their fellow colleagues.

It can have a huge impact and isn't something that will necessarily come up on performance review.

Good points here. We are shifting away from leaderboards. Stay tuned

"Thousands of business teams have ditched emails for Slack".

Really, they did? Not us, we send emails for reference stuff all the time...

Nobody has "ditched emails for Slack," and if they have that's a company I wouldn't want to work for. You still need a way to have more permanent personal documentation besides a wiki and the ability to send things more securely compare to slack.

Dunno, that’s what customers (and Slack) tell us.

Whoa, always very cool to see a fellow Aucklander here on HN :)

Hmm, I'm curious to know if you would consider something like Officevibe to be a competitor for example?

From what I understand, their Slack integration can't be configured on a team by team level for example so it's mostly used via email where I work. As a result, it's really easy to just overlook all of those requests for feedback and so on as they blend in with the rest of my inbox

I presume it wouldn't quite be as Officevibe is more for anonymous (opt out) feedback while Karmabot is focused on visible feedback it seems.

Hey, good to see you mate. Officevibe is great for NPS kind of thing. Karma bot is for daily casual micro-feedback, encouragement and rewards (coffee, movie tickets, Amazon gift cards). Some of the things it does, work well for enterprises, but don’t get that much traction in startups. On the other hand, brick-and-mortar businesses find the idea attractive (pizza place, car-washing and car-leasing services we’ve got). 500 teams use it for free, 98 actually pay us to manage their karma.

That's cool, I did the same a few years ago and got an email from Slack asking to put this green banner at the bottom saying it's not affiliated with Slack.

https://wakatime.com/slack

Finally proof that slack is a platform. Emulation????? What the heck

Could you please elaborate on choosing Nuxt?

It's one of the best — robust and flexible, well-supported and regularly-maintained – Vue-based frameworks out there. https://nuxtjs.org/guide

Seems like a perfect match for millennials!

nice! how about discord messenger?

Totally doable. However, in our case, not sure if anyone would pay for a bot like ours on Discord.

Looking great!

I knew you'd love it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com