Show HN: Jackfruit – Add an always-on video hangout to your Slack channel | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Jackfruit – Add an always-on video hangout to your Slack channel

jackfruit.live

67 pointsdrpancake37 comments

Our company is fully remote. We have an always-on Google Hangout that everyone is on all day.

The key for this to work is that everyone has their mic + camera turned off except when we have a scheduled meeting (ie. standups, team meetings).

Throughout the day, people often pop in the hangout by unmuting themselves to ask the team a quick question, which also works great. In practice, this doesn't cause very many interruptions because people know to ping someone 1-1 if they have a question meant for a specific person rather than the whole team.

Even on days when everyone's mic + camera is muted all day except for standup, it's still effective at creating the feeling that you aren't sitting there working alone (I guess it acts as a reminder that you really do have teammates working alongside you, albeit virtually).

I enjoy remote work because I want to feel alone – I can't help but think preferences like this alienate some of your employees. Like me, if I worked with you.

What level of human communication would be non-alienating for you?

Slack with access to video calls at need.

I've worked remotely for over 8 years at 3 different companies. Two have had some variation of this (Hipchat/Slack + Google Hangout / GoToMeeting or Slack calls) and it works great. We have a daily standup meeting on video and then we can jump on a video call through out the day if we find a need for it.

Otherwise, I have clear focus through out the day - I can choose whether to respond to slack notifications or turn them off and work through them later.

I wonder if these remote working tools come from people who worked in an open office space. I have an office, and before that I always had a cube. If somebody wants to start a conversation it starts by knocking on the door, or the entry area to my cube.

I'm not used to the idea that somebody on my team can just start talking and assume the team will hear them. So I don't feel the need for that kind of communication with remote employees.

That's a fantastic idea! there's something like focusmate.com to do something similar, 1 hour blocks of being on video with another person, both of you share your goals in the first minute, and then mute microphones, work and then recap at the end of the 50 minutes session

I find I have to keep these sorts of always-on things (some kind of text chat aside) on a dedicated device (iPad, another laptop) or they drive me nuts. The resource use of Yet Another (probably) webtech memory hog in the age of 750MB-memory-use browser tabs and three electron apps to interact with your company's basic work tools, and a kind of constant nagging in the back of my head knowing they're open on my main machine.

This feels like a nightmare to me. If I am thinking and in concentration - all external stimulation needs to be shut off.

Founder here - yes I can appreciate that. I'm a fan of deep work. I've found that most teams jump in-and-out of rooms during the day and the original idea of hanging out together while you work hasn't really materialised.

Author here. The original inspiration for this came from working remotely for 7 years and feeling occasionally lonely and isolated. I wanted to create a frictionless, always-on video room for your team to hang out in while you work. But I've found that so far most teams use it for stand-ups.

Feedback is much appreciated!

I would totally play into “frictionless standups” and specialize the hell out of experience. For one, I think it avoids a lot of “creep factor” that other commenters keyed into. Second, companies are paying for non-slack standup conferencing software and it’s all godawful and cumbersome, especially for the tech leads/managers. This would be a no-brainer for standups in every org that I’ve been in. Godspeed to you, I think you’re onto something.

Having done remote work I completely get what you’re trying to achieve. It’s not the tool which is causing a cautious(?) reaction but knowing how unscrupulous micro-managers might demand this be used. I’m sure we all have stories of bosses acting like fools because we turned off the company’s instant distraction app so we could concentrate and get something done. I totally understand both sides: the tool looks awesome and I could see it being abused by management to impede progress and degrade morale.

We used an always-on-video solution (the now dead Sqwiggle) in a past startup. It all went relatively well until one day, the wife of one of your coworkers, walked naked in the background. His webcam/laptop froze at that moment and a picture of his naked wife stayed up for about 5 mins.

That was the last time we used that app. Just something to take into account.

minor typo: "your" vs "our" coworkers.

I guess it would be handy to have some way of hiding everything except maybe the face. Would be annoying to have to dress up

At that point why not just use a snapchat-esque bitmoji.

It would be ironic if he shut is laptop to kill the video stream and that ended up causing the system to freeze on that last frame of video.

Always-on video staring at people's faces is weird in the best circumstances. It's a bizarre view to have passively, rather than during active conversation.

I think it’s creepy.

Go look at Camfrog.

Make a web version that does what they do. You will have much better success.

Great job on building something but man I’d hate it if employers actually demanded always on video, even for calls. Slack is pretty intrusive as is.

One camera on you, and an additional camera pointed at the keyboard to ensure that you are in fact working.

Slack is extremely intrusive, doesn't obey DnD and forces favicon updates.

I've been using https://muzzleapp.com/ on Mac.

Not affiliated, just a happy user.

I can relate to this! There's a slight misconception about this being 'always-on'. It's supposed to get across that the rooms are always available to use and that the URL doesn't change.

I need to work on the copy.

I like this idea. Discord has it for audio. Our fully-remote company pretty much uses zoom in a somewhat similar way. "Always-on" doesn't have to mean everyone is always in the room, it's simply an analogue of a physical meeting room or even an IRC channel directory. You can see who is currently in it and what the topic is (if there is one), and choose to hop in. That said, I would probably disable audio and video if I'm idling in a room I'm interested in until someone joins and starts talking.

It's a video meeting channel directory. I think a lot of comments are focused exclusively on the "always-on" wording, which I feel misses the point.

Pretty cool, but terrifying. I would be in constant stress and probably resign the day after if I was required to join an alway-on call.

I work remotely.

@drpancake -- aren't you nervous about Slack doing something just like this? They seem to own all the technology required.

Not too much. Slack has built-in video calling features already and what I'm doing is outside of their core focus. But it's a possibility.

We tried various iterations of this when I was a PM a Blue Jeans (enterprise video conferencing company). We always called it the virtual water cooler - a place where people on distributed teams could just pop in and ask questions/chat as people in the office do at the water cooler.

Lots of customers showed interest, but nobody ended up actually using it. Video conferences always ended up being scheduled ahead of time (i.e. meetings) or escalated (more like this use case - starting a Slack chat and turning into a call because that was easier for the topic at hand), and this occupied a sort of weird middle ground between the two.

I still love the idea, and I hope you can make it work, but I suspect that it's really only ever going to be practical for a small subset of distributed teams that have just the right culture for it (and I don't know exactly what that culture is).

This is interesting, thanks. I'm seeing the same behaviour here - very few teams use it to hang out while they work, they're typically using to jump on ad-hoc video/audio calls or screen share.

Pretty slick implementation. Was also wary about the always on video rooms but it seems they’re opt in for the most part.

I have zero desire to shove my face into other people's existence remotely. If I want to see people or be seen I work at the office. I turn off video in our conferencing software and I absolutely despise people who blast their face into a 27in display sized window, and then decide to eat snacks the whole time.

Not to take away from the efforts of the developer but this basically turns Slack into Discord. Which I think would be interesting. I think always open audio channels are useful because anybody can just join and you can code and talk whilst doing so.

Discord was certainly an inspiration here, as well as the now-defunct Sqwiggle. I'm seeing some teams using it like that, but most of them like to jump in-and-out of the room during the day as needed.

Congrats on launch, but I would never use this or force the engineers on my team to use this.

On chrome os screen sharing button is disabled even though it's still chrome.

Sorry about that. Could you let me know the OS and browser versions you're on?

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