Hacker News Reader

Comment by nikisweeting | Hacker News Reader

I much prefer Zulip to Slack because it forces you to split your convos into topics, making it more like a forum than a realtime chat system. It also intentionally eschews push notifications in favor of keeping everything asynchronous (unless you're specifically @mentioned).

I haven't seen any chat system other than Zulip quite nail this yet, but I'm optimistic that others will eventually catch on. I'm not convinced that human-provided topic labels could ever be replaced by an AI deciding which things should be clustered, but maybe I'm wrong...

View on HN

Zulip's advantages in async/quick skimming of relevant topics and global hierarchy/structuring of streams/topics are huge.

Yeah I agree. Zulip is really good. It's a nice mix of email+chat. I much prefer it over slack.

What I miss in Zulip is Slack-like threads. In Slack, when you don't care about a thread, you just don't open it, it doesn't clutter your view. But Slack also misses Zulip's model.

These are topics in Zulip. Async usage for me looks like:

    1) Skim list of Streams in the org, streams show 
    the number of new messages in a bubble next to the name

    2) Click on the Streams relevant to me to expand 
    the list of Topics with new messages 

    3) Skim the active Topics to see which are relevant 
    to me and click into each of those to skim new 
    messages and reply if necessary 

    4) Feel good knowing I've caught up on everything 
    relevant to me without needing to see the thousands 
    of other messages in the org

    5) Click the dropdown for each Stream and select "mark
    all messages as read" so I'm back to the equivalent of
    inbox zero and can repeat the process later.

You can mute topics in Zulip, which should keep it out of the way unless you decide to open it specifically. You can't really have topics if no one sees when they get created.

Streams (similar to slack Channels) are not automatically joined. If you find there is too much noise, you may need to split the stream to have multiple more focused streams.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com