Comment by artpi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by artpi | Hacker News Reader

There was previous discussion around written asynchronous communication being a superpower. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23577228

I feel that Slack dominance is hurting the productivity, because:

- It's impossible to be productive using Slack or Teams alone. The ultimate power move is to write things up in a company wiki, google doc or an internal blog

- Slack is incentivized to keep you IN Slack, for engagement. They don't have their own permanent-knowledge-base-software, so they pretend it's not needed.

It's a different case with Teams, because they offer quite a roster of software to write things up permanently - like sharepoint or office365 and will likely pursue integrating tighter and tighter.

Because Slack is a standalone product, they will push for using chat in the workplaces MORE. Microsoft can offer chat as a "when needed" basis.

The logistics of trying to be productive on a company group chat led me to create a free "Win at Slack" mini-course: https://deliber.at/chat/

This is right on. Slack's pricing is based on regular usage, so they have an incentive to keep you distracted (to put it bluntly).

Microsoft sees chat as a piece of an overall communication "puzzle". They have Sharepoint for more persistent information and Yammer for "outer-loop" communication.

My startup (https://www.friday.app/) is based around the idea that there needs to be a "home" for the most important stuff at work that complements workplace chat. It's somewhere in-between Slack and a wiki (which most people don't use regularly).

Workplace chat tools like Slack are wonderful for quick collaboration, but if you over-index here you will run into trouble. That's why Zapier, Automattic, and Stripe have all built their own internal tooling to help.

>impossible to be productive using Slack or Teams alone. The ultimate power move is to write things up in a company wiki

Every Team, by default, has a Posts, Files, and Wiki tab. Designing a way to roll up those Wiki pages, like they do with Sharepoint hubs, would be a good move.

From this perspective, Notion would be the perfect acquisition for Slack. Adding a wiki / todos / workflow / document editor to Slack with deep integration.

https://www.notion.so/

The company wiki/internal blog depends on people reading it though. The perk of group chats is usually smaller messages that can spark interest in discussions.

Zulip honestly seems like they've solved this problem better than Slack though.

You are spot on. For effective team communication, one need a healthy mix of sync (voice/video calls, chat) and async communication (wiki, task management and documents) . That is the whole premise of our apps (https://www.airsend.io). It brings both sync and async tools in one space to minimize context switching. MS Teams is better in that respect (context switching) when compared to Slack. But Teams UI/UX is really confusing and thier forced integration of tools just adds too much complexity.

I will be the weirdo and say I would rather have an amazing search feature in chat than have to go through moving knowledge into a more “permanent” location.

Permanent, searchable chat in Slack has been way more powerful for me than all of the other options for knowledge capture (SharePoint, Confluence, etc). I can almost always find what I need and if there is more up to date information, Slack seems to surface that first.

It seems like the difference between real-world usage and theoretical solutions in this case is wide.

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