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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

Get used to async chatting in the general channel... in text. That will solve your problem.

No, it won't ... maybe you meant this as a joke?

Don't believe so. Its the digital analogy of small talk with opt-in (read: IRC) :-)

I have been a professional developer for 20 years, 10 of those remote. He is right. If people learn how to work and communicate through async text, you can come up with ideas, exchange thoughts quite easily. Problem is, most people love to hear themselves talk so dismiss ways where they aren't the 'center of attention'. I would say in 20 years, less than 5% of the 'meetings' or 'coffee chats' couldn't have been done through slack/irc/whatever.

Async is the keyword here. Have several text channels, some with a specific topic, some more random. Get people used to posting in them and reading them once in a while. Get people used to move to one on ones and/or ad hoc small group chats when they have something to say.

Yeah, just like irc. What do you think Slack is modeled on?

And just to make myself more hated, cut the scheduled meetings down. If everyone is spamming status in #general (or #status or whatever) you don't really need them.

Oh and, like the parent poster, been doing this for at least 15 out of the last 20 years.

Maybe that works when you have thousands of users like here in hn. I don't see much value in it with a team of 6 people.

Remember when email was the internet's killer app?

& all those open source mailing list threads have done plenty of work. Not to forget their IRC channels

Plain-text email with a well-admin’ed listserv, yes!

Yes, it will. In asynchronous conversations, there is time to think. But with in-person conversations, people feel an imperative to fill gaps with talking. The result is either that (a) you are talking without having the benefit of pre-thought, or (b) someone else is, which makes it impossible for you to think.

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