Comment by jakebasile | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jakebasile | Hacker News Reader

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I switched to fully remote work 2.5 years ago, and my tips are somewhat similar. All of these things have positively contributed to both my own well-being and job satisfaction, and they've been positively mentioned to me by higher ups in reviews and such. I didn't start these things with that intention but it has been a welcome side benefit - I started to do all this because working remotely left me feeling isolated and lonely. Now, things are pretty good and I can't really imagine going back to work in an office!

- Use Slack for water cooler talk, but not just "on brand" links like articles about software. Make or join a #videogames, #movies, #music, and/or #photography channel and talk with people outside your team. If it makes sense, some of these hobby channels can have little activities or contests. Our photography channel runs an inconsistently updated photography "contest", but mostly we just share our favorite shots and talk about gear we can't afford.

- Have a team happy hour about once every other week, during company time. We do ours on a Friday, just after 1pm for me (central time). It's late enough that many people are ready to relax a bit before the weekend but early enough to let the people on the west coast join. Just grab a drink (hard or soft) and talk about stuff!

- Do activities after hours with coworkers, if they're open to it. I run a bi-weekly movie night (on weeks we don't have the happy hour) and invite everyone on the team to come. Frankly, it's usually only a couple regulars, but those that come seem to enjoy it and it's really improved team camaraderie. On some nights we switch it for a game night. Among Us is a newer game that is absolutely perfect for this.

We actually allow team talk time every day. The IT meeting is supposed to be about discussing what we've done and what we'll do, sorta scrum-style, but management knows and allows it to run as long as we like while we socialize. This was even the case before we went fully remote for Covid. I believe the CSRs do the same, but I haven't been to their meetings.

They tried a scheduled after-hours happy our with the whole company, but people showed up for a few weeks and then it died off.

We have Discord and have a few channels including #general and #random. We haven't found the need to get more specific since there's only a few of us. It might be nice to have those specific ones shared with the entire company instead of just the team, though. I think I'll suggest that.

The photography one in particular caught my attention because a few people on the team wanted to do a flat-lay photo contest with a prize, but CS just wasn't into it. We're still considering doing it unofficially.

Thanks for the info!

> I run a bi-weekly movie night (on weeks we don't have the happy hour) and invite everyone on the team to come

How does this work? You guys meet up in person?

We just watch the same movie at home, and sit in discord for light discussion/jokes. I just count down to press play so we're all somewhat synced up. It's close enough.

Hmm sounds like a good idea for a social app that syncs the movie watching experience. If someone wants to make a toilet pause or rewatch a scene it's hard to sync again.

SyncPlay + MPV is a nice open source way to go about it, sharing time control and synchronizing playback.

With youtube-dl installed, you can also stream YouTube together as well (Google Hangouts used to be about to do this before they purged all the integration features), not just local media files. But playing from local media files though helps save a lot of bandwidth when watching with friends with limited connectivity, or in prioritizing voice/video call quality.

There's also browser extensions such as Netflix party, or mobile apps such as Rave, but the first is still buggy, and the later is a bit sketchy.

Plex also has a watch together feature, so everyone can just stream from your own media server, no exchanging files beforehand, but only supports mobile platforms so far, looks like browser or PC support is still in the works.

Discord has been the best internet voice app I've found for movie watching, as the voice activated mics and background noise suppression improves the watching experience for everyone else considerably.

Anyone else have suggestions?

Thanks for the overview of available products! It's great to hear that others saw this as a potential market as well. Google wasn't the first search website, MS office not the first word processor, Apple didn't invent the mouse. The market still seems ripe for someone to make a "proper" social media watching product, and I think there is no better moment for it than the current corona times.

My partner and I did "3, 2, 1, play" with Netflix at the start of lockdown (we don't live together). I'm surprised the big streaming companies don't do a 9pm movie equivalent to normal TV.

There's something fun about putting on the TV and knowing that friends could be watching and you could tell them to put it on or talk about it the next day. There's plenty of films I wouldn't choose to watch but would keep it on if its there.

Plex has a feature called “watch together” and does a good job

https://support.plex.tv/articles/watch-together/

I looked for an app like this and a few exist, but all of them fall short of meeting our needs in quality, universality, and ubiquity:

- Quality was lacking on many of them. They looked and felt like a side project from some bored dev in lockdown, probably because they were! But I wanted something polished.

- Universality wasn't there, meaning that it would work with all the big streaming services. All the ones I found were specific to a single service, provided by that service, or only worked with a handful. We watch movies from all over so it needs to support all of them.

- Ubiquity is the big one. What I mean by that is that you can use the sync service on every device. Lots of the streaming services have their own half-assed group watch feature now, but most only work on their website and not in the Apple TV or Roku or WebOS or whatever else app. We all watch our movie differently, so it really needs to be cross platform.

I'd like to see an app or web extension that basically screenshares someone's desktop, and comes with chat functionality. High quality screenshare with chat, not sure how legal this is but this would be ideal for movies or live sports (especially in these dire times).

You can share a youtube video with meet.jit.si. It can almost be like mistery science theater 3000 :-D Too bad it is only youtube.

This was a feature of the Netflix app on the Xbox 360 IIRC. I don’t know if it continues on other gaming platforms today.

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