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Comment by tmakks | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular opinion & OT: Synchronous communication (eg. calls, video calls, real meetings) with more than two people rarely add value.

Edit: Dear Downvoters, it's ok that you downvoted as it was expected but please share why you think different and give examples what value a 2+ meeting adds

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My team hosts a weekly call where we sum up our progress for the last week and loosely plan the activities for the next week.

It's very useful. It adds value, since during this kind of conversation one can offer useful suggestion or another point of view on an issue that they hadn't addressed before (because they were working on something else, for example).

Different use case: incident handling with tight time constraints. In other words: prod offline and has to be brought up asap, but coordination is needed in touching the various systems. A 2+ people voice call is a godsend because now everything is "in sync" and usually updated in real time with what other people are doing.

Your opinion is not unpopular, is just the product of an HN-like echo chamber. People advocating of async-only communications are a small minority that makes a lot of noise, it's a common situation.

Yes. You need both sync and async capabilities in a communication tool. It is hard to choose two different tools for that purpose. Both have a place when it comes to Team communication.

Clubhouse user here, it can add value if people are intentional, empathetic to others in the room, and have differing perspectives. There is something magical about co-creating a conversation like Jazz musicians improving a piece. When it works you feel a tangible energy that is it's own 'person', when it doesn't work it degrades into a mob. So the key here is curating people and making sure they have some common base of values.

To add to this: The same reasons we have weekly team meetings on a conference call for work.

This is weird.

I had to talk to two others yesterday, all separated by thousands of kilometres. The video chat gave us the ability to catch up without having to repeat the same stories twice. And it was a chance to hear two voices on the same topic from their experience in their specific country/place. And I got to see their smiling faces.

I disagree, but I upvoted since I hate the kind of downvote you're describing and I am regularly downvoted for the same reasons.

I think it adds a great amount of value, I can have a group discussion and plan things in real time instead of a slow async discussion.

Especially for online games, a async communication would be terrible. ;)

Does having a conversation with more than 1 person in real life also rarely add value?

You're thinking business, but this is more like Teamspeak (or Discord).

Telegram is also used for business. In fact, my firm uses it as the primary method of communication

One of my doctors in Berlin, Germany uses Telegram (web) in their practice to communicate between the front desk and the private office rooms.

I always wondered how legal it is.

This this this, i primarily used tg for professional purposes but discovered the communities there lol it's indeed a little like discord.

It's basically a comparison of two functions. On the one hand is the overhead of needing to schedule and maybe travel in order to meet, and amount of time wasted by people in the meeting who don't actively need to participate. On the other is the cost of context switching, risk of misunderstanding inherent in lower-bandwidth communication and delay in understanding one another that comes from asynchronicity. Whichever is more costly in a given situation loses out. In my experience, if the conversation would require a lot of back and forth (e.g. complex or delicate topic) synchronous wins, otherwise asynchronous wins out. As async tools become better, the cost of async goes down, and it comes out ahead more often. It's not always the best solution, but it often is.

I guess its ok for non-business purposes, e.g. catching up with friends. It was a bummer having to bounce off to Messenger for that, especially when tg's user interface is smoother.

Clubhouse seems to be doing something interesting with voice chat, twitter is testing out too. I think it has value as micropodcasting.

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