Ask HN: What about gdocs/notion/xyz do you find lacking for collaboration? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What about gdocs/notion/xyz do you find lacking for collaboration?

2 pointsv1l3 comments

Pre-Covid, teams I worked in were all co-located so I used to find sharing knowledge and discussing what needs to be done and how much easier. We did document in Google Docs etc but any gaps were largely filled by tapping on someone's shoulder, a quick discussion, or a live meeting.

Now that we're all remote (and async), I find all document tools severely lacking. I can't put a finger on it but I find them highly unproductive for collaboration, long running discussions around a topic, and to keep information organized.

Curious what your frustrations are with these tools? Have you found anything better?

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The model is wrong from the inside out.

The tools you mention are a shadow of Microsoft Word which is a shadow of a paper document.

Living documents are best modeled as a network of small text that have structured relationships and attributes and that support multiple task-based views.

For instance you might go to a meeting, jot a bunch of ideas down, break it up into a bunch of "post-it notes", turn some set of those into a set of tasks and requirements.

Add relationships and attributes similar to what is in JIRA and you've got a project plan.

Why hasn't it happened yet?

People who tried to fly before the Wright Brothers did not understand that flight involved control in 6 degrees of freedom and that the problem was not lift or thrust (don't need thrust at all to make a glider!) but not tumbling.

Most of them understood some of the requirements but did not address all of them. They could get off the ground in some cases but not stay off the ground!

For instance seeing the relationship of texts in a graph is part of the solution, but if the graph looks like this

https://eagereyes.org/techniques/graphs-hairball

it is part of the problem. The answer isn't (just) a magic layout algorithm but is in letting the user customize task-specific views of the document complex.

What do you mean by task-based views?

Notion et all have something like that don't they? Eg you can create tasks in a notion doc, add tables, kanban board and so forth.

by task i mean 'a task you are doing with the tool' and not 'a task managed by the tool'.

There might be 10,000 document fragments in the database but you have the cognitive capacity to see (say) 10 of them at once.

These could be filtered by rules & queries or could be picked out individually by a curator.

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