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Comment by e2021 | Hacker News Reader

e2021

One of the things I miss working at Facebook is the internal FB (called Workplace). It basically replaced email for the whole company, and worked really well for long form posts where maybe you would write some proposal up or make an announcement and get a bunch of comments. I now work at a slack centric company, and it just doesn't compare - there is no 'newsfeed', so unless you remember to check all the channels, you end up missing stuff. You can send out a group email, but people are reluctant to reply-all, so this doesn't get good discussion either.

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I've seen internal Facebook-alikes a couple places and they've been gross LinkedIn-tone places taken over by HR and managers doing rah-rah-let's-go-we're-so-great stuff and a few workers trying to kiss ass. What about Facebook's kept it from being that? Broader culture, or was there some enforcement of it?

(plus, and this is just a me-problem, I find them impossibly confusing because they ape Facebook's UI, which I find so hard to understand that my one attempt to use it for about a month c. 2010 was nothing but frustration and wondering how the hell normal people manage to use it)

Good question, and I don't know the answer, because I've never seen the alternatives. In WP anyone can create a group, and make it private, so you can just make a private group for a bunch of engineers to work on some project with no pressure to be 'performative' for the rest of the company. Basically its a replacement for email distribution lists, but with many advantages over plain email.

The biggest thing about Facebook's Workplace instance is that it's actually used by everyone, so while there will be the HR and manager posts, there are also all of the incident discussions, feature discussions, investigations, etc in there as well. With teams having the power to create their own (potentially private) groups to manage their own communication too, it meant that a lot of the content was useful.

I work there currently and I agree - I can imagine frustration for a while after leaving and not having a good place to make a bunch of posts.

Posts and work groups are actually a generally good way for scalable work communication - and leaving a public and searchable record. This doesn't replace Google docs and wikis, but serve as another layer to organize them. (I promise this doesn't lead to needless bureaucracy, that still happens but not because of Workplace).

Does it show completely different posts each time you reload the page, like it does on Facebook.com?

Yeah you miss a lot with newsfeeds lol.

If people need you to see something, they can message you directly. I just look at some priority channels semi regularly. No channels create notifications for me, thread replies do not either only DMs and direct @mentions do.

Workplace Chat is like Slack and depending on the team, that can be where a lot of the discussion happens. For a couple of my teams I feel like it’s been the worst of both worlds. I still have emails, gotta check my WP posts, but also have discussion happening in chat all day long.

We had Yammer at my last job and it was a pretty good forum for stuff like this.

How did that work well when nothing was ever in order?

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