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Comment by nescioquid | Hacker News Reader

> Casual, asynchronous chat is great ...

I'm in the lead-weight-dragging tail (working in a bank using Teams, but dealt with this at the last job in Slack as well). The major hassle seems to be getting people to understand this is asynchronous communication (perpetrators are both developers and executives) and this problem seems to stand before the rest of the more sophisticated complaints evinced here can be even addressed.

A: Hello B.

[... typing/waiting animation]

B: Hi.

A: Good afternoon.

B: All clear for transmission, A. What's going on?

[... now B is derailed, waiting several minutes for A to compose his thoughts and type and edit them]

For all the pseudo UX voodoo we go through, can we not do something to give a hint that this is not a fucking phone conversation or something that requires a Q code? Or am I exiled to some benighted colony? Why is this not the first-order problem to be dealt with?

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We have an unofficial policy in my company that all pertinent information should be in the first message specifically to avoid the scenario you mention. Highly recommended.

Can you shed light on how this consciousness was raised? I'm the sort who demurs to be his own cause.

edit: this is evidence (for me) of why UX is B.S. completely detached from HCI.

Curious to hear more about your UX vs HCI thesis

The business I work for has the same, it is branded "Naked pings suck".

That's grand and I'm envious. I guess what I'm suggesting is that if UX were grounded in HCI in any way, this would be the _primary_ problem to be addressed and is the issue which thereby outs UX as an over-priced modern-day hardware store color palette for the blind (primarily preoccupied only with forestalling law-suites).

I guess my question, really, is what affordance could be surfaced to suggest this communication medium is asynchronous and discourage this imposing behavior? Or, while the more socialized effete users know this is a problem and are properly socialized and are more concerned with problems on the frontier, I'm suggesting that there are major problems in the hinterland that have simply been ignored.

> what affordance could be surfaced to suggest this communication medium is asynchronous and discourage this imposing behavior?

I was employed through the transformation of pre->post changes, It took about 6 months of consistent reminders on all communication mediums, it even become memeish at one point.

>I'm suggesting that there are major problems in the hinterland that have simply been ignored.

I strongly agree with this, the lack of 'deep work' that instant communication mediums have created has destroyed so much innovation, possibility and profit through its creation.

Ginsberg was a genius, but things have changed.

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the waking hours looking for slack notifications, burning for the modern digital connection to the dopamine laced cloud.”

I put my status as nohello.net , and if people don't follow, I politely say that nohello.net is the better way to do things in the future, and everyone can answer you questions faster if you do it that way.

I one day dream of having someone place my outgoing calls Is this xyz? Please hold for Blitzar. I might have to extend this to all messages.

Yes, I see this problem as well. People need to be told that they don't need to ask if you can ask... just ask.

I have enough respect for the study and discipline of HCI to think there is an interface solution here which doesn't resort to the (threat of the) cat o' nine tails.

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