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Comment by Trasmatta | Hacker News Reader

Something that's coming to mind while reading this is how much company communication these days happens almost exclusively on Slack, and how antithetical that format can be to writing and thinking clearly.

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I've suggested creating a company forum at a few different places, but it's always received like a strange idea that nobody will actually engage with or give any thought to.

Email, Slack, etc, none of them create a good long term record that outsiders and newcomers can consume. Some companies have a wiki, but I've never seen them used. Forums are good for long form communication, people can put in more effort knowing that their effort will be available to all going forward.

Our team has begun using GitHub Discussions for this purpose, and it's actually pretty good. I've been actively trying to push conversations there from Slack, but some people still seem really hesitant to use it. Or even worse, some people seem to try to use it like a chat application, sending a bunch of short and quick replies, rather than letting the conversation evolve slowly and async.

I've heard 90+% of people will not participate in online discussions. It makes me wonder what people would do if you forced them to do so as part of a job. How many people can participate in a forum and make coherent multi-paragraph arguments? We HN participants can, but we're a biased group. A lot of people are accustomed to conversational-style communication as found in Slack or social media, and they may not have written a formal argument since high school.

I think you're spot-on. If anything, it's closer to 99%. I've run/managed various forums over the years, and the disparity between the active participants and the passive readers was always wider than you'd think.

Oh yeah, good point. A lot of people these days have never used a communication medium like that. It would be interesting to work at a company that really prioritized people who prefer that communication style, over the non stop stream of consciousness that Slack turns into.

A lot of my old colleagues actually balked at the thought of creating a report, preferring mostly to be told what to do, or doing it their own way. Actually justifying their arguments in writing with cons and pros was a no-go.

These days, as I'm working as a freelancer, I try to get much of my thinking in writing. These makes sharing information a bliss as I have a trove of documentation to support whatever discussion we're having

Actually, Automattic, the distributed company behind WordPress uses blogs (called p2s after the WP theme) for this. Each team has their own 'blog' and you can link them, comment, etc. Then there are company wide blogs with different topics, watercooler blogs, etc.

Really useful to revisit past decisions and as a company wide knowledgebase. They even created a product out of it: https://wordpress.com/p2/

Disclaimer: I work there, but on a different product.

At a previous job we had certain email lists that were archived and searchable. But I think today everyone would just use Slack.

Forums are preferable to email lists, in my opinion.

This idea was completely alien to me until I experienced it first hand. The F in FAANG puts emphasis on putting things like weekly/monthly status reports, incident investigation (even minor ones), and other useful information into 100-500 word posts. This has created a wealth of historical documentation about projects and problems that always helped me debug problems. What's more, it made discussing plans easier because participants had hours/days to think things through and shape them into paragraphs.

I've heard that Stripe and Amazon have writing coded into their cultures as well. I wish I knew more companies that did this because it's absolutely a different level of communication that helps ease so much friction (at a small price of reading/writing).

Yes, I'm still smarting from this default behavoir that pressing "return" sends the message instead of starting a new paragraph. My thoughts usually run to more than one paragraph, and I like to edit before I send.

I supposes that's not "chat", but then again written is not oral.

(side note-- again, two paragraphs, plus self-commentary)

I hate that as well - but finally learned that you can actually change the RETURN behavior in Slack’s preferences.

I wonder why they decided that a different behavior was needed depending on you being in a code block (RETURN -> new line) than normal writing (RETURN -> submit). That’s bad UX!

I’m so old school that I want an e-mail so I can file it (as a file) in whatever folder I find logical - that’s not possible in Slack (which is good for non-worthy-of-being-saved chit-chat kind of communications)

You can use SHIFT-RETURN in Slack/Discord to insert a newline. Maybe not great for RSI, but it's muscle memory now.

I don’t understand. Slack is written communication. How could that be antithetical to writing? Every time you use it is an opportunity to practice.

Slack (and teams, discord, skype) are all antithetical to the style of written communication outlined in the slide deck. They make difficult writing a long, well-structured document to record and transmit a complex idea. IM team coordination platforms are only good for the first phase of writing, that is, just getting ideas down in written format. The issue is that the tools built into those platforms do not aid in the other phases of the writing process, and in fact, they sort of make it difficult, actually. I speak from experience having to go back through thousands of Discord messages to condense the ideas into a collection of documents on different topics.

Someone should write an extension that makes it easier to convert IM thread to an organized document outline in slack or discord. That would be nice.

We dont use slack like that really, but google doc comments are similarly limiting. Atleast most thoughts happen in a google doc

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