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Comment by artpi | Hacker News Reader

I work at Automattic as well and love P2s to the point that I changed my internal work title to "Accomplished P2 author".

I love how:

- They are async by default

- Incentivize deep analysis and thoughtful writing

- There is a canonical link for every piece of information, project, etc

- Discussions only need to happen once. Whenever somebody starts discussing a matter we analysed 3 years ago, somebody drops a link on slack to provide context.

To be fair, we are a company of 2000+ and every time we grow, we are actively discussing ways to evolve how we use P2s.

Keeping a writing culture requires habits as well. We specifically hire for good writting communication skills.

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Is there something about P2s that prevents the number of them from multiplying out of control?

A persistent theme I see with Confluence is that data just keeps getting added into Confluence, but without any organization or structure. It effectively becomes a "write only" structure - data goes in, but doesn't come out.

This line from the post jumped out at me:

"It’s organized much like a Yammer or Facebook stream, but on the back end it still operates like a blog, allowing for archiving, advanced search, and rich media embeds."

Does advanced search help P2s retain their discoverability? Does that make it easier to find relevant P2s?

> Does advanced search help P2s retain their discoverability

In my experience that's a strong yes, that works really well. I've been able to get helpful context on previous projects from a few years ago with none of the people still around just by search across all our P2s.

Yeah that's the issue I have with wikis as well; there is often a big push for documenting everything initially, but then it becomes a dumping ground for things and eventually ends up unmaintained.

If you have a wiki, you need to assign a primary maintainer / editor who keeps the contents up to date. This also applies to Notion btw. And that role needs to be passed down and around.

A big issue with a lot of engineering teams is an over-eagerness to keep adding tools and processes without setting their governance in stone. It has to be done in an afternoon at most, then "thrown over the fence" for "the team" to maintain. But nothing works like that.

Don't add a tool if you're not planning on maintaining it.

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