Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidmurdoch | Hacker News Reader

Lack of long term retention of knowledge? What do you mean by that?

> defaults of encouraging interruption and lack of structure and lack of long-term retention of knowledge

I guess the emphasis is on "defaults" because interruptions can be minimized by seeing notification levels and muting. Lack of structure? There are channels and threads, I'm not sure what else I'd need from a product like that. Retention is fixed by paying for it.

Retention of knowledge needs a bit more than just a preserved log. Slack does not make it easy to mark important recurrent conversations for archival.

In slack (or discord), due to its lack of structure, if someone explained some piece of institutional knowledge, that explanation gets lost in the "slackhole". Other tools are at least marginally better at preserving institutional knowledge

There are deep links and, if you pay for it, retention. Are you looking for a CMS, something like Notion maybe?

in this tool (and others I've seen, maybe zulip does this), you can mark threads as "done", and mark messages as canonical.

with slack, it's easy to have a thread with 15 different answers which are all slightly different.

The "knowledge retention" features I'm looking for is being able to mark a thread as "this is the decision made", have that highlighted in metadata and archival, maybe be able to link off to a notion page, and have the thread closed to finalize the decision.

EDIT: the number of times I've had to kick people off a thread because they're adding bad info during a crisis reallllly drives my desire for marking canonical messages lol

Ah, highlighting specific messages would be a neat feature to have in Slack! It aligns with their official acronym: Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge.

Any org will often have multiple users asking the same questions over and over again on slack. Apart from a search bar there isn’t a good way to archive or pin important conversations for everyone to see

In slack indeed there is no good way. But other tools provide better ways to do it (with examples among sibling comments). I am not saying zulip solves much of this, there is probably a better tool, but they are at least not at rock bottom like irc/discord/slack.

That's why you get a wiki or something like Confluence, Sharepoint, Google Docs pages etc etc and write shit down :)

Wouldn't it be nice if it was even easier to transfer from one to the other, or even better, if one tool served both needs?

So let's applaud those who try, even if we believe they failed (or at least haven't succeeded yet).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com