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Comment by bsenftner | Hacker News Reader

I've been working remote for over 25 years, and one of the better options to what this post is describing is to open, and leave open a voice channel / speaker phone on in all the locations that a remote team operates. Of course, this is not every day, but is used to create a "shared virtual space" that is very useful when the team is exploring something new as a group, and ambient conversation while doing so aids one another, plus social chatter and jokes are natural then too. Furthering a sense of community.

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At the start of the pandemic I saw tools that reminded me of old social flash games I would play as a kid (habbo hotel, club penguin, Gaia online) where you had a kind of avatar you could move around a 2D cubicle farm, and the program would adjust the volume of other people as they moved closer/further from you. Thered always be voice enabled (unless you muted obviousl) but i think the idea was to lower the social cost of initializing voice communication

Neat idea, but personally I think the benefit of working remotely is asynchronous communication - I think we should encourage more forum-like communication rather than something like a ventrillo channel, though bringing back vent would be cool

It's http://gather.town

I would hate this. More than the commute, the reason I hated in office work are the constant interruptions. Now when I need to do “deep work”, I turn off Slack, email etc and block off my calendar.

We are all busy, when we want to talk about something or get sanity checks, we schedule time on each others calendar. I go to work for one reason - to exchange labor for money. I’m not anti social and I can carry on small talk with the best of them. But there is a strict separation between church (home) and state (work). Well I did meet my now wife at work in 2009…

> when the team is exploring something new as a group, and ambient conversation while doing so aids one another, plus social chatter and jokes are natural then too.

It was not used routine, it was for times when the entire team is looking at an SDK for the first time, we all have a group item to discuss, and times like that. It's like a non-meeting, ambient party call. Not for continual use, by any means.

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