Threads instead of Chat Rooms

Slack is supposed to make us more productive...but is it?

I once read an article called Is Group Chat Making You Sweat? (a must read!) that really made me second guess if Slack is a great way for all communication, or really any group chat tool.

Meanwhile I learned about Twist.com which is a slack alternative that looks like this:

Twist Example

Also Basecamp Basecamp Example

Both The Twist team and the Basecamp team realized something about group chat that I never really understood, it's not for everything! In fact, exclusive use of it can cause serious communication issues to arise.

So What is Group Chat anyway?

A infinite thread of short messages in reverse-chronological order (newest to oldest) with no form of organization besides the "room" (channel) that's usually organized around a team name (like webchat-cats crank-city), a place like utah-office or an interest like gaming.

Popular examples of Group chat include Slack, Discord, IRC, and SMS group texts

When Group chat is good 😇🤙

As in the article he says:

Group chat is great for…

  1. Hashing things out quickly.
  2. Red alerts.
  3. Having fun.
  4. A sense of belonging.

When Group Chat is bad 🔥😭🔥

To understand when group chat breaks down it's helpful to look at a slack channel:

Picture of Slack

How many different subjects are being discussed? At least 3 in this view. Luckily people are breaking out into threads, when the discussion gets long... but what if they didn't?

Too much one-off communication

The power of the written word is largely due to the nature that you can write it once, read it many times. This is awesome! This means that you only need to share a piece of information once, then people will have it forever!

That is...if you can find it.

Communication seems like a good thing until you have too much of it

Group chat, due to it's, real time, non-stop march of messages creates a feeling of stress for anyone trying to keep up. Problem is, even if you did keep up, it would be a horrible waste of time. Most of those messages were never worth reading in the first place because most aren't relevant to you. The noise to signal ratio is way lopsided, yet we're expected to dig through all the messages to always be aware of that one important one.

The channels are too broad, yet if you make them specific you have too many. [[Slack's channels live forever|Because they never. Die]].

It also creates this culture of constant tapping in people's shoulders. You expect everything NOW.

Also studies have been done on slack

One study found that Slack users spend an of average of ten hours per day in the app

That's a stupid amount of time

“I’ve often felt like Slack is like an open office placed right in my skull.” by Scott Rouse https://link.medium.com/I1mSrqEjPY

Imagine that everyone at the company is on a treadmill and every time you take a step it requires a quite a few of the other people to take a step, you're going to run yourself ragged in no time. How is this any different than the treadmill looking slack feed? It's not.

From the Siganal V.S. Noise thing from above it says

Group chat is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda.

What makes a good meeting?

Lets think about these in terms of a group chat like Slack:

Introducing "Threads"

A thread is basically a conversation focused around a single topic that reads in chronological order (oldest to newest) that exists for a short time then eventually is archived for learning in the future under a clear tile.

Popular examples include: Stack overflow post's, Reddit comments, forums, RFCs, and GitHub issues.

When threads are good

Group Chat is great for some things, just not types of communication.

What's the purpose of team communication tools

  1. Get/give information to/from other people
  2. To provide a self-building, searchable knowledge base of knowledge
  3. To ask others to do stuff for you
  4. To build friendships and help us all not feel alone, help us to have fun.

How does group chat do with these things? Let's see:

1. Get/give information to/from other people?

You can give it quickly but information is only good if you can find it. Finding it is hard beause of how the data is structured:

  1. Small amount of channels (5-50?) 😌
  2. Infinite Messages in those channels 😱

What about the quality of each message? Hard to say. Short messages are nice because you can read them quickly but they're bad because they tend not to be very complex. This happens a ton on Twitter, someone will post a "Hot take" and it will take forever to try to explain what they actually meant to say.

Group Chat is like trying to read a book on a treadmill

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