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For the past few years, I’ve been trying to keep myself up-to-date with the latest news in technologie...
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I agree completely, Bobby. This general issue is one of the core problems we are trying to solve in the long run with dev.to. Not all at once, but in the long run. I really love Slack for some cases, but have totally given up on it for the big OSS projects, which also means I don't always keep up with what I should be. Email news lists have always been just as bad for me. Really hard to follow and high implied barrier to contribute.
Our comment threads right now are sort of hybrid between threaded and chronological. They are generally threaded, but the threads only go 4 deep and then they become chronological. I see it as a nice compromise, but it's also something we've left open to tweaking in the future.
I say this with a degree of humbleness. We're far from being the solution, but I've personally identified this as a big problem for some time.
Out of self-awareness, I have to mention this:
But I see it as a challenge. Gotta do something with my 9-5, might as well try to tackle a fundamental problem in our industry.
This is a great outlook to have. I think I treat StackOverflow a little like a discussion board; though there are times I'd like to ask a question and be able to discuss back and forth, rather than be constrained by the binary question/answer format.
I know the conversations/extended discussion mechanism in SO handles this somewhat, but I always feel like that's hidden in out of the way.
I've never personally been able to get over the hump in finding value in SO other than the Q/A as a resource. I see that as an indication that there's room for a different approach. The last thing we are trying to do is challenge that platform head-on for Q/A, but there is so much more developers need and trying to squeeze it into Stack Overflow's general mantra has seemed a bit square peg/round hole to me.
I really love what you're doing with dev.to, Ben! Thank you and the whole team for taking the challenge.
I must confess that dev.to as a community platform slipped my mind when I was writing this article, but since I was talking about specific communities around a certain product, I hope you don't mind it that much :)
We're new and I don't expect us to be mentioned alongside the established platforms that are way bigger than us. Most of our potential is yet to be realized, so I never feel snubbed when folks don't include us yet. We'll just keep plugging away at the problem.
There are some excellent points here. The visibility and searchability, especially for an open source project, should be paramount. Discourse is a great solution, and seeing it in use by any project install boosts their credibility for me.
I still think chat can have a place in a project. Using it for things like build/deployment notifications and minor progress updates has been a boon for me at my current job. It can also be used for user/developer support. Sometimes, I don't want to post some big long thing on a more public forum. I want to talk to someone right away that help with an unusual use case. Stuff like that might get buried on a forum.
Chat has a great place in projects. I think it needs to be a complementary environment, rather than the core one. Slack is weird in that you access this whole different environment just for the chat, so I think it leads you to wanting to do too much with it. Also, Slack as a company doesn't really seem to have an interest in serving this community. Gitter is better in this regard, but still not really a "full solution". Gitter was acquired by GitLab, so it will be interesting to see what they might do with it.
Yeah, Slack seems like overkill for chat, period. We use Atlassian's products at my job, so we're all in on Jira/Bitbucket/HipChat, and the combination of the three is really excellent.
We are having that problem at my work right now as well. We use Slack, which is helpful to have runnign discussions, but stuff is just getting lost. We're trying to push more informatin into GitHub issues now.At least that has a record of it, and it's organized into issues.
Slack's threading feature suffers from a terrible UX. Nobody wants to use it for that reason.
I also use mailing lists and groups. I find them better for offline communications, but are also rather disorganized. At least they have threading though.
Definitely some valid points. I mentioned in another article that IRC is a bit unique compared to other chat platforms in that lurking is expected. As such, there are a lot of systems in place to allow better async communication on IRC - MemoServ, chatbot
!tellfeatures, IRC relays. As for me, I'm on about 10-12 hours a day, but because I'm culturally not expected to answer anything right away, I feel safer ignoring it than even Twitter.As to keeping track of conversations, that's why we have IRC logs. One
grepand I can find anything I'm looking for.But, I can also see how IRC can be limiting for async conversations. You don't usually expect to get an answer to a question two days after the fact, and it isn't uncommon for a question to get lost in the backlog in particularly busy rooms.
I still say it has a place, but it's no replacement for, say, Discourse.
I agree completely. More times than I can remember I have found an answer to some problem from old mailing list discussions (in which I have not participated but which are picked up by search engines). Especially when working with some technologies that are not so commonly used. Chances are that someone else has already encountered the same problem and received an answer for it. Though, it's not always easy to find these answers from e.g. mailing list archives, but with chat systems this information is not available at all.
I can completely agree with you. I use Gitter, Slack, Flock.