Comment by lifeisstillgood

But this is about social norms, not technology. Hear the phrase "remote workers...tap lightly on the shoulder".

We have had thousands of years to work out our nuances over interruptions and social signals when around the same campfire.

But suddenly (and from the past 20-30 years suddenly) we have phone conferences where half the conversation is "no, sorry, you go ahead" and email going from killer app to no longer being a way to get a reply in ten minutes but two days because the signal to noise ratio hit a tipping point somewhere around 2006. (No it's not spam, that's mostly a done problem. It's co-worker spam that's clogging our minds of not our inboxes)

So the differences between Zulip and Twitter and Slack and IRC and Microsoft bloody communicator why does it not know about tabs ffs! (Sorry). The difference with all of these is not their technology - it's pretty much the same all the time - but their social utility.

One day some comms package will get it all together (I think there is too little context to get it right yet) and we will all go"of course".

Until then we will try each different social choices baked into the code - rooms or tags or whatever. Maybe the next step is to have rooms for something, open cry for others.

Who knows - maybe we should look at pubs bars, libraries and streets for inspiration.

Whatever it is - Zulip is not the right solution nor is it the best - it is one more random mutation in the evolution of remote communication.