Comment by dangus
5 years ago
The poll results show the real sentiment, that close to 30% of people actually like synchronous chat. That is a significant chunk.
Perhaps there's an unmet market need for a product that both excels at synchronous and asynchronous communication.
I could see potential for a feature in a chat program where a message or series of messages could be selected and enshrined in a search engine-indexed synchronous knowledge base page, working something like a more powerful version of a pin in Slack or Discord.
Overall, though, I felt like the article was kind of bossy.
> Perhaps there's an unmet market need for a product that both excels at synchronous and asynchronous communication.
The Rust community has had great luck with Zulip for that. It works well live, as well as asynchronously, and the content remains useful and findable later.
(We also have forums, which serve a different purpose (longer content), as well as GitHub.)
The poll is not exactly lined up with the point, though: it says that people want synchronous chat, while the article says synchronous chat is not beneficial to the community. Both can be true.
Yeah I could see in a few year Discord/Slack having "chat" channels, voice channels, and "forum" channels. Maybe even add in wikis, or dashboards.
And then people can live in their closed ecosystems where exporting data will be ever more difficult.
Who are these people and how do they have time follow synchronous chat on deep technical products all day?
No data to back this up, but I have a feeling the industry is so bottom-heavy with juniors that we've started optimising towards their immediate need to learn. Juniors don't have a problem sitting in Slacks all day.
I have the same thought, and not just about technical chats, like who is spending so much time in Discords? Maybe the sibling commenter is right that there are a lot more junior developers now who want instant answers and to move on, rather than longer form forum discussions?
>Perhaps there's an unmet market need for a product that both excels at synchronous and asynchronous communication.
Basecamp?