25 ms·

Realizing the dream of good workplace software

33 points by monkey_slap 2y ago

doubtfuluser 2y ago
I have to say, Facebook at work was probably the best thing I ever used for collaboration and knowledge sharing. It was so much better than slack, I never understood why people wanted this chat style for group communication.
- monkey_slap 2y ago
  I worked at Facebook for 5 years and agree. Though the culture was a big driver too. It’s not like switching to Workplace will magically transform company culture.
  - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
    Yeah, me three (I was also there 5 years oddly. Do you enjoy being a traitor, incidentally?). But I think that the big learning from trying to roll Workplace out to other companies is that it was the FB culture that made it work. It's also worth noting that even though internal-FB stuff in core FB was absolutely bonkers, it definitely contributed to community formation, as you'd end up seeing that your XFN peeps hobbies/kids etc, so there was a loss there. Although speaking as someone in EMEA, it was totally, totally worth it.
    - monkey_slap 2y ago
      Love being a traitor. Just can’t look at $META and do the math.
      - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
        Yeah, I invested all my remaining stock (not much, given that I wasn't US based) into a house which has appreciated (but a lot less than Meta).
Already__Taken 2y ago
rip Google wave The author having to post the right content to the right channel dooms all IMO. it's all good and well having a web design thread/channel etc but nothing stops someone posting their kids photos except moderation. curious to see what embracing that is like and only allowing users to post to 1 channel but they can only read an organized contextual threaded steam.
crabmusket 2y ago
I've recently started using Zulip a lot more after the Changelog podcast soft migrated their community from Slack to Zulip. I've also been following along with Zulip's official dev group, and some other community groups. And it's really good. I don't mind Slack at work at my fairly small company. It's definitely a distraction, but only a fairly small one. But coming back to a community chat after a day or three of not paying attention, having that index of topics with new messages, lets me triage what I'm interested in, get up to date on those chats only, and "mark as read" the rest.
- ykonstant 2y ago
  My old smartphone (Samsung galaxy A5) struggles to load heavy webpages (it is fine with HN); with Zulip, it gives up completely. Zulip never loads on my phone. Frustrating, since Zulip is where the Lean community decided to be.
aetherspawn 2y ago
Is MS Teams channels really so bad that we’d pay $16/mo per user for something else?
- brainzap 2y ago
  yes
- pards 2y ago
  Yes. It'd be worth paying $16/mo to opt out of MS Teams. Although, it's as much about the culture of the companies that use MS Teams as it is about the software itself.
- _se 2y ago
  No, and you also shouldn't hire people that think that a company's culture is dictated by which chat app they use. Very stupid.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    “Dictated” no, “highly influenced by,” yes. It’s insane someone could think otherwise. If your organization communicated by carrier pigeon, it’d make some types of organizations and cultures and solutions possible while precluding others. Obviously communication methods influence organizations :| We switched to Campsite and our mode of thinking changed immediately. Suddenly we were able to have long-lived, complex conversations. Which is important to us as a company that has to solve complex problems over long periods of time.
- beAbU 2y ago
  Tell me you've never used Teams without telling me you've never used Teams.
  - loco5niner 2y ago
    I use Teams on a daily basis and it's fine. That said I've never really used any other chat software for a similar purpose so have nothing to compare it to.
drcongo 2y ago
As someone who absolutely despises what Slack has become, runs an agency, and holds the purchasing power at work, I imagine I'm the target audience for this product. I read this post while nodding along sagely, posted the link in our Slack, then went and looked at the pricing. Campfire is apparently almost triple the cost of Slack. Does it offer triple the value? The product features page suggests not, and even if I'm the one with the purchasing power in this company, I'd still need to get personal buy-in from a lot of people to pull that trigger. It's a shame, but this seems wildly overpriced to me. The article includes this line... > It kills me every time we lose a customer saying “we hate Slack and Campsite app is amazing. We just can’t deal with the switching costs right now.” Honestly, if this was priced anywhere near what Slack is, absolutely nobody would be saying that to you. They'd be switching and giving you money. You can effectively translate that to “we hate Slack and Campsite app is amazing. We just can’t justify tripling our costs right now.”
- monkey_slap 2y ago
  Really appreciate the feedback, thank you
  - drcongo 2y ago
    You're welcome. 45 minutes later I'm still thinking about Campsite because I hate Slack so much, so I really hope I'm wrong and it takes off for you.
    - monkey_slap 2y ago
      I do think we deliver $16/user/mo of value fwiw: unrestricted posting, DMing, video calls with recording + transcripts + LLM summaries, API, and tons more. But we're not doing a good enough job: 1. Giving people an on-ramp to try posting on Campsite without committing to $20/u/mo. What's your take if we had a $10/u/mo "starter" tier? 2. Telling the story on how working the "Campsite way" is so much better than Slack, and the craft in the product justifies the price (in my strong, very biased opinion).
sureglymop 2y ago
The repeated use of "I couldn't agree more" confused me a little bit. Besides, you probably could have agreed more, no?
HereBeBeasties 2y ago
fibery.io all day long :-) It now has a thread view so you can replace tools like Slack with it, and entity-grouped notifications, so you can easily catch up on things if you are away for a few days. Plus it does a much better job of proper knowledge management, with references, proper relations, build a domain model of your business, per-entity and linked-entity permission models if you need that, etc. etc. It provides integrations for existing tools, so migrating to it is much less big bang (sync in your JIRA tickets, Linear, Slack conversations, etc.). Two-panel nested views on entities make navigating through status on task boards, projects, etc. a joy. You can build automations (create a new Slack channel and invite the assignees to it when I make an Incident, add a 'priority' labels when certain people comment or certain keywords are used", etc.). Add meeting minutes, automatically convert the follow-up bullet points in those into Tasks for people and assign them, without ever leaving the same single page view. You can use it a bit like e-mail, and a bit like JIRA, and a bit like Slack. And you can pick and choose those "bit like"s to best fit your needs. We haven't completely replaced Slack with Fibery, but we've moved most of our more intentional communication into it. We no longer feel we need to "complete Slack" to catch up on the state of the world. We love Fibery and are very happy customers. ♥ It's great.

33 points by monkey_slap 2y ago

I have to say, Facebook at work was probably the best thing I ever used for collaboration and knowledge sharing. It was so much better than slack, I never understood why people wanted this chat style for group communication.

monkey_slap 2y ago
I worked at Facebook for 5 years and agree. Though the culture was a big driver too. It’s not like switching to Workplace will magically transform company culture.
- disgruntledphd2 2y ago
  Yeah, me three (I was also there 5 years oddly. Do you enjoy being a traitor, incidentally?). But I think that the big learning from trying to roll Workplace out to other companies is that it was the FB culture that made it work. It's also worth noting that even though internal-FB stuff in core FB was absolutely bonkers, it definitely contributed to community formation, as you'd end up seeing that your XFN peeps hobbies/kids etc, so there was a loss there. Although speaking as someone in EMEA, it was totally, totally worth it.
  - monkey_slap 2y ago
    Love being a traitor. Just can’t look at $META and do the math.
    - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
      Yeah, I invested all my remaining stock (not much, given that I wasn't US based) into a house which has appreciated (but a lot less than Meta).

Already__Taken 2y ago

rip Google wave The author having to post the right content to the right channel dooms all IMO. it's all good and well having a web design thread/channel etc but nothing stops someone posting their kids photos except moderation. curious to see what embracing that is like and only allowing users to post to 1 channel but they can only read an organized contextual threaded steam.

crabmusket 2y ago

I've recently started using Zulip a lot more after the Changelog podcast soft migrated their community from Slack to Zulip. I've also been following along with Zulip's official dev group, and some other community groups. And it's really good. I don't mind Slack at work at my fairly small company. It's definitely a distraction, but only a fairly small one. But coming back to a community chat after a day or three of not paying attention, having that index of topics with new messages, lets me triage what I'm interested in, get up to date on those chats only, and "mark as read" the rest.

ykonstant 2y ago
My old smartphone (Samsung galaxy A5) struggles to load heavy webpages (it is fine with HN); with Zulip, it gives up completely. Zulip never loads on my phone. Frustrating, since Zulip is where the Lean community decided to be.

aetherspawn 2y ago

Is MS Teams channels really so bad that we’d pay $16/mo per user for something else?

brainzap 2y ago
yes
pards 2y ago
Yes. It'd be worth paying $16/mo to opt out of MS Teams. Although, it's as much about the culture of the companies that use MS Teams as it is about the software itself.
_se 2y ago
No, and you also shouldn't hire people that think that a company's culture is dictated by which chat app they use. Very stupid.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  “Dictated” no, “highly influenced by,” yes. It’s insane someone could think otherwise. If your organization communicated by carrier pigeon, it’d make some types of organizations and cultures and solutions possible while precluding others. Obviously communication methods influence organizations :| We switched to Campsite and our mode of thinking changed immediately. Suddenly we were able to have long-lived, complex conversations. Which is important to us as a company that has to solve complex problems over long periods of time.
beAbU 2y ago
Tell me you've never used Teams without telling me you've never used Teams.
- loco5niner 2y ago
  I use Teams on a daily basis and it's fine. That said I've never really used any other chat software for a similar purpose so have nothing to compare it to.

drcongo 2y ago

As someone who absolutely despises what Slack has become, runs an agency, and holds the purchasing power at work, I imagine I'm the target audience for this product. I read this post while nodding along sagely, posted the link in our Slack, then went and looked at the pricing. Campfire is apparently almost triple the cost of Slack. Does it offer triple the value? The product features page suggests not, and even if I'm the one with the purchasing power in this company, I'd still need to get personal buy-in from a lot of people to pull that trigger. It's a shame, but this seems wildly overpriced to me. The article includes this line... > It kills me every time we lose a customer saying “we hate Slack and Campsite app is amazing. We just can’t deal with the switching costs right now.” Honestly, if this was priced anywhere near what Slack is, absolutely nobody would be saying that to you. They'd be switching and giving you money. You can effectively translate that to “we hate Slack and Campsite app is amazing. We just can’t justify tripling our costs right now.”

monkey_slap 2y ago
Really appreciate the feedback, thank you
- drcongo 2y ago
  You're welcome. 45 minutes later I'm still thinking about Campsite because I hate Slack so much, so I really hope I'm wrong and it takes off for you.
  - monkey_slap 2y ago
    I do think we deliver $16/user/mo of value fwiw: unrestricted posting, DMing, video calls with recording + transcripts + LLM summaries, API, and tons more. But we're not doing a good enough job: 1. Giving people an on-ramp to try posting on Campsite without committing to $20/u/mo. What's your take if we had a $10/u/mo "starter" tier? 2. Telling the story on how working the "Campsite way" is so much better than Slack, and the craft in the product justifies the price (in my strong, very biased opinion).

sureglymop 2y ago

The repeated use of "I couldn't agree more" confused me a little bit. Besides, you probably could have agreed more, no?

HereBeBeasties 2y ago

fibery.io all day long :-) It now has a thread view so you can replace tools like Slack with it, and entity-grouped notifications, so you can easily catch up on things if you are away for a few days. Plus it does a much better job of proper knowledge management, with references, proper relations, build a domain model of your business, per-entity and linked-entity permission models if you need that, etc. etc. It provides integrations for existing tools, so migrating to it is much less big bang (sync in your JIRA tickets, Linear, Slack conversations, etc.). Two-panel nested views on entities make navigating through status on task boards, projects, etc. a joy. You can build automations (create a new Slack channel and invite the assignees to it when I make an Incident, add a 'priority' labels when certain people comment or certain keywords are used", etc.). Add meeting minutes, automatically convert the follow-up bullet points in those into Tasks for people and assign them, without ever leaving the same single page view. You can use it a bit like e-mail, and a bit like JIRA, and a bit like Slack. And you can pick and choose those "bit like"s to best fit your needs. We haven't completely replaced Slack with Fibery, but we've moved most of our more intentional communication into it. We no longer feel we need to "complete Slack" to catch up on the state of the world. We love Fibery and are very happy customers. ♥ It's great.