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by llasse
999 days ago
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Chat has a lower level barrier to participate than a forum post (or even old schooler: a mailing list).
Chat is More direct and faster paced, which has its positive and negative effects (engagement vs quality - I’d assume most people put more thought into a forum post or email than a simple chat message)
So far I have only seen Reddit/HN style „forums“ to combine these aspects together successfully (although I don’t know if that also happens in slack and the likes).. Another option might be to filter out important discussions and elevate it on a certain (“BB or mailing list worthy”) level - that seems to be a challenge, that the threading function does not sufficiently solve (also, as users don’t always adher to the technical aspect of replying to a thread). It will be interesting how LLM/AI might solve some of these issues of organizing the knowledge that is generated in these different formats. That’s a task that so far seems to be too tedious to be done by humans, after all.
A wiki generated by AI to certain discussions and topics? Summaries in the chat software to certain keywords/discussions and suggestions on further reading? |
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> In today’s chat-centric environment, there’s a skewed emphasis on the ease of posting. We rarely pause to consider the broader implication: for every message posted, it’s likely to be read 100 times by other people. Yet, we continue to post more and more low-value messages, because it’s easy to do so.
> For the vast 99% majority who are on the receiving end, chat becomes a source of stress. Constant notifications require frequent context shifts. Unstructured discussions make it difficult to follow along. And, the lack of summaries means onlookers are left out of the loop.
> Knowledge work becomes more productive when non-urgent communication gets shifted to an asynchronous format. Thoughtful, long-form communications promote deeper thinking and better decision-making. This insight led Amazon to ban PowerPoint in meetings, and instead require 6-page memos to be read silently at the start of meetings. Programmers have long recognized the efficiency of this approach in their work, utilizing batch processing to have computers efficiently handle repetitive tasks. We need to apply a batching approach to our communication.
Getting the newsletter right, including relevance scoring and summarization, is a really fun opportunity. I am experimenting with some GPT approaches - it's quite really effective at summarization.
[1] https://www.contraption.co/news/launching-booklet/