| Countless tools have promised to highlight "what's worth my attention". None of them have worked for me or my team. What's different on Struct? A few questions I jotted down while watching the video on Struct's landing page: 1. the concept of channels seems to be important on Struct as channels are the starting point of threads/feeds. Could you clarify the concept of channels on Struct? Is it just a concept to group users? Can you also chat on channels? 2. Conceptually how do you handle the fact that only the threads on the realtime feed are visible to the user? Maybe there's a low-signal high-activity thread that takes space and hides the high-signal low-activity thread which results in users missing important information or reminders. 3. Tags are crucial for filtering threads, is there a way to "police" the tags? Using tags usually grow into a mess of similar-but-not-the-same collection of text. Think of JIRA tags. 4. How to handle threads created independently by different users but discussing the same topic? 5. Not a question, but I'd be interested in knowing more about private conversations between two parties. It's mentioned only briefly in the video. Hopefully these questions don't come out as overly critical. The tool definitely has potential. |
1. Channels for Struct are just groups of people. You engage with a channel, just like you'd engage with a user. You start a thread, and then mention users or channels to define access for that thread. You don't go to a channel to chat.
2. A thread can only take so much space on the feed. The height per thread is fixed. So, both the threads you mentioned could be in the feed, visible to the user. We'd also add a way to archive or mute a thread for some time, that should help with cleaning up that feed.
3. There's a limit on how many tags can be added per thread. Tags help with adding context, and more importantly, very useful for creating custom feeds. We use them for tracking task priorities, which converts our Struct into a lightweight task management system. Nothing to beat Jira, but it's nice to have just one platform for all discussions.
We'd allow tags to be merged. That should deal with similar tags growing parallely, creating confusion. And perhaps, we can also limit new tag creation to moderators. Many controls are possible.
4. You can merge similar threads. You can also select a bunch of chats in a thread and fork them into a new thread. We'd maintain links between threads. Coming soon.
5. To do a private conversation (DM), just mention the users you want to DM with. For example, mentioning @struct would invoke a DM between you and the bot. Mentioning yourself would create a "self-DM" (useful for TODOs, or just remembering stuff, or as a starter thread which you later mention other users/channels to expand reach).
Keep the questions coming. I know the market is filled with chat platforms, and Struct might feel like "yet another". But, I've looked and waited for years for other platforms to do what I thought should be obvious, but they didn't. And that's why I decided to build Struct.