[phailhaus]

From the video:

> The homefeed is ranked specifically for me, so it shows me what it thinks is most important for my work first

How can it really know this? It feels like this could fall in the trap that social media has, where there is no common shared experience because everyone has a unique feed based on opaque rules. Not only does this lead to fractured bubbles, but it's hard to know what you're missing, why, and how to "train" the algorithm to do better.

I agree that chat solutions tend to overwhelm users, but there is a huge advantage to everyone being able to go to a channel and see the same things sorted by time. Does Patchwork still support viewing a feed chronologically?

[mks]

Add the persistent anxiety that you are missing something you should not have and you end up with constantly refreshing the feed instead of working - just like social media and exact opposite of what you want.

MS Teams cause enough headache by sorting the messages by "latest updated thread" completely obliterating the mental model of the conversations in the channel I have.

Some ideas for ideal team chat:

* Automatically build threads or tag messages by topic in threads so you can easily filter out the topics interesting to you - often there are multiple discussions intertwined that should have been in separate threads but people just reuse the threads

* Collapse the resolved discussions into a conclusion (with option to view the discussion) - when the discussion goes into shootout of messages you might be interested only in the conclusion, not how they got there

* Announcements - sometimes you really just want to announce something (on company wide scale, team scale, or just personal Tweet sort of thing) - make these separate and browsable - here the automatic feed construction sounds appropriate

* Activity digest - at last workplace I liked the Confluence digest email as it brought attention to projects and topics I was not directly involved with - nothing happened if I missed those, but was nice to keep an eye on some of the initiatives

It is super important to make a tool the people can trust - no one likes to make or hear excuses like "sorry I did not see the message".

We definitely need better tools for communication, so keeping fingers crossed for your success.

[shahflow]

You can definitely view the feed chronologically as well. There's also notifications for things that you shouldn't miss. For the algorithm, we can use a variety of signals (post's content, relationship to author, interactions with groups and related posts) to surface posts we think are valuable for you to see first but definitely agree on the difficulty of building an one-size-fits-all solution. We're thinking through how to let users adjust their feed sorting preferences.

[aurareturn]

It should default to chronological and give users full control over what they want to see. For example, give them tools to always show by keywords, topics, authors.

It’s work. The last thing you want as a worker is to miss something important that has real money implications. For social media, it doesn’t matter. For work, it does. You’re not optimizing for engagement like social media. You’re optimizing for communication.

Do not use an algorithmic feed. Seriously.

[ideamotor]

Some workers want to be baby fed information and don't want to go out of the way to learn something beyond their narrow scope. These employees can write a simple to-do checklist and as they go through their list of narrowly scoped tasks, they can cross each item out perfectly and nothing changes from what was expected. Why would they search for anything? Some managers love this too. Their employees will never deviate from the omniscient plan. Just feed them what they need to know, and secure your position (and time) by limiting access to information. Win win. Too much information and communication are time killers. How many organizations are really structured where employees can "miss something important that has real money implications"?

P.S. I agree with you

[burnte]

> Some workers want to be baby fed information and don't want to go out of the way to learn something beyond their narrow scope.

And I think the entire world would be better off not catering to those people. Those are the people that make the rest of our jobs harder because they're so lazy. I don't care what they want. I want them to pull their weight or be fired. I have no desire to help them coast.

[Teleoflexuous]

With all seriousness, if we give up on solving the problem we would like to see, and try to solve what decision makers see as their problem, providing feed management tools (also?) to managers probably would be an improvement.

[jstummbillig]

That what you are describing is (arguably) failing, is the reason this product is being built in the first place.

If you disagree with the premise, that's fair.

[aurareturn]

I do disagree with it. The moment this tool causes a communication problem is the moment the team loses confidence in it and stops using it.

I do like the thread + AI approach.

[ckluis]

I'd love to talk to you about the software. ckluis [@ googles email].com

[burnte]

Yeah, I don't like the way algorithms sort my social feeds. Focused Inbox in Outlook is the single biggest step backwards in usability since the menus that hide things in the late 90s. The LAST thing we need is some other algorithm messing with my job.