[daedalus_j]

I was scrolling through looking for the Google Wave comment. Sad to see it at the bottom.

Wave was, IMHO, the UI paradigm of the future for this sort of thing. I have hope that it was just too far ahead of it's time and something like it will catch on again.

I think the problem it suffered from, besides being a little too "out there" for the average user, was that it required to much careful attention to how you used it. Where to fork the discussions, where to spilt them off into their own wave leaving only a link in their place, etc. It just doesn't work for people for whom the "reply all" button seems a sensible solution....

I had such hope for it though. The technical side seems pretty well solved at this point, it seems like that we need is a crack team of psychologists and UX people to have a go at the problem.

[Esras]

> ... too much careful attention to how you used it.

Zulip has been mentioned a couple of times in this thread, with similar results in utilization.

I like learning and exploring new tools, but if there's one thing I've learned about building them is that most people are only interested in using your tool to the barest minimum to get the result they need. See (without citation) how many software engineers you know don't "understand" Git beyond add / commit / push.

What that means is that if you have a dedicated group of people that is interested in exploring a new tool and understanding it, then great! Those people are going to love the tool and take the time to learn it. But the demands of society / work / time limits means that most of the time, they don't want to spend that time investment. It might be a "waste" of time, it might not solve the right problem, other people also have to invest the time, etc.

That friction is huge. That's why Slack took off at first, and then Discord blew it away in the consumer world. Discord removed those internal silos, had a lot of the same chrome on it that Slack did for IRC, and then they've continued to make certain things very easy to do within their platform (jumping into voice chats, for instance). But, if you see the newest way they've tried to have threads act as forum messages or posts, there's no consensus on how to use them effectively and I haven't seen them used much, as a result.

Anyway, one day we'll get Wave again and hopefully it won't be killed before its time, for those few of us that really loved it.

[jjmarr]

Tools are created to reduce the amount of time one spends on a task. The greater the ratio between benefit and effort the better a tool is. If a tool requires the "barest minimum of effort" to be moderately useful, it is an amazing tool because that ratio is high. A tool that requires high effort for high benefit isn't.

That being said, people will voluntarily learn new features if it creates tangible benefits for them. But the learning curve can't be too steep—it has to be intuitive on top of what they already know with consistently increasing rewards.

[cubefox]

I think this isn't necessarily true for a company environment though. If a tool is useful and is made the "official" solution for some problem, people will be forced to learn how to use it. Example: Jira. It has lot of complex structure and it can take quite a while to understand just a fraction of its features, but a lot of companies use it. (Granted, most people don't use or need all of its features.)

[chrisjj]

> Wave was, IMHO, the UI paradigm of the future for this sort of thing. I have hope that it was just too far ahead of it's time and something like it will catch on again.

This paradigm is alive and well at www.cix.co.uk - which predated Wave by 20yrs. HN looks based on it.

I agree. Its way beyond what today's average user wants.