[GZGavinZhao]

UI and user ergonomics continues to be Zulip's biggest blocker to wider adoption. I understand that to many people not having E2EE and truly independent self hosting (e.g. push notification issues) is a deal breaker, but for many organizations the current level of openness from its values is enough.

I really wish Zulip could find someone to re-design the interface around the channels/threads model to make it easier to use and more friendly to beginners. I am personally never bothered by the design and got used to its interface quite quickly, but I know many many people who got turned away by its design or uses it in a Slack/Discord way by posting everything into "general chat".

[solarkraft]

I am one of these people. I remember liking the concept a lot, but just couldn’t stand wading through the UI (or telling anyone else that I expect them to).

[zukzuk]

We've been using Zulip for our company chat for 2 years now. It does what we need it to do — while letting us control where it's deployed and where the data is stored (!!). But the UI is dated and awkward. The general feeling I get is that everyone at our company is okay with Zulip, but no one loves it. It just has that air of mediocrity about it. It's "okay".

[ssivark]

> UI and user ergonomics continues to be Zulip's biggest blocker to wider adoption [...] many people who got turned away by its design or uses it in a Slack/Discord way by posting everything into "general chat"

Having thought about this a bit, I propose there is an underlying dichotomy between "completers" and "cultivators"

## Completers

Prioritize "velocity" and closing open loops. Limiting context means that they can act with focus. Close tabs often. Communication appends to the task queue; each conversation is an open ticket to be closed. Anything that scrolls off screen is implicitly marked as done. The ephemerality of the stream allows them to "process" a conversation and move on. Zulip might cause anxiety because threads/discussions linger without closure.

## Cultivators

Communication as externalized cognition. Messages are nuggets to be filed / incorporated into a larger schema. Wants a "dashboard" to maintain sense of control; fears something falling through the cracks more than they fear clutter. Don't care to "finish" a chat; want to keep the context organized and accessible for deep work / future decisions.

## Problems

Zulip defaults to assuming that all chat is valuable and taxes every interaction with a little bit of up front effort. Slack assumes most chat is of ephemeral value and doesn't see the point of taxing 90% of the interactions for the 10% that might be valuable. Slack forces cultivators to become completers and Zulip nudges completors to act as cultivators.

Completers preferring who prefers Slack/Discord/etc are implicitly adopting the the fragmentation of multi-system setup -- chat for ephemeral communication, and anything longer term must move to docs/wikis/Jira/whatever (which now begs for dozens of "integrations"). Understanding the state of anything now requires forensic archeology. (cue [Charlie Pepe Silvia meme]) Complicated acrobatics in channel names such as `#team-proj-blah` are attempts at combating the fundamental entropy of treating everything ephemeral.

The challenge is that, ultimately organizing is also real work and ignoring it in a short-sighted drive for efficiency hinders longer term effectiveness.

## Potential solutions?

1. The chat platform could offer two different views: a triage flavored mode for completers, and a dashboard flavored mode for cultivators. Even one person could toggle back-and-forth between the two as necessary.

2. Better UX for organizing incrementally, eg. UX improvements for manual clustering, and AI-assisted clustering / topic naming. Wouldn't it be great if people could continue chatting in the stream but the same message would simultaneously get filed under a topic? Technology might now enable such a product experience.

3. Slack needs to stop pretending that search is an effective replacement for organization (esp when search is crappy). I haven't used Slack in a while (preferring Zulip with catchall topics as a good balance) but I get the impression that Slack [Canvas](https://slack.com/intl/en-in/features/canvas) is an attempt to combat this problem.

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[Charlie Pepe Silvia meme] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pepe-silvia

[ajb]

I don't think slack or discord are optimised for completers. They are optimised for dopamine stimming. Sure, not every chat has much value. But it all has a cost.

I don't know zulip, so I can't comment on whether it's better. The most effective org I worked for didn't use messaging: email, or in person only.

[carderne]

This is super interesting framing. I’m definitely a completer, not that I like much about Slack. Probably useful to have this kind of discussion before/while making knowledge management decisions in startups.

[mickdarling]

You could literally drop this into Claude Code or Codex and point it at a local fork of Zulip and have it build your bimodal version with triage and grazing styles.