Hacker News Reader

Comment by Buttons840 | Hacker News Reader

I've suggested creating a company forum at a few different places, but it's always received like a strange idea that nobody will actually engage with or give any thought to.

Email, Slack, etc, none of them create a good long term record that outsiders and newcomers can consume. Some companies have a wiki, but I've never seen them used. Forums are good for long form communication, people can put in more effort knowing that their effort will be available to all going forward.

View on HN

Actually, Automattic, the distributed company behind WordPress uses blogs (called p2s after the WP theme) for this. Each team has their own 'blog' and you can link them, comment, etc. Then there are company wide blogs with different topics, watercooler blogs, etc.

Really useful to revisit past decisions and as a company wide knowledgebase. They even created a product out of it: https://wordpress.com/p2/

Disclaimer: I work there, but on a different product.

Our team has begun using GitHub Discussions for this purpose, and it's actually pretty good. I've been actively trying to push conversations there from Slack, but some people still seem really hesitant to use it. Or even worse, some people seem to try to use it like a chat application, sending a bunch of short and quick replies, rather than letting the conversation evolve slowly and async.

I've heard 90+% of people will not participate in online discussions. It makes me wonder what people would do if you forced them to do so as part of a job. How many people can participate in a forum and make coherent multi-paragraph arguments? We HN participants can, but we're a biased group. A lot of people are accustomed to conversational-style communication as found in Slack or social media, and they may not have written a formal argument since high school.

Oh yeah, good point. A lot of people these days have never used a communication medium like that. It would be interesting to work at a company that really prioritized people who prefer that communication style, over the non stop stream of consciousness that Slack turns into.

A lot of my old colleagues actually balked at the thought of creating a report, preferring mostly to be told what to do, or doing it their own way. Actually justifying their arguments in writing with cons and pros was a no-go.

These days, as I'm working as a freelancer, I try to get much of my thinking in writing. These makes sharing information a bliss as I have a trove of documentation to support whatever discussion we're having

I think you're spot-on. If anything, it's closer to 99%. I've run/managed various forums over the years, and the disparity between the active participants and the passive readers was always wider than you'd think.

This idea was completely alien to me until I experienced it first hand. The F in FAANG puts emphasis on putting things like weekly/monthly status reports, incident investigation (even minor ones), and other useful information into 100-500 word posts. This has created a wealth of historical documentation about projects and problems that always helped me debug problems. What's more, it made discussing plans easier because participants had hours/days to think things through and shape them into paragraphs.

I've heard that Stripe and Amazon have writing coded into their cultures as well. I wish I knew more companies that did this because it's absolutely a different level of communication that helps ease so much friction (at a small price of reading/writing).

At a previous job we had certain email lists that were archived and searchable. But I think today everyone would just use Slack.

Forums are preferable to email lists, in my opinion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com