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Comment by n42 | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the first Slack competitors that has caught my attention. I really think you're on to something here. I have one thought after watching the video (other than a generally positive feeling about it):

It feels, somehow, less personal. Where Slack rooms felt like digital _rooms_, this gave me the feeling of an office bulletin board. I'm imagining being a new employee at a company that is fully bought in on Struct, and somehow I feel like developing personal connections with my coworkers would be more difficult. I don't really get why, that's just my first impression from the demo.

Otherwise, as a currently funemployed but past SV eng leader, I would have loved to have had this at my last company while dealing with all of the communication chaos that entails.

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Founder here. Jason (OP) and I think about this a lot. The balance of cluttering everyone's names on the left panel, v/s making it feel like you're in the same room as these people.

If you look at feed based platforms, they tend to get very asynchronous (almost forum like). And so our design for the real-timeness of the feed was to emphasize the fact that you're in this room with these people, and they're talking right now. It's really fun when a new thread pops up, or a new chat emerges in the feed. That is exciting.

I think perhaps it would help to show a list of online people, so you feel like starting a conversation. Or, perhaps, just seeing other people participate would help. There's surely room to optimize to get the conversations going.

yeah, you've hit it on the head – I think what I felt was missing in the demo was a feeling of presence. a hard thing to capture. anyways, awesome job and good luck!

Thanks! We'll be brainstorming ways of making user presence felt, while keeping it clean.

+1 for human presence. I agree with the commenter upthread that it feels off-puttingly impersonal. Show me the faces!

Otherwise, I totally get the problem you're trying to solve so I poked it and quite liked it.

As someone with 2091 years worth of Slack convos (and Slack wanting me to upgrade to export them) can you let me know how you handle imports and exports?

You can install the Struct bot in Slack: https://struct.ai/install-slack -- This would by default pick up the last 3 months of conversations (we do this to decrease the unpaid load on GPT). You can ping us and we can help sync it from the beginning of whatever history Slack shows.

We don't have an exporter yet, but can surely put one together which provides a SQL / CSV formatted output (or whatever works best for users). We would never charge for exports.

I can imagine a series of useful threads always at the ready for onboarding new people.

But I hear you, ensuring new employees to feel warm and welcomed is crucial for every organization. Especially true for orgs that lean more remote.

Orgs can still use @random channels, @club-channels and you could set up an @annoucements to have spaces for fun links and bulletin materials, and other ways to get to know your peers.

@struct we lean pretty work-focused, we love building. But we should bring the fun too!

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