Hacker News Reader

Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

I never used Wave personally and I think it had a lot of cool innovations for the web at the time, but I also would disagree with a lot of the premises it was designed around. It seemed too overcomplicated to ever really latch on in the mainstream, and honestly I hate the idea of instant messaging in a Google Docs style where people can see my unedited drafts of messages where I likely said something stupid, just for the luxury of "not having to hit enter". Being able to edit my message before I send it off to the other person is a feature!

View on HN

I'll say it as I always do. One time I threw together a "blurred version of your text is shown as you type, becomes clear when you hit enter" and it was some of the nicest instant-messaging I've ever had with another person. Blur was the trick, to give a sense of the length and activity, but not the message.

As a person who constantly writes, rewrites, edits, reads, edits, deletes, and rewrites, that sounds completely awful. I don't even like having typing notifications.

Just going to say it. It sounds like you are using the wrong medium. What you're doing is emailing, nothing wrong with that, but imagine if someone talked as you described face-to-face. It would be a very weird experience.

I do prefer email, yes.

Or you can full real time text, like we all used to have. https://typeto.me

Throw a short LLM summary in there also, that will mask the content and also give everyone an idea of what the message contains without revealing the message contents until it's sent.

Oh god no, I wouldn’t trust a robot to summarize my unfinished messages.

I was totally joking! My humor is not compatible with the current SV trendscape.

"also a distant relative bought a piece of farmland."

I don't get the reference. How does this interact with my commentary on the rapid proliferation of "AI" keyloggers in SV text areas?

"Stardew Valley".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31g0YE61PLQ

I am a person who loves building and testing new interaction models. When you do this as a team, you end up climbing away from the main local maxima and building a new one. However, you get so used to living in that new local maxima and thinking about how great it is, you forget how to onboard people to it.

With a new interaction model, it often matters more to build the path to get people there, not the new local maxima itself (unless you're going to get kids to adopt it first, but Wave was definitely not targeted at them).

The Wave "onboarding" experience definitely should have had more demo videos, had features that turned on or were discoverable slowly, or had sandbox rooms where you could try it out with basic bots. It's a major missed opportunity that Google didn't do this; it feels to me like Google didn't have an internal playtesting or dogfooding culture where they intentionally left some people out so they could be fresh. I wrote about how to build this culture here: https://dustinfreeman.org/blog/playtest-rituals/

It was overcomplicated, but arguably it paved the way for Slack.

Slack is more successor to IRC than Wave, imo.

Were the Rasmussens who created Wave maybe earlier involved with some kind of IRC variant, by the way? LysKOM? I do seem to remember people comparing Wave to LysKOM back in the day, at least.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com