Question
Any tools you use for long form discussions within the team?
Most of our communication is on Slack, but it is not super great for long discussions (stretching into a few days) where multiple people need to participate. The real time aspect creates too much FOMO, while their threading makes it very hard to follow the discussions you care about and stay on the topic.
Any recommendations? I'm aware of Twist, but not sure we are ready to abandon Slack completely. Theads and Something like Discourse appear to be alternatives, but I am wondering if there are better ones.
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Something I've started to do with my team is have asynchronous video "conversations": whenever we do a design review, for example, we individually use Loom to screen record and talk out loud to review the design. These all get posted inside a Slack conversation, so anyone at any time can go through and replay the videos, add questions/comments, and we can have a threaded conversation in that channel.
Microsoft teams might be solution for long group discussions, adding a drive to it of creating a Sharepoint page (I'm not a MS fan, but this works great)
Not certain we have this down to a science, and it’s more a way to revive older discussions after they go documented, but we’re using Notion for long-term discussions reasonably well with comments. Essentially we document ideas in Notion—everything from article ideas to development projects to things we might want to take on in the future. If you’re adding something just for reference, just make an edit. But if you want to pick the conversation, add a comment and mention people, and it’ll notify the right people and get the conversation going again.
Definitely interesting idea though; there should be more ways to have asynchronous conversations over longer timeframes.
Check out Threads.com, they’ve built an awesome product for long-form communication. It’s still a ‘threading’ concept but the similarity to Slack mostly stops there. The product’s design, notification system and text formatting make it much more suitable for discussions that require longer posts and last days/weeks.
That's a great question that I'd like a solution to as well. I would be wary of adding another tool for our team, though, so I wonder if any Slack apps potentially offer this?
It does seem like there should be something better in Slack for this. Comically I check the Slack app directory and the closest matches seemed to be either the Threads app or Twist, both of which are more-or-less Slack competitors but that also have Slack integrations where you can pull a chat discussion out into their more long-term threads.
Niles calls itself a wiki in Slack, but that looks like it'd almost be a better way to store commonly asked questions and knowledge rather than keeping discussions going over the longterm.
Slack reminders could almost work here, where a PM could mark discussions to get reminded about after X time and then restart the conversation to keep it going if no consensus had been reached.
Thanks thats some great info. I also often check the Slack app directory and I've noticed Twist. Didn't like that it was by the Todoist folks since we passed them up for Asana and I don't like their design approach. Threads I'll take a look at but I'd like an app that keeps everything in Slack.
Funny you mention wikis as we just started looking for options there and found Guru which we're testing. Will take a look at Niles.
I've used the reminders but more for personal use to remember to check on something/someone. Had not thought of using it for conversations though. Good tip though will test it!
Confluence has been helpful for moving longer discussions out of Slack threads and into a slower, more meaningful format. We've done this by editing a page or using the longer form comments at the footer.
Anything that needs a decision goes into Confluence to be documented and the search is decent.
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Great point. Detailing ideas in Notion before a call, then logging notes after the call back in Notion to keep the conversation going might be the best call.