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Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

(danieldelaney.net)
858 points cryptophreak | 1 comments | 04 Feb 25 16:06 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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taeric ◴[04 Feb 25 16:47 UTC] No.42934898[source]▶
I'm growing to the idea that chat is a bad UI pattern, period. It is a great record of correspondence, I think. But it is a terrible UI for doing anything.

In large, I assert this is because the best way to do something is to do that thing. There can be correspondence around the thing, but the artifacts that you are building are separate things.

You could probably take this further and say that narrative is a terrible way to build things. It can be a great way to communicate them, but being a separate entity, it is not necessarily good at making any artifacts.

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dapperdrake ◴[04 Feb 25 17:08 UTC] No.42935321[source]▶
Email threads seem better for documenting and searching correspondence.

The last counter argument I read got buried on Discord or Slack somewhere.

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taeric ◴[04 Feb 25 17:12 UTC] No.42935388[source]▶
Discord and slack baffle me. I liked them specifically because they were more ephemeral than other options. Which, seems at odds with how people want them to be? Why?
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jayd16 ◴[04 Feb 25 17:22 UTC] No.42935549{3}[source]▶
Were these ever ephemeral? Are you misremembering history free IRC chat rooms?
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1. taeric ◴[04 Feb 25 17:26 UTC] No.42935598{4}[source]▶
Fair that they were probably less ephemeral than I have them in my mental model. Which, as you guessed, was largely from them taking up the same spot as a slack (edit: I meant irc) instance in my mind. Slack, in particular, often had policies applied so that messages were deleted after a set time frame. I remember people complaining, but that seemed legit to me and fit my model.

I also confess this model of ephemeral conversation is amusing in this specific website. Which I also largely view as a clubhouse conversation that is also best viewed as ephemeral. But it is clearly held for far longer than that idea would lead me to think.