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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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jayd16 ◴[04 Feb 25 17:14 UTC] No.42935429[source]▶
Isn't this entirely an implementation detail of slack and discord search? What about email makes it more searchable fundamentally? The meta data if both platforms is essentially the same, no?
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1. NovemberWhiskey ◴[04 Feb 25 17:37 UTC] No.42935791{3}[source]▶
I think this depends very much on how you use the tools.

My experience with email is that people have subject lines, email explicitly identifies to and cc recipients; email is threaded; email often has quotes/excerpting/highlighting from prior parts of the thread.

On the other hand, most chat usage I see is dependent on temporal aspects for threading (people under-utilize platform features for replies etc), tagging is generally only done to ping people to attract attention, chat groups are frequently reused for multiple different purposes.

Leaping to a point-in-time within a chat stream is often a bad user experience, with having to scroll up and down through unrelated stuff to find what you’re looking for.

Stuff in email is just massively more discoverable for me.