(2021-08-11) Ocean Conversation App Design

Malcolm Ocean: A shared page on Conversation App design...the reality is that "conversation" is the backbone of project & team management
they're not separate that's, in some sense, the actual insight slack had they just didn't know what a good conversation looked like*

Max Krieger: yeah even Project Management tools are hidden transaction logs of conversation
Asana edits are messages

Slack and the other apps are all using old dead metaphors.
Leaving aside, to some extent, the actual UI (is it more chat-like or twitter-like), what new metaphors might enable a different kind of text-based conversation?

Well, for starters, using a metaphor of "conversations" rather than "channels" or "groups" seems like a great start.

check out Max Krieger's Glue concept ↓
(although Glue seems a bit more oriented towards 1-on-1 chats, and solving the problem for groups is also a very worthy task and more what I'm ideating about below ((2020-01-31) Krieger Chatting with Glue)

QC > there's a structure to conversations, and it's a tree evolving over time
MO > like new branches grow

preserving the aliveness of the conversation but allowing other people to view it later & comment on it.

What problem is being solved here?

Almost all of the slacks I've used (like a dozen) are actually not solving the problem of "too much (corporate) email".

tune into this context
relates to tuning and also points at user control

I'm struck that the What problem is being solved here? question is kind of OP I feel a pretty clear sense that ultimately a layer on-top of Roam is what's wanted. Or deep deep integration with Roam. If those are even different.

This would allow
tracking the ongoing threads by using page refs
referring to earlier utterances by using block refs
natural nonlinearity of conversations via both those above two structures as well as tree-shaped stuff potentially
convergence of topics because "which earlier message is this a reply to" can be more easily "all 3 of these utterances" or "this utterance in light of this thread/topic/lens/door/frame"

the idea that utterances are by default frozen - you can later revise what you want to say, but your original utterance was what it was. could even call these "utterances" rather than messages!

Other thoughts
I'm thinking about Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse and conversations as a fundamental infinite game, and this mode of play being very different than the kind of goal-oriented "we've got to figure stuff out & make decisions and have them be final" approach.

Slack's "should we send a notification?" flowchart - not simple

*Notes from my friend Hrothgar
when i once did concept brainstorming for trying to design a better group-communication app, i was faced with the following issue: there are THREE relevant dimensions when sorting messages for a user display:

1. chronology (when was it sent?; ordering)
2. context (where was it sent? to what was it a reply?; threading)
3. relevance (what do i want to see?; priority)*

Places I think slack legit innovated
emoji reactions (slack invented these)
app integration - tons of really cool stuff here, from bots to new context menu items, to expanded previews

"As soon as your users ask for your communication tool to have snoozing, mark-unread, etc features then you know it’s no longer delightful. Then it’s a todo list."