It's nice to know there are people whose preferences are so different to my own. I'm much happier using a computer indoors, as much as I love doing other things outdoors.
I've never seen such a steep discount for annual payment. 50%!
Whereas this, under the "what we don't do":
> Feature circus
> Workflows, canvases, clips, huddles, lists... When did chat get this complicated?
This is not very believable. This new product doesn't have those things because they haven't had time to build them yet. They will. Because there will be users that want them. Maybe not every user wants every feature, but there's a reason they're there.
People want to integrate their entire company into their chat product, and that's all part of it.
I see nothing mentioned about integrating webhooks or some kind of similar feature. The Slack app ecosystem and the general ease of integrating literally anything into it is the revolution of the whole thing.
It’s great that this is “Slack with no features/bloat and cheap” but I’m not sure the creators of this project realize how cheap Slack already is.
If you’re hiring employees, paying under ten bucks a month per user for a full communication suite is not bad.
Might I add that the Huddles that get criticized by this product but are actually pretty amazing. This product criticizes AI features but huddles AI summaries are downright incredible with how they summarize a meeting and cut out 100% of the small talk and distractions.
>I see nothing mentioned about integrating webhooks or some kind of similar feature.
Exactly - nothing so far. But it's impossible to believe they won't.
>If you’re hiring employees, paying under ten bucks a month per user for a full communication suite is not bad.
Yeah, if the Slack is for an organisation of full-time employees, the pricing is a non-issue.
All the cases where it's been a problem are something different: either an organisation of volunteers, or just a collective of people, or maybe an org that has some employees and some contractors who might be inactive for a while etc etc.
- lower expectations (my own and everyone else's). I work out the bare minimum that would work for the event and do that. People need food. They don't need music.
- tell people how to contribute: "bring snacks and drinks", ask one specific person to bring ice. when people arrive I often give specific tasks: "can you find someone to help move the table and chairs into the other room", "can you sort out music"
- do it the same way every time so it's less mentally taxing
Ah, success through lowered expectations! This has been my mantra for the last 40 years, and it has worked surprisingly well. I started out with a New Year’s resolution to not intentionally consume significant quantities of human flesh, and have worked my way up from there.
It may seem ridiculous, but it’s a form of stoicism adjacent philosophy that presumes nominally more control over one’s circumstances, and it has had excellent outcomes for me. Ratchet forward but expect modest clicks and be delighted when something goes right or someone comes through.
Well you know, probably everyone is constantly swallowing some of their own dead skin cells. Nobody's perfect. So I'm not going to feel too guilty when I cheat and buy a human-balogna sandwich every now and then, especially if they're free range.
Yeah, the phrase "significant quantities of" is really throwing the whole comment for an unfortunate loop. Maybe "I choose not to steal any vehicles" or "I choose not to commit fraud" and work up from _there_ instead of somehow trying to faux-normalize cannibalism. Very strange indeed.
Well, I added that after realizing that it wasn’t uncommon to accidentally eat small parts of your mouth, fingertips, things like that in the course of a year, and I was not about to fail in my quest to reject cannibalism for the year. I mean, for me, that would have been a new low.
It’s surprisingly difficult to not eat a little human flesh. People nibble on loose skin and the insides of thier mouth a little, you end up swallowing blood, and there is often a tiny bit of human biomass in processed food.
Ergo the “significant” qualifier. Imagine the sense of defeat to fail in your New Year’s resolution to not resort to cannibalism by years end… so you have to be careful how you define your test case.
If I were a cannibal, it would have been an ambitious resolution, but the whole point was success through low expectations.
But fair enough, people tend to be touchy about people eating people, and rightly so. No way that ends well as a mainstream practice.
I'm assuming this is referencing "taking a pound of flesh" generally meaning to being cruel in demanding what you're owed (from Shakespeare Merchant of Venice). Presumably they're tired of unloading on people for not following thru or contributing. Doesn't seem like the best use here, particularly so indirectly.
Nope, I meant literally not consuming human flesh as food. After years of unsuccessful New Year’s resolutions, I decided to pick one I was sure I could stick to. Success through lowered expectations.
I mean, it is kind of a bit, in a way, but I really did announce to my social group my resolution, about 40 years ago, and I’ve been ratcheting it up gradually ever since. I have kept my public and official New Year’s resolutions for 37 years running. I’m up to “intentional and senseless acts of violence that end in the injury of innocents“.
You may scoff, but senselessness is highly contextually dependent and can easily apply to something that seemed rational under the fog of circumstance. Thats actually not that easy to promise without forsaking the option of violence altogether, which I am not at liberty to do, since I have a family to protect.
It’s a slow, intentional process. I don’t want to risk overreaching. Still, they are worthwhile goals. Low-hanging fruit is still fruit.
The useful thing to me has been to expect little from people and life in general, but a lot of myself. Then be delighted when things go as they should, or when people come through. It’s a contagious positivity masquerading as cynicism, or maybe the other way around, I’m not sure… but it allows me to focus on my role in things, my choices, my actions, and reactions to the external world. It is stoicism adjacent.
The New Year’s resolutions are mostly an advertising campaign for the overall philosophy, really, by promising people easy success in something that is often a struggle, and illuminating the fact that we choose our successes and failures by how we view external circumstances, not so much by the circumstances themselves.
I find that the more a group does things, the more everyone chills out. It's like the expectations come from a fear of being judged and from uncertainty. When everyone has information from the last ten events then you don't need to stress anymore, because everyone knows how this one will go and they've all judged one another already.
It helps to remember that you are competing with: no event.
If there are other parties happening and you're trying to make a better one, by all means, go all out. But mostly people in their 40s aren't going to many house events, so they're just happy to be somewhere with people. They don't care that you didn't decorate or sweep the floor or prepare an elaborate meal. You made soup and they're thrilled.
I'd also add that first-event nerves (on host and attendee sides) can be an uncertainty problem. No one wants to misunderstand the dress code, social code, etc. Once people have been together, there are now group norms that assuage that (aka "I know what's acceptable to wear and talk about").
Absolutely. I throw “open houses” with open hours. There will be some food and company and some booze. Probably music. But in the end everyone brings what they can and it rules.
Granted it’s still a lot of effort but it’s low key and I find people prefer that unless it gets enough momentum to become a “thing” haha
Agree with this approach. I've hosted a lot of "work adjacent" events over the years, with no real idea what I'm doing. I've always focused on the intent (why do I want to attend?) and a few crux details; everything else tends to work out or is just not that important. It seems to be one of the areas where "fake it until you make it" not only works but might be superior to ultra-planning.
Once you've got the gist down, try and find one thing that you can go a little overboard on; it makes it very memorable. Examples: I made a big pot of home-made chili once, and another time we did (what looked like) an extravagant nacho bar. It was both better and way cheaper than typical event food.
Definitely enlist an accomplice, but be aware you likely need to (appear to) be the mastermind.
> I've always focused on the intent (why do I want to attend?) and a few crux details; everything else tends to work out or is just not that important
This was my primary takeaway from some time spent doing higher-end catering front of house. You'd be amazed what absolute fuckups can occur on non-critical stuff... and no one even notices.
(Possibly the bride, but that's why we had dedicated bride handlers to appropriately message that kind of stuff)
Wow. This is so true. My social life has improved hugely in the last couple of years and it's almost all because of this.
I host board game days.
I organise a pub trivia team.
I organise singalong nights.
I host occasional parties. Soup nights. Zucchini parties.
I set up a lot of group chats and keep them alive.
I organise to visit my family.
For a lot of events, I get a 5-10% attendance rate compared to the number of people I invite. People are busy. It just means I need to keep expanding the circles of people to invite. If people don't want to come it eventually becomes clear and I quietly remove them from the lists. But mostly I hear the opposite - they really want to keep being invited, even if they don't make it often.
Yeah in Australia I remember seeing a lot of small electronic items on eBay that were $1 shipped from Hong Kong or China. You literally could not post a letter within Australia for that price.
Yeah, "arbitrage" is not the right term here. This is just a complicated way to get a lower quality version of a service (sending a letter by mail) at a lower price.
There are some of us going to great lengths to reduce the amount of plastic we consume, the crap we buy and then throw out, distances travelled on our behalf.
And then there are these people. Sending a pregnancy test to their grandma. What a hoot!
Sometimes it's a curse to think. My friend group years ago started "Secret Santa" at Christmas and I quickly realised it wasn't about giving useful or even entertaining gifts, it was just about the joke of the item itself. The more useless or stupid the better! I didn't realise this and chose a gift I thought would be appreciated but they were super disappointed that they weren't part of the joke. I've boycotted Secret Santa ever since.
reply