It’s probably an unpopular opinion, but the best online technical discussions I’ve ever seen in a company were done in Bugzilla.
Every bug or feature request was a ticket. Tickets sometimes had quite long discussions.
The advantages were:
* Permanent, so you thought about what you wrote.
* Public, same effect.
* Sequential, so it was very rare for people to reply over each other.
* Goal-oriented, you wanted to move towards resolution, which was then archived forever.
* Opt-in for following, so you had some control over your attention.
* Available, so you could search and see old attachments etc etc.
* Safe, Local, easily self-hosted and backed up.
* Customizable, e.g. easy linking to the repo even if you change repos.
The more things moved to various forms of the all-consuming Jirapoly, the attention sink of Slack, the anarchy of mail+chat, the less useful and (importantly) the less productive these conversations became.
Every bug or feature request was a ticket. Tickets sometimes had quite long discussions.
The advantages were:
* Permanent, so you thought about what you wrote.
* Public, same effect.
* Sequential, so it was very rare for people to reply over each other.
* Goal-oriented, you wanted to move towards resolution, which was then archived forever.
* Opt-in for following, so you had some control over your attention.
* Available, so you could search and see old attachments etc etc.
* Safe, Local, easily self-hosted and backed up.
* Customizable, e.g. easy linking to the repo even if you change repos.
The more things moved to various forms of the all-consuming Jirapoly, the attention sink of Slack, the anarchy of mail+chat, the less useful and (importantly) the less productive these conversations became.