Loom makes it very easy to voice over and annotate a recording, with both individually editable in a way raw screen recordings don't support, and to share the result via a link.

It's not (yet?) heavily used among engs where I am, but we love it anyway for massively shortening the feedback loop with designers who can drop a 30-second demo of some prototype UI at the head of a Slack thread and asynchronously receive the kind of nuanced feedback that'd usually need to start off with a (necessarily synchronous) huddle.

Cool, this is the answer I was looking for. Thank you so much!

Their video summarization and speed-ups are killer features.

I think lots of people haven't realized that video clips like Loom are actually built into Slack. The button that looks like a video camera below the input text box does it.

It's not a full replacement, but it's the one you already have.

Slack's huddle feature is actually so nice. We use it more often than the dedicated MS Teams our org pays for (sadly).

We used it for a bit then stopped after discovering the screen share resolution is super low

I had never even noticed that button before. thanks.

Anecdote: It's so well hidden or underpromoted that exactly 1 colleague has sent me a video recorded via Slack in its feature's existence. (employee count: mid 000's)

Personally, I'm not 100% sure those videos are a net benefit for teams. It definitely reduces the effort required by the person creating the video, but comes at the expense of requiring more effort from the people consuming the content. While there are certainly cases where showing is easier than telling, more often I find the quick videos are more verbose and less well organized than a doc or a message. "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I [recorded a video] instead."

Who knows, maybe the counterfactual isn't "wrote a concise doc," but rather "didn't share the information at all," in which case I suppose Loom et al is a positive.

> but comes at the expense of requiring more effort from the people consuming the content.

Before that you got an issue saying "There's a bug on the notification list" and you needed to figure out how to reproduce it. Now you get a video showing exactly how to reproduce it.

It's a life changer and the opposite of what you describe.

Like I said, there are definitely cases where showing is easier than telling, and bug reports often fall into that category. But as an alternative to more durable documents (design explorations, PRDs, etc), I often find that docs are more thoughtfully organized.

I would be very surprised to see anyone try to put a Loom in place of a PRD or RFC!

Oh sorry, I don't mean replacing the documents entirely. what I've seen is loom videos replacing sections of those documents (where in the past you would have expected screenshots + text to explain decisions or a design). To me, there may/may not be more total information, but the information density is much lower. I think my hierarchy as a reader is: document with good screenshots and text > doc with good loom video > doc with bad loom video > doc with no screenshots / bad text.

> requiring more effort from the people consuming the content

This hasn't been my experience; if anything, quite the opposite, in that it's enabled my team to contribute much more actively to design. The effort of providing actionable feedback is admittedly slightly higher, but that's not a bad thing; needing to (and having time to!) write up feedback seems to yield more actionable results than doing it verbally in the moment, and for things that do really need talking through we have several sync touchpoints during the week with our embedded designer.

Of course, in contexts where no such touchpoints exist or where design and eng generally don't have a close relationship, I could see Loom being difficult - but I'm not sure I'd blame that first on the tool; if Design and Eng communicate only by throwing things over a transom at one another, I think the tool much more likely exposes problems you already had and didn't know about.

They're not necessarily buying it just for the tech; I have no doubt that Atlassian could build their own version of Loom.

I'd guess that a big part of it is customer acquisition and then raising prices or ramping customers to other Atlassian products.

Also recently Atlassian released a Whiteboard (read Miro/infinite canvas) feature in Confluence cloud, so this could become another tool in the set that they release to keep people collaborating on their platform and not heading elsewhere.

No, I mean, desktop and mobile screen recording, in my opinion, seems to be simple enough even for laymen. I could also be convinced otherwise :)

As others have pointed out, it's not the recording that's the hard part per se; more so the entire workflow from hitting firing up the recording tool to getting the final recording -- possibly edited -- into the cloud for sharing in some seamless flow.

Lots of ancillary stuff involved. I know a team that went down this route and built a competing tool and the hardest part was working out the streaming upload and storage. Then you layer on things like permissions, lifecycle management, etc.

I have a lot of doubt Atlassian can build anything in a reasonable timeframe. CLOUD-6999.

Oh that's nothing. Check out CONFSERVER-5926. Create April 2006 and finally closed with resolution Duplicate(???) in 2019.

It’s well-executed and convenient. That’s worth a lot.

This discussion reminds me of when Dropbox was at ShowHN and someone was commenting on how this could be done with FTP.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

To be fair, the person asking the question genuinely is interested in the answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37858345

I still haven’t purchased Dropbox. When the choice came up, it seemed important for our backups not to be made in USA.

So, indeed, a very cool replacement was SSH.

I still don’t know anyone who didn’t leave Dropbox after they jacked up the prices. A USB key is much cheaper (and reliable, at the rate at which Dropbox nukes accounts that they deem not compliant with whatever policy).

Most people I know just went with their cloud provider's sync solution once everyone added one (GDrive, iCloud, Amazon photos, OneDrive, Creative Cloud, etc.)

Can't remember the last time I saw a USB key in use anymore.

The cloud stuff is convenient, but it quickly became a commoditu Dropbox is still better in some small ways (like delta syncs) but it wasn't enough I guess.

It's amusing to see "but it wasn't enough I guess" in relation to a profitable $10 billion company with 3,000 employees. That's a pretty good outcome!

True! It's still a useful product, but the pressure to keep getting huge-r is always there I guess. I knew someone who worked there and they seemed pretty desperate for new initiatives (like the failed Paper). Most of their competitors have online storage as part of their product portfolio. I don't know of anything else major that Dropbox does...

Well, it’s relevant: Atlassian launched a paid issue tracker in 2003 when the open-source Mantis was all the rage.

There is always room for a smooth paid service compared to the rough free one. Android and Linux vs twice-more-expensive Apple.

> I still don’t know anyone who didn’t leave Dropbox after they jacked up the prices.

Funny, I don't know anyone who did.

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.[1]

[1] https://m.slashdot.org/story/21026

Surely those are the qualities Atlassian will want to change as quickly as possible, though.

It always destroys my laptop, MacBook Pro i5 from 2020. Desktop app, chrome extension, whatever, it absolutely chews up my CPU.