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A comment on Atlassian to buy Loom for nearly $1B. Parent comment

Re:Atlassian to buy Loom for nearly $1B by tqi on Thursday October 12, 2023 @02:28PM (#37861000)
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.

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Re:Atlassian to buy Loom for nearly $1B by simlevesque on Thursday October 12, 2023 @03:29PM (#37861947)
> 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.

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Re:Atlassian to buy Loom for nearly $1B by tqi on Thursday October 12, 2023 @03:59PM (#37862387)
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.
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Re:Atlassian to buy Loom for nearly $1B by throwanem on Thursday October 12, 2023 @04:43PM (#37862936)
I would be very surprised to see anyone try to put a Loom in place of a PRD or RFC!
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Re:Atlassian to buy Loom for nearly $1B by tqi on Thursday October 12, 2023 @05:13PM (#37863219)
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.
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Re:Atlassian to buy Loom for nearly $1B by throwanem on Thursday October 12, 2023 @04:43PM (#37862928)
> 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.

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