shahflow

It's similar to Yammer in that the core communication component is a feed. However, Patchwork is centered on how teams get work done and not just community discussions which can be seen in both our workflows and our integrations with github, calendar, linear, figma, etc.

Thanks for the support. Communication models definitely come in waves. Chat and the ability to instantly access someone no matter where they were was an extremely powerful tool when it came out. Now that its being overladen with all types of communication, it feels like people are ready for the next wave and it seems like feeds are definitely on the rise with struct.ai as well. Agree on chat being more an ephemeral form of communication and interesting to think about if we should start treating it as such.

Appreciate the support!

We added screenshots to both the post and landing page. Thanks for the feedback!

We both still think Workplace was a magical product. Unfortunately, because it was a direct fork of Facebook's codebase, it was never really built from the beginning with work in mind and is very much built for very large companies. Patchwork was built from the beginning with product teams in mind, so you'll see everything from our integrations to builtin workflows are much more geared towards that.

Definitely. Chat is often seen as easier communication because it's more forgiving but not all communication should be on chat. We've seen LLMs really help to have clearer communication for non-native english speakers which pushes towards not having an over reliance on chat.

Thanks! Agreed that talking to people is on a whole distracting but necessary. We think the problem is that not all daily updates, design and eng discussions and announcements need to be immediately talked about. The problem with chat is it's a time/recency based system. Patchwork attempts to separate out immediate discussions vs async instead of all of it being in chat.

Not at all. Patchwork should be the home page to what's going on in your team. All of the changes and progress should role up into it and we should be able to help you see the ones most important to you. That's a lot of what the integrations are for.

Thanks! We'll boost the voice and re-upload the video. Agreed that technology doesn't solve the social issues at play and unfortunately policing behavior is hard. We think Patchwork can at least help the problem by having an alternative form of communicating rather than just chat. Then at least people can point interruptors to the tool and nudge them to use it.

I believe they have some very large companies running on it like McDonalds. Statsig also runs on Workplace if I'm not mistaken

It's great to see other people are seeing the problem too. Definitely validates the space. We're a bit different in that we see Patchwork's home page as the overview of everything going on in your team both on and off platform.

Some larger companies are doing this with their chats (though for longer than 30 days) and it has forced people to put more things in docs. Unfortunately, the docs aren't easy to find later either.

Agreed. It was an oversight and we're adding that in. We do have a demo on the HN Launch if you're interested in seeing more.

Google wave definitely got a lot of things right but we agree the UI was confusing and they tried to do a lot all at once. For Patchwork, we've definitely kept in mind ease of use and standard paradigms as we've built the product and also really utilizing LLMs where they're helpful (i.e. summarizations for catching new people up).

Thanks for the feedback on the website. We'll definitely take a look and add screenshots and demos to that as well. There's a demo in the HN post if you're interested.

Agreed, we've been heads down on building product; we'll update our landing page with screenshots.

Focus blocks are a must for getting focus time. Do not disturb on Slack is definitely one way to do it.

You can definitely view the feed chronologically as well. There's also notifications for things that you shouldn't miss. For the algorithm, we can use a variety of signals (post's content, relationship to author, interactions with groups and related posts) to surface posts we think are valuable for you to see first but definitely agree on the difficulty of building an one-size-fits-all solution. We're thinking through how to let users adjust their feed sorting preferences.

Thanks! We really think a key part is driving down the cost of creating high value information content. LLMs can help with removing friction in creation in many ways but also improve readability for consumption! That's a fair point on getting the algorithm right for what everyone wants. We definitely will have the ability to switch to chronological but it's important we think through other ways to sort and filter through that information.