Not the parent commentator but I've been in both situations described above too. If I understand what's was written, it's that if you don't have the option of group/team chat rooms in the software you're using then, it forces 1:1 chat conversations instead. I believe GP is then describing how the dynamics are different in a group-level broadcast of information, versus a one on one chat.
I think that’s a distinct problem from the one the article describes; the article seems to be written about mostly one on one communication. Group conversations change the dynamics massively, even moreso when the conversation must be productive, as opposed to just enjoyable.
To me teams appears that only one person can be heard talking at a time (bit hard to describe, someone can interrupt but it seems like there's some kind of limitation as to who is being heard). On the other hand on Google meet I noticed that conversation sounds closer to a normal meeting.
> I think the reason chat applications like Discord or Slack, are usually a clusterfuck, is because the people using them are not used to have an organized conversation.
But those same people deal just fine in a group of 20 friends at a bar, where they naturally break out into several distinct conversations with the people close by, and move to be closer to other people if they want to bet part of a different conversation. Discord/Slack/et al. force everybody to be "that guy" who shouts across half a dozen people to join in a conversation at the other end of the table.
There have been a few projects I've seen where people are trying to do video chat in virtual 3d spaces with sound localisation based on your avatars proximity to other users, which I think is an interesting approach, but I don't have any ideas about how to make that "localisation" thing work in a text chat context, apart from the not very useful "exploding number of slack channels" solution...
In a chunk of my friend groups - "ephemeral Signal chats with disappearing messages set to 1 hour or 1 day" gets used fairly successfully, where a side conversation can be taken out of the "main group chat" with the intention of it _not_ becoming an ongoing new group chat. It's still way more friction than turning round on a bar still and joining the conversation on the other side though...
> that's no different than just being in multiple calls but just swapping between them
Its very different.
Lets log into Discord. We see Alice, Bob, and Charlie are in Room A. Domingo and Ed are in Room B. Francine, Greg, and Hoarice are in Room C. To swap between these three conversations, we just double click on one room or the next. We're instantly swapped between these calls.
Lets say your group of friends has three different calls going on in Skype. How do you quickly see who is talking to who? How do you quickly hop from one conversation to the other? Like in Teams, if a few people are in a call together, how do I know? Sure, I can see Alice and Bob are in a call, but how do I know they're in the same call? How do I know that Charlie is also in there? How do I join their call in progress if not a scheduled meeting? If I'm in the call wtih Alice, Bob, and Charlie, how do I know that Domingo and Ed are talking about the topic of Room B?
The ergonomics of the "call/meeting" versus "room/channel" is vastly different. They both very much have their place, but they're not interchangeable. Forks are good for eating, but it turns out spoons are useful too.
I think we've gotten better at compartmentalizing our conversations. When IRC and AOL chatrooms were big, the idea of online communication was fairly new. Nowadays, most people can handle the concept of asynchronous chatting with ease-- being able to follow multiple, non-real time (in the sense that you aren't forced to listen to the person at that moment in time-- a chat line can be read instantly, or when you're done with what you're doing) conversations at the same time.
To that end, most people don't even think about having group chats. They compartmentalize what they're doing into single units of required information, and then go to each person they need that unit from individually. Let's say you're having a party at Bob's place, Jill is bringing the food, and then you're meeting at the movie theatre at 6 beforehand. It's almost an ingrained reflex to converse with Bob in one chat window about cleaning up beforehand, while talking with Jill in window 2 about how many peppers to use, all while telling Alice and Eve to hold on while you hammer plans out in windows 3 and 4.
And the thing is, while this seems inefficient, from the side of who needs to know what, it's actually simplified. Bob doesn't need to know what kind of peppers are going to be in the food in order to take care of what he's doing. Neither does Jill need to know the details of which cleaning crew is going to be at Bob's before the party. And all Alice and Eve want to know is which movie theatre it is and how late the party's going til. For the most part, 1-to-1 communication does what we need it to without being overwhelming (as the chat window would end up being if we had Alice, Bob, Eve, and Jill with us in the same IRC channel).
Which isn't to say there aren't situations wherein having groups of people are useful. But those are generally defined as "meetings", and there's both explicit and unsaid rules that usually pertain to such things-- there's a point to the meeting, an agreement to not speak over each other, a meeting leader that has a syllabus to follow. You're not going to have 3 separate conversations going on where 2-3 people of the 10 at the table are talking across the table to each other during the meeting. And any meeting that doesn't have this sort of order imposed on it ends up being a waste of time, because no information gets passed on and nothing gets resolved. All you end up with is a mass of chaos wherein you have to tease bits of meaningful conversation out in a process roughly equivalent to trying to get a pair of headphones out of a ball of wire that's been sitting at the bottom of a desk drawer for a couple years.
tl;dr: I don't think it's a software issue so much as it is a wetware issue-- meaningful unstructured communication gets exponentially more difficult when more people are involved.
The 'solely online' group chat really doesn't seem to be the norm for all but a very specific demographic. It's also very different from what is being discussed in the article.
> ... he's preparing to be left out of a lot of decisions ...
I struggle to see how substantive decisions can be made legitimately through group chat. How do you facilitate decision making such that it allows people to prepare and participate?
I would strengthen this statement to "use group channels unless inappropriate."
There are definitely topics that shouldn't be discussed publicly, but for everything else, I think it's best to default to using a public channel.
I can't tell you how many times people give me a bunch of details in a direct message, only to have to replay all those details when someone else is added to the conversation.
Using direct messages is also rude if you are doing so in an attempt to bypass a team's normal process for handling incoming requests.
1:1 chats have worked fairly well for me, but groups have been utter chaos with messages being delivered only to random subsets of the group and things like that.
The thing is that we prefer to communicate one to one on IM. Everyone logs into the chat server, but they don't use rooms as much. That's probably because everyone is in separate teams, and each team prefers different ways of communication.
Could also be a combination of missing social queues, lag and low quality audio. If there's a teams session with multiple people, it happens quite often, that two or more people start talking at the same time, which feels very awkward.
This is something which happens in real life, too. But it's a lot easier to alleviate without lag and strong eye contact and other body queues.
The result is, that virtual discussions are moderated by a single participant and natural conversations are simply not possible that way.
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