Campsite is a post-first communication tool. This is a big change if you've spent the last decade using a chat-first tool like Slack to talk with your team. Post-first communication is calmer and context-rich by default. Posts encourage people to write more words, add links, and be explicit about their questions.
Sometimes, when I have questions for my team, writing the post becomes the rubber duck I needed to answer the question on my own — no post needed after all! Even in these situations, a small tweak to the post could suddenly turn it into a self-documenting artifact that the rest of the team can reference in the future.
Posts on Campsite are:
- Contextual, with complete sentences, rich text, and links.
- Visual, with support for sharing any file (great for sharing prototypes and project updates)
- Fast to acknowledge with inline reactions and comments
Despite having posts front and center, I still find myself defaulting to chat. Chat feels like I’ll get an answer faster, which is usually true because it necessarily notifies someone else. It is a distraction machine, with the upside of being slightly more efficient for the question-asker.
But I’m steadily breaking this habit.
“But posts feel too heavy…”
A common objection is that posting feels too heavy, and people won’t have time to write them. If there’s too much friction, chat no longer becomes an escape hatch; it becomes the path of least resistance.
Unfortunately, this is why tools like Slack are so noisy: the path of least resistance is the only path available.
Here’s what our post composer looks like:
We’ve worked to make this composer feel lightweight and approachable. It has powerful tools for adding context to posts, like polls, files, and tags, and supports a feature we call Feedback Requests, which lets you request input from specific people on your team (when they encounter the post, there will be a special indicator that their feedback was requested).
But those tools are minimized by default, and it’s fine just to write a few sentences and share. In my experience, this composer is lightweight enough not to feel intimidating but grows naturally as you type so that it doesn’t feel too cramped when sharing bigger ideas.
Posts are the sweet spot between chat and docs. The shape of the post composer affords adding a bit more context, writing complete sentences, and thinking async-first. It guides people to be just the smallest bit more mindful when sharing with their team, and that tiny bit extra makes all the difference.
We aren’t anti-chat
Chat is still important for greasing the wheels of everyday team communication, like asking quick questions and sharing minor updates. It is an outlet for off-topic conversation with peers — necessary for building team culture, especially for remote or hybrid teams.
Here’s a great example of when chat is the perfect tool: we started our team call this morning, but Ryan was a minute behind and let everyone know with a chat message. This wouldn’t have made sense as a post, but chat was the perfect escape hatch.
After the call, we shared the recording + summary into a post to capture our decisions for everyone who wasn’t able to join, and for our own future reference:
Not posts vs. chat — it’s posts and chat
Posts vs. chat is a false choice — every team needs both. To go even further, we built calls and notes into Campsite because we believe all four mediums are necessary to accommodate the full range of daily communication.
So not only is it important to choose a team communication tool that affords this flexibility, but the tool should also guide people to use the right communication method for the task at hand, not the easiest one. Because 90% of the time, chat will be the easiest method. And when chat is the easiest method, suddenly anyone has the power to distract everyone.
