Chat-first team communication is a mess.
People constantly talk over one another, topics get mixed up, and it’s impossible to have a long-running async conversation. When a thread disappears from view, it’s functionally out of sight and out of mind…forever. Chat affords fast, short responses — small text input, small ideas.
I believe this is what people mean when they say they’re burned out on Slack — it creates a profound sense of FOMO because conversations are only relevant as they’re happening. Old threads are hard to find, awkward to engage with over long periods, and rarely give anyone a sense of resolution.
Similarly, I’ve seen dozens of teams that try to shoehorn project conversations into docs. But document-first tools like Notion and Google Docs don’t have an easy way to visualize chronological progress. They force teams to constantly check individual documents or send manual reminders to draw someone’s attention to a new update.
Posts are the sweet spot between chat and docs — a better default for team communication.
Nearly all of our team’s communication happens in posts on Campsite. We see chat, docs, and calls as a helpful escape hatch but not a desirable default for most conversations.
Posts encourage people to share complete thoughts.
A chat input encourages sending bursts of short messages that, in aggregate, add up to a complete thought. People often abuse this to think out loud, correcting earlier messages or adding clarification as they go. The start-and-stop stuttering of a typing indicator keeps everyone else distracted while one person tries to form an idea.
Posts are different. A post can be composed in isolation without the chance of someone else’s message or typing indicator derailing an entire channel. The size of the text area helps, too — a bit of extra space is a visual reminder that it’s okay to write more.
Posts are self-documenting.
When people write complete thoughts, they add more context — helpful links, quotes, code snippets, and files. All replies are naturally encapsulated in the same place. In a chat-first world, it’s too easy to split a conversation between the main chat and a thread, bifurcating the conversation and making it impossible to re-read in the future.
Posts are easy to follow in a single feed.
A feed is a better way to keep track of conversations across multiple groups or projects. Instead of bouncing between dozens of channels, a feed is a single place that pushes relevant updates into view when they’re ready. Because everything in the feed is a complete thought, each new post is high signal and worthy of attention.
Posts reduce the pressure of keeping things perfectly organized.
The hierarchical nature of doc-first tools like Notion and Coda creates too much pressure to organize everything. Folders and directories are great for wikis, but terrible for following progress over time. Most project updates aren’t evergreen documents and should live outside the constraints of folders.
Posts create a calm rhythm for daily work.
In a chat-first world, every message feels important, lights up your notifications, and causes constant bouncing around channels to feel caught up. The recent Slack redesign made this worse: it feels like every new message creates three unread spaces that each need to be marked as read. This constant clicking and triaging tricks people into feeling productive when, in reality, they’re spending an unreasonable amount of time and energy chasing down tiny bite-sized messages.
Posts encourage working in the open.
In a chat-first world like Slack, every message marks a channel as unread, which means the tiniest thought any person has is an opportunity to distract everyone on the team. When posts are the default, people spend less time bouncing around unread channels, and each unread indicator is more likely to be a high-signal, information-dense update. As the signal to noise ratio improves, it encourages people to follow more people and projects to keep up with progress across their organization.