Conversation

The scarcest resource is real, engaged synchronous meeting time, whether irl, video or audio. When you want people to actually pay attention, voluntarily set aside side-channel activity options, and do the pre-read because they are actually eager to be prepared and participating.
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A minute of such time is worth as much as the individual sum of all participants’ time value. If you and I are worth $5/minute, if we do a genuine meeting, that minute is worth $20, not $10. Meeting-coin is how real wealth is mined.
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Unfortunately it’s a currency that’s abused and debased in traditional orgs. Meeting printer go brr. People hate meetings because they’re expected to show up for meetings with no incentives to make the meetings real. Negative-sum expected value. $2 instead of $20 gdp/minute.
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Getting real meetings to work is so hard, even purely social ones meant to deliver nothing more than the pleasure of company and hanging out — meetups, dates, parties — are hard to sustain after the first curiosity-satisfying instance. Most will die by instance 3.
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In comfy orgs full of bullshit work though, futile meeting tracks run by coercion chug on as zombie meetings for months or sometimes years after everybody has kinda died inside when in the meetings. The currency mined is worth negative dollars.
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A meeting track need not pay off every time, anymore than every hash mined in a blockchain has to win a block reward. But the expect reward over a reasonable horizon has to be positive. The longer people have known/trusted each other, the longer they can go hungry between “wins”
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Now that we’re all being forced to discover true value of meetings by being forced to pay a big coordination tax, we are re-examining meetings with a very skeptical eye. A zoom call is 10x costlier psychologically than an office meeting, and 100x higher than a watercooler bump-in
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Even a discord audio chat, the closest thing I’ve found to a water cooler chat is at least 3x the cost of its irl counterpart. Because even text-saying to another person who’s present in the discord, “wanna hop on a chat?” is costlier than simply starting to chat at a watercooler
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Even for extroverts it’s easier to stay asynchronous and accept lower rewards than to think harder and engineer the higher rewards to offset higher cost of an audio chat. By contrast, irl, cost of initiating chat is negative because *not* saying hello at water cooler is rude.
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Couple of late points. One: that law, forgot source, that states that communication will default to the lowest fidelity medium that will do the job. This means longest-acceptable delay texting for most things. 2d video is probably the highest fidelity.
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Oddly enough VR is likely cheaper. The one Oculus Quest meeting I’ve had so far was more fun than Zoom because you can do fun stuff with your hands Owe meet in SculptVR, a sculpture/building app)
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Second, the real cost of participation is less than full value of time because we should discount to the extent we “go dead” in a meeting by exercising fidelity-lowering options. For example, turning off video, muting mic, participating mainly in the chat channel over talking etc
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