
We built a Slack emulator to demo our chatbot - kulesh
https://karmabot.chat/slack-emulator-for-chatbot
======
rlt
Not sure how I feel about the product itself. Giving "karma" to your coworkers
and having a leaderboard feels a bit Black Mirror Nosedive-esque
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_\(Black_Mirror\))

Are these kinds of things actually good for corporate culture?

~~~
steve19
As a manager I find it horrifying. At its core it is the gamification of
office politics.

And must surely lead to groupthink and conformity. The consequences of
disagreeing might be at the end of the quarter a manager is looking at your
low score and wondering if you should be cut.

Any company looking to adopt this should only do so after carefully looking at
high quality peer reviewed studies on the outcomes of this kind of social
credit system.

~~~
brodo
Exactly. I bet there will be ‘upvote cartels’ where people agree to upvote
each other and downvote everyone else to get ahead. A game theoretic analysis
of this would be interesting.

~~~
amelius
Reminds me of this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_assessment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_assessment)

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kulesh
The interactive tour on our website at
[https://karmabot.chat/#demo](https://karmabot.chat/#demo) (desktop only) is
pretty cool. It looks good and can do a lot:

\- It executes bot's commands

\- Emulates Slack interface with channels, conversations and all

\- Generates dummy data on the spot

\- Supports multiple languages

Sharing a semi-long read with some code bits. Please feel free to ask any
questions. Thanks!

P.S.: Got Mictrosoft Teams demo too:
[http://karmabot.chat/ms/#demo](http://karmabot.chat/ms/#demo)

~~~
minikomi
It doesn't escape input from the user.

~~~
kulesh
Will check on that, thanks

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darepublic
Slack is distracting enough as it is without having to send and reply to karma
requests like this. Would negatively effect my view of a workplace employing a
bot like this

~~~
m12k
I actually had an idea for a sort of opposite slackbot: It would sit in all
channels and keep track of the messages sent by each person. Then it could
calculate how many man hours each person's messages had caused others to spend
reading them. It could give you weekly feedback, and encourage you to focus
your communication, and avoid spacing it out, but handling things in
concentrated bursts, so you don't keep re-distracting people. Maybe it could
even have weekly leaderboards with the people that managed to communicate the
least disruptively with their colleagues.

~~~
lapnitnelav
Or it could be used as yet another metric of which people are willing to spend
a bit of time to help their fellow colleagues.

It can have a huge impact and isn't something that will necessarily come up on
performance review.

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nottorp
"Thousands of business teams have ditched emails for Slack".

Really, they did? Not us, we send emails for reference stuff all the time...

~~~
autotune
Nobody has "ditched emails for Slack," and if they have that's a company I
wouldn't want to work for. You still need a way to have more permanent
personal documentation besides a wiki and the ability to send things more
securely compare to slack.

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spondyl
Whoa, always very cool to see a fellow Aucklander here on HN :)

Hmm, I'm curious to know if you would consider something like Officevibe to be
a competitor for example?

From what I understand, their Slack integration can't be configured on a team
by team level for example so it's mostly used via email where I work. As a
result, it's really easy to just overlook all of those requests for feedback
and so on as they blend in with the rest of my inbox

I presume it wouldn't quite be as Officevibe is more for anonymous (opt out)
feedback while Karmabot is focused on visible feedback it seems.

~~~
kulesh
Hey, good to see you mate. Officevibe is great for NPS kind of thing. Karma
bot is for daily casual micro-feedback, encouragement and rewards (coffee,
movie tickets, Amazon gift cards). Some of the things it does, work well for
enterprises, but don’t get that much traction in startups. On the other hand,
brick-and-mortar businesses find the idea attractive (pizza place, car-washing
and car-leasing services we’ve got). 500 teams use it for free, 98 actually
pay us to manage their karma.

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welder
That's cool, I did the same a few years ago and got an email from Slack asking
to put this green banner at the bottom saying it's not affiliated with Slack.

[https://wakatime.com/slack](https://wakatime.com/slack)

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greatjack
Finally proof that slack is a platform. Emulation????? What the heck

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diezvl
Could you please elaborate on choosing Nuxt?

~~~
kulesh
It's one of the best — robust and flexible, well-supported and regularly-
maintained – Vue-based frameworks out there.
[https://nuxtjs.org/guide](https://nuxtjs.org/guide)

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alex_baber
Seems like a perfect match for millennials!

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mei33
nice! how about discord messenger?

~~~
kulesh
Totally doable. However, in our case, not sure if anyone would pay for a bot
like ours on Discord.

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karmabot
Looking great!

~~~
kulesh
I knew you'd love it.

