[shadowmint]

This is well said... although I think its unlikely to be a popular opinion with people at a personal level, but I hope the people who find themselves disagreeing take a moment to reflect on it.

While I think it's fair to say these sorts of applications do disrupt people and reduce their productivity, I'm certain that they help focus team efforts in a way that meetings just don't.

You can't split off 3 members of the team and have an important technical discussion during a meeting (or if you can, your project manager / meeting organizer isn't doing their job). You can't come back later and see exactly what it is you said that you'd do after a meeting. You can't tell a bot to create a bunch of tickets or what the current status of a system is.

If you find that your chat apps are not providing you with any value, maybe you're using them for stupid purposes like sharing funny pictures & this mornings cool tech blog post, or you're subscribed to the support channel, or your team is treating them like a social hang out space.

It's not that its a bad tool; its that you're using it wrong.

[foobarian]

I don't think funny pictures are a stupid purpose. They cheer me up and expose a different side of my coworkers, increasing morale and team cohesion. Of course they happen to be the right kind of funny pictures/links. :)

[epicide]

I think the point was: if that's all that you use it for, then of course it won't help productivity. It's like any other tool: it can be used to build or destroy.

[tomphoolery]

the question is more "do we need a bot for this" and not whether the actual action is productive

[morinted]

It doesn't help that emoji and giphy are listed as prime features in this new offering.

You're right that the applications can be used productively. I find that my work Slack is a lot less focused on being productive than the dev channels that I follow in Discord for open source projects.

The other big issue is the discussion of asynchronous versus realtime communication: https://blog.doist.com/why-were-betting-against-real-time-te...

I do find that in some Discord servers we accidentally exclude people living in different time zones, which is not as much the case with an async medium like Google Groups or other mailing lists.

[jjrh]

> If you find that your chat apps are not providing you with any value, maybe you're using them for stupid purposes like sharing funny pictures & this mornings cool tech blog post, or you're subscribed to the support channel, or your team is treating them like a social hang out space.

There is nothing wrong with doing that if it's in the right place - the off topic channel. The same is true if discussion that doesn't concern you is happening in a general channel - you tune out and don't see a message that are relevant to you.