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by altotrees 3211 days ago
So we have all of these chat apps. Choice is never a bad thing, but this has to be somewhat beyond saturation point, no? I don't know about anyone else, but I would rather have my work chat apps resemble social media chat apps less rather than more. Fewer Gif's, fewer emojis — they can be funny and endearing in the right context, but just feel forced and obtuse in a work setting. Also, this is coming from the makers of Confluence and Jira...I'll have to try it and see it in person before forming a true opinion, but not holding out too much hope.
5 comments

  Fewer Gif's, fewer emojis — they can be 
  funny and endearing in the right context, 
  but just feel forced and obtuse in a work 
  setting.
The difference in context is mostly related to the reality that all the best humor is NSFW, whether it's a GIF, an image macro, or any other meme-related content.

The emotional responses being grasped at by most workplace humor is contaminated by power differential, and practical need for a high signal-to-noise ratio so that shit actually gets done. Snappy banter is frequently an accumulation of unwanted cruft, depending on the performer and the audience.

When HR or an operations manager, or anyone else with serious authority in their hands, try their hand at anything other than Dad humor, unless they're extremely clever, and the joke is deftly crafted (usually not the case), the result is often inadvertently crass, and compounded by the Dunning-Kruger effect augmenting their awareness of how unfunny or otherwise tepid their material really is.

Work somewhere more fun.
It really is a valid point. Humour can easily be overdone.

Microsoft's Guide to Humor https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/training-and-event...

For a quick demonstration in degrees of contrast in tone deaf humor, compare Google's 2016 April Fool's prank with any of their other Easter eggs, or early Google Doodles, and you can see where the slightest variation of context pretty much ruins everything...

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/02/technology/april-fools-un...

This is the sort of thing that scares most people into tepid, mediocre Dad humor at work. Sometimes, that's a healthy fear to have, even if finding yourself burdened by such constraints is unfortunate.

FWIW, I use finch (https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Using%20Finch) as my client and it's great.

No emojis, no gifs, etc. is awesome. It gets the job done, and gets out of your way. It's not trying to focus your attention on chatting instead of doing your job.

I still really don't like having chat go to an external party, but if I have to, it makes it easier to use.

I don't use any Atlassian products, but I see the appeal of a Slack-like chat app that natively integrates with other Atlassian products - particularly for knowledge management purposes. Businesses can configure/customize Slack to do this, but it's not really intuitive.
In my experience atlassian products dont really integrate with each other any better than they do with third party products. I wouldn't expect a jira/stride workflow to be any better than a jira/slack workflow.
I see the appeal of a Slack-like chat app that natively integrates with other Atlassian products

In which way? I often see this touted as a benefit, and rarely see it work effectively, or productively.

Try out eul:

https://eul.im

It'a native desktop client built for professionals with a focus on performance. It supports Slack, Skype, Gmail, and will soon support Stride as well.

> Fewer Gif's

My team often uses gifs to document and demonstrate workflows in UIs. It's easier to consume than a series of screenshots, albeit harder to maintain.

The comment is referring to meme gifs. Your use case obviously makes a lot of sense.