[floatingatoll]

There’s an irony / dilemma to point out here in the contrast between “spamming emotes” and “fairly serious”: both of these are a success, in a certain view.

The non-work Discord you describe now resembles how actual social interactions and friendship often work these days: mostly irrelevant interactions by volume, with a low incidence of significant conversation surrounded mostly by a lot of brief flashes of emotion shared haphazardly without much weight behind them.

The work Slack-ish you describe now resembles a professional environment, focused more effectively on doing work and less on watercooler chat.

I think that the chat platforms selected in each case are exaggerating how we behave in each situation, and that’s not necessarily a positive or negative.

IRC is wildly unproductive without extraordinarily high levels of effort invested in keeping it under control. Slack-ish work chats are wildly productive without a conscious effort to drag some degree of personal interaction into the workplace to replace what’s drained away when leaving IRC.

Is IRC truly the only way to return a bit of social coexistence to a workplace, or has culture changed in a more significant way that just happens to be reflected through the lens of chat systems?