[brimble]

I've seen internal Facebook-alikes a couple places and they've been gross LinkedIn-tone places taken over by HR and managers doing rah-rah-let's-go-we're-so-great stuff and a few workers trying to kiss ass. What about Facebook's kept it from being that? Broader culture, or was there some enforcement of it?

(plus, and this is just a me-problem, I find them impossibly confusing because they ape Facebook's UI, which I find so hard to understand that my one attempt to use it for about a month c. 2010 was nothing but frustration and wondering how the hell normal people manage to use it)

[yuliyp]

The biggest thing about Facebook's Workplace instance is that it's actually used by everyone, so while there will be the HR and manager posts, there are also all of the incident discussions, feature discussions, investigations, etc in there as well. With teams having the power to create their own (potentially private) groups to manage their own communication too, it meant that a lot of the content was useful.

[e2021]

Good question, and I don't know the answer, because I've never seen the alternatives. In WP anyone can create a group, and make it private, so you can just make a private group for a bunch of engineers to work on some project with no pressure to be 'performative' for the rest of the company. Basically its a replacement for email distribution lists, but with many advantages over plain email.