[arp242]

> Work appropriate chit chat and water cooler discussions - which are beneficial from a "social cohesion" standpoint for remote teams, but are generally wasted time.

I don't agree it's "wasted time"; some amount of social interaction is pretty useful for a team to work well together. Essential? Probably not. But it does tend to lubricate the process a bit.

There's also idle work-related conversation that doesn't really neatly fit in a "ticket" but is nonetheless pretty useful.

All of that being said, I think Slack is horrible for all of this as its UI forces stuff into "threads" hard which serious reduces visibility and ability to "join in" on conversations hours or days later.

[msm_]

I agree with both points. One of the things I miss from my previous job is a thriving mattermost instance with channels full of jokes mixed with technical (but not necessarily work-related) info. It really brought the team together and I believe it had many indirect positive productivity effects.

For some reason I never saw this magic replicated with Slack.