In the past simple plain web-based text chat worked fairly well for some places I worked at, especially for smaller team rooms.
Today, everyone is using Slack, and I feel it's really killing any social chat because it tries very hard to force you to use those stupid "threads". Someone posts something in the morning and then I reply three hours later with a joke and no one will ever see that except the person who posted it because it "disappeared" in a thread thing. I know you can select "also send to whole channel", but in practice almost no one does that.
Add to that the 6 bots constantly posting stuff and it becomes even worse. Do we really need to see the CI status of every branch every time someone pushes anything?
I think building relationships over remote work is already hard, but if your tools are built to discourage it then it becomes even harder. It's not that it can't be done with e.g. Slack, it's just (even) harder.
Today, everyone is using Slack, and I feel it's really killing any social chat because it tries very hard to force you to use those stupid "threads". Someone posts something in the morning and then I reply three hours later with a joke and no one will ever see that except the person who posted it because it "disappeared" in a thread thing. I know you can select "also send to whole channel", but in practice almost no one does that.
Add to that the 6 bots constantly posting stuff and it becomes even worse. Do we really need to see the CI status of every branch every time someone pushes anything?
I think building relationships over remote work is already hard, but if your tools are built to discourage it then it becomes even harder. It's not that it can't be done with e.g. Slack, it's just (even) harder.