I have never heard of react vs respond. I wonder if you could explain a bit of what it means?
Reaction:: Since our boss has posted it and you don't want to be seemed a second rung player and the one who is NOT on her/his toes, you jump on the keyboard and first "Like/Thumbs Up" that post and then comment for the heck of it, something like "Wow", Amazing", "Insightful".
Then you look over your back ie, to see how many others have commented before you, and if you hardly see any, then you pat yourself on the back and consider the day to have been well spent.
Response:: You read the article once and decide whether it concerns you or to be discarded. If it concerns you, you read it once more, may be twice and take relevant notes. Then you decide, whether you should discuss this over an email to your boss, or a personal meeting would be more appropriate.
And thus, you draft an email or ask for 10 mins of private time with your boss.
Slack has its pros and cons, but these are largely the same pros and cons as any instant group communication platform. If one is depending on Slack too heavily for non work-related content then they have separate issues that need dealing with.
If you want reasoned discussion, there should be an ask from the boss on the channel-toss even if it is a @TheRealmccoy call-out on the posting.
At hindsight, if you look at a Slack channel, so much information would be found redundant.
It is there just because it is so easy to put out there, because of the intrinsic nature of the medium, and it is so because, most of it is reaction.
Like, oh this is nice, let's put it out on Slack.
While writing an email,when the communication is being initiated, there is sufficient pause built in the system, to let one ponder, is this really worth it?
Email is not fool proof either of this syndrome, but far better.
What prevents redundancy is searchability. Most email clients are great for that, but Slack's searchability is inherently better than email - if you're not part of a channel (because you weren't on the team at that point), posts can be searched once you do gain access to the channel.
Emails between other team-members excluding you cannot since you will never have access to them.
There are so many times I just link back to a previous answer on the topic and just h/t the original poster. Takes a moment, but is far more definitive.
If they are just trawling for likes and noticing who posts something first, I will find a new boss.
might just be our culture though, there's aren't really any "jockeying for position" situations.
Slack is for small teams which have a lot of shared context
Maybe this is common in startups or in teams where the manager expects to be friends with their engineers. I suppose I've been fortunate to never be put in the situation where chatting with the boss overrode doing solid work.
If my boss was sharing content and then my coworkers were "looking over their backs" to see who liked something first or liked something with enough enthusiasm, I feel like a lot of other things would also be wrong with that work environment to make people behave that way.
Our boss actually uses e-mail for this purpose, which I find much more appropriate because it matches the "if you have time" bit better than Slack.
On Email always worked like, it was email, for those it mattered, they responded and rest carried on with their work.