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Comment by linsomniac | Hacker News Reader

My company switched to a free slack account a couple years ago, from our own IRC server. The primary reason for the change was to get something a bit richer in abilities, and emoji reactions is something we make extensive use of. Just saying there are people out there that find these sorts of "XMPP breaking" features not only useful, but mission critical.

Would have been useful if their announcement included some of their data for reaching the conclusion, like "95% of channels use emoji reactions in more than 5% of their messages". The announcement, as it was, didn't read very well to me.

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How do you use emoji reactions in a mission-critical way?

Someone says 'about to push this potentially breaking change to a shared resource, is that ok?'. Then everyone else posts a :thumbsup:

Obviously, this could be done differently. But it's easy to do it like this and come to depend on it.

While that use case is certainly an example of a convenience, I don’t think it passes the “mission critical” bar.

I can’t think of any way that emoji reactions would be mission critical unless they are part of an API that can be used for automated execution of tasks. But maybe that sort of thing does exist?

And is that an acceptable paper trail? If you break something can you show your bosses "look, Jack thumbs-upped me on Slack!"

We typically do something similar in Hipchat - "Hey, I'm about to push to prod, any objections?" "No, go for it."

It is a perfectly adequate paper trail. It's much easier to check in a postmortem than shouting something across the desk. Like code review, because you know your approval will be recorded irrevocably, you just think it through that little bit extra before approving.

Well, you can undo your own reactions, so not 'irrevocably'.

This is what I don't get; for someone wanting to use an irc client ":thumbs-up:" is as least as good as the actual graphic. Nothing is lost. And that goes for all the built-in emojis in slack.

Now if it was :4677: it'd be a different story - without some support it'd be hard to understand the constant identifiers.

/shrug

We use it for an on the spot estimation outside of our normal grooming sessions.

I have to admit, this is the first time in my life I've ever read that someone (a company, no less) switched from one software product to another because the one they switched to had emojis. I somehow feel my life is more complete, like I checked something off my bucket list. Thanks!

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