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Comment by senko | Hacker News Reader

I fail to see how this is different from a general off-topic chat channel which you're not expected to follow (but can peek at on downtime or while waiting for Claude Code).

While that doesn't scale for large companies, for 2-10 (mentioned in the article) it's better than 2-10 such channels you need to keep track of.

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“while waiting for Claude Code” is the new “compiling” innit

Yeah, encouraging using and engaging in a single off topic channel would create far less overhead on all but the smallest teams

In practice 2-10 individual channels with 1-3 posts per week has less overhead than one off-topic channel with 30 posts because there's less mystery meat. It reduces the "am I missing something important?" feeling.

We do also have an off-topic channel but on our team the individual rambling channels get more posts. Maybe because it's less likely to derail an existing conversation and allows more continuity with each person's thoughts.

> Maybe because it's less likely to derail an existing conversation and allows more continuity with each person's thoughts.

That's a good point.

I think threads would help here (always reply to a thread), but enforcing this consistently can be a chore (on all parties).

That's what #general on slack is for, mostly?

#random

It depends, #general isn’t necessarily declared to be only used for off-topic content. It can serve as an official channel that everyone is obligated to read.

In my experience some orgs use it as all-hands (with #random for chitchat), others as water-cooler.

As long as everyone agrees on the usage (usually set from the top), anything's fine.

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