Here's to hoping they change the name from Channels as to not overload the name even more w/ all the existing web socket/buffer implementations out there (e.g. web socket channels for Django or Elixir, buffer channels in Go or Clojure core.async)

My first guess was a group chat service, segregated by programming topics. "Channels" suggests realtime flows of information; something like "Silos" would more closely resemble this product.

Looks like another of those non-core stack exchange projects they'll scrap in 6 months when nobody bothers using it.

I love Stack Overflow, but what exactly is the point of this? It seems like they're trying to implement Slack, which itself is a fairly terrible idea. What problem does this solve that isn't already solved by others?

They have a whole blog post on the 'why'

https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/11/09/why-channels/

> For example, when developers need to ask their teammates questions, they tend to default to the tools that they’re already using daily: namely, chat and email. But those tools have their own problems. Chat is ephemeral and tough to search, and email is inherently limited to the people included or copied in. Both tools put a lot of strain on the few developers at a company who know the answer to a given question, and neither method excels at storage and recall.