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Re:Slack's bait and switch by linsomniac on Monday March 12, 2018 @07:53AM (#16567540)
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.

Re:Slack's bait and switch by pavel_lishin on Monday March 12, 2018 @08:49AM (#16567794)
How do you use emoji reactions in a mission-critical way?
Re:Slack's bait and switch by root_crontab on Monday March 12, 2018 @08:57AM (#16567825)
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.

Re:Slack's bait and switch by cdubzzz on Monday March 12, 2018 @09:46AM (#16568073)
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?

Re:Slack's bait and switch by cup-of-tea on Monday March 12, 2018 @10:07AM (#16568189)
And is that an acceptable paper trail? If you break something can you show your bosses "look, Jack thumbs-upped me on Slack!"
Re:Slack's bait and switch by root_crontab on Monday March 12, 2018 @10:45AM (#16568444)
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.
Re:Slack's bait and switch by wgjordan on Monday March 12, 2018 @11:29AM (#16568771)
Well, you can undo your own reactions, so not 'irrevocably'.
Re:Slack's bait and switch by pavel_lishin on Monday March 12, 2018 @10:36AM (#16568365)
We typically do something similar in Hipchat - "Hey, I'm about to push to prod, any objections?" "No, go for it."
Re:Slack's bait and switch by e12e on Monday March 12, 2018 @04:04PM (#16571019)
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

Re:Slack's bait and switch by s73v3r_ on Monday March 12, 2018 @12:59PM (#16569509)
We use it for an on the spot estimation outside of our normal grooming sessions.
Re:Slack's bait and switch by ryandrake on Tuesday March 13, 2018 @12:46AM (#16573914)
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!