Perhaps it’s just because I got used to it, but I do miss Workplace a lot - mostly for allowing me to easily stay on top of what’s interesting to me.
* Workplace made it really easy to be on top of what’s happening in the company, and in what it thinks you’ll be interested in. The algorithmic feed was super helpful.
* I was able to follow along with what’s happening overall in the company and all the interesting to me info just with a few minutes at beginning of each day scrolling my Workplace feed. Now, with Slack / gdocs / emails, I would need to read all updates in hundreds of different Slack channels and figure out myself what’s relevant.
* Google Docs - super hard to find anything, or even know if it exists since everyone applies restrictive sharing options. With Workplace, I would write a post in the relevant group - easily searchable by everyone (and discoverable by being ranked on Workplace).
Slack is good at synchronous communication, it’s a substitute for Workplace Chat.
Where I’m at now there is nothing similar to Workplace, which is great at asynchronous communication. On Slack content scrolls up the page and loses its engagement quickly. Also if someone does make a post that gets super high engagement in a channel I don’t regularly check, nothing will surface that post to me.
On the other hand, Slack is a simple communication tool where I can asynchronously coordinate with whatever team I need to get in touch with, it's exactly what I had asked for years at companies I worked for in decades prior to Slack: a well made IRC-like interface. It just works, with all its flaws and performance issues, it's still valuable. Workplace on the other hand is not valuable at all, it could disappear from the company stack of tools and I would never bat an eye. And I work for a global company, much smaller in size than Meta but definitely one that you either heard about or use our products.