People will try their best to be professional in work chat, they comment on ideas, share their thoughts about someone else work, and so on. But it's chat, I mean, it's CHAT! We all know that chat culture built up from the AOL era (or Yahoo in Asia..). One of a sudden, someone will have a casual comment about it, and then someone else, and then the whole group became casual. And then of course, there is the whole thing of scrolling back to get the context of what people are discussing.

Then teams make rules in chat for things to be in order. But well, if you can make people function strictly in chat, why don't just force them to a video meeting?

During the last month, this the only use case I have for group chat: "Let's lunch"

There's very little productive going on in those group chats. Far more socializing than anything else. Memes in particular abound. And the interruptions are constant, driving my productivity to a fraction of what it should be otherwise.

Really, email was great, and 10 years of freelancing taught me to be a very good communicator on email (maybe even over communicating).

Now all that is ruined, and I'm trying (unsuccessfully so far) to bootstrap a software company so I'll no longer have to spend my days chatting about trivial matters on Slack when I have work to do.

For work not so much.

The only time a group chat worked was on a low budget film set where I worked as a camera operator, because people only wrote something there when they needed sth.

Is that true to you and your team as well? What are your team interactions like?

The thing is, as I've seen in this, group chat has a "cuteness" to it. Just like IRC back in the day (or today depending on if you still use it), people are much less formal in group chat and there seems to be less expectation of formality. There is cat pictures and funny emoticons. This isn't a tool challenge; both email and group chat can be equally informal and cute. I contend that email /still/ is a better mechanism given the non-realtime nature of it.

But then again, the realtime nature of group chat is what some like. It's precisely what I don't like. I like 1-1 chat quite a bit, though I very quickly default to video in these cases as well (higher fidelity, quicker, less prone to written miscommunication).

Hipchat/Slack/IRC are great for some use cases that require the type of communication (specifically I think of operations, incidents or things along those lines). I feel other general team communication in these mechanisms is, well, overblown. My gut tells me PRs are better for much of what group chat serves, and if not PRs, email/ML are still great. And don't forget getting everyone into a room or video hangout.

I don't particularly like email, but I don't hate it either. I do, however, very much dislike group chat.

Is that true to you and your team as well? What are your team interactions like?

Chat works for a lot of things but I've never found it to be that great for socialising. Again, I suppose this is atypical now, but I always prefer in person meetings or phone calls and probably always will.

Voice chat is probably better but since that usually precludes being part of a text chat in the first place, I haven't had a chance to try.

Teams channels are for topic specific content and comments that will likely need to be tracked/re-referenced down the line.

The sole exception is the water cooler meeting channel that is just a channel to host that meeting.

Overall teams is awful for searching though.