Note: This post was never actually published until now (2024-07-31) so some thoughts mentioned here were never fully formed or executed on.

A little while ago I was asked: 

If ZATech only started tomorrow instead of 7 years ago. What would you do differently?

It's a complex question to answer, and in one way or another something I think about quite a lot. It has also been a long time since the last post about ZATech so I'm rolling my response to that question into such an update.

To answer directly, I think Slack is not a good tool for a "community". It's fine for companies that have HR and you're interacting with colleagues or people in a very professional context. We've had to roll a bunch of our own tooling for things that are useful for a community and sometimes just go without.

I also wish that I had been much more focused on having only tech channels from the start. I'm well aware that a space to "just talk shit" is valuable to people (I was basically raised on IRC), and having it overlap with specialised/niche areas is useful for growth and convenience. But at least 99% of the pain is caused in non-tech channels. Closing politics/covid and the rise of the private channels has been a huge shift. There's a bunch of pros/cons to this shift depending on who you are, and unfortunately many very talented people have left the community. Often because they disagree with others who have outsized voices or the (non-)moderation of people/topics.

In the above images you can eyeball where politics and covid discussion was moved to private channels. For a long time I thought this was a win. Topics that were perceived to generate a disproportionate amount of conflict were now off the table. Having the existence of said private channels mostly-know (via their discussion in #private-channel-directory etc) however has created a sort of "underground" or shadow network of people who still hang around in their little cliques, occasionally popping up to disrupt the public, meme-ing about the fact that they can just hide in the shadows if they want.

We don't have any control over the existence of private channels, but going forward we're going to close the #private-channel-directory channel. If people want to self organise around private channels that's fine, but having a place to advertise what are essentially "go here to not be moderated" spaces seems very counter-intuitive.

We're also going to be leaning harder into the idea that the Slack group is intended to be a professional place, and the expectation that a user on the Slack group is a human being in the real world with an associated LinkedIn/GitHub etc.

The larger "non-tech" channels will be under the spotlight too, it doesn't make sense to draw a line that says "only tech channels can exist", but as things niche down they become more focused and less prone to issues. e.g. #cooking is useful while #random is a nightmare.

These changes may very well anger people and push them away, however if the goal is to be a professional space we have to make moves to curate that experience. The internet is a big place with many other spaces to take the noise.

Something I also think I've gotten wrong (or admins at the time) is that we don't ask people to chill out enough. I've often fought hard to not ban people and I mostly stand by this, but there's been many cases where people are just a little shit and no one says anything. I believe this has lead to a culture where a lot of things are fine to do until eventually there's a huge blow up. I wish we did many more much smaller interventions. Unfortunately it's a very time and energy consuming thing to do that no one really has capacity for when it's all volunteer work between real lives/jobs/etc.

@n1c