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Comment by hk__2 | Hacker News Reader

> The cynic in me says this ends up as yet another list of channels that I need to scan for anything interesting, and interact with to keep up an appearance of engagement.

The post says it’s channels you mute and you are not expected to interact with.

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That will last until the first person shares a link to their rambling channel or the first time a pair of team members discuss something at standup that only appeared in someone’s ramblings channel.

Every time a company has said “you should mute and ignore this channel” but also encourages relevant project discussion in that channel, it becomes something people realize they need to unmute and monitor.

The only people who have the luxury of completely ignoring channels are managers and leads, because they can dictate how people need to bring information to them.

But you still know they are there, and that your colleagues should perceive you as at least casually interested in what the others are up to. Even if muted, these channels inevitably become another liability.

I think everyone knows and silently understands that the people responding/emoji-ing in those channels all day every day are doing so at the cost of work output, and that there are a lot of people working that aren't typing away about the last audiobook they listened to. I think you've created a stressful situation out of something that isn't inherently stressing.

What is "inherently stressing"? Is it not enough that some people feel stressed by something for it to actually be stressing?

I know that also for me these rambling channels would add to my stress.

Generating business value is not your only responsibility, though. Most companies expect you to be a team player, to stay in touch, to communicate across departments, and so on.

So depending on your work environment, communicating and responding quickly may be implicitly expected and not conforming may lead to stagnation in your career.

Yeah. It's either channels that you actively engage with or you effectively block. For active communication purposes the "you might see it" in-between option isn't really very effective. It happens anyway to some degree. But isn't ideal.

In teams and mattermost, they show up as bold and almost unavoidable to the eye. Any other software that truly mutes?

Slack will turn them a muted colour, and they'll only get an unread indication if you're explicitly pinged by default, but I think you can turn even that off too.

Hmm ok we don’t use Slack and it would have to be on prem due to company policy

Muted channels in Slack do not indicate in any way when there's a new message.

Slack mutes fine.

Mattermost can truly mute. Doing so disables the behavior that makes the channel name bold when there are unread messages.

Just hover on a channel name, click the three dots, then "Mute".

Mattermost truly mutes.

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