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Comment by user24 | Hacker News Reader

Actually, this makes me wonder why every institution doesn't have an unregulated broadcast channel like this. Seems like it's a great way to embrace community. And I bet you that, if you run it long enough, there'd be some tangible value come from it, as well as the intangible value of fun.

In physical environments, we all have 'water cooler' conversations all the time. As we move more into 100% virtuality, is there a need for a digital analogue (if you'll excuse the somewhat jarring juxtaposition of phrases there)?

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It might have some benefit somewhere along the line, but the cost of day-to-day abuse (or plain old misuse) would be far greater.

Cost-benefit analysis says no.

And this is how you miss out on the amazing things that can happen when one part of your organisation starts talking in an unscripted way to another part that it doesn't normally talk to.

Yep, I work in a small, very distributed company. We use Hipchat and specifically have a tab that contains everyone in the company for that purpose. It's good to be able to occasionally just talk shit with folks you otherwise only meet once or twice a year.

Most colleges do. When I was in college, we has a similar incident. The Bursar sent out an email to all students, one student reply-all's, and a deluge of messages followed. I thought it was pretty funny. After a day or two, the sysadmin shut of the listserv and reminded everyone of usenet-esque newsgroup that had existed for years but no one used.

Networks like these popup and are cool because they're underground of sorts. That makes them appealing and interesting.

A couple guys at my college (Claremont McKenna) were somehow able to copy all of the student web addresses into an e-mail and proceeded to market their on-campus moving company, then later that list was abused to advertise parties and people angry about their name being included on these threads...

I agree, and I thought that was one of the use cases for Yammer or some other "Facebook for companies".

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