
How We’re Designing Channels - lainon
https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/12/04/designing-channels/
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lastofus
Here's to hoping they change the name from Channels as to not overload the
name even more w/ all the existing web socket/buffer implementations out there
(e.g. web socket channels for Django or Elixir, buffer channels in Go or
Clojure core.async)

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mintplant
My first guess was a group chat service, segregated by programming topics.
"Channels" suggests realtime flows of information; something like "Silos"
would more closely resemble this product.

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superflyguy
Looks like another of those non-core stack exchange projects they'll scrap in
6 months when nobody bothers using it.

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nthaoe09ntaeont
I love Stack Overflow, but what exactly is the point of this? It seems like
they're trying to implement Slack, which itself is a fairly terrible idea.
What problem does this solve that isn't already solved by others?

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notnarb
They have a whole blog post on the 'why'

[https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/11/09/why-
channels/](https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/11/09/why-channels/)

> For example, when developers need to ask their teammates questions, they
> tend to default to the tools that they’re already using daily: namely, chat
> and email. But those tools have their own problems. Chat is ephemeral and
> tough to search, and email is inherently limited to the people included or
> copied in. Both tools put a lot of strain on the few developers at a company
> who know the answer to a given question, and neither method excels at
> storage and recall.

