The hierarchy there was basically a reflection of the company's browser team org chart. You could find a group for every team working on the browser where many of them were having their regular technical conversations.
I mean. It’s still very far from actually being NNTP, and it’s not decentralized like Usenet or anything like that.
But all this time I’ve been thinking of Slack as “better IRC, with images and links and threads”.
When really Slack is more like “fancy Usenet service with client that renders images and other attachments”. (Although on the protocol and server and client implementation level it is very different from NNTP.)
Well. At least we don’t have to inefficiently yEnc encode attachments nor to split attachments into a bunch of pieces with par2 files. So there’s that.