The worst part for me is "unread message" indicators. I'm the type of person that cannot bear having such an indicator or notification left unread/unopened. I s

The worst part for me is "unread message" indicators. I'm the type of person that cannot bear having such an indicator or notification left unread/unopened. I see a dot on a channel and I generally have more internal need to remove the dot than I do any need to read what happened. I know I can disable notifications with some reasonable amount of granularity, but all this does is cause me to miss things that I actually did want to read, or cause me to cycle through every channel to catch up. At least with a single channel I can mentally filter what I don't care about, and as long as the unread message notifier is gone I can do this fairly quickly. I agree with everything in the article, but want to add that I believe a single channel also builds a greater sense of community at a small scale (dozens of users, not hundreds or thousands - see also Dunbar's number [0]). As the author suggests, this removes the issue of conversations splitting unnaturally into subject-appropriate sub channels. I have often seen discussion completely squashed for veering from a topic appropriate to, say, #movies, to the soundtrack of the movie ("this belongs in #ost"). I think one of the main things against having a single channel is the potential signal to noise concern, where a significant number of things simply aren't worth reading. I don't have an answer this other than keep your group small and intimate enough that what they say is relevant simply because it's said by somebody who matters to you (again see [0]). On a related note, being able to train yourself how to filter out the noise is a very useful skill, and I recommend using 4chan to develop this skill... if you have thick enough skin and fortitude of mind, that is. Don't try that if you can't follow Tyler The Creator's advice on cyberbullying [1]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number [1]: https://twitter.com/tylerthecreator/status/285670822264307712 https://twitter.com/tylerthecreator/status/28567082226430771...