I would agree that culture is a major factor - we briefly implemented Slack a few years back at a company before I left, and I watched it drive our Senior Programmer nuts, as we didn't really have good solid rules or behavioral standards for Slack. I'm not talking about a tome of laws and regulations, but just a few simple things like "Don't spam chats with non-work related items", "Don't spam looking to get someone's attention", etc. The Senior in question was an older guy who had a lot on his plate and and a bit of a short fuse. It absolutely ended up driving him nuts as now instead of relatively quiet and ignorable chat messages, he was getting spammed and pinged by absolutely everyone at once, and those in the office with less on their plate definitely treated Slack like their own IRC channel for shitposting.
Poor support from our management in general, and a poor delineation between private channels and public channels resulted in a lot of private rants being exposed publicly (not just from the Senior), and the end result was Slack was shelved for the time being and the Senior Programmer left the company.
My new place of employment utilized a multi-tiered approach, using Skype for quicker questions (with rooms dedicated to specific topics or aspects of the work), and anything requiring more than a sentence or two of background being regulated to an internal message board system. Our management is quick to shut down too much spam, and everyone in general is taught about the expected etiquete of the chat.
Without such precautions, I think it's too easy to fall into the more casual "shitposting" that is common for message boards and the chatrooms of old. Workplace chats are meant for very narrow and specific purposes, and it needs to be enforced that these are not the places to be spamming the latest gif you found on reddit/imgur.
I think giphy integration is a huge mistake for Slack. I used Flowdock at my last job and it didn't really have the problems people tend to talk about wrt Slack. We also had separate channels for separate teams, so it wasn't one big free for all.
Poor support from our management in general, and a poor delineation between private channels and public channels resulted in a lot of private rants being exposed publicly (not just from the Senior), and the end result was Slack was shelved for the time being and the Senior Programmer left the company.
My new place of employment utilized a multi-tiered approach, using Skype for quicker questions (with rooms dedicated to specific topics or aspects of the work), and anything requiring more than a sentence or two of background being regulated to an internal message board system. Our management is quick to shut down too much spam, and everyone in general is taught about the expected etiquete of the chat.
Without such precautions, I think it's too easy to fall into the more casual "shitposting" that is common for message boards and the chatrooms of old. Workplace chats are meant for very narrow and specific purposes, and it needs to be enforced that these are not the places to be spamming the latest gif you found on reddit/imgur.