Slack is now a game, lets play!
/Launch EmojiManiaHQ
As the IRC vs. Slack debate rages on, the number of communities that are converging on Slack continues to grow. The more we see the more these communities will begin to compete for space on the left side of your Slack app. Mine is filling up fast..
Everything from developers, investors, freelancers, startup founders, gamers, and everyone in between are joining communities to chat with each other. There is even this awesome new social platform called Hamster Pad where you can discover and join new chat communities.
“It’s so exciting to see just how many awesome and diverse Slack communities are out there. I believe we’ve only just begun to explore chat as an alternative to social networks like Twitter and Facebook, I can’t wait to see what types of communities and chat based experiences pop up.” — Matt Schlicht (Creator of Hamster Pad)
I love that this is becoming a thing, Slack is my jam! I even got #slocks
There is one problem though, of that list of 250 communities on Hamster Pad they are all missing something! Even my “serious” community, SportTechieHQ which is included in that list, is missing something! EMOJIS! 😍
Now i’m sure that most of those communities use emojis, probably more than they should. But do they use ONLY emojis? No!
I had a thought, it might be really dumb but it could be really entertaining. What if there was a community that existed solely for communication between humans using emojis? Now just wait, hear me out. Before you completely dismiss anything I am about to say. Do I know this is really dumb? Yes. Could it be fun though? Yes.
I sent out a few emails last night after putting this together. I found a few people who were makers of emoji products on Product Hunt or people who had the word “emoji” in their twitter bio. A few of the responses I woke up to this morning sounded something like this…
“How do you communicate without words?”
😂 But most of the responses I received this morning went something like this.
Wow. I am so glad this exists troy! Thank you.
These people are visionaries, either that or they just choose not to take themselves too seriously, or both. Communicating with emojis can be done, Its not too crazy of an idea to think of emojis as a distant cousin of hieroglyphics.
It’s kind of funny to think about when 👽aliens invade earth and they are rummaging through the remains of human existence, all they will find is emojis and Kim Kardashian. Extremely unfortunate for us. You just gotta play the cards you were dealt though right? 😂Now lets get into this idiotic emoji Slack community/game we were talking about haha.
/Launch EmojimaniaHQ
Rules:
Here are the rules, these will be strictly enforced. If you break any of the rules you will be kicked out and banned from Emojimania for life!🙊 (Jk, I won’t kick you out, but follow the rules. It makes it more fun for everyone.)
⓵. Once you join the community, you must introduce yourself in the #intros channel. You guessed it though, you have to introduce yourself using only emojis. I wonder who is gonna be the 🍆 😂
⓶. All public channels must consist of emojis only. No words of any kind allowed in any public channel. If you speak words, slackbot will yell at you. 😳
This was not staged, I put together a ton of different automated slackbot responses and it just worked out this way haha. Its kind of like this…
“Many years ago, maybe 12 years ago, I was on IRC a lot, and we started a channel called #CAPSLOCK AND YOU HAD TO HAVE CAPS LOCK ON OR ELSE WE YELLED AT YOU. IT WAS FUN.” — Stuart Brent (Startup Resources)
… except for now, just like many other instances in our modern lives. The human is being replaced, the person that is yelling at you is now a robot. 🤖
Tomorrow I will tweet out a typeform and gather some funny slackbot responses from everyone and add them. Follow me on Twitter @troy_ruediger
⓷. Private channels are considered safe havens for real human words, although we still encourage the use of emojis as much as possible!
⓸. Emojis of any kind can be used in public channels, this includes pictures. BUT.. the picture has to be made of emojis. Something like this..
👆this was made with this. There are ton of other similar tools though, all kinds of custom emoji keyboards, translators, face makers, etc. Just search “emoji” on Product Hunt, or don’t, I did it for you. I was going to list a few of these but lets just say its all fair game. If its emoji then go for it, we might have to tweak the rules as we go but I think thats fair for now?
⓹. The other thing that will be allowed are links to things. FOR NOW
… one other thing, you can’t delete or edit messages so be careful. 😈
Again, these rules might have to be changed and tweaked so we will see how it goes. Other than that, feel free to add custom emojis, invite whoever you want, create private channels, GO NUTS! Slack is not only a real-time messaging, archiving, and search platform for modern teams. It is now a game, lets do it! 😜
JOIN NOW!
.. one final last thing. THIS GUY, please just go follow this guy now! 😂
Thanks to David Markovich for sharing our tweet! 😝 David runs a number of different Slack communities, Online Geniuses being one which has over two thousand members. He is also the organizer of the NY Slack Meetup. I’ll be there so if you guys are in the city, come hang out.
