Slack is ingraining emojis even deeper into your work environment whether you like it or not. Users were already able to send emojis casually while chatting, but now anyone can specifically react to messages in Slack with emojis. It’s pretty easy to get creative with this, and it’s sure to spice up the chat with your co-workers.
Slack is calling this “722 ways to say ‘I got your message’,” which is the title of the blog post making the announcement. Why limit yourself to just using a regular smiley face or a thumbs up when you have an entire library of emojis to express what you’re feeling or thinking?
If a team member in Slack wants to know if you’re interested in participating in an assignment, you can now respond with an eggplant. Just go for it, don’t hold back. It has to mean something to someone.
Practically though, it’s an extremely useful tool for quickly letting someone know that you understand the message. You can host polls in your Slack channel and have members vote with specific emojis, applaud someone for a job well done, or even add your own images to let everyone in your team start using them as emojis.
The Cult of Mac team uses Slack to communicate and things have already started to get a bit weird – or more weird than they already were anyway.
It doesn’t appear that emoji reactions are available in the mobile apps just yet, but the update is already live on the Slack web app and Mac and PC apps.