I spent a good chunk of time recently doing something that most people would find deeply boring: analysing Slack channels. Not reading them casually, the way you skim a thread while waiting for the kettle to boil. Actually analysing them. Pulling out the data. Looking at what gets shared, what gets reactions, what gets ignored. Looking at when people post, how often, and what patterns emerge over weeks and months.
It started as a side project - one of those things I built because I could, because Claude Code made it possible and because I was curious. But what I found was genuinely surprising. Slack channels, it turns out, are one of the most honest data sets available about what people actually care about. Not what they say they care about in meetings. Not what they put in their annual reviews. What they actually spend their attention on when nobody is formally watching.
And the gap between those two things is enormous.
The gap between stated and revealed preferences
Economists have a useful distinction: stated preferences versus revealed preferences. Stated preferences are what people say they want. Revealed preferences are what their behaviour shows they actually want. In surveys, people say they eat healthily and read serious literature. In reality, they order takeaway and scroll TikTok. Neither version is wrong, exactly, but the revealed version is more honest.
Slack channels are a goldmine of revealed preferences. When someone drops a link into a channel, they're telling you something about what caught their attention that day. Not what they think should catch their attention. Not what they want you to think catches their attention. What actually made them stop scrolling, copy a URL, switch to Slack, find the right channel, and paste it. That's a meaningful act. That link passed a real filter.
When I started mapping the patterns in the channels I had access to, I found things that no amount of surveying or interviewing would have revealed. The culture channel that was supposedly about advertising and brands was actually, by volume, more about food and restaurants. The tech channel spent more time on design tools than on actual technology news. The strategy channel - and this is the one that really got me - was obsessed with career content. Not business strategy. Career moves, job changes, who went where. The channel name said strategy. The behaviour said people tracking their own industry like a stock ticker.
The four people who matter
Here's something else the data revealed: every Slack channel has roughly four power sharers. Four people who account for the vast majority of posted links. Everyone else is a lurker. Not a passive lurker necessarily - they react, they occasionally comment, they clearly read the content - but they don't share. The active surface area of any given channel is remarkably small.
This matters because it means the culture of a Slack channel isn't democratic. It is editorial. Those four people are, whether they know it or not, the editors of a publication. Their taste, their interests, their browsing habits are shaping what fifty or a hundred other people see and think about. It's a magazine with four editors and a captive readership.
I found this fascinating because it mirrors what I know about culture more broadly. Culture isn't created by the majority. It's created by a small number of people with strong taste and the willingness to share it, and then adopted by everyone else. The Slack channel is a microcosm of exactly this dynamic. The sharers shape the channel. The lurkers absorb it.
What the reactions tell you
Links get shared, but reactions tell a different and equally interesting story. Not all content that gets shared gets reacted to. The most shared content is often industry news - announcements, product launches, company changes. It gets posted because it feels important. But the most reacted-to content is usually something else entirely. It's usually something funny, something outrageous, something that provokes an emotional response rather than an informational one.
The ratio of shares to reactions tells you something about the emotional temperature of a channel. High shares, low reactions: the channel is functional. People are using it as a news feed. High reactions, low shares: the channel is social. People are using it as a group chat that happens to centre around a topic. The best channels, the ones that feel alive, have both. Content that matters and emotional engagement with that content.
I noticed something else about reactions that I hadn't expected. The emoji people choose is remarkably consistent. Each channel develops its own reaction vocabulary. One channel I looked at used the fire emoji for almost everything positive. Another used a specific obscure emoji that had become an inside joke. The reaction patterns are as much a part of the channel's culture as the content itself. They're the audience speaking back to the editors.
Timing reveals priorities
When people share is as telling as what they share. Morning shares tend to be the things people found the night before or first thing that day - the overnight accumulation. They tend to be more considered, more substantial. Lunchtime shares are impulse posts - something caught their eye during a break. Late afternoon shares are the most interesting category. These are the procrastination posts. The things people find when they're supposed to be doing something else. And procrastination content, it turns out, is the most honest content of all, because it reveals what people would rather be thinking about than their actual work.
There's also a weekly rhythm. Monday shares are dutiful - people posting what they think they should share to start the week. Friday shares are looser, more personal, more fun. The channel is a different publication on Friday afternoon than it's on Monday morning, even though the people are the same. Context shapes curation.
What this means for building products
I didn't set out to build a product from this analysis. I was just curious. But the insights changed how I think about several things I was already building. CultureTerminal, for instance, is fundamentally an automated version of what the best Slack channel sharers do manually. It surfaces the stories that matter at the intersection of topics I care about. The difference is that CultureTerminal does it with RSS feeds and algorithms, while Slack sharers do it with instinct and taste.
And honestly, I think the human version is often better. Not more comprehensive - CultureTerminal will always find more - but more interesting. Because a human sharer isn't just filtering for relevance. They're filtering for surprise, for delight, for provocation. They're asking not just "is this important?" but "will this make someone stop scrolling?" Those are different questions, and the second one is harder to automate.
The Slack analysis also reinforced something I believe about Trove, the taste engine I built. Your saved links, over time, reveal your taste. But so do your shared links in Slack. The difference is intentionality. Trove captures what you save for yourself. Slack captures what you share for others. Both are taste signals, but they're different kinds of taste. Private taste versus performed taste. What you genuinely love versus what you want to be seen loving. There's overlap, obviously, but the gap between the two is its own kind of signal.
Everyone is a curator, whether they know it or not
The biggest takeaway from the Slack analysis is one I keep coming back to: everyone in those channels is curating, even if they would never use that word. The act of choosing what to share is editorial. It is creative. It requires taste. The four power sharers in every channel are performing a role that used to require a magazine, a publication, a platform. Now it just requires a Slack channel and the instinct to know what's worth someone else's attention.
This is the democratisation of curation in its rawest form. Not mediated by algorithms, not shaped by engagement metrics, just humans sharing things they find interesting with other humans they respect. It's the internet at its best, happening inside the most mundane corporate tool imaginable.
I find something hopeful in that. In all the noise about AI and algorithms and the death of the open web, the thing that keeps working - the thing that keeps being valuable - is a person with good taste sharing something interesting. That's what a Slack channel is. That's what the whole internet used to be. And that's what the best parts of it still are.
The crystal ball isn't the technology. The crystal ball is the behaviour. Watch what people share when they think nobody is counting. That's where the truth lives.
