This is actually an explicit decision, designed to maintain consistency of the user experience across GOV.UK services in terms of information architecture and content design. It's not something that departments choose to do (or not), and is codified in the GOV.UK Service Manual: https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/get-a-domain-na...

An employee's use of a company-provided communication channel like Slack isn't covered by GDPR, but the company is liable for the content that's stored in their Slack account. Under GDPR, I, as a customer of Company X, have a right to know about and request a copy of any data stored about me by that company, which includes Slack conversations, in both open and "private" channels. GDPR also applies retroactively, so the old compliance export process wouldn't cover it.

Vaguely related: there's a great episode of the 99% Invisible podcast [1] about how two specific ice cream truck jingles are used to help deal with Taipei dealing with trash disposal.

[1] http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/separation-anxiety/

I don't agree with working like this, but I'd expect that you're generally going to get marginal gains from each extra hour worked (up to a point of exhaustion or burnout), especially in the short term, so it might make sense to have people work in this way _occasionally_. I know I've been on "work all the hours available" projects in the past, and I definitely got a lot more done than I would have just working a 40hr week, even if I did feel like cr*p at the end of it.

I think you're confusing the who the "user" is in this case. It's not Joe Bloggs out on the internet who wants to see fresh content on your site; it's you, the web developer, working on your local machine, building a web site or application.

The live-reload functionality is there as a development workflow tool, to automatically reload the page to see the results of the latest code change, rather than manually switching to the browser and hitting ⌘R/F5.

Regarding (Slack/4)... I believe that toomuchtodo is talking about the following features within Slack:

* Stars: the ability to privately star individual messages (so you can easily find them again)

* Pinning: the ability to publicly highlight specific messages within a channel, much like pinned posts in a forum (effectively channel-wide starring)

* History links: click on the timestamp next to any Slack message and it'll open a canonical URL for that message, allowing you to drop these links to specific messages or points in a conversation into other chats, GH issues or anywhere else you fancy.

I can see this being a really nice idea to use across a team, if such a thing was offered. A few use-cases / benefits:

* An agile team could use this as part of their retrospectives, and could track the data points across multiple sprints to see trends, as well as "scoring" the latest sprint.

* Sometimes an individual in a team can be quite quiet and reserved, and won't physically speak up if something's not going so well. Moving to a system like this may give them a voice.

* The levels can be tracked both by the team and by an individual's line manager to keep an eye on those people who are consistently (or increasingly) bored, frustrated, not learning, or generally unhappy.

* If this were completed every day, then it would effectively become a Niko-niko calendar[1] (although you might want to fill out just a single data point if you're doing it every day).

* Having a daily version would also work as an early-warning indicator of trouble brewing within a team or project.

[1] http://agiletrail.com/2011/09/12/how-to-track-the-teams-mood...