My former employer did this until the most popular person and post was the one who complained about the lack of COLA raises after the CEO received a ten million dollar bonus. They tried hard to squash the whole discussion without being heavy handed but that failed miserably so they eventually told everyone to shut up and deleted the post. They've since changed the social media platform to something that allows them to approve all posts before they're seen by anyone else. I'm told now no one bothers to use it except HR and senior management for making announcement.

And any Slack interaction you do have is incentivised to be a fake (or at least shallow) happy-clappy karma-driven demonstration of Core Values and Team Spirit.

> So basically, companies are supposed to reward people for being gregarious/outgoing/funny/popular on Slack, rather than for getting their work done?

I just took a quick glance at their page, but don't see this, can you be more specific?

The example they give is rewarding a specific individual and rewarding a whole channel. As someone who like to quietly get things done, I have multiple time helped people around me and I'm pretty sure that active or not on the Slack, many of them would have given me the reward. A project channel contains people related to a project, them being active or not on that channel wouldn't affect the reward.

We use this at work and don't have any of the issues you are talking about. The only time I've seen the karma bot used is when an individual goes above and beyond for another individual. I have yet to see any other use of it, such as what you described. We are a remote-ish team (we have people in a centralized office but also have workers throughout the country) and all of our communications go through Slack. The use of karma bot for our department is to recognize hard work to all, even those who aren't in the office.