How my coworkers react to my Slack messages
Three years ago I switched to management. When I was a developer, I loved seeing various git stats such as lines added, files changed, etc... Now that I'm in management my job is much harder to capture quantitatively. A big part of my job is communication and one way to analyze my communication style is to look at my most commonly used tool, Slack. In a previous post, I looked at how often I use certain words in my Slack messages. This time I wanted to look at how people respond to my messages.
One of the ways to analyze my coworker's responses is to look at the reactions my messages receive. However, to gather that data it wasn't as simple as using Slack's search. Instead I had to build a small app called Reaction Count that uses Slack's APIs to iteratively query for messages that I've sent that have a reaction and then one by one gather the reactions for those messages. It was a fun project and gave me a chance to dive into code again.
After running the app for over an hour and half, waiting while it worked through Slack's rate limiting, I was able to get a list of all the reactions my messages have received. It was interesting from a data standpoint, but I didn't quite know what to make of it. It's 2025 though, which means I know longer need to think for myself. So I took the data, and plopped it into ChatGPT. Needless to say ChatGPT, a tool that's never been known for exaggerated flattery had these kind words to say:
TL;DR โ What your reactions say
- Helpful & actionโoriented. The top reactions are ๐(1,351) and โ (164) โclassic โagree/ack/looks goodโ signalsโplus ๐(362) and ๐(123) for celebrations. That pattern strongly suggests your updates are useful, clear, and often about wins/shipments.
-
People thank you a lot. โThankโyouโ themed reactions (e.g.,
,
,
) total ~728โa standout.
Thatโs a
hallmark of someone unblocking teammates and sharing knowledge.
-
High positivity, low confusion. By categorizing all reactions,
~96% of โopinionatedโ reactions (positive vs. negative) are positive;
โConcern/
Confusionโ (e.g.,
/
) and
โNegativeโ
(e.g., 
) are
small (143 total). This implies your messages are clear and
lowโdrama.
-
Announcement vibe that gets attention.
(231)
is a topโ5 reaction, often used for โheadsโup: watching/curiousโ. That matches an
announcement or status update style that people pay attention to.
- Culture carrier with lots of custom emoji. Youโve got 531 unique reactions across 5,928 totalโhuge variety with a โlong tail,โ but the top 10 still account for ~56% of all reactions. Translation: your org uses a fun emoji culture, yet people converge on a few standards for feedback.
Thanks ChatGPT!
The full reaction count
Here's all 5,928 reactions my messages have received on Slack over the 5 years I've been with H-E-B. This include all my DMs, all the messages I've sent in private channels, and the messages I've sent in public channels from the past year (H-E-B's retention policy is one year for public channels). That's 4,353 messages with reactions. For posterity, I've sent 35,758 messages in total.
