FYI, Mike Rowe has been financially backed by the Koch brothers, and is a known right-wing commentator. Obviously this is ad hominem, but not necessarily a fallacious one: Context and financial incentives are important, after all.
Being added to the black list makes it harder to do almost everything (including making money), which then means it is very hard to get off the black list. Because of that, I'm not a fan of this system.
| If this were an information architecture problem, it would have been solved already by Slack itself.
That is a strange/dangerous position to take. You seem to be saying that this one company's current implementation of mostly text chat is the best possible way to communicate.
| If you have a noise problem is because you have a system that pushes information to its users faster than they can consume it
I also disagree slightly here. Users don't need to consume all information that they have access to. It's okay to dismiss notifications without reading their content, if you can determine it's noise for you. But the problem with channels/room-focused chat services is that they tend to have a few fixed number of channels, and users have to scan/read through content to determine if there's any signal in there.
To me, that seems to be the core differentiator of Zulip. For example if I've been gone for a few hours or few days, I can quickly see that I can dismiss conversations in streams like Dev/lunch-ideas, but I might choose to read up on Dev/prod-outages. In most/current chat services, all that conversation would be mixed up in the same room/chat history.
EDIT:
Another way to think about it is that people have conversations, but most chat services only gives you rooms. People generally only care about some of the conversations that takes place in some of the rooms, so low signal to noise ratio. Most chat services leaves it to the user to deal with that, eg make a new room per new conversation. Zulip offers another, perhaps more user-friendly way.
