I suspect OP was making fun of the open office fad where interrupting my debugging flow by hearing the finance clerks arguing about workload when posting accounts receivable forms or whatever will magically make my code 100x better. Or if I stand up and read from the book of Knuth on the topic of the evils of the bubblesort, that will motivate the salespeople to sell sell sell. Or at those open offices that are as quiet as libraries used to be, the off the charts sarcasm level displays that nobody works together with anyone at all, which is kinda sad and sterile working environment.

At a large company I worked at they tried discussion software but once the shine was gone, out of 150K people you'd have like 10 people who actually posted and on this web discussion board thingy and the content was all filler. Sometimes funny filler, but filler none the less. Imagine the sadness of a HN with only 10 participants.