Ask HN: Having 1-on-1 discussions in public channels on Slack? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Having 1-on-1 discussions in public channels on Slack?

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My partner and I run a SAAS with a small team of 5-10 people. Over 99% of our communication takes the form of direct messages. Public channels are almost never used.

Has anyone ever tried encouraging people to have 1-on-1 discussions in public channels, so that everyone can be aware of what is going on in the entire company?

We wouldn't necessarily want people to involve themselves with every single discussion, as slack and chat in general is a huge time waste, but I think the idea could improve group cohesion and also prevent my partner and I from independently providing conflicting instructions to our team.

Anyone have any thoughts or experiences?

I personally like seeing the discussion in a public company channel and just set the culture so people know they are not required to join unless asked (but it keeps everyone on the same page). Just set some expectations around public conversations so people are on the same page. People can/will still have 1 on 1's outside the public channels when discussing a specific task etc, which is fine.

In the end though, this only scales so far, and then having specific channels for specific types of discussions and limiting the membership to those channels is important. e.g. business/marketing doesn't care about development except for timelines, so exclude them from dev channels etc. But for 5-10 people, you aren't at this point yet.

i would find this annoying. Sure it depends on how exactly you use slack, but when i am in a channel i am there because it is relevant to my interests/tasks and when i get a new message i expect it to be relevant as well. Having unrelated messages popup would be the real time waster, because i still have to parse them to make sure they are not again relevant to me.

We've used "task force" channels tho for specific problems that got semi open discussed in documented in these channels.

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