I think this is the difference. Slack is great when you need information from other people, it's terrible when people need information from you. You, like most new hires, need a lot and have little to give. Once that balance starts to shift you'll start to feel the pain points.
I'd challenge this.
IMHO, Slack is pretty decent if one instills 3 rules in corporate culture.
#1 - No DMs. Talk about all work in an open channel. Radical transparency will also make you a better company.
#2 - Keep replies on the same topic in threads. I.e. don't use it like IRC. Conversely, don't put unrelated replies in a thread.
#3 - Post-back end solutions/resolutions. A thread should NEVER end with "I'll DM you" or "Let's talk about this offline"
If these are followed, at some point you reach critical mass, where "question someone wants to ask you" is discoverable in your history.
I think in smaller companies where people can set their egos aside, it's possible to make it work, but once you hit more than a few hundred people you're bound to have a few people who are constantly trying to prove how smart they are and they ruin it.
I've said it before, but I also feels very micromanage-y to me. Like, we're all adults, why don't you trust me to use my best judgement on Slack? No one has issues if I book 1:1 meetings, no one makes rules about who needs to be on email thread, what makes Slack different?
If the culture is bad then Slack doesn't hide it, if it's micromanagey already then Slack will exacerbate that, I agree.
The way to avoid letting those people interfere is to let me direct message the people I need to talk to. Why are you taking that away from me?
Also, I can't control everyone else in the thread. Even if I ignore the person that doesn't mean other people will. All it takes is one person engaging and it pulls the thread off topic.
It just seems weird to me... I hear people complain so often about how meetings (especially big meetings) are useless because they get off topic and it's super easy for a few loud voices to take over, but then we want radical transparency on Slack.
Also, also, I think it's funny that we're still pushing this idea of radical transparency when it turned out to be a total sham at one of the poster child companies for it ("Away"). It ended up being massively toxic and radical transparency was really just a way for management to ensure they could have an opinion on everything and leadership didn't hold themselves to the same rules. https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo...
I like #2 because it keeps the channels quieter when conversations are had within threads.
Something we've done recently is cut down the number of channels. We essentially just use #general and #random now. We're only a small company (<20 employees) so it facilitates a better information flow if everything is in the one place. One thing we also do, is if a thread contains valuable information we will transcribe this into our documentation system (currently confluence)
F.ex. at my company we have #help-{product} channels where engineers from each product team hang out and answer questions once a day or so
I guess the primary utility is roughly grouping queries and distinguishing question from general.