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Comment by allknowingfrog | Hacker News Reader

When I have this problem, it's usually via a private Slack message. I'm happy to direct people to the appropriate channel, but there's really no good way to link to the original question, even if I wanted to be "warmer". Asking someone to copy-and-paste into an appropriate channel has always worked for me, and I'm not so sure that that isn't the best approach in general.

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This is the biggest issue I have with Slack. Often I'll have like 5 different conversations involving different people all around the same thing, and the only way to bring them all together is to start a channel which then either sits around forever or eventually gets archived and disappears. There's no way to move messages from one channel to the other to collect a history of comments, so it's not terribly useful for advancing a concern from one group to another as it collects receipts. Instead, the old thread with the old receipt dies completely and the context has to be rebuilt for every new group of people you are talking to.

I hate DMs in Slack for this and many reasons. One thing I do try is to ask people to move to a public channel unless it's a personal issue. Copy/paste their question and cc their handle.

Depending on whether it is a single message or not, Slack now allows you to embed messages from private channels or DMs and have them shown to people who don't have access to those areas.

Ya there is a simpler solution to OP's problems. Stop using an awful, slow piece of software like Slack.

Would other chat systems do it better somehow? Which ones?

I'd imagine that "system supports private messages; I cannot link to them in public channels, copy-paste is the only way to share" is pretty universal. Even IRC and ICQ operated this way.

I used Zulip at a previous job some years ago and was pretty happy with it. I honestly don't remember whether it had a better strategy for DMs in particular, but the general policy of "everything is a thread" seemed to solve a lot of problems.

Software is rarely the solution for bad process.

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