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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

How big is your company? We have ~800 people and after about two years I’m in close to 200 channels. I don’t leave them because then I won’t be able to find messages in search for the private channels. I just throw everything into a “stale” category at the bottom of the sidebar every few months.

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Same, private channel search privilege.

Most channels should not be public but when people have fear, it is private by default, and when they have safety it is public by default.

There should be a way to leave a private channel but rejoin it at any time, so that it’s included in search results.

But then again that’s solving a problem that shouldn’t exist if there is no performance penalty from joining many channels. It doesn’t seem like there is, either. I haven’t had an issue just hiding everything under the “Stale” category.

They're all private? Why are you guys doing that?

We get security alerts when we set a channel to public. We also have 1 day retention for private chats. (Teams, not Slack, but same idea)

A 1 day retention? That seems suspiciously short and like it is intended to cover things up

Yes, it's absurd. But our industry put heavy incentive on R&D DLP.

Where I am, you need an admin to make a public channel; you cannot do it yourself.

A good number of them are. I don’t like it either. I make every new channel public.

So stupid. I could possibly see it in a giant corporation where security could be more of an issue, but at 800 people?

There’s plenty of legitimate security concerns. But that’s not the usual reason for private channels. They’re created by people with control issues. It’s just another gatekeeping mechanism and way of playing politics.

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