[zwayhowder]

The usage stats for our MS Teams instance shows this. Before COVID hardly any messages, after a massive increase as you'd expect, but private messages outnumber public messages 10:1 or more. Several times I've found out that there are multiple private chat groups all for the same P1 or Project instead of using Channels that all staff can see.

[nitrogen]

I saw the same thing with Slack stats at a company. Plotted over time, private messages started at like 10%, but eventually reached something like 80% after a couple of years.

[sevrinsky]

I've tried to convince my colleagues to use MS Teams channels instead of chat groups, to increase searchability and spontaneous joining (rather than needing to be invited). They've mostly resisted because they prefer the interface for group chats.

MS Teams makes a substantial distinction between:

- group chats, which appear like any other chat interface (Whatsapp, FB Messenger)

- and channels, which appear as potential threads to be nested (which most chatters _hate_)

MS Teams also has much greater overhead for adding members to a Team, which is a prerequisite for looping them in on a @mention within a Channel. All of these are much easier and straightforward on Slack, but you're basically stuck once your Corporate IT Overlords have selected a Product.