[ctvo]

Agreed. It takes effort to establish a culture where people work openly through Slack. The path of least resistance is to message someone privately with a question. Two obvious reasons:

- It reduces embarrassment from looking ignorant, uninformed or in a negative light to your peers. "How could you not have known that?!". This is worse when the channel has anyone in the power hierarchy that's above you.

- It gets a more immediate response. Ask publicly and the chance someone answers is lower than asking directly to a subject matter expert.

So at a systemic level, because we're humans, Slack defaults to being pools of private knowledge or private conversations. There's nothing in the tool itself that encourages open communication. It takes leadership and effort to establish a culture where people feel safe asking things in the open, and it's a default.

[ritmatter]

It's definitely possible that in my post I conflate openness coming from Slack vs coming from my company's culture. Maybe the openness I'm describing would persist with many different apps, as long as the company fosters that culture.