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Slack DMs

At the moment, I'm working in an organization where almost 80% of the Slack messages are direct messages. We have a low threshold on contacting others - in private. While it is obviously good to share information the method is not the best.

I don't need to enumerate the drawbacks of DMs compared to messages sent to public channels. The most obvious ones to me are the increase of tribal knowledge and the further reduction of us into separate silos (devs, marketing, sales, etc...).

We recognize that most of the DMs are casual conversation. Yet, these contain information gold nuggets and ideas which should be shared with everyone. We have a couple of ways how we are to stop direct messaging

  1. If someone DMs you, actively move the conversation to a suitable public channel. No need to be polite in this.
  2. Use more threads in public channels (yes, this is a bit controversial)
  3. Have channels for hobbies and chit-chat

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