- 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.
Perhaps, but this can be hard to insure. Short form messaging tends to lead to a situation where everyone is in perfect agreement but no one knows that everyone has agreed to something different. Eventually someone has to write up an email with their long form understanding of what was agreed to.
It took maybe two weeks since this person became active on the channel for private conversations to start popping up.
I do strongly agree with the main premise that open is better than closed. This requires organizational cultural discipline to pull off; someone needs to be pushing and training for an open approach to be used by default.
But you don’t need Slack to implement that open style.
