Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?

Make conversations public by default. If you use Slack, make team channels, project channels, announcement channels etc. all public. Discourage 1:1 and private communication unless really necessary, especially for engineering topics. This single change will have an immense impact on overall company culture.

Teams badly fucks this up by not providing normal-ass chats that aren't private ephemeral-ish groups. Their "teams" only have these weird announcement-oriented chats with terrible UX and visibility for ordinary chat activity, so you end up having to do everything in meeting-tied chats (created by the meeting, not the other way around) or ad-hoc group chats.

You can fake it with lots of manual "pinning" but that relies on everyone agreeing which chats are primary and should be pinned so they don't start splitting messages over other chat rooms, then you still end up with things like chat for one basic topic being split across multiple meeting-chats that all have the same membership or (worse) just slightly different membership.

It's as if they designed the tool to make effective remote work hard—but this also (like most things that make remote work worse) makes using it in an in-office context worse. It's just flat-out bad.