Thanks for your response. I suppose the biggest problem I have with this approach is that its goal appears to be saving as much time as possible for the message

Thanks for your response. I suppose the biggest problem I have with this approach is that its goal appears to be saving as much time as possible for the message sender, with little regard for the time of the message receiver. Several of the message recipients will eventually need to be told "never mind, I fixed it". By employing this strategy, you need to accept that you will be interrupting at least some people for no reason, every single time, and I don't think that's fair. A problem that could potentially be solved by three people feels like it would be better suited for a public channel. Why is pinging three different people with a "hello" message better than posting "does anyone with experience in X or Y have time to help me with Z" in the developer channel?