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Comment by joewee | Hacker News Reader

The most important purpose of these exploding message capabilities is destruction of data that doesn’t need to be archived.

The primary threat is compromise of a device. Keybase allows you to revoke keys but that assumes you are aware that the device has been compromised. Which is already too late for sensitive messages.

The average user doesn’t understand data persistence, or secure destruction of data. Manafort is a good example of this. I wish apps just expired messages by default. I don’t understand why WhatsApp doesn’t have this feature.

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As a user of messaging services, I nearly never want to delete a message. I want to be able to use my digital memory extension (phone) to store messages so that I can easily recall my conversations. Rarely do I want to delete a message. In fact, I would only want to delete it if it's sensitive: I rarely message such sensitive things. Most people fall into this camp. It's rare for someone to never want any message to be kept.

Why do you want your messages deleted by default when you use one of these secure messaging clients?

Plenty of people feel exactly the opposite, and avoid using messaging services for many purposes because of it. They want the bulk of what they say to fade away, because it is ephemeral, and they don't want to worry about it forever. More and more people are aware that, even if what you say today is perfectly benign, tomorrow it may be a problem. And why create potential problems, when there is absolutely no benefit to you in putting your request to your partner to buy some eggs on the way home on a permanent record?

You might worry about not being able to find something you said. Others worry about being able to find something they said.

I personally chose my defaults appropriately, with work stuff getting archived and everything else not even getting backed up. And realistically, even the work stuff is completely useless after a couple of years; a problem I have is not finding information, but finding current, useful information.

Ephemerality is liberating. A large portion of social media use is not about exchanging information (which would be useful to persist) but about socializing. Just as you probably wouldn’t feel comfortable if every conversation you had with your friends while hanging out were recorded, a lot of users (particularly young users) feel more comfortable expressing themselves when they know with reasonable certainty that their communications are not being recorded online. Its often for sharing moments and making jokes and hanging out, not for conveying actionable information.

I deliberately don't pay for Slack because of this. The 10,000 message limit is perfect for "enough memory to be useful, not enough to be dangerous". I'd love to see it as a feature in other messaging apps (i.e. "permanently erase all messages over 6 months old")

Does Slack actually do that, though? Or just soft-deletes the older messages, hiding them from the UI? (I don't think they make a statement either way)

My understanding is that it just hides them from the UI; if you upgrade your plan, you get access to all your old messages and files that were previously "gone".

Yes this is correct. In fact even without a paid subscription you can access all files that have been added to a Slack through the web UI (myslack.slack.com/files). You can't see the related messages, but all the files (images, snippets, etc) are available as one big list.

I did not know this. Useful, thanks.

Hell, I wish messaging services made conversation much more searchable. I hate having to scroll and scroll to find some past conversation topic that maybe had interesting thoughts/links/shared media.

As far as I know, Slack and Telegram are currently the two leaders in the “searchable” area of messaging apps.

Any client with proper log files (many IRC clients, Pidgin, etc) is much better than Slack, which uses word indexing rather than full search, meaning it doesn't find the message "helloworld.com" when you search for "world".

I have never searched my message text history with the exception of trying to find images sent to me. Never content. Most companies I’ve worked at have a similar policy of not archiving text messages from internal chat. No reason to keep content, minimizing the amount of data you archive is a core element of security and risk mitigation for a number of reasons. Plenty of large organizations don’t archive employees Lync/internal chat messages for similar reasons. And from a threat perspective you don’t know ahead of time what information an attacker will find useful.

Keybase isn't making messages exploding by default. There's a button to opt in to the feature.

Sure, as a recipient I want to keep a history of everything. But as a sender, I might want sometimes to send a message with some guarantees that it will self destruct after a period of time, mission impossible style.

Because WhatsApp is done with the endeavor. The founders would have wanted this kind of feature but they've since parted ways after selling out to FB, probably because FB isn't interest in such features and privacy.

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