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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I personally just want the ability to save specific messages. My friend sends me a recipe? Save. Just shooting the shit? Don't save. I don't understand why people want to save their whole chat history but I do understand why you'd want to save specific messages, and that's a big missing feature.

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I don’t always know which are important messages until a while later. Someone mentions a useful service or name, so I search WhatsApp to find it. Moved phones recently, iOS backup was screwed up, and I lost some great covid memes and was looking for a specific one. Had to ask the sender to resend it to me.

The idea is to save all messages and have a good search option, so you'll only ever see the good posts when looking back into your history. No need to tag them beforehand.

Honestly I don't want all messages saved. I don't see that as useful. Not only is that noise but just makes me feel uncomfortable in the same way I would if someone pulled out a tape recorder while we were shooting the shit over beers. Then you think about how cultures change and people make a fuss over things from years ago on Twitter even when the person has changed opinions? No thanks. Not everything needs to be recorded. That's the premise of too many dystopian sci-fi stories.

You can simply keep those messages in an encrypted backup. Who knows how valuable they will be in 20+ years. And maybe you will be able to apply (local) AI to them and find out interesting things about yourself.

s/specific messages/& and conversations/

> I don't understand why people want to save their whole chat history

Valuable messages and conversations can happen too often that it's a hassle to save them manually. This is probably more common in group chats where lots of people occasionally share valuable stuff.

Your point and use case are valid but unrelated. I agree with the parent comment but not with your sentiment.

The thing is: your use case and wants seems to be different than like, 90% of Whatsapp users, as they expect to never lose their history. So... Signal is not a replacement to Whatsapp

That's fine with me. I was just pointing out that those two requests are not really related.

I don't know much about WhatsApp, and I've never lost any message in Signal, so I am not sure I am well equipped to discuss whether it's fit for that purpose. But I would certainly love to save individual messages in some sort of vault, as well.

Please provide source for the 90% figure.

Sure, conversations. But honestly I feel like saving everything just generates more noise and makes it difficult to find the signal.

See my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25690699.

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