Exactly. Keeping message history is a liability. There is no need to keep all old messages beyond one week. If there is something specific worth saving, there are apps for taking/pasting notes.
- a friend says something that you don’t realise is important until months later and need to reference
- a friend or partner dies and you wish to revisit old times by reading your messages
- a couple wish to nostalgically re-read random conversations from their early time together
- a group chat for work or students shares valuable resources that you wish to reference, but is impractical to make copies of the dozens of messages
- legal reasons if somebody accused you of saying or doing something you did not do
- you’re going to an address (for example) that somebody sent you a week prior, but you forgot to save it
People are forgetful, people are emotional and nostalgic, and people are argumentative. All very good reasons for a chat history. Disappearing messages are simply always opt-in precisely because most people do not want it.
Based on what use case? Many times I searched old personal and group chats, to find what I wanted in a message from 1 year before