Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I have always thought that Slack is designed to make information go away, and that's why people like it. Email never goes away unless you archive the thread. If you have a bunch of things that are going on, you open your inbox and realize just how behind you are, every time you open it. Slack, conversely, scrolls up and always looks the same. If you miss something, the world moved on without your input, and you feel the same.

The article is right that the problem is when the information doesn't want to be deleted. Now you have to do extra work. (Specific example; a long time ago, I figured out how to get Github to notify me on Slack when a code review was assigned to me. It is not easy to find in the UI and took me a while to set up. I wrote down the instructions in Slack... and that helped people that were reading it then, but it doesn't help me tell someone how to do it that asks me today. Should have written a runbook!)

Remembering to persist information is always something you have to do, and it's not specific to Slack. Your shell history is useless to your coworkers. Your design discussions is useless to someone that just joined the team today.

amusingly, my understanding is that the original goal for slack was to be an archive.

slack originally stood for: searchable log of all communication and knowledge

but then in practice, i saw message retention locked down to 30 days or less, which kinda defeated the point.

other modern tools, like trello, also seemed to have gaps when it came to logging/searching/archiving what happened. trello is fantastic for organizing "what needs do", "who do", and "when done"... but in my experience is pretty terrible for "what happened" and "why". this is fine i think at smaller scales, but once complexity starts to scale up, it can be a nightmare. it's hard enough fighting issue hysteresis (reoccurring issues and bugs that drag on for years) when there's good historical views and explanations.

I don't know of any productivity tool that handles archiving well. You can store done tasks in some way, but all the context is lost. Over time, it's annoying even on a small - individual - scale.

I think Azure DevOps handles context pretty well. I can look at old tasks and see associated commits, conversations, and related work.

yeah, the info is there and you can do the same with most tools, but it often requires a lot to extract it. how well organized is it? how hard is it to go from line of code to complete discussion around when it was last changed?

Doesn't slack have full history if you pay for it? We use Teams and I regularly find myself searching for stuff I remember I was sent months ago.

It does and today I just learned that there are some companies that don't store all messages sent. Slack works great at my company, I can search for things a year or more back and even write messages to myself as a form of note taking.

My company has slack archives going back ten years. They imported everything from the old chat system.

Well, a real paid slack instance doesn't go away. All the public free slacks do.. The whole fact that Slack charges a lot for the privilege of keeping history beyond a couple of months, proves that it's worth a lot to many people.

Yes, but as gmail has illustrated, that just shifts the problem. Where before your problem was "It got deleted". Now the problem is search pulls up too many things.

Slack seems to be even worse because unlike email, you don't really have subjects or thread beginnings, just continual flow of chatter.

You can make threads in slack. The implementation is a bit weird but (as of last time I used it circa 2018) it did the job sufficiently. For features which required more focused discussion from a sub-team over a longer period of time there was a pseudo-room feature (I don't remember what it's called though)

I don't really have this issue with Gmail. It works a lot better than O365 search with the same amount of mails in it (I recently migrated everything over).

But indeed the lack of organisation of any kind makes it harder for chats.

I'm confused. What are the differences between Slack and email? Both are generally displayed on a relatively small list where new messages eventually cause old messages to be hidden. Those hidden messages are still accessible if you try, both with similar processes (assuming you're using an email client with text search like Gmail).

Corporate Slack retention is typically measured in days, while email retention is measured in years.

> I have always thought that Slack is designed to make information go away, and that's why people like it.

I think it's exactly the opposite?[0]

People like it because, except for the free plan, you can find anything that was ever discussed.

[0]: https://slack.com/pricing

This is exactly why at my org, slack is one of the de-facto sources of truth. And it's awesome. I can often find the solution to a specific, niche problem that someone else discussed 4 years ago in a few seconds. Assuming your org pays for whatever it is that allows full archival, it's a great way to capture org-specific, tribal knowledge that you won't find on google, but that nobody will take the time to add to an internal wiki or something accessible beyond their immediate team.

If you want a chat nightmare, try microsoft teams. That quickly became one of the most painful parts of one of my previous workplaces.

Teams is built by boomers, for boomers

In a few seconds? Wow. I'm a very fast reader and probably need at least 15 seconds to wade through a busy Stack Overflow page.

I've found that Slack's discoverability is severely limited because it seems to prioritize low-effort input. Here's what I mean: in a busy channel, Slack makes it so easy to reply in a linear chain. Unrelated messages get interleaved. Following a train of discussion can be difficult.

In contrast, I very much like how Zulip organizes threads. It allows content to be organized both up-front (at posting time) and over time. This feels very natural to me.

cmd+k > copy and paste error message > (few seconds pass) > results appear in slack search

I do this all the time at work. I didn't say that I can expand and read through all the results in a few seconds, that part takes time. But comparing that to something like teams, which would often freeze for me when going back in a convo history, let alone something like asking people individually, slack has been great for finding internal knowledge.

I have a paid Slack plan and while I can find specific threads where I remember a lot of the details, I've never found anything that I didn't personally participate in.

Overall, I think search is a bad knowledge base management tool. It proves the positive quickly (search for "foo", see "here's how to use foo"), but never lets you prove the absence of documentation (search for "foobar", nothing comes up, search for "foo bar", nothing comes up, search for the previous codename "barbaz", nothing comes up... did you forget something, or is there just no documentation/discussion? you'll never know. the result is that people stop reading documentation.)

From my experience, the mark of a well-run Slack is the ability to find old, valuable information. You're right that it's not always easy, but you can get a LOT further with 1) well-defined channels 2) good use of pinning 3) good use of "saving" messages for yourself.

It helps that Slack's search is actually pretty good imo, and usually quite fast.

But yeah -- it can't be your only tool. If you don't have a better system for long-form documentation, you're gonna lose a lot of important stuff.

My experience with Slack is the opposite. Scanning through my list of channels, I'll see some channel I don't recognize, and it will still be pinned at the top unread message 4 months ago when someone added me for some reason.

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