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Comment by jelling | Hacker News Reader

Huh? Have you not used the search feature in Slack or Discord?

Whether it's a forum or a chat, the data structure is largely the same, especially with Slack/Discord as they have threads.

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I’ve never succeeded with slack chat. Basically I just have to remember when a conversation happened and go to that time and scroll until I see it. Even if I remember most of the words of a message I’m searching for.

Outlook is the reigning champion of terrible search, but don’t Slack is the runner up.

My understanding is that when people are talking about search, they are talking about outside of the community/client itself.

I can search Reddit with Google. I can’t search Slack with google. So if you are using it as a repository for information or troubleshooting or what have you, it is completely worthless outside of its use for the people in the actual community/on that client, e.g. slack/discord. Whereas a thread on Reddit, HN, etc. that addresses some issue I am having is discoverable to everybody.

Let me put it to you another way: how many tech problems have you solved by searching Google and finding a Reddit thread, and how many times have you solved one by finding something on a Slack or Discord server you weren’t already a part of?

> Have you not used the search feature in Slack or Discord?

I have. Discord, in particular, has the worst search function I've ever seen in my life, or close to it.

I have. Sometimes it does its job.

The problem with their search is that it’s only their search — no other engine can index it.

And then the medium tends to make discussion a ripple in a pond rather than a running discussion.

Come on. Discord or slack is like a forum where you have every post ever made on a topic in a single thread, 92,000 pages long. Sure, you can use search, but the nature of chat means that once you find one message (say, where a question was asked) you have to then skim through other discussions also going on at the time — often many of them — wondering if anyone answered the question, or if the discussion might continue after each interruption.

It’s okay for some applications I guess, but it’s the worst replacement for a forum, wiki, or knowledge base I’ve ever seen.

It's a bit disingenuous to pretend like they're the same thing. Explicit design for threaded discussion encourages a different style of communication than design primarily intended for real-time chat. Even if the information exists somewhere in Discord/Slack, it's often harder to find, harder to link to, provides less context, requires login and access to a specific community, isn't indexed by search engines, etc.

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