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Comment by polpo | Hacker News Reader

If all you want is text chat with no shared history, sure IRC is fine. But think about these features that the chat apps bring:

Search: half-remember some conversation from months/years ago? It's right there, in the app.

Persistent history: onboarding a new employee? All of the company's past communication is there to browse and search (see above point).

Inline file attachments: need to share a small file or a screenshot with someone? Drag it into the app and they can get it at their leisure. No need to mess around with DCC send or uploading to Google Drive and sharing a link, it's right there.

All of these could be solved with IRC (in fact, Slack was initially built around IRC) but they require extra infrastructure and tooling and development to make it seamless, and that takes extra development and hosting costs.

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Slack's pretty bad as an information repository. How do you know there hasn't been a subsequent discussion that updated the conclusion of a particular chat? Search isn't particularly consistent in how it serves up results.

By all means chat asynchronously to decide on something, but then get it into a wiki. I actually like Slack's auto-expiry for free accounts, as it incentivizes the mindset - if you want to keep the information around, boil it down into a readable form and put it in the right place in the company's documentation.

Agreed!

Sure, this a correct mindset, and an obvious one for people who build and maintain information repositories professionally, but at an average company with hundreds or thousands of people, it's a losing battle to enforce. Paying for Slack and having the ability to find information in conversations that should have been documented but were not is valuable in practice.

This is the wrong point of view for many (probably most) workplaces, where the officially "maintained" information repositories are often very out of date and where the alternatives are usually: 1) Find a conversation you can at least start from, or 2) Get someone to give you a brain dump now.

Sure, a curated, well-maintained repository could be better. It also requires work time that usually doesn't get budgeted for. Slack is a band-aid, but a useful one.

Being able to say, "I know this issue came up a few months ago, let me see what we decided back then" -- and being able to back that up with a link -- is a superpower. Not everything that comes up in discussions gets documented.

Exactly the opposite of my long-term experience – Slack search is good enough that it’s my first port of call for information, and regularly finds me the right answer. It’s a better information repository in practice than any other system I’ve used at work. That is kind of sad, of course I think “proper” documentation is better, but such is life.

> Search: half-remember some conversation from months/years ago? It's right there, in the app.

I've never had to do that and Discord or Slack aren't the right places for that anyway they should go in some knowledge repository like a wiki.

Our group runs The Lounge, and at this point only a couple people use standalone clients any more (and one person with a Matrix bridge). It gives you all the above (except perhaps the company wide persistent history, I'm not sure) and it's still IRC.

The last time I looked at The Lounge, the installation and configuration seemed pretty involved, not to mention ongoing maintenance.

Has this improved recently?

>Search: half-remember some conversation from months/years ago? It's right there, in the app. Persistent history: onboarding a new employee? All of the company's past communication is there to browse and search (see above point).

This is where Slack really squeezes companies. Our (barely) medium sized org has a seven figure Slack bill, and they only support 1 year of history. Going beyond that becomes absurdly expensive. It would be absolutely pricless for me to be able to go back and read older convos. But it's somehow impossible to do without spending millions of dollars. Absolutely insane.

Where do see the one year history limit? Any paid plan has unlimited history, from what I see.

The numbers you see on a website are very different from what corporate pays. Everything is negotiated through sales.

Being able to search in the past for a half-remembered conversation sounds great until you have idiotic, asinine corporate data retention policies that require anything beyond 90 days to be deleted anyway, for some bullshit reason like being open to litigation or whatever and that being subject to discovery.

Then that's implemented with no warning to be able to migrate important info out into a wiki or other documentation. So in the end, no better than IRC really, but I get it, not a Slack problem, but allowing that whiplash at a click of a button doesn't help. Slack seems to help paper over deep cultural problems in a way that makes it all colorful and squishy.

But as other seem to agree, it's pretty bad at keeping anything organized like you want to be as an info repo, there are tools that are geared toward that specifically. Don't crowbar one into the other.

> Being able to search in the past for a half-remembered conversation sounds great until you have idiotic, asinine corporate data retention policies that require anything beyond 90 days to be deleted anyway, for some bullshit reason like being open to litigation or whatever and that being subject to discovery.

Well that just doesn't sound legal. In fact, I'm pretty sure Google just got the book thrown at them for this. [1]

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/29/tech/judge-google-deleted-cha...

That might not be the official reason, in Europe you can argue you sometimes discuss customer info and thus it needs to be deleted once no longer relevant.

Of course stating you're doing it for the purpose of destroying evidence is stupid.

dude, we work at the same company...

The company I work for has the same chat retention policy, but despite that, even being able to go back just 90 days has proven very useful!

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