Comment by monksy
5 years ago
The discord/slack as a means of communicating technical questions is a great example how an entire generation refused to accept a solid solution because it didn't fit their impediment desire. (Need is wavy here because the responsiveness isn't the original need.. it's the answering of the question that's a need.. being instanteous is just a convenience )
What am I saying: We've had technical mediums to discuss technical problems asyncly for a while now. (Usenet, reddit, phpbb, hackernews) Instead lots of younger people in the industry decided they weren't obligated to use those and foolishly decided to move to a more transient form of communication for everything.
In doing so we're losing technical knowledge, misinformation is spreading, and we're running into development of technology that has a limited set of experience behind it.
What I suggest: Figure out how to enhance async communication to switch to syncronous and store the results of that. (in other words identify deficiencies and try to solve the problems there rather than completely scrapping them)
I mean, a lot of developers used IRC as far back as I can remember?
Forums are newer than IRC chat, though arguably Forums are based on USENET, BBS, or email-lists.
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IRC / Discord / Slack / Skype are real-time communication / instant messenger style communications.
Email / Forums / USENET / Reddit / Digg / Slashdot / Hacker News are async and slow.
Note the (d)evolution here. IRC was an open standard, with numerous client and server implementations. The other chat apps are all bespoke proprietary solutions. Ditto with email/NNTP vs other async options.
IRC adoption never really peaked like slack and discord has
More importantly, I don't recall IRC ever replacing mailing lists / newsgroups / forums. People generally knew when to use either one appropriately. But these days, it's not uncommon to see a project page straight up saying that if you have any questions, Discord is it.
If conversation threading were enforced adequately in a Slack/Discord, a bot could watch threads for a heuristic of usefulness and kick off the archival of some form of read-only SEO-happy forum-like store.
Being a bit pedantic in the case of Slack:
You can't write a bot to archive this.
It's in Slack's financial interest to prevent this as that it would save messages that would otherwise only exist in their paid version.
Secondly, that assumed that the users are behaving in a way that classifies those messages as a threaded manner. Depending on humans to go back after a conversation has taken place to classify and organize that conversation isn't a highly rewarding activity.
Another concern: The medium is a temporary and off the cuff one.. this may lead to negative reprocutions for non-agreeing tribal members to defame someone. (A sabiture turning on that feature on discords that are private) [Given today's moralistic "cancel culture" - this is a very real possiblity]
Does Slack’s API still allow pulling down all messages? I coded something quick to do that many years ago.
Then the heuristics can just happen with the pulled down content.