Comment by TeMPOraL

We seem to have interesting differences in perspective.

> There, I was able to share my knowledge freely without fear of being penalized or judged through a voting system, or being heavily moderated as is the case with Wikipedia or StackOverflow.

Private communities, especially chats, come with - IMO much stronger and impactful - built-in judging by peer pressure. That is, if someone doesn't like your contribution, it (or you) might get ridiculed in front of the entire community. At the very best, you'll have to defend the merit of what you wrote, which is kind of like replying to criticism on Reddit/HN, except you have to do it real-time. I personally vastly prefer the voting system on discussion boards. Less noise, takes more time to settle, lets you get positive feedback too (this is now partly solved in group chats via reactions), and of course:

> I also didn't have to worry about my contributions being eternally indexed on the internet. As a contributor, this is a feature (much less so for the lurker).

As a contributor, I never thought about it as a feature - on the contrary, I'm less willing to contribute something to a community (as opposed to small group of real life friends and family members) when said community is staying unindexed and unlogged - denying access to information to lurkers, and also to future community members, and even to current community members, as on such platforms search, if it exists, is so bad that it may as well not be there (also group chats make this structurally hard, too). I just don't like, and never liked, contributing anything to knowledge black holes.