Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

Email threads seem better for documenting and searching correspondence.

The last counter argument I read got buried on Discord or Slack somewhere.

Discord and slack baffle me. I liked them specifically because they were more ephemeral than other options. Which, seems at odds with how people want them to be? Why?

Isn't this entirely an implementation detail of slack and discord search? What about email makes it more searchable fundamentally? The meta data if both platforms is essentially the same, no?

Can't say for everyone, but I have terrible memory and rely heavily on the chat history (and other tools) to keep my mental model in shape.

Here, ephemeral means "this conversation might as well never had happened", so why waste time on that?

I suspect it has to do with mental models. For my model, at large, conversations are worthless. Anyone that tries to hold you to a conversation from weeks ago that didn't secure a stronger commitment is almost certainly flying loose and more than willing to selectively choose what they want to be committed to.

Does that mean I can't have some pleasure in conversing about things? Of course not. But, I also enjoy some pleasure there from the low stakes and value that a conversation has. It should be safe to be wrong. If you have a conversation spot where being wrong is not safe, then I question what is the advantage of that over trying to adopt a legalese framework for all of your communication?

Were these ever ephemeral? Are you misremembering history free IRC chat rooms?

Fair that they were probably less ephemeral than I have them in my mental model. Which, as you guessed, was largely from them taking up the same spot as a slack (edit: I meant irc) instance in my mind. Slack, in particular, often had policies applied so that messages were deleted after a set time frame. I remember people complaining, but that seemed legit to me and fit my model.

I also confess this model of ephemeral conversation is amusing in this specific website. Which I also largely view as a clubhouse conversation that is also best viewed as ephemeral. But it is clearly held for far longer than that idea would lead me to think.

Personally, when I send an email, I feel less time pressure to respond, so I more carefully craft my responses. The metadata is similar enough, but the actual data in email/forums is usually better.

What makes email more useful in general is that each email is a separate object that you can organize in any way you want, i.e. move, copy, rename, sort into folders, attach as a file to any calendar entry, todo item, etc., or indeed to any other email. You can forward them to any other recipient, you can add and remove any recipient to and from the conversation at any time. It is conceptually powerful and flexible in a similar way that files in a file system are a powerful and flexible way to organize data. And it is easy to understand.

While all of these features could in principle be realized in a chat system as well, in practice they don’t provide that flexibility and power.

Another usability feature of emails is that they have a subject line. This allows to meaningfully list emails in a compact fashion. In a desktop interface, you can easily view and visually grep 50 emails or more at once in a mail folder or list of search results (in something like Outlook or Thunderbird or Mutt). This allows working with emails more efficiently than with a chat view where you can only see a few messages at once, and only of the same thread or channel.

Yet another usability feature of emails is that each email has its own read/unread status. This, again, is facilitated by each email being its own separate data object, and by the separation between subject and body, which allows the read status to be unambiguously bound to “opening” the email, or to navigating in the list of emails alongside a preview pane. And you can mark any email as unread again. In chats, the granularity of read/unread is the whole chat, whether you’ve actually read all of it or not. You can’t easily track what you’ve read or not in an automated way as with email, other than by that coarse-grained linear time-based property of when you last visited the channel.

Oh, how nice it must be to complain about Slack. Try using Teams and you will never want to complain about Slack again.

I think this depends very much on how you use the tools.

My experience with email is that people have subject lines, email explicitly identifies to and cc recipients; email is threaded; email often has quotes/excerpting/highlighting from prior parts of the thread.

On the other hand, most chat usage I see is dependent on temporal aspects for threading (people under-utilize platform features for replies etc), tagging is generally only done to ping people to attract attention, chat groups are frequently reused for multiple different purposes.

Leaping to a point-in-time within a chat stream is often a bad user experience, with having to scroll up and down through unrelated stuff to find what you’re looking for.

Stuff in email is just massively more discoverable for me.

I find things get buried just as easily in email. People on my team are constantly resending each other emails, because they can’t find the thread.

This is why, if something is important, I take it out of email and put it into a document people can reference. The latest and correct information from all the decisions in the thread can also be collected in one place, so everyone reading doesn’t have to figure it out. Not to mention side conversations can influence the results, without being explicitly stated in the email thread.

No, it has to do with context. In an email you will frequently have to provide more context for your answers to make sense. Chat is a conversation, which search drops you straight into, may with AI you could get placed at an appropriate starting point, but you're still reading a conversation. It's much easier to get dropped into a correspondence. To me the difference is like reading someones letter, vs. overhearing a conversation in a bus.

This obvious assumes that who ever wrote the email isn't a madman, who insist on using emails like it was a chat.

I really don't get why people are so happy about Slack (never used Discord). The interface is awful, it barely functions as a chat client, yet people adds bots, automation and use it as a repository for documentation. Honestly it would be better if history was deleted weekly or something, just to prevent people from storing things in Slack.

> This is why, if something is important, I take it out of email and put it into a document people can reference.

This is how things should be done, regardless of which medium is used to discuss the project. Without isolating and aggregating the final decision of each thread, there is no way to determine what everybody has agreed upon as the final product without looking back, which quickly becomes onerous.

Things get messy when you start having different versions of each feature, but that doesn't change the concept of using email/Slack/Discord/text/etc. for discussion and a separate "living" document for formalizing those decisions.

Lets toss in a minimum number of [digital] signatures.

We had this problem in our organization circa 20 years back so I built a ticketing system, now each conversation exists as its own object, and "the same thing being discussed twice" has the opportunity to be merged into one, etc. That seems to have helped a lot with our internal conversations.

Accessing Thunderbird via JDBC from my favorite SQL client was so convenient. No messaging app search is even remotely close to what a simple SELECT/WHERE can do. Old Skype versions also stored chat info in an SQLite db. I wish I'd still have SQL access to my messages.

Slack is way worse than Teams. I honestly rather dislike both and rather use email only, but will pick Teams over Slack any time.

My preferences are the opposite, but my mental frame is more about utility than about safety. I'm not worried about someone fishing for something I said that could be construed as commitment or admission - they can just as easily do that with e-mail[0]. For me, conversations can be extremely valuable, and I gravitate towards people and places where that's a common case. HN is one of such places - the comment threads here are conversations (half-way in form between chat and e-mail), and they often are valuable, as people often share deep insights, interesting ideas, worthwhile advice and useful facts. Because they're valuable, my instinct is that they need to be preserved, so that myself and others can find those gems again, or (re)discover them when searching for solutions, or read again to reevaluate, etc.

So now imagine such (idealized) HN threads transplanted to Discord or Slack. Same people, same topics, same insights, just unrolling in the form of a regular chat. All that value, briefly there to partake in, and then forever lost after however much time it takes for it to get pushed up a few screens worth of lines in the chat log. People don't habitually scroll back very far on a regular basis (and the UI of most chat platforms starts to rapidly break down if you try), and the lack of defined structure (bounded conversations labeled by a topic) plus weak search tools means you're unlikely to find a conversation again even if you know where and when it took place.

That, plus ephemeral nature of casual chat means not just the platform, but also some of the users expect it to quickly disappear, leading to what I consider anti-features such as the ability to unilaterally edit or unsend any message at arbitrary time in the future. It takes just one participant deciding, for whatever reason, to mass-delete their past messages, for many conversations to lose most of their value forever.

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[0] - Especially that the traditional communication style, both private and business, is overly verbose. Quite like a chat, in fact, but between characters in a theatrical play - everyone has longer lines.

I think this is fair. And I should be clear that I'm not so worried about someone digging to find something stupid I said here on HN. Or in a chat. I'm more thinking about people that are afraid of saying something stupid, to the point that they just don't engage.

I think my mental model is more for chat rooms to take the place of coffee room chats. Ideally, some of those do push on something to happen. I'm not sure that forcing them into the threaded structure of conversations really helps, though?

Maybe it is based on the aim? If the goal is a simulacrum of human contact, then I think ephemeral makes a ton of sense.

I also kind of miss the old tradition of having a "flamewars" topic in newsgroups. I don't particularly love yelling at each other, but I do hate that people can't bring up some topics.

(I also miss some old fun newsgroups. I recall college had Haiku and a few other silly restrictive style groups that were just flat fun.)

It's the opposite in my experience, it's the best parts of IRC and the history is gold. Storing things in Slack is one of the most useful bits of it. I've seen several multi-billion dollar companies built most of their collaboration across offices around Slack.

This is, to put it mildly, a minority opinion. I don't hate Teams as much as most people do but my old (big and small) companies had both Slack and Teams and about 40% of employees had Teams statuses of "ping me on Slack I refuse to use Teams".

how? scrolling up a conversation takes hours, this alone makes me cry if i have to use it

> scrolling up a conversation takes hours, this alone makes me cry if i have to use it

Funnily, this is the exact same issue I have with Slack.