Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

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?

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.

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.

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.