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I see more and more people moving to Slack communities for the QA that they used to post on SO. This is sad - slack is a closed protocol and is not searchable. Answers are only available to a subset of the tech community and only for a limited time (no one really searches before asking the same question again but someone will usually prompt with "that got asked a couple of days ago" in cases of extreme duplication.)

Spectrum [0] is heading in the right direction to counter this but it's still a walled garden.

[0] https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-...

2 comments

This is a depressing trend in itself, and not just for QA setups either. Way too many communities seem to exclusively post on login only walled gardens like Slack and Discord, where stuff gets lost very easily and search engines can't index anything.

As you said, it makes it very annoying to find said information later, especially if you're not already part of the community/don't know where to look.

I heard someone a while back mention that he treated discord like verbal discourse: ephemeral. Perhaps not everything needs to be logged.

The issue is that Slack and discord are essentially ephemeral verbal discourse AND that they often become the _default_ mode of communication. This isn't bad as a small community, but does limit the growth of these communities. Newcomers are at a disadvantage as are anyone that's out sick/vacation etc. Anyone who's worked somewhere where major decisions are made in hallway conversations and never documented should understand the problem.

True, not everything does need to be logged. General chit chat being ephemeral is fine.

But a lot of communities use it for a lot more than basic chit chat. I've seen open source projects where relevant info is only shared on their Slack server and nowhere else. Companies often get useful resources shared on their Slack instances that never gets backed up elsewhere for later.

And in the gaming world, it seems like Discord is the default method of communication for the game development, modding, speedrunning and hacking/datamining communities. For instance, most of the relevant techniques used for speedrunning Zelda Breath of the Wild are only found in the Discord server, or a Google Docs linked from it.

There needs to be a separation of the ephemeral from the non ephemeral here, and communities need to share the latter on publically accessible sites instead.

I wrote a post about how to extract slack posts to a Google sheet (but of course it could go to an email list too): http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3126

I wonder whether some of the attraction of slackfor community and q&a is the immediate feedback and the ephemeral nature of the questions. If I am looking for an answer, I want it asap. And maybe it is easier to ask or answer questions because both go away? At the least it means that the answers will avoid some of the SO issues (where the best answer is 10 years old and has been superseded).