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Comment by ixtli | Hacker News Reader

One of the gems in this that i think might be getting overlooked:

> This trend of using chats for questions is plaguing open source projects and I think it needs to end. There is no collective learning anymore.

This is a very important notion not least of all from an archival pov.

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Yes! Also things like Gitter and Slack are really messy for storing knowledge. Questions get lost, answers are interspersed with more questions. Maybe I'm getting old, but give me a forum based, one-thread per topic any time of the day.

I prefer forums as well, at least for technical questions/discussions. It seems to me the biggest advantage of chat apps over forums is that you can use a single account to join many rooms. Are there any forum platforms designed around that idea?

> Are there any forum platforms designed around that idea?

That's basically Reddit

Spectrum.chat

I see why many people consider this to be a problem, and it does severely limit the ability of knowledge to persist, but I think there are some benefits to it, namely that the answers can always be up-to-date.

I don't know how many times I've found answers for versions of my libraries/toolkits that are so old that they're useless. There's little point these days in persisting answers to questions about Node 0.4.0, for example - and that's only ~7 years old, downright modern by some viewpoints.

For sure! The fact is that IRC has existed parallel to the development of this entire industry so the desire to hang about in a chat room is real and should be served, but the modern incarnations of this are causing some people to stop cataloguing the small bits of necessary info about complex systems which i think is bad.

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