[eanc]

I hate chats so much. Having to ask something manually and then wait and hope for minutes/hours/days for a manual reply, I can’t think of something more opposed to what people who are familiar with what computers can do for humanity should recognize the value in, and yet here we all are.

[nootropicat]

On the balance I like chats much more. In terms of personal connections per time spent on contributing I found chats to be about one order of magnitude more effective than old (gone) phpbb forums. Forums were much more transactional and impersonal in nature.

Compared to what forums morphed into - reddit, hn, similar - these are another order of magnitude worse than old forums. See, consider yours and my reply. I won't remember your nickname nor will you remember mine. There are no avatars. It's borderline machine level information exchange with the author itself a faded out barely visible string.

[LocalPCGuy]

I find the exact opposite - it is multiple orders of magnitude worse in chat than in forum or newsgroup type discussions. But I also had the pleasure of being in some very active and substantive discussions in both formats. Chat is so inefficient, particularly the part where we decided to put them all behind walls that search engines cannot pierce. So you can't find the conversation from 6 months ago that answered the exact question you have, you have to ask it again. It reminds me of IRC days where people created bots to re-answer FAQs.

This is likely something where it isn't something that can have an absolute worth put on the various technologies, but where it'll change from person to person, depending on how they like to interact with others, how comfortable they are in a real-time vs. asynchronous setting and so forth.

But that said, I do believe that all of the walls that currently exist (and yes, I know they've existed in the past, not like IRC was archived) as antithetical to the spirit of the Internet and the idea of sharing information effectively. We have yet to find the perfect medium that combines some level of privacy for those that want it but allows for information to be shared so it isn't lost to the annals of some chat log.