[jelling]

Huh? Have you not used the search feature in Slack or Discord?

Whether it's a forum or a chat, the data structure is largely the same, especially with Slack/Discord as they have threads.

[n8cpdx]

I’ve never succeeded with slack chat. Basically I just have to remember when a conversation happened and go to that time and scroll until I see it. Even if I remember most of the words of a message I’m searching for.

Outlook is the reigning champion of terrible search, but don’t Slack is the runner up.

[Forgeties79]

My understanding is that when people are talking about search, they are talking about outside of the community/client itself.

I can search Reddit with Google. I can’t search Slack with google. So if you are using it as a repository for information or troubleshooting or what have you, it is completely worthless outside of its use for the people in the actual community/on that client, e.g. slack/discord. Whereas a thread on Reddit, HN, etc. that addresses some issue I am having is discoverable to everybody.

Let me put it to you another way: how many tech problems have you solved by searching Google and finding a Reddit thread, and how many times have you solved one by finding something on a Slack or Discord server you weren’t already a part of?

[Turing_Machine]

> Have you not used the search feature in Slack or Discord?

I have. Discord, in particular, has the worst search function I've ever seen in my life, or close to it.

[wwweston]

I have. Sometimes it does its job.

The problem with their search is that it’s only their search — no other engine can index it.

And then the medium tends to make discussion a ripple in a pond rather than a running discussion.

[xp84]

Come on. Discord or slack is like a forum where you have every post ever made on a topic in a single thread, 92,000 pages long. Sure, you can use search, but the nature of chat means that once you find one message (say, where a question was asked) you have to then skim through other discussions also going on at the time — often many of them — wondering if anyone answered the question, or if the discussion might continue after each interruption.

It’s okay for some applications I guess, but it’s the worst replacement for a forum, wiki, or knowledge base I’ve ever seen.

[fasterik]

It's a bit disingenuous to pretend like they're the same thing. Explicit design for threaded discussion encourages a different style of communication than design primarily intended for real-time chat. Even if the information exists somewhere in Discord/Slack, it's often harder to find, harder to link to, provides less context, requires login and access to a specific community, isn't indexed by search engines, etc.