At larger companies, data retention policies that delete old data are pretty standard for platforms like this. A lot of them can harbor conversations that can be taken out of context or were never meant to be public, so it makes sense from a liability standpoint.
That said, there can also be a large body of fruitful technical knowledge sharing that happens on these platforms that should be retained for the good of the company.
The real rub is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. How can the signal be isolated/retained/copied easily so the noise can be purged? This is especially difficult for very old data that is spread across innumerable channels whose value could be lost and the team left unawares.
A traditional forum/message board is much better for archiving that fruitful technical knowledge. How many of us have found answers to a problem thanks to a forum post from 10 or 20 years ago?
I've never liked Slack/Discord for anything other than instant messaging, and always thought of it as ephemeral. If it's anything of significant importance, it should be documented in a place that is meant, by design, for documentation.
> If it's anything of significant importance, it should be documented in a place that is meant, by design, for documentation.
The challenge we have found is that amazing technical documentation is often born from ephemeral conversations. I would love a solution that eliminated the toil required to clip out those comments into a long-term store.
The flip-side to the challenge is that moving our team from Slack to another platform better suited to long-term technical Q&A requires a significant cultural shift that may not be practical.
> The real rub is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. How can the signal be isolated/retained/copied easily so the noise can be purged? This is especially difficult for very old data that is spread across innumerable channels whose value could be lost and the team left unawares.
I think you need a culture of summarising this type of info & saving somewhere that isn't ephemeral (e.g. README, team wiki). Else even with the history maintained, it's still a pain to try to a) play pattern matching with Slack's search engine and b) weed out all the false positives of old info that's no longer relevant.
This feels like the type of thing that maybe could be farmed out to a trained LLM in the future — "summarise today's discussion on X in channel Y and post into the wiki".
This seems like one of the few really compelling reasons, for a particular type of person, to push return to office. Fewer paper trails to get retained, with in-person conversations…
Keep, beyond legal requirements, for something as loose as Slack seems unusual to me. Having worked for some very large companies they tend to be very worried about purging email, Slack, etc., within months, before there's a chance for a subpoena.
That said, there can also be a large body of fruitful technical knowledge sharing that happens on these platforms that should be retained for the good of the company.
The real rub is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. How can the signal be isolated/retained/copied easily so the noise can be purged? This is especially difficult for very old data that is spread across innumerable channels whose value could be lost and the team left unawares.