If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

That doesn't seem enough to reject the premise of the article, which explicitly calls out that chats are great for both "Low-stakes status updates" and "Swarming around red alerts or outages", a high CPU alert that was just a notification is the former, a high CPU alert that people discussed and fixed is the latter.

Also, your "database", singular? Was the answer something like 10 times? Would that scale?

My company has slack archives going back ten years. They imported everything from the old chat system.

I dislike the concept; take Anki the spaced repetition learning system as an example for comparison: you add in some flashcards around a topic you want to learn and remember, and it prompts you to work through the cards you are most likely to forget. One failure mode is that you don't bother checking it for a few days, and suddenly there's a ton of cards to work through and it's overwhelming and you don't want to or can't spare the time, the next day there's even more they pile up until you "declare bankruptcy" on them.

But your memory doesn't magically work better after declaring bankruptcy, if you imagine Anki is approximately correct about when you'll forget things then /not/ going through those cards means forgetting things you said you wanted to remember. That's a fundamental problem that should be addressed - you desire to remember more things than you have space in your life to sustainably commit to. Reset and restart is one way forward, but it's not a way out; presumably some of the things you wanted to remember are more important than others, and you're leaving it completely to chance which survive the reset and restart. If none are important then don't restart. If it's only for fun and that's not fun, it's not working well.

To bring it back to email, the idea is "if I declare bankruptcy, the important things will come back again eventually". Things other people think are important will come back - using other people's brains to track the tasks which aren't good at that and are busy with other things - while throwing out the computer which is extremely good at record keeping - so good it's showing you the overwhelming amount of information you /actually have/ personally requested, or organisationally been subscribed to. If it's too much for one brain then it's too much. If it's too much irrelevant or redundant, then the organisation systems or tools are broken.

If the response to that is to throw it all out and reset then it stays being too much, too irrelevent, too broken, indefinitely, for everyone. It's covering over the symptoms to avoid addressing the sickness. It's a trip to the ER to have your stomach pumped so you can go back to binge drinking from the firehose instead of going to rehab and making difficult changes, it's a part of our hoarding culture that's so widely supported in this thread, a part of the obesity crisis, information addiction, and panic in the face of mortality, and all those unrelated (but related really) things.

"If I just do everything, know everything, have everything, eat everything, keep records of everything, I'll maximise my life experiences and save myself from {unspecified future horror {eventually death}}".

There's an amount of work an employee can reasonably, practically, pragmatically do, and computer systems we have developed which are /completely incapable/ of helping us track and prioritise that, but /absolutely fantastic/ and overwhelming us with nonsense trivia and redundant messaging noise and tasks nobody is going to do that are socially unable to be dropped but are actually going to be kicked down the road until they don't matter. It's an awful system we've built where "declaring bankruptcy" on the messages we (individually or collectively) have to be involved in is a consideration at all. But if that is the way forward, it shouldn't be a guilty pleasure that you don't want to admit; evolution has an aggressive reaper function to cull all but the most fit, if we're going to adopt that, we should wholeheartedly do it openly and enthusiastically - any job which isn't worth remembering by brain can be wiped off the system after X days, no harm no foul. The combination of "too much" and "archived forever" is killer in the bad way.

(How many people have left their jobs just to trigger this reaper function? If it was overwhelming the employee, the next employee won't have to deal with it, fresh start for both leaver and position).

I feel like most of these arguments can be made about in person meetings, too. Decision making needs to be documented somewhere regardless of the medium the conversation took place in.

Live chat could maybe be a good place for that to happen but then someone needs to transfer that information into a tool designed for it. Just like you would if you had a meeting in a physical office.

Now if the argument you want to make is that live chat is a bad place for those discussions to be had then that is different. Having worked at multiple fully-remote orgs with team members across many timezones and working different schedules I can agree live chat is not a great place for decision making to happen either.

We use RFCs for async decision making when live chat, zooms, or in-person meetings aren't possible. It is slower since you are often waiting for a response until the next day, but I also find that the waiting time can be quite productive for other tasks and gives everyone more time to think about an issue.

Why today?