Because I have repeatedly dug out useful information from chats, days, weeks, months, or years later.
> If something important comes up, like an address or recipe, copy/paste it into your notes app.
You're assuming that 1) you know what's important at the time, rather than realizing later, and 2) you want to take the time, at the time, to figure out somewhere to file it.
> I used to be a message-hoarder too, but I recently realized it was all utterly useless
That's your choice, but that doesn't make it the right choice for everyone. Your preferences are not universal. (And descriptions like "hoarder" deride the choices of others.)
> Signal isn't email.
People advocate using Signal in place of email, for security.
I cannot advocate Signal to anyone I know until it learns to treat user data as incredibly valuable and irreplaceable.
If people want to mark their messages as transient, or even mark all their messages as transient, so be it; that's their choice. But if a message is not marked as transient, it must be possible to securely and easily preserve that message for longer than the lifetime of any one device.
There are more than a few conversations I would absolutely love to be able to revisit, but I can't. Like those small, ordinary moments with my Grandma, of which I remember just very little, I didn't think much of them at the time. With those people I've lost who did leave chatlogs, they have been helpful at times.
I find it also can be very insightful to be able to drop into ten-years-ago me's life, just to find how much I've changed in some respects – or how little. It's a great source of self-reflection for me.
If keeping chat logs is something you personally don't value, that's great, you do you. But keep in mind that people are wildly different and lots will have needs, preferences and principles that are the opposite of yours, and just as valid.
- a friend says something that you don’t realise is important until months later and need to reference
- a friend or partner dies and you wish to revisit old times by reading your messages
- a couple wish to nostalgically re-read random conversations from their early time together
- a group chat for work or students shares valuable resources that you wish to reference, but is impractical to make copies of the dozens of messages
- legal reasons if somebody accused you of saying or doing something you did not do
- you’re going to an address (for example) that somebody sent you a week prior, but you forgot to save it
People are forgetful, people are emotional and nostalgic, and people are argumentative. All very good reasons for a chat history. Disappearing messages are simply always opt-in precisely because most people do not want it.
Based on what use case? Many times I searched old personal and group chats, to find what I wanted in a message from 1 year before
I used to be a message-hoarder too, but I recently realized it was all utterly useless and the cost of maintaining and transferring that history around everywhere wasn't worth the twice-a-year I actually wanted to search for something.
Signal isn't email.