There has long been a place in the ecosystem for ephemeral chat. Often alongside non-ephemeral things like written documentation.
/s
C'mon
IRC chats, especially in opensource projects channels, could and would be archived, published over the web and indexed by search engines.
Can you show me how to access the archives of the ask-for-help channel on the openllm Discord server? Right now they're discussing "loading models on CPU vs GPU". No matter how explicit I got, google did not find the discussion.
#haskell on Libra is publicly logged, but I couldn’t get Google to return a quoted phrase from a message a few weeks ago.
Many people on IRC don’t enjoy being in logged channels. I’ve also heard that there are GDPR implications to publicly logging people’s messages without their consent.
Discussion of the difficulty and downsides of IRC logging, from a coulple years ago:
=> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22892015
=> https://web.archive.org/web/20200417001532/https://echelog.c...
The HN blowback to developers choosing to use Discord is just wildly out of proportion.
On the other hand, if people have to actually converse to get an answer to their questions (like back in the real world), newcomers can more rapidly become part of the community, and help make it more diverse.
There's a balance between engaging with new members and not turning it into a time sink for older members. This is probably a good use case for LLMs.
This to me is the real way through this "Eternal September", where in every "cohort" of newcomers, one or more choose to stay close to the doorway to welcome and guide the next cohort.
I’m wondering how could learn from games, making the content also adaptive to user levels/experiences.
It’s prob also the key agenda in education.
In any case, I'm not arguing that it's impossible, but rather that the more comprehensive the archive, the less welcoming the community would tend to be, all other things being equal. To take it to the extreme, I'll posit the following law: "A well-curated archive is the grave of a community"
You can still have channels open to welcoming new people while at the same time having a large archive of answered questions so that over time a reservoir gets built.
Saying that the same questions getting asked over and over again by new people is somehow a more welcoming community, is like saying that there's any meaningful interaction happening when two people say "What's up?" followed by the response "not much". It's a handshake protocol equivalent without actual depth.
I see friends shaking hands
Saying, "How do you do?"
They're really saying
I love you.* FFS, read the fuckin' archive noob and stop wasting our time
* Hey there, thanks for asking! This is actually a pretty common question, and we have guides written up for just this case. Try entering some of your search terms here [link], and come back with a follow-up question if that doesn't help you!
But yes, in fairness, I'll certainly agree that a community which _chooses_ to respond as the former will stagnate and die.