[JoshTriplett]

> being not around when people are talking means not being part of that conversation.

Persistent chat is one of the biggest values of Slack or Discord or Mattermost, and one of the big reasons I'll take it over IRC any day.

Persistent chat that you can join and read the backlog of is incredibly valuable. It becomes an asynchronous communication medium, rather than a synchronous one. And it's much richer and lower-friction than email.

[detaro]

Agreed about being able to access some backlog being important, but even in well-implemented systems with good search etc. I personally haven't found backlog older than maybe a few weeks that useful.

Similarly, I'd disagree about friction, but I can see how that might be cultural/personal preference - none of the chat systems I've used provides good-enough tracking of "I still need to take care of this" compared to email clients with a few flags.

[AdrianB1]

With people having the expectation of chat to be instantly replied, like a chat in a real life (someone walking to your desk and saying something) it is not asynchronous in any way.

[iso-8859-1]

You seem to suggest people have that expectation, but I think it might be very culture specific. Where I come, people will not freak out if it takes you a day to respond to an SMS.

[AdrianB1]

SMS is NOT chat.

[detaro]

That's also culture-specific.