[glacials]

The author specifically calls out ephemerality as a feature of IRC.

If it's easy to get history people will assume everyone is reading what they're typing. This would make people feel obligated to play catch-up every time they miss some messages due to being AFK or in the zone.

By making history hard to obtain, IRC simulates real-world conversation -- you're either in the room or you're not.

[phicoh]

And then lots of people have bouncers to be there 24x7.

[Etheryte]

Personally, the main benefit of a bouncer is not missing highlights when someone wants to turn your attention to something interesting, reading up the logs for even a single channel isn't a reasonable way to invest your time.

[sanderjd]

It's not about scrolling up, it's about search. Which is another thing that IRC, even with a bouncer, is not good at.

[echelon]

> reading up the logs for even a single channel isn't a reasonable way to invest your time.

I'm beginning to feel this way about everything. Reddit, Twitter, social media in general...

The hoarder mentality likes for this stuff to still exist in the hopes it might one day be useful. In fact, it has very little value.

Snapchat got it right when they started with ephemerality.

[nxrabl]

Which makes for an interesting dynamic, since it's the people with the most experience for whom the chat is least ephemeral, and the people who would benefit most from having scrollback who are least likely to have it set up properly.

[phicoh]

One of the nice things about the IRC bridges between Matrix and big IRC networks is that you can experience IRC from the comfort of Matrix.

[zaarn]

If I wanted real world conversation, I can drop into a conference call, I don't need IRC for that.

Chats in organizations are specifically for when email is not realtime enough but it's important to keep a record of the conversations for some time.

[krageon]

> Chats in organizations are specifically for

This varies immensely per organisation so it's always kind of dangerous to generalise like this. For example: The use-case you quote does not align with my experience of (bigcorp) chats at all.

[zaarn]

So your bigcorp does not require any chatlogs or did they phase out email entirely for chat? Or both?

[krageon]

Logs for regular chat are removed after a very limited amount of time.

[zaarn]

So you do need logs, just not forever.

[krageon]

I think either you misunderstood the scope of what I meant ("I need to see what I just wrote") or I misunderstood the scope of what you meant ("I need to see what I wrote last month") when talking about logging. I should have asked for a more specific definition.