[BLKNSLVR]

I think I'm an exception in this instance, but I don't understand what value there is in message history. How often do you find yourself reminiscing by going back through a messaging log?

If there are photos that should be kept then there are other ways to back them up. Is there valuable context in the conversation that was had around the delivery of the photo?

Are messages backed up and restorable for other messaging systems, and have you ever needed to go through a restore process to look back through a conversation?

If it's for the purposes of software project development team discussion and history needs to be kept for legal reasons then I think Signal is intentionally not aiming at that demographic.

I get that there are special moments in life but, for me, the textual conversations around them are very secondary to the moments themselves. But then, in discussions I've had with other people, my opinion seems to be the exception.

[wpietri]

Yes, you are an exception. Just look at how popular books of letters are: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/100260.Best_Books_of_Let...

Or look at how popular "Letters of Note" is: https://twitter.com/lettersofnote

Conversation is connection.

[bigiain]

He's not the only exception.

I have all my Signal messages set to auto delete after 7 days (or less). And I'm pretty happy with how that works. If I thought people at a bar were recording every conversation they had or could overhear forever, I'd talk less freely (and go to different bars).

Not everybody wants ephemeral chat. But I suspect more people _think_ that's what they've got - but in reality do not have...

[BLKNSLVR]

I'm going to keep digging this hole for myself because I think there is some amount of treasure to be found. I'm also interested to see how far out of touch I am.

There are tiers of conversation. Letters between famously literate people or during times of war have a value proposition on an entirely different scale to group chat messages.

It's about the value that the individual assigns to the content of the conversation (this is almost arguing against my stated position). But if that conversation is never re-visited anyway, the value is the status of Schroedinger's cat.

What content that is worthy of "Letters of note" is a) to be found in chat history? b) not already been saved elsewhere due to it's noteworthiness? c) going to be re-discovered by going back through hundreds or thousands of lines of conversation text on a mobile device screen? d) worth trawling back through hundreds or thousands of lines of conversation text on a mobile device screen?

Again, I'm aware that I'm an exception, but I think it's potentially natural human laziness to want to keep 'everything' in case it might be useful or valuable in a few years' time. Electronic hoarding.

I've recently setup an instance of NoteSelf to more easily track links to interesting articles and my own thoughts and ideas and various other things that I think are worthy of keeping. This is my form of targeted electronic hoarding. I'm in control of it, and it's robust enough to survive a mobile device theft, breakage, or some other kind of failure. Prior to that I write things down in journals, or other systems, some of which have been totally lost, but I don't find myself missing it or 'wondering what could have been'.

It feels as if the point that I'm trying to make is that mindful archiving is a better solution than to just 'keep all the things' - for me, primarily, it's the far improved wheat / chaff ratio.

Conversation is connection. Yes. But recorded conversation is just a reminder of connection, not the connection itself. I think my argument falls down when it comes to someone that's passed away, and keeping their flame alive to some extent. I don't work like that, but I wouldn't expect it of others.

[JoshTriplett]

First, search makes the logs far more useful.

Second, time helps ("we were talking about it around this time of year").

Third, you don't necessarily know how valuable the conversation is when you first have it.

And fourth, pictures and video and similar.

> It feels as if the point that I'm trying to make is that mindful archiving is a better solution than to just 'keep all the things'

I used to carefully archive every email in an appropriate folder. Now I only have one folder, "Archive", which contains all mail, and I use search to find what I'm looking for. (Search is all I used back when I had folders, too.) That requires far, far less work at the time of receiving a message.

Consider the time taken to carefully file something away, the difficulty of keeping such things organized manually, the ease of just automatically storing everything organized by time and people, and the likelihood of you successfully predicting in advance what you'll want later.

[wpietri]

> There are tiers of conversation. Letters between famously literate people or during times of war have a value proposition on an entirely different scale to group chat messages.

Only in retrospect. At the time, it's impossible to know. We happen to have (some of) Picasso's childhood artwork. What might it be like if we had da Vinci's and Bosch's and that of the Lascaux Caves artists?

Or look at the way Pepys' diary serves as an important source to historians for the details of daily life at that time. Or how Pompeii's graffiti gives us valuable historical insight: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/adrie...

Destroying information now is expressing 100% confidence that nobody will have use for it later.

> It feels as if the point that I'm trying to make is that mindful archiving is a better solution than to just 'keep all the things' - for me, primarily, it's the far improved wheat / chaff ratio.

Depends on the cost of storage and retrieval, really. That was certainly true for, say, paper letters. But as the cost of storage and retrieval goes steadily down, manual archive selection becomes less and less worth it. Hoarding is only a problem IRL because it becomes expensive and unsafe. But my digital archives grow much more slowly than Moore's Law, so the cost to me of keeping all my email, photos, etc, is effectively zero. When I replace my backup drives every few years I spend about the same amount of money, and I keep having more and more space left over.

[bigiain]

> Destroying information now is expressing 100% confidence that nobody will have use for it later.

Or an acknowledgement that it might have the capability to be used against you later.

Would you be happy for every word you ever said, in public or private, to be recorded and transcribed and searchable just in case it becomes an "important source to historians", or just as likely "an important source of parallel reconstruction data for $yourCountry{'nsaEquivalent'}"???

We never got a record of Pepy's bar discussions, only what he chose to record in his diary. I'm not sure we need my Signal messages stored for posterity either. Read my blog or Reddit posts, other stuff was intended and should stay private.

There's a good reason a bunch of interesting bars banned Glassholes...

[wpietri]

Sure! Don't store them if you don't want to. I'm not sure how you take me as saying we should live in some sort of totalitarian fantasy you have constructed. I'm trying to help somebody understand why other people want to voluntarily save things.

[lightcatcher]

> It feels as if the point that I'm trying to make is that mindful archiving is a better solution than to just 'keep all the things'

On the topic of plain text things (such as text messages) - how much data are you actually hoarding?

Let's say you type 100 words per minute for the next 40 years (and each word is 10 bytes). No sleep, no breaks, just 40 years of typing. Congratulations, you just produced 21GB of data. This fits on an SD card (<$30) or in the cheapest tier of cloud backup like Dropbox or Google Drive. You can search your 40 years of typing in well under a minute. If you remember the year you typed in, you can grep the data from that year in under a second.

I don't like the term "hoarding" for this. Hoarding has a negative connotation. Storage of plaintext is so incredibly cheap (and search so fast) that I feel that option value of retaining the text is almost always greater than the miniscule cost of storage and slower retrieval.

I don't think are any valid analogies between storing physical items and digital items, as digital storage and search is orders of magnitude cheaper. Consider the same experiment where one writes with pen and paper for 40 years, and then wishes to search for the name "George".

Making a decision of what to keep must be more expensive and time-consuming than just keeping everything.

[thaumasiotes]

> How often do you find yourself reminiscing by going back through a messaging log?

Are you kidding? All the time!

Most commonly by first reminiscing and then searching out the appropriate part of the message log.

[atoav]

I think if yoi know everything is gone you will decide actively what is worth keeping.

I keep a journal for exactlt these things

[m-p-3]

I remember searching for something in Hangouts at work for a tidbit of info that I should have noted elsewhere. It was useful, but I wouldn't say it's a must.

An email thread is useful and somewhat readable, and endless conversation between an individual or a group is less so.