People didn't put documentation in IRC channels because they didn't want to answer the same questions over and over. Info went into a wiki, and you would get flamed for asking a question on IRC that was answered on the wiki. Discord is not a good place to stash documentation.
In my experience, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an IRC log in a search result.
#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:
No, it's not. If you work on an opensource / open development project, it totally makes sense to avoid walled gardens for the community chat/forum (a few years ago it was public Slack instance, nowadays it's Discord servers).
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.
Isn't there something really nice about it though?
It seems to me that most every community gradually evolves into one where every new message from a new-ish member is answered by something like "Duplicate, please search first!". And this in turn makes those newcomers either go away, become passive lurkers, or become part of the "hive-mind" (as only likeminded questions get answered).
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.
LLMs could indeed address the first part, but not the second, of bringing the newcomers in via actual conversation with the older members.
The only good solution I encountered to this is of having some (preferably not too experienced) member(s) actively take upon themselves the role of welcoming newcomers and answering their questions, whether that's in an official or unofficial capacity.
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.
The best of both worlds - a friendly community that welcomes newbies, with a searchable archive - is possible. Limiting to only chat-based support means that support is bottle-necked by the folks who are available and engaged at the time of the question, and that knowledge will "drop out" of the community as people forget it.
Apologies for my skepticism, but is it just "possible", or do you actually have an example of a long-lived community that remained fully welcoming to newbies while utilizing a searchable archive?
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"
Hard disagree. If anything you'll find that the most knowledgeable members get burned out answering the same questions over and over again, so they begin to simplify their answers until they just become copy pasta.
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.
A very reasonable question, and I'll admit that I'm not deeply-entrenched in enough technical communities to give you an actual example. But yeah, intuitively I do agree with the sibling commenter - a well-curated archive is a tool of technology which allows skilled respondents to preserve their time and energy for new and interesting questions. A pointer to search is not necessarily dismissive - there is a world of difference between the following _technically_ equivalent responses:
* 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.
There has long been a place in the ecosystem for ephemeral chat. Often alongside non-ephemeral things like written documentation.