[jandrewrogers]

The biggest problem with Slack, by far, is that it is effectively ephemeral. An enormous amount of valuable content in Slack quickly becomes undiscoverable for all practical purposes. This creates significant challenges if history matters and this only gets worse as the number of people on it grows. In every organization I've participated in where Slack is the central "everything box", they had to invent parallel processes and systems so that things don't get lost in Slack.

Slack should be treated like the super-IRC that it is, it is poorly designed to be the nominal system of record that people try to use it as.

[crystal_revenge]

I hear people say this all the time, but at multiple jobs in the past Slack has acted as my own internal Stack Overflow.

Whenever I got a weird build issue, or some error that was related to internal code, I would just search Slack and the majority of the time I would get the answer I was looking for, provided that answer was a problem in the past.

Likewise I've found Slack search invaluable when it comes to remembering conversations I had with someone months ago.

Beyond just search, I've seen teams have lots of luck with task specific channels for major projects. It keeps the chatter low and the information high.

Ultimately I think my favorite thing about Slack is that it is a pretty good de facto internal knowledge base (better than poorly maintained confluence pages for sure).

[wingerlang]

Same here. Slack provides answers way more often than Confluence. I tend to write conclusions to threads or discussion in a somewhat keyword heavy manner, simply so that I know I can search for it in a year or two.