The Death of Community Memory

I recently spent forty minutes searching through Slack trying to find a technical decision — made eight months ago — about an app that 60% of my creative life depends on.

I knew the conversation had happened. I remembered participating in it. I could picture the rough time frame and vaguely recall who else was involved. None of this helped. The discussion had taken place across three different channels, and was then moved “offline” by the team, and the rest of us (The Community) had no idea where any of it had landed.

I eventually gave up and just asked someone to explain it again, which they did, poorly, because they didn’t quite remember either.

This keeps happening.

Communities are having the same debates over and over. New members ask questions that were definitely answered six months ago. Teams rediscover solutions to problems they already solved. Users search for solutions to problems that seem to repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

We used to have forums. And forums had one massive advantage: you could find things.

Threads had descriptive titles. There were categories. Search actually worked because the content was structured for retrieval. If someone asked a question that had been answered before, you could link them to the previous discussion instead of retyping everything.

Then Slack happened, and Discord, and Teams, and we all decided that real-time chat was simply better: More modern // more collaborative. More like how humans “naturally communicate” (as if there’s anything natural about the internet itself.)

The real-time feedback loop is genuinely useful. Being able to quickly ask questions and get immediate answers removes a lot of friction. The problem is that we replaced forums entirely instead of using both tools for what they’re good at.

Chat is architecturally designed to be forgotten. Messages flow by in streams and channels multiply until nobody knows where anything is. Important decisions get made in casual conversations that disappear into the archive. Search sort of works if you remember the exact words someone used, but good luck finding that nuanced technical discussion from last quarter when you only remember the general topic.

I’m not even arguing that forums are better than chat for most daily communication.

Chat is great for quick questions, coordination, social connection, all the small interactions that keep a team functioning. The issue is that we’re using chat for things that need to be permanent: Technical decisions, policy discussions, onboarding documentation, explanations of why we built something a particular way etc.

All of this goes into Slack channels where it effectively disappears after a few weeks.

The result is that organizations are getting dumber as they grow.

Why?

Because community memory no longer exists in any accessible form.

Everything lives in someone’s head until that person leaves or forgets. Knowledge that was carefully built up and shared gets lost because it was shared in the wrong medium.

Small groups can get away with this. When you’re five people, everyone is part of every important conversation. You don’t need an archive because the archive is your collective memory. But past a certain size, maybe around 20 or 30 people, you start losing things. Decisions get made that other people don’t know about. New members can’t get up to speed because there’s no coherent place to learn how things work.

A community hits 50 people and suddenly nobody can find anything. They start talking about “documentation” and “knowledge management systems” and maybe someone sets up a wiki that nobody uses. The real solution would be to stop having important conversations in chat, but that feels impossible because the entire culture is built around Slack now…

So they keep using chat and keep losing knowledge and keep wondering why everything takes so long.

But this is a problem we know how to solve!

The technology exists. Forums still work. Searchable, threaded, persistent discussions are not some lost ancient art. We’re choosing not to use them because real-time must be better, right?

Because real-time communication feels more dynamic and exciting. And apparently, communities have to spark an adrenaline rush now?

Companies pay for Slack per user per month. The cost of storage is real but abstracted. Meanwhile, the cost of fragmenting and decaying knowledge is completely invisible until it’s too late. How do you measure the time wasted rehashing old decisions? How do you quantify the mistakes that could have been avoided if someone had been able to find that old discussion?

These costs are real and large, but they don’t show up in any budget line.

I think there’s an easy answer in treating different types of communication differently.

Chat for ephemeral coordination; forums or wikis or something persistent for decisions and explanations that need to be findable later. Clear norms about when to move a discussion from chat to somewhere permanent. Actually writing things up after important video calls instead of letting them evaporate.

I’m tired of searching through Slack for answers that I know exist somewhere but can’t find. I’m tired of watching good ideas get lost because they were shared in the wrong channel. I’m tired of organizations that are smart individually but stupid collectively because they’ve destroyed their own ability to remember.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

When I first got online in 2003, my home on the internet was a collection of video game modding forums—places like DieHard Wolfers, a Wolfenstein 3D community where people shared custom levels and argued about game design. I was probably too young to have anything interesting to say, but I posted anyway. Tips about texture mapping. Questions about making better enemies. Half-baked ideas about what made levels fun.

Twenty-two years later, that forum is still there. The posts are still there. I can type my old username into a search box and find conversations I barely remember having. I can see how I thought about problems back then, what I was excited about, what I was trying to learn. The community's entire history is intact and searchable — every tutorial, every debate, every solved problem still available for anyone who needs it.

Those forums were designed to be permanent and findable. And because of that, they still serve as the actual memory of a community. New modders can search for answers instead of asking the same questions. Experienced people can link to old discussions instead of rewriting explanations.

That's what we've really lost: the idea that some conversations should be designed to last, that communities and companies need memory to function, that real-time and permanent aren't the same thing, and that we need both.

I'd give a lot to have that kind of searchable permanence for the technical decisions we're making right now. To know that in 2047, someone could search for why we built something a particular way and actually find the answer. To build a community — or a company — that gets smarter instead of constantly forgetting itself.

We know how to do this. We just have to remember that we want to.