I'm an admin in Reactiflux, which is one of the largest programming communities in the world, and hosted on Discord (https://www.reactiflux.com).
I agree that message flooding is an issue with a real-time chat channel environment. If multiple conversations are going on at once in a channel, it can be hard to follow, and questions can quickly scroll out of site and not get answered. Getting answers is also highly dependent on when they're asked and who's around.
At the same time, real-time chat offers an immediacy: you can get interactive help, _right now_.
One of the big sales pitches behind Spectrum is that "all questions and answers are indexed by Google". That's not wrong, but I think it also kind of misses the point.
As we've seen both through Stack Overflow's years of existence, as well as the thousands of devs that have been helped in Reactiflux, new developers aren't going to go searching for answers. And, even if they did, they don't generally have the expertise needed to properly assess the quality and relevance of the answers they find. Most of the time they need some hand-holding to walk them through their current problem, right now.
Yes, this _does_ lead to the same questions getting asked, over and over, but I truly don't think anything is going to prevent that from happening.
Spectrum is real-time too, but conversations are threaded rather than separated by global topics. I suppose Discord and Slack offer a kind of urgency to messages that are hard to replicate in threads.
I agree that message flooding is an issue with a real-time chat channel environment. If multiple conversations are going on at once in a channel, it can be hard to follow, and questions can quickly scroll out of site and not get answered. Getting answers is also highly dependent on when they're asked and who's around.
At the same time, real-time chat offers an immediacy: you can get interactive help, _right now_.
One of the big sales pitches behind Spectrum is that "all questions and answers are indexed by Google". That's not wrong, but I think it also kind of misses the point.
As we've seen both through Stack Overflow's years of existence, as well as the thousands of devs that have been helped in Reactiflux, new developers aren't going to go searching for answers. And, even if they did, they don't generally have the expertise needed to properly assess the quality and relevance of the answers they find. Most of the time they need some hand-holding to walk them through their current problem, right now.
Yes, this _does_ lead to the same questions getting asked, over and over, but I truly don't think anything is going to prevent that from happening.