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.
The result is that organizations are getting dumber as they grow. Because community memory no longer exists in any accessible form. Everything lives in someone’s head until that person leaves or forgets.
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.
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.