Digital Hoarding - Community Comments

09 Sep 2015

I help run a UX community on Slack. We have ~5000 members but make use of the free tier. This means that the community has a 10,000 message limit in place, once we reached that 10,000 anything new added pushes out one of the older posts.

Useful comments, useful links, jokes, insights, detailed explainations and in-depth analysis all lost like

Tears in the rain

The other Admins and I had a few discussions on this, how were we to keep this useful info, how could we capture it before Slack removed it and add it somewhere useful. We talked of archiving systems, Pinterest, moving to another system without the message limitations.

But then, in the course of these discussions, we had a thought—perhaps we don’t need to keep everything. Digital moves fast, what was gospel 6 months ago can be discredited in an instant so that

Nobody does it that way anymore.

What do we achieve by keeping a record of these old links? With ~5000 UX professionals as part of the community we have an ideal up-to-date crowdsourcing system. People do ask the same questions as they can’t always see what has been asked and people do give the same answers for the same reasons - but - this ensures that the questions & the answers provided are always the most relevant, the most well thought out, in-the-moment resources.

Storage is cheap these days but it’s worth thinking about why to archive information, why to keep resources - just because we can doesn’t always mean we should.