2025-12-19 Throw Away Your Organisation’s Chat History
I’ve spent a lot of time at distributed / “remote first” orgs, where IRC / Slack has been “the office”.
One advantage of having so much chat being written is that you can retain it for search. Want to revisit the conversation you had yesterday with someone? It’s right there!
However I’m a big believer in culling history after some time - specifically dropping chat history after 18 months.
Why drop the history? First and foremost, to keep it from being used as a primary knowledge base. When your chat history is persistent and linkable, it’s all too easy to get sloppy and instead of writing up decision logs, documentation, resolutions, notes etc., just link to the section of chat. That’s not so bad for something low-effort and transient (“what were we talking about last week”) but you want proper records of anything important - knowing that your chat is transient helps encourage good behaviour there.
I think there’s also a more human aspect to it. While I believe in the wisdom of “dance like nobody’s watching, write like `disclosure counsel <https://www.cps.gov.uk/about-cps/disclosure>`__ are reading everything you’ve ever committed to text”, when text-based chat is folks’ primary means of communication, you want them to feel at ease, be open and transparent etc. - and knowing that the joke they made, the quip they fired off, or the disagreement they had, won’t be Archived In Perpetuity can help people open up and engage a little more than they might otherwise.
Finally there’s a risk mitigation aspect. Sometimes people inadvertently share things they shouldn’t, sometimes people get access they shouldn’t, sometimes (especially when it’s the modal form of communication) people type rashly. Timeboxing history can help limit damage and concerns.
Why 18 months? As much as you want folks to proactively take notes and document things, people are human and fallible - and especially when it comes to things like annual processes or other things you don’t do hugely often, it can be valuable to say “uh, let’s look at what we were doing last year”. Because things often don’t recur on an exactly-12-months schedule, and because sometimes you want a bit of extra context, 18 months gives you an extra 6 months of buffer.
If you’re in a particularly regulated environment, this may all be moot and retention is decided for you. But for the many folks who aren’t, I’d definitely encourage replacing perpetual chat retention with an 18 month cutoff.