> move your internal “how do I do X” chatter from Slack to email lists and maybe a StackExchange installation, and you end up with multiple indexable, searchable sources of long-form documentation.
Really, those stores of "long term" documentation complement chat rather than replace it (whether it's Slack, IRC, or whatever). Over time, you should be developing that documentation, so when you have repeated "how do I do X" type of questions in chat, you can often direct people straight to the docs.
But documentation is never foolproof. It's inevitably incomplete, it goes out of date, etc. And for the information that the docs don't cover, you want a real time asynchronous discussion that's not as heavy-weight as a meeting or as slow as email, which is a good fit for chat.
Chat is absolutely asynchronous. It supports synchronous discussion, but I specifically like chat because I can ignore it until I dedicate a few minutes to look through the notifications.
You're lucky then. IMs are by their design pretty asynchronous, but there is this common dysfunction in many organizations - expecting you to be constantly on the chat and participate in real-time. That's the organization turning an asynchronous tool into a synchronous one, true, chats tend to facilitate that dysfunction much more than e-mail.
Really, those stores of "long term" documentation complement chat rather than replace it (whether it's Slack, IRC, or whatever). Over time, you should be developing that documentation, so when you have repeated "how do I do X" type of questions in chat, you can often direct people straight to the docs.
But documentation is never foolproof. It's inevitably incomplete, it goes out of date, etc. And for the information that the docs don't cover, you want a real time asynchronous discussion that's not as heavy-weight as a meeting or as slow as email, which is a good fit for chat.