Doing things right is a lonely craft | Andros Fenollosa

A while ago I proposed a change of approach. Instead of using Discord (any ephemeral chat works as an example) to discuss ideas, document processes or ask for help, I proposed creating a forum. It seemed not only natural to me, but trivial. We could hold conversations that survived the day's scroll, organize the content into categories, have a search engine and permanent links to every thread. And most importantly: preserve the knowledge outside an ephemeral, private chat.

But the response was practically unanimous:

Forums are obsolete.

My first mistake was underestimating human friction. The solution is almost never technical, but cultural. And changing a culture is much harder than changing languages or frameworks.

When I try to do things right, I feel alone: proposing a solution that preserves knowledge over the comfort of a private service, applying architectures that favor long-term stability, avoiding trends and fads that create instant technical debt, prioritizing quality over speed, carefully reviewing every Pull Request, anticipating problems, setting aside time to tackle bottlenecks that are boring to solve, updating documentation and tests, separating responsibilities, etc. Silent work that nobody asks for, sees, values or rewards, but that, if left undone, will bring someone knocking on your door to ask why it wasn't done.

To be honest, they had a point. Writing in a forum takes more effort than dropping a message in the chat: thinking of a title, picking a category, writing with a minimum of order. The chat solves today's question in two minutes, and nobody wants to maintain two places at once. My colleagues didn't vote to destroy knowledge, they voted not to pay today a cost whose benefit arrives years from now. That's the underlying problem: the cost of the forum is paid today, the cost of Discord is paid by the future, and the future is never in the meeting to defend itself. Even setting up the forum on my own would have been a mistake: an empty forum is worse than a living Discord.

But understanding the incentives doesn't change the outcome. When there are no immediate reasons to change, people choose what's comfortable even if it destroys long-term value. We can't ignore that the day Discord closes the server, all the content will be lost. And you probably won't get any warning before the apocalypse, nor a tool to export it. This is not an exaggeration: two of the essays I link at the end of this article no longer exist on their original websites, and if you can read them today it's because an Internet Archive bot passed by in time. Even worse, working in a volatile place fosters a throwaway culture: nobody develops a sense of protection for the content, because nobody is willing to invest time and effort in something that isn't theirs.

Then there are the missed opportunities. Maybe someone comes up with the idea of building an AI that feeds on the forum threads to answer questions, or a bot that summarizes the discussions and publishes them on a blog or internal newsletter. The team might even learn to organize their ideas better, become sharper and clearer when documenting, or take the chance to customize the experience while learning new technologies and tools. Everything costs more, but it makes us better professionals. On a chat with no structure, no search and no permanent links, none of this can be built.

To wrap up, I'm sorry to say I didn't manage to convince anyone, except one colleague. However, Notion (a private service for documentation) is being used more and more. It's far from perfect, but it's a first step in the right direction. Important changes require time and patience.

I can give you a list of solid reasons to adopt any technology or workflow, but if there is no culture to back it, nobody will take the step on their own. And if they are forced to, it will only reinforce rejection and resistance to change.

If you want to dig deeper, you can read the articles that inspired me to write this:

Discord is not Documentation, by Terence Eden.

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, by Clay Shirky.

The Rise of Worse Is Better, by Richard Gabriel.

Nobody Cares About Quality Anymore, by Shawn Seymour.

A bad X is better than none, my previous article: why it's worth publishing knowledge in open spaces even if they are imperfect.

This work is under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

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