I have a paid Slack plan and while I can find specific threads where I remember a lot of the details, I've never found anything that I didn't personally participate in.

Overall, I think search is a bad knowledge base management tool. It proves the positive quickly (search for "foo", see "here's how to use foo"), but never lets you prove the absence of documentation (search for "foobar", nothing comes up, search for "foo bar", nothing comes up, search for the previous codename "barbaz", nothing comes up... did you forget something, or is there just no documentation/discussion? you'll never know. the result is that people stop reading documentation.)

This is exactly why at my org, slack is one of the de-facto sources of truth. And it's awesome. I can often find the solution to a specific, niche problem that someone else discussed 4 years ago in a few seconds. Assuming your org pays for whatever it is that allows full archival, it's a great way to capture org-specific, tribal knowledge that you won't find on google, but that nobody will take the time to add to an internal wiki or something accessible beyond their immediate team.

If you want a chat nightmare, try microsoft teams. That quickly became one of the most painful parts of one of my previous workplaces.

In a few seconds? Wow. I'm a very fast reader and probably need at least 15 seconds to wade through a busy Stack Overflow page.

I've found that Slack's discoverability is severely limited because it seems to prioritize low-effort input. Here's what I mean: in a busy channel, Slack makes it so easy to reply in a linear chain. Unrelated messages get interleaved. Following a train of discussion can be difficult.

In contrast, I very much like how Zulip organizes threads. It allows content to be organized both up-front (at posting time) and over time. This feels very natural to me.

cmd+k > copy and paste error message > (few seconds pass) > results appear in slack search

I do this all the time at work. I didn't say that I can expand and read through all the results in a few seconds, that part takes time. But comparing that to something like teams, which would often freeze for me when going back in a convo history, let alone something like asking people individually, slack has been great for finding internal knowledge.

Teams is built by boomers, for boomers