Is Slack your accidental Knowledge Base?

Remember that knowledge base you set up last year? The one with the perfectly organized folders, the comprehensive onboarding guides, and the painstakingly documented processes?

Yeah, the new hire is still asking for these in Slack.

Welcome to the age of the accidental knowledge base.

Here's a familiar scenario:

New hire Joe needs to set up his development environment.

He dutifully clicks through to the official docs, only to find instructions referencing software versions from two years ago.

Frustrated, he turns to Slack, drops a "hey all, how do I..." in the #dev-team channel, and within 20 minutes, he's got step-by-step instructions, complete with a message about the latest workaround for that pesky firewall issue.

Slite - as a company building a Knowledge Base service - is guilty of it as well. We're humans too, and this is the norm. Slack has become the de facto place for a big part of our knowledge, and it's time we admitted it.

So, Slack - 1, Slite 0. But how?

It's simple: Slack mirrors how humans naturally share information. We're not librarians (despite what the "Um, actually" guy in engineering might think).

We're gossips, storytellers, and problem-solvers who like to chat.

But does Slack solve the problem of Knowledge Management? Absolutely not.

Slack-as-knowledge-base comes with a massive set of problems.

Extreme Noise-to-Signal Ratio

The information in Slack is mostly noise, and in all cases 100% context-dependent.

That gif-filled thread? Noise to the CFO, but gold for the new hire learning company culture.

The random GDPR chat? Irrelevant now, crucial when you expand to Europe.

This is one of the biggest problems we're tackling while bringing AI search to companies, reading both knowledge base and chat apps.

Telling the machine what's "useful" or "irrelevant'' from unstructured data sources like Slack is extremely challenging.

The Ephemeral Nature of Chat

That brilliant solution Sarah shared last month? Good luck finding it now that it's been buried under 10,000 messages about the office coffee machine.

The "Wait, Who Said That?" Problem

In the land of Slack, authority is murky. Was that a crucial security protocol shared by the CTO or the intern who shared a YouTube video on hacking?

The Groundhog Day Effect

The same questions get asked and answered over and over because nobody can find the original answers. It's like "Groundhog Day" but with more JIRA tickets.

So, what's the solution?

Do we double down on traditional knowledge bases and force everyone to use them? Do we embrace the chaos of Slack and hope for the best?

Or is there a third way?

What if there was a way to:

1. Ingest your entire Slack history

2. Identify key information and recurring themes

3. Append this info into a structured, searchable log of knowledge

4. Continuously update based on ongoing conversations

Of course, building something like this brings up a whole new can of worms. Potential for AI hallucinations leading to hilariously wrong "official" documentation? Absolutely.

The possibility of the AI becoming sentient and deciding that the real knowledge was the friends we made along the way? Okay, probably not, but who knows?

The point is, we're at a crossroads. The traditional knowledge base is not always living up to its promises, Slack is a beautiful mess, and AI is the wild card that could either save us all or add to the chaos.

What do we do in the meantime?

Embrace the Slack. Stop fighting it.

That goes for you, and for us, the humans behind Slite, as we build and rethink what a knowledge base truly is.

If Slack, Discord or MS Teams is where a large part of your company's knowledge resides, let's accept it, and start thinking about how to make it work better for you.

What's next for Slite

That’s why we're creating an AI-powered knowledge base that doesn't fight against the tide of chat, but rides its wave.

Our vision? A system that seamlessly brings information from your Slack (or Teams, or whatever chat platform you're married to), continuously learning and organizing your company's collective knowledge. It's not about replacing your chat – it's about enhancing it.

Imagine asking a question and getting an answer that's not just a Slack search result, but a synthesized, context-aware response drawn from both your company's chat history and documentation.

Is it ambitious? Hell yes. Are there challenges? More than we can count. But that's what makes it exciting.

That's why today you can already index your Slack data to get answers from both your docs and chat in Slite, and why we even are exploring a new experience solely focused on this.

At the end of the day, the goal of a knowledge base is to make information accessible and useful.

If it lives in a perfectly organized wiki, great. If it is somewhere in a Slack channel filled with emojis and inside jokes, we'll find it too. The medium is not the message – the knowledge is.

So the next time someone asks "Where can I find info on X?" and you find yourself typing "Let me dig up that Slack thread for you", don't feel bad. Just go try a modern knowledge base that will do the work for you, next time. Try Slite.

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