One theme I’ve noticed is that people are mentioned that “quick” questions are for Slack and “detailed” questions are for Discourse. Perhaps that disconnect is part of the hesitancy toward this decision. I might submit this to the #confessions Slack channel, but probably 50% of my Discourse searches involve silly things I just forget like “how do I add leading zeros?” To many this may be a “Slack” question, which will be answered fast, but is inevitably lost. And I don’t see myself or others talking the time to manually cross-post once an answer has been found. In Slack, questions can be repeated ad nauseum, especially as the community grows.
To me, a relative outsider, Slack/Zulip still feels like a bit of an “original users club”, for lack of a better term. I recognize many of the names posting here, which means we aren’t hearing from new users, the ones #helpdesk is purportedly helping the most. While I definitely see the value in the Slack back and forth, I do think it’s worth it to encourage Discourse over Slack/Zulip rather than have them on equal footing. Also, I see lots of examples and help in the #plotting channel go down the drain instead of being archived as cool examples of the possibilities on Discourse.
Before I ramble on much more, my original point, maybe we all just need to change our frame of mind, Discourse isn’t for a “certain type” of question, but it is indeed for ALL questions regardless of complexity. I know I have started asking more questions on Slack/Zulip of late. But having given this some thought, I do think I will try to only ask questions on Discourse in the future. Maybe some other user(s) can benefit from my ignorance.