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[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

We’ve observed the “fast lane / slow lane” dynamics for quite a while. Megatopics for example are a cry for chat:

Chat rooms, topics, and evergreen topics

You can, but it’s going to break you in the long run (due to db size), and it adds hosting costs in terms of pageview, storage, bandwidth load. It is true that there are two distinct forms of communication, and I definitely agree with this characterization: fast lane — chat, disconnected / incoherent words, ephemeral, lettin’ it all hang out, off-the-record slow lane — discussion, coherent sentences + paragraphs, permanent, on-the-record At the moment, I suggest signing up for a free S…

Using a topic as a chatroom

The main issue you will run into is megatopics, which chat topics always become. There is a limit of 10k replies for a reason, and you want to minimize the number of megatopics you have as they are very expensive in server (and client) time. That being said, if you have one of these topics at a time and delete the old ones, you’re probaby fine. This gets into “slow lane” versus “fast lane” discussions and it is something I want to eventually design for.