Recently, many members of to community, including me, have noticed that our chat is very close to dead in terms of how active our chat is. I want to change that.
I've seen how chats can be beneficial to the site's quality and content. I do think SE chat can be important to a SE community. For example, many chats support the use of "cv-please" or "flag please" to discuss bad quality posts. Many times, members come to chat to discuss about their answers & what other people think. Chat can be a good place to give and get feedback from others. There are other events like Chemistry's TRE and ELL's TCE that use chat to improve questions on the main site.
Also, chat is a free medium for free conversation, and since we want a detailed library of content, we can't allow chatty comments and the SE spirit fights against those. However, humans are social creatures and they need social casual conversation. Moderation of comments would be relatively easier if we used chat for . . . chatty purposes. By making chat more active, many people would probably use chat, instead of chatty comments to questions and answers.
Many times, I am stuck using chatty comments because the user I am talking to doesn't use chat. As you can see, it can become a problem but if we motivate people to use chat instead, it is much easier for moderators and other members of the community.
So chats have repeatedly proven to be beneficial to the site's quality and content, and a friendly, easy-to-use interface for scientific discussions. My question is -- Should we go about improving our chat, and how can we do this?