Why not just paste it into chat
A long snippet in a chat channel pushes the conversation off the screen, loses its indentation, gets re-wrapped by the client, and becomes unsearchable within a day. Anyone joining the thread later has to scroll through it to reach the discussion.
A link keeps the channel readable and the code intact. Whitespace survives, syntax highlighting makes the structure visible, and the snippet stays at a stable address that can be referenced from a ticket or a pull request.
Expiry, and what to do about secrets
A paste is public to anyone holding the link. That is what makes it easy to share and what makes it the wrong place for credentials. Redact keys, tokens and connection strings before pasting - and if you have already pasted one, rotate it rather than deleting the paste, because you cannot know whether it was read.
Setting an expiry is good practice regardless. A debugging snippet is useful for a day and clutter forever after; letting it disappear on its own is better than intending to clean it up later.
Not indexed by search engines
Shared pastes are excluded from search indexing. The content belongs to whoever wrote it, and a search result is not where they chose to publish it - so a stack trace shared with a colleague does not turn into a permanent public record of an internal hostname.
Frequently asked questions
- Do I need an account to share a snippet?
- No. Paste, get a link, share it. Pastes you create are remembered in your browser under My stuff.
- Can I set a paste to expire?
- Yes. Choose an expiry when you create it and it is removed automatically afterwards, which is the sensible default for debugging snippets.
- Are pastes private?
- They are unlisted rather than private: anyone with the link can read them, and they are excluded from search engines. Never paste credentials.
- Will my paste appear in Google?
- No. Shared pastes are excluded from indexing so your snippets do not become public search results.