Discord is a black hole for information

by Prestoon • 4 years ago

570 367 4 years ago

arkitaip• 4 years ago

At least discord doesn't just paywall content you created yourself like Slack does. I have seen dozens of slack servers where entire channels are scrubbed of information because they are on the free plan and hit the 10k messages limit.

kevincox• 4 years ago

Yes, but why it it's Slack's job to pay for these archives? I'm sure they are not that expensive, at least individually, but I more blame the people who are encouraging these valuable discussions to be posted there.

udbhavs• 4 years ago

Gitter is much better in this regard since messages can be indexed by search engines and show up in searches.

blhack• 4 years ago

I experienced this when I bought a niche 3D printer (a CR30, which is a belt printer).

The machine required a lot of finessing to get working properly, and almost all of the information was in discord channels.

The people writing and sharing info in those channels were of course very gracious and helpful, but it was frustrating to try and search for things there instead of on a traditional forum.

iqanq2• 4 years ago

Discord is a chat program. Chat comes and goes. The fact that search sucks is a feature. If you need a good search feature, good categorisation, etc then you need a forum or something similar. People use Discord because they don't want a forum, they want a chat.

eternityforest3• 4 years ago

Just don't use one of those modern forums that basically act like chat rooms...

Chat and forums/wikis should probably be integrated in one app again, like the old shoutboxes on forums.

alexb_2• 4 years ago

Most information, especially anything about video games, is tucked away in a discord nowadays. I'm in many that literally act as storage of information - a large number of channels that only the admin can post in where they post info.

eternityforest3• 4 years ago

Endless scrolling is a black hole for information. And the hawking radiation that comes out is keyboard diarrhea.

If I were trying to subtly encourage pounding out content free crap, I would probably want people to use difficult to search, non paginated scroll feeds as much as possible.

Discord might be a black hole, but Discourse has some of the same properties. Facebook is the same way.

Anything that funnels people into multi-thousand post individual pages is going to lose information.

Old proboards forums, github issues, and wikis don't have this problem. Content is in smaller blocks that can be linked to easily, and there is a strong culture of keeping topics focused. You don't have multiple unrelated conversations in one place.

You can jump to the end or beginning of a thread when quickly skimming to see if it's relevant.

And you can see all threads in a given time period pretty easily with pagination, when you want to understand the larger picture at a point and time.

These are all things that are useful both for a sense of community and for technical work itself.

jsemrau• 4 years ago

The UI should differentiate between comment and relevant contextual replies. None of the existing social networks manage that properly.

CyberShadow2• 4 years ago

Discourse isn't all that bad with JavaScript disabled.

micromacrofoot8• 4 years ago

you can search everything in discourse and categorize it, it has all the same features you mentioned about github

I never lose info like I do in discord

guywhocodes2• 4 years ago

I've been working with this idea for a while, that it's immutable pagination that makes any written work worthwhile. With it we can spatially reason about it and we commit its location to memory. You can never do that with an infinite scroll.

Maybe a time-based tree structure would improve how we use slack for example.

ffhhj• 4 years ago

Timestamp instead of page number?

agumonkey2• 4 years ago

I find myself enjoying searching vintage mailing lists a lot more. Maybe a matter of information density (people think more and speak less ?)

urthor6• 4 years ago

There is a strong culture of keeping topics focused

I think you're mistaking the type of content on Discord/Facebook as a byproduct of the design of their platforms.

Upvote oriented forums are the internet's equivalent of academic citations.

GitHub issues have more than a sprinkle of the "middle managers preening themselves in meetings for status" vibe.

They both have the same property: end users displaying individual dedication to writing thoughtful comments.

People do not come to Discord/Facebook to discuss weighty topics, with highly edited well thought out answers. They are there to blast nonsense after a long hard day at work.

And that's okay, we all do.

Anecdotally, I find Discord search still fairly easy to use. It's an extremely similar experience to what I have to do to wring answers out of the mitts of Google, Splunk, Slack search, grep, or any other search bar I've encountered.

Like grep, you just have to put in the effort upfront to learn the search filters. In fact it's far easier to search Discord than picking up regex and grep ever was.

opdahl• 4 years ago

What is strange about Discord is this great discrepancy between the ones that love it and the ones that hate it. If I were to guess on the reason of why that might be it would be that Discord is probably really good for the people that are constantly on it, and don't really miss any communication going in. These people have probably been there for some time so they don't feel the problem of not knowing where the past information is, because they were there when that information was communicated and therefore never need to look back at it. These people will (obviously) recommend using Discord, since it works so well for them!

The problem arises when you have people that just now-and-then hop into the Discord. These people are not in the "clique" so they don't feel comfortable talking/discussing too much in the channels, and they also really have no clue where to go for any of the lost information these super users don't even think about. This is probably why I never really use Discord except for voice, since I just don't get anything at all from reading an endless chat log. It's like being someone stepping in to a tight knit friend group with a long history and no way of looking into it.

Discord will most likely have to figure out how they can keep it so that it works for these super users, but somehow make the information organized for people that aren't hard core community members.

Edit: Wrote "clique" wrong

Aerroon• 4 years ago

But do you need to know the past discussions? I don't really see why this would scare away newcomers to a group any more than usual.

qayxc• 4 years ago

Do you remember IRC? It had similar issues.

Past discussions are invaluable for providing context. The worst thing that can happen to a (technical) discussion is new people repeating points that have been resolved already while the discussion has since moved on.

Admins and regulars alike may waste time and screen space repeating past conclusions, something a quick forum search avoids.

PretzelPirate• 4 years ago

If you go to technical discords you’ll find that there’s someone joining almost everyday who asks a set of questions that was aksed the day before.

These people annoy existing servers members and get angry replies because people are so tired of answering the same basic question multiple times a day.

Some servers have created processes where you can only access the FAQ channel until you prove your knowledge, and only then you can enter ‘general’. That clearly shows that something is wrong with content discovery on Discord.

simias2• 4 years ago

I've been using IRC for decades at this point and Discord is, seemingly, a modern, proprietary version of IRC so I assumed I'd feel at home the few times I've been invited to participate on it, but in practice it was an overwhelming, rather unpleasant experience and I never stuck with it.

I think the main difference is that on IRC you'd usually be invited to a specific channel and you'd slowly work your way to other channels as your interests grow. If a given channel has too much activity and is too "off topic" you'll usually find like-minded people who'll just fork to a smaller, more manageable channel. But on Discord you're invited to what they abusively call a "server" and from there you usually see dozens of groups with various purposes and features and you're bombarded with gifs and notification icons all over the place.

I think I agree with you, if I was an ~18yo right now and was willing to invest time into a community I'd love all this... stimulation. But as a boring old 35yo it's just overwhelming and feels like the signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal.

doublerabbit2• 4 years ago

Discord forces you to be online or nothing. You can hide the "server" within some folder but your presence is still online.

If you truely wish to depart you need to leave the server and to return isn't an easy task; as to be able to get back in to the room you need the invite link which has it's own set of caveats. At the same time people tend to think your gone for good.

Unlike IRC where if you desired to step away, you could close the channel and reappear at your own leisure and still continue where you left off. If you returned regularly you end up being known as a regular. IMO the current pitfall of IRC is that it's plagued with idling.

And the days where I could post my own non-https link to a funny image are gone; it feels that most are now self-conscious of cliking linked-content from none-mainstream sources. How did we end this way?

charcircuit8• 4 years ago

what they abusively call a "server"

It's modeled off of IRC / Mumble / TS / Vent terminology. A server is home to many channels which one can join.

zozbot234• 4 years ago

Matrix is a good middle ground; free and non-proprietary, but it still offers a few convenience features compared to IRC (which is a bit clunky by modern standards).

xboxnolifes• 4 years ago

But on Discord you're invited to what they abusively call a "server" ...

I don't know if this has changed, but they were originally called guilds.

holler2• 4 years ago

I too grew up on irc and now working on an alternative that has no gaming association, totally open so you can view w/o being logged in, topical, no gifs, and low friction, and planning to keep it clean and simple. https://sqwok.im

bozhark3• 4 years ago

LMAO our discord has people from 18 to over 65. It’s really whatever you make it.

We just bullshit and game. But not that well. So it fits a lot of people’s style.

behringer• 4 years ago

Maybe you're not using it right (tm)

With discord, you search for a server that interest you, for example "city xyz gamers" and then you disable all notifications unless they mention you.

Then you browse to your hearts content and turn on mass notifications for the rooms you do like to see.

mr_beans• 4 years ago

100% agree down to the boring old 35 year old part. And now I work for a startup and discord is the main way we communicate with the public. Abysmal!

OOPMan• 4 years ago

I'm 38 and on something like 50 discord servers.

I'm only really super active on two or three of them though.

You don't need to absorb everything on every server and their are plenty of ways to control what notifications you get.

I don't think making a vague claim that it's for young people only is useful.

TheBicPen• 4 years ago

As a Discord user, I don't really understand this issue. In what way is having a single channel with content on every topic less overwhelming than having specific channels for individual topics? If I want to read about a specific topic on Discord, I simply go to the channel for that topic. But if there's only a single channel a la IRC, then I would have to search through a whole bunch of conversations about topics irrelevant to me to find what I'm looking for.

bradknowles• 4 years ago

Everything depends on the Discord community you’re connecting with.

We use it extensively for hosting chat related to role-playing games that I’m involved in, along with the voice channels for when we’re having an actual game. Character sheets are hosted on RPGSessions.com, with bot links to our Discord channels.

For that use case, I think it works pretty well.

JonathanMerklin• 4 years ago

I'm not sure if "click" is intentional wordplay or not, but if it isn't, the word is "clique" FYI.

I'm also strongly of the opinion that tying core business functionality and information transfer to a third-party chat application is a massive footgun, and other than the fact that I use it out of business needs and not just for voice, I think s/Discord/Slack/g applies. I've both heard Discord described as "Slack for hobbies" and Slack as "Discord for the employed" (although obviously it's not a perfect distinction and I've seen e.g. Netrunner groups on Slack and e.g. some startups communicating through Discord).

That said, the number of teams and departments I have either encountered or heard about from engineering friends elsewhere whose primary - and sometimes only maintained - deployment interface is a Slack command clearly means that I'm the dumb one for trying to work the UNIX philosophy into most of my life's tools and nobody else is blinking twice about vendor lockin and memoizing solutions in a chat application. I just try and take any question/answer that was sufficiently obscure or anything asked more than once and shove it in an "OAQs" ("occasionally asked questions") on Confluence or whatever the knowledgebase application du jour is, but it still feels like teardrops against the ocean sometimes.

Coding_Cat3• 4 years ago

I use Discord a lot and I agree that it's bad to use it for anything that you can't afford to suddenly lose (though people still use Google and Paypal too).

I do think a modern chat app is a value-add for fast moving (tech) companies. It is a nice hybrid between sending an email or knocking on someones door for a chat.

And as for the 'chat commands', they're usually just thin wrappers around the UNIX style tool. It's maybe not the most reliable way, but it does have a low barrier and there's not much lock-in. I used to have my server email myself whenever something needed my attention, but now it'd probably use a Discord bot for that.

However, I still wouldn't use it professionaly. the lack of self-hosting (privacy) and archival(bots can solve this pretty easilly) and restricting DMs (see slacks previous issues) makes Discord unsuitable.

friedturkey• 4 years ago

I mean, people aren't really keeping up with the top posts 3 weeks ago on HN, reddit, or twitter. That's why reposts are so common.

The first two are easily indexed by google, so that's one advantage. Twitter has a site-wide search. Discord doesn't (yet?) have such a thing, but I think the focus being private communities might keep that from happening... unless they get bought out and some MBA says "how can we better get clicks?"

zhte415• 4 years ago

USP, Unique Selling Proposition, a term I'm shoehorning for wan of a better one.

Different USPs, or pseudo USP as it's a weak U, more a network effect.. The USP of Facebook being closing a circle Facebook controls around you. Of Reddit being indexable/discoverable communities/interests, of Stackoverflow focused, transactional answers. Of Twitter being bullied into change from their earlier premise to serving bigmedia noise. Of Discord wasting users time for the reward of 'being part of..', that's their USP and Discord would die without the waste time through repetition that holds membership (for now).

Philip-J-Fry• 4 years ago

The issue comes frome people shoehorning Discord as a replacement for forums. Like a subreddit is a nice place for discussion and it's free. Discord is a chat app, not a forum app. It's about real time communication. In popular discords you can often just be ignored and they have to deal with the same stuff asked every single day.

If I want to share something cool then I'd rather post it on a forum because you don't need to be only at that exact moment to see it. If I want to report a bug then I'd rather use a forum. If I want to ask questions then I'd rather use a forum.

I love Discord, I think it really disrupted the industry. But a real-time chat app is not a replacement for a community forum.

zppln• 4 years ago

A subreddit is a horrible place for discussion though.

tekknik13• 4 years ago

Like a subreddit is a nice place for discussion and it's free.

Reddit is cancer. Their karma system is ripe for abuse, and a great majority of their mods have power issues and ban for frivolous reasons. Reddit is just a joke for any real conversation.

neutronicus• 4 years ago

I love Discord because people were jerks on forums and they are nice on Discord.

Something about knowing this flame war is for the permanent record (and the fact it keeps getting bumped) just seems to drive people off the deep end.

adam12• 4 years ago

My experience is exactly opposite. People seem to go to war when they know that the conversation will just be lost over time.

sweetbitter• 4 years ago

and the fact it keeps getting bumped

One thing I never understood is why so many forums neglected to implement sage functionality like what you have on imageboards. There would never have been bans for so-called 'necroposting'.

arriu• 4 years ago

It seems like AI could be setup to address this. I would think it would be insanely useful.

Personally, I’d rather look at an enriched summary than the original chat log in most cases. Can somebody get on this please :)

Smithalicious• 4 years ago

In my experience discord servers will scale up to about about 20 people at most. I don't think that's the use case model discord is trying to push, but I think there's a large long tail of small friends-only discord servers in the order of 3-20 people.

Within those parameters discord does work well. Nothing else has the necessary creature comforts (by default). I think most of my friends have misgivings about discord, but I don't think there's anything else that fills this niche well at the moment.

Big discord servers are a completely different world, I don't understand how people put up with that.

wyclif2• 4 years ago

About half of the Discord servers I have joined completely stalled and became ghost towns; when they did I deleted them. The bigger ones, while thriving, have huge numbers of users but are terrible for finding information that the org they represent needs to retain.

AmericanChopper• 4 years ago

That’s basically how I use. Just as a replacement for Ventrilo or Mumble for voice chat while playing video games. It’s rather good for this use case. I think there’s maybe 10 people on our server, and I’m pretty happy with the UX.

pmontra• 4 years ago

and therefore never need to look back at it

Time passes by, memories fade away and sometimes you have to find that very piece of information you remember it's somewhere in there. I had to look for information on forums I was active in ten years before. Some of them were there, easily searchable or not, some went away. It seems that Discord is on the hard side of the searchability spectrum.

woko• 4 years ago

This situation becomes obvious when you want to use the search box to retrieve old conversations. I use Discord every day, so I fall in the first category in your post. However, every time I try to find an old conversation, Discord UX and search engine make it super hard, if not downright impossible. I can feel the pain of a user who would have just arrived on the server.

andrecarini• 4 years ago

A couple of things I personally find disappointing in Discord:

1) No concept of isolated identities for each server (or group of servers).

2) I use Discord maybe once per week, and every time I do, I have to log in again. The phone app quietly disconnects after a week or so.

3) Hard to find messages I have been mentioned in. I think there's an "inbox" that clears itself out after X days.

4) Pollution, mostly visually (can't collapse certain elements).

micromacrofoot8• 4 years ago

if you pay for nitro you can change your identity per server

slightwinder2• 4 years ago

2) I use Discord maybe once per week, and every time I do, I have to log in again. The phone app quietly disconnects after a week or so.

Do you perhaps have multiple sessions of discord open at the same time? I only get the login when I accidentally open discord multiple times, otherwise I never really get asked for a login.

Accacin• 4 years ago

To be honest, I do like Discord, but I only really use it for gaming with friends. We set up a server and use it for multiplayer games, occasionally share memes, etc.

I really do not like it for communities, there's too much noise and too many annoucements.

remram9• 4 years ago

I was surprised to see that it's used more and more for work, instead of Slack. At first I thought this was a good thing (Discord feels much snappier, doesn't have the same search limitations, has voice channels) but it's been awkward. There is a way to change your name on specific servers, so you can be anonymous on gaming ones and recognizable on work ones, but people can still track you across (for example with the "servers you're both in" profile feature). Changing your avatar on specific servers is also a paid feature.

I kind of want to run two instances, but this is apparently a ban-able offence.

pndy2• 4 years ago

In the last years I saw same amount of jerks on both. Trying to get help, any form of help or giving a feedback result in same canned replies, or irrelevant comments where you can clearly see people want to have own 5 mins of the Internet fame of becoming a meme. Also, on discord you have still a chance to reply but on forums people who become mods and who clearly shouldn't have been given such task in first place, will lock your thread and you can bite the dust. It's like you'd give the mythical Karen a chance to become the manager /s.

charcircuit8• 4 years ago

You are missing the meta of informational channels which are read only channels which come with information for people to reference. Past information can be collected in these channels.

n3dm• 4 years ago

Not really, people despise it for other reasons. I.e. how bloated and sketchy their privacy practices are and just how invasive it is.

Zababa• 4 years ago

Discord is also great for people that don't mind having just one identity on the internet. There is basically no support for multi account, so your account for talking with your friends, taking classes and finding information on that video game is the same. Lots of people seem to not mind doing that, but I've always thought that this was terrible if you want to protect your identity online.

continuational• 4 years ago

Hey, sorry for replying off topic.

We had a discussion on Firefly earlier, and I've just written the first small peice of Firefly documentation, introducing the new capability-based async/await inference: https://www.ahnfelt.net/async-await-inference-in-firefly/

You said to reach out by email, but it's not showing up for me on your profile. If you're interested, there's also a draft on part 2 here: https://www.ahnfelt.net/p/ce19cc5c-d18c-452f-86c3-85a920e748...

Thank you :)

alexb_2• 4 years ago

https://theoptionselect.com/2020/02/12/tutorial-just-check-t...

"With the release of Granblue Fantasy Versus, many players are getting into fighting games for the first time ever. But often for new players, the genre can seem to be daunting or overwhelming. But luckily it’s easier than ever to learn how to play. All you need to get started is to just join the Discord. No, not that Discord, the other one."

cinntaile2• 4 years ago

Not having to take care of your own infrastructure is pretty nice though. This is just like companies that only have a Facebook page and no own website.

binwiederhier4• 4 years ago

As a maintainer of a small open source project I have to disagree. The hurdle for someone to join Discord and ask a question is much lower than signing up to a custom forum and posting there. I also love interacting with people that use my stuff. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy to see that people are actually using it.

I can see the other side of course. There are a few things that are repeated questions or useful content that may benefit others. I try to push that stuff into GitHub or add it to the docs. I've also thought about recording the Discord channel and publishing that too, so that the search engines get it. I am afraid that that may scare people away though. If you feel like everything you ask (even with you pseudonym) is recorded forever, you are more afraid to ask stupid questions.

CyberShadow2• 4 years ago

Have you tried GitHub Discussions? They even have a Q&A mode for your own mini StackOverflow.

binwiederhier4• 4 years ago

I should check those out, thanks for the suggestion.

Though I do feel that that splits the community even more. I do agree with he author's point that having too many communication channels split the people unnecessarily.

rcarmo• 4 years ago

Check out Discourse, which is a proper, modern forum and a way better experience.

nextlevelwizard11• 4 years ago

aaand it costs $100/mo vs Discord being free and everyone who joins needs to create new account per instance

spaniard892773• 4 years ago

Discourse is an atrocious blob. If anyone is looking for a sleek forum software, Flarum is the answer IMO, https://flarum.org/

It's PHP, but requires composer so not as easy to setup in shared hosting as old forum software like MyBB et al.

kitkat_new2• 4 years ago

Perhaps Matrix is an option as well.

It's open source and open (decentralized) - and can be indexed by search engines if you set the discussions to public

Matrix can also be bridged to Discord, so you wouldn't split the community.

jeroenhd3• 4 years ago

Indexing chat convos doesn't solve the problem in my experience. The way the discussion is structured changes completely when someone on the other end responds instantly, and unless you're willing to replay their 20 minute discussion you won't easily be able to find what you were looking for. Mix that with different conversations happening in the same channel and others chiming in halfway through and starting separate discussions and you're up for a challenge.

There's been quite a few cases where the only hit for an obscure error message I could find was some kind of Gitter chat, but I've learned to not even bother with those results.

Search engines also have trouble working with chat messages and even modern forums like Discourse. When you click a link you will have to spend significant effort trying to find the highlighted text, something that was a lot easier back in the static HTML days. You have to let Javascript do its fetches and queries to get the information supposedly found somewhere in the page, and it doesn't always load so you may need to scroll to the end to get the rest of the discussion, making "find in page" useless. Discourse tries to solve this by providing heir own control+f handler which is somehow even worse.

I understand the want for more and quicker interactivity. It's a better experience for the person writing the question or the response. This comes at a massive cost in readability and knowledge transfer, though.

tluyben24• 4 years ago

Discord itself is fine, but it needs something to write it's logs to a public html page per channel every x hours. Cannot be that hard and everyone benefits. Every chat for open source should do that as so much valuable stuff is discussed per day that no-one will write down elsewhere.... I mean that's the only thing; all (open source) projects I knew on IRC had an archive in .html which was indexed. Handy to find issues years later.

pas2• 4 years ago

But that IRC archive was written by a bot, not the server(s). Adding a bot to Discord is just as easy.

password43213• 4 years ago

https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter

Always scared to earn a ToS ban using something like this though.

throwaway3snao2• 4 years ago

If you feel like everything you ask (even with you pseudonym) is recorded forever, you are more afraid to ask stupid questions

One reason more to stay away from Discord, which can keep your data and metadata forever.

nextlevelwizard11• 4 years ago

Yeah, so instead your create accounts and have your email and potentially password stored in plaintext on some random guys server which they won't keep updated anyway so all your shit will get leaked anyway

born-jre2• 4 years ago

i also have similar view, i think it could be solved by bot that can watch message and if someone asks_and_answers question that might be useful for broader people you could do something like /makrbot mark 5 then it will publish recent 5 conversation to some read only seachengine indexable public page, maybe also anonymize usernames.

Prestoon2• 4 years ago

One of my biggest issues is that the principles and ideas that come with the open source community are practically shutout by the use of discord. Information does not flow freely, it's locked in a server and it's not easily accessible by other people. It's not indexed by search engines. It might as well be missing completely. Half the time I plan to learn an open source project and learn that the majority of the discussion goes on in Discord, I already know that I'm going to have a horrible time finding answers when I need them so I just search for alternatives.

binwiederhier4• 4 years ago

Isn't it an illusion though that GitHub is more accessible than discord? Yes, it's indexed by Google, buy these days it'll disappear quickly if it is deleted. I don't even know if all of GitHub and its issues are even indexed to be honest.

You are right though that GitHub is at least accessible read only without an account.

MatthiasPortzel4• 4 years ago

This is the argument that most of these comments are making. But Discord isn't supposed to replace a bug tracker or documentation. It's supposed to replace IRC or a mailing list.

The Linux kernel-dev mail list archives might technically be accessibly by anyone, but they're still not going to come up in a web search. And IRC history isn't stored at all.

And if you really need some piece of information in the Discord server, you can join the Discord server and search for it, all you need is an email.

I've been using Discord for a couple of years and greatly prefer it to forums or IRC.

hedgewitch2• 4 years ago

There are a few things that are repeated questions

I honestly think that this issue is vastly overstated in the case of Discord. I've seen any number of even non-technical applications that could literally put, in bold, flashing text, "click here for setup instructions" right next to the download button and people would still be asking on Discord how to drag and drop or how to register an account or whatever inane setup procedure the application entails.

It's an issue with the people, not the format.

EDIT:

If you feel like everything you ask (even with you pseudonym) is recorded forever, you are more afraid to ask stupid questions.

Ha. Funny. In my experience, this isn't a deterrent.

For a not-quite-relevant, but nonetheless elucidating, example, see: Any number of celebrities on Twitter who have said something insanely stupid and later said "you don't think about how the things you say are going to stay up there forever."

Social networks do a really good job of making permanence feel ephemeral to the average user. To those of us who know better, this is a strange concept, but the reality is that people don't really think about or care whether someone will judge them for their stupid questions in five years or so.

Hayarotle2• 4 years ago

The issue of the barrier to entering a forum and ask a question used to be a non-issue, as it was easily solved by appending a shout-box to it. Ephemeral, anonymous, low barrier chat coexisted with search engine-indexed, longer-form forum threads (as well as pinned threads that had a similar function to a wiki).

Pseudonyms were less of a problem when you could use a different pseudonym in each forum, while on Discord/Reddit you are mostly confined to a single identity for all forums.

Having a barrier of entry in the form of having to sign up to a custom forum to participate on threads had its problems, but was useful in preventing spam and low-effort content. Most larger Discord servers I've been in try to replicate this property by requiring some sort of authentication for new members to be able to even look at the discussions on most of the channels.

Discord seems to stand on the middle ground between a shout-box, a message board and social media walls: like a shout-box, discussions are ephemeral and non-paginated, and not indexed on the web; like a message board, you can look up older messages; like social media, it nudges you into using a single account for all your different interests. I can see how this combination can work for some people and for some purposes, and I use it myself, but I much prefer the days of message boards and IRC.

tester7564• 4 years ago

shout-box to it. Ephemeral, anonymous, low barrier chat coexisted with search engine-indexed,

How would that even work?

google indexes something under forum.com/ and you enter it and have to scroll forever?

vorpalhex• 4 years ago

I'm a discord user. I'm in several servers. I'm even Nitro.

...and I'm probably not going to join your server to ask questions or get help. If I can't get help via your git platform or shoot off an email, I'm probably just going to not use the software.

Gitter, for all it's flaws, is ok for this case. The effort to join is very low.

Discord is a whole beast. Every server has a gauntlet to join with a dozen bots and channels, and then Discord over-notifies you for every message until you tune it down.

binwiederhier4• 4 years ago

I guess it is a personal preference then. I don't think any project will stop you from posting questions on GitHub in their issues. I for one will happily answer questions in discord or GitHub issues. I don't know about others.

sanjiwatsuki• 4 years ago

Although there are certainly some servers with gauntlets to join, I think that's only for some really huge ones that have scaling issues.

I have no issue joining a Discord for technical assistance.

toastercat• 4 years ago

Gitter is better for your use-case. The search just sucks, but there are archive pages. You can also use a Matrix client to access Gitters.

hocuspocus• 4 years ago

It's a real shame GitLab bought Gitter just to let it rot.

mgdlbp• 4 years ago

As far as I can remember, I've never been able to use Discord at all as a guest through any device on my home network (always demands verification; never used Discord before through the ISP, and undoubtedly my dynamic IP has changed many times throughout).

This isn't helped by the infuriatingly opaque 'Invite Invalid' screen that is shown whenever I follow any invite link, for which the help link doesn't even include the case of being seemingly IP-range-blocked across all of Discord.

Doesn't give a great impression for any of the large open-source projects that are the main reason I follow such links.

iopq• 4 years ago

I'm more likely to go into Github issues or Discussions. If I join your discord, there's no guarantee I'll get an answer. I'm not staring at your Discord for a few hours trying to see if anyone decides to answer the question when they log back in

trinovantes• 4 years ago

It's going to get worse with discussion channels (in testing). Discord will soon replace niche subreddits at this rate

https://np.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/sknctl/discord_i...

posix86• 4 years ago

I haven't made that bad an experience with Discord. I remember having an issue with Svelte and simply not finding the answer even though I thought that should be a fairly common problem (disabling SSR). There were threads on Github with the same problem but no answer, and closed. I went to Discord to ask someone there, but first search for it in the chat, and lo and behold: It was there, white on black.

Maybe I was lucky, that the problem had such a clear keyword to look for. But writing an extensive documentation of ypur project takes a lot of time, and having a place where ALL people can ask questions and other people can find them is a good thing (nothing against Svelte's docs, they're amazing). Maybe Discord could improve search functionality, and a clear culture of channel organization still has to develop

dgellow2• 4 years ago

If that would have been asked and resolved on a forum anyone using a search engine would be able to find the solution. Instead you have to create a discord account, install the client, join the server, agree to the server rules, search for what you want, hope you find an answer.

verisimi• 4 years ago

Yes - I think there is some general confusion about the different applications.

I personally think its fine that discord is a black hole. Its a voice and text chat program. Its great for instant research, instant interaction - its not for the detailed and considered laying out of some idea. Forums or blogs would be better for that.

PS Dark corporate spy note: I'm not saying btw, that Discord is literally a black hole. I'm sure they keep and measure everything and have their AI bots running over the data. The data will also be re-worked by MS or whoever eventually buys them in future, to build even better profiles of us.

danShumway• 4 years ago

Separate from the more fundamental problem of using chat apps in general as a wiki, Element/Matrix's concept of spaces are a big step forward as a Discord replacement for me. They're a lot like Discord servers, but they can be nested, and you can add rooms to multiple spaces, and they generally seem to be a lot more lightweight.

There's still a ton of polish issues to work out, but stuff I really like that I wish I had in Discord:

- I can dictate which rooms in a space get surfaced by default. When I join Discord servers, it's really chaotic, you have this giant list of rooms you're suddenly subscribed to, and it's overwhelming. With spaces you're not auto-subbed to every single room in the space. There's even a way to search for rooms in a space, which would be a feature I would want in Discord if Discord didn't just throw every room on a server at your face in one list.

- I can import spaces into other spaces, so I can make a public space that's a composite of other public spaces.

- Nested spaces can be used for organization, they kind of act like folders. Discord sort of has this concept with sections, but Discord sections are only 1 level deep, and spaces can be nested multiple levels.

- The first thing I always have to do when joining a Discord server is update notification settings for all of the rooms I'm in, and Spaces has that problem less (although I wish there were easier ways to set notification settings for an entire space).

- A giant feature that I wish existed in Discord is that rooms can be shared across spaces. So I can have a private space in Element that is only for me that I use for organizing a set of rooms I've joined across multiple spaces. Say that I've joined tech support channels for multiple projects. I can have one space that lists out all of the individual support rooms.

- And obviously, Element spaces/rooms can optionally be previewable without forcing the user to join, which Discord still refuses to do.

----

I'm not saying that everyone should just drop Discord right now and that Element is better in every way, more just pointing out that the direction Element is moving is really positive. It's a little bit exciting to see a UX effort in Element that (while still very much in-progress and in-development) is not just competitive with Discord, but better than Discord's system on its fundamentals. I haven't seen spaces get talked about that much, and they're a massive UX improvement, one of the most exciting non-protocol/infrastructure changes to Element I've seen in a while.

Of course Element doesn't fix the problem that Element/Discord are messaging apps, not wiki platforms, and they're not going to get indexed by Google. But at least its a bit less of a black hole, even if I wouldn't advise replacing your wiki with it.

mysterydip• 4 years ago

Discord is the open source equivalent of companies replacing customer service call centers with a phone menu "assistant". It saves time and resources for the maintainers to just say "check the discord!"

donmcronald2• 4 years ago

It's like the tech support version of burying you in legal documents. It's a great way to make you give up.

karterk• 4 years ago

At Typesense [1] we face a similar problem with Slack. Slack has been great for us in terms of quickly discussing an issue but the free plan limits the searches to last 10K messages. We would be happy to pay for it but the current pricing model is just not catered towards large communities where users interact in periodic bursts. Most communities will not be able to afford it.

I've been tempted to index our Slack archive and make it searchable (afterall we are a search company) but I'm afraid that it's against Slack's ToS.

If someone from Slack is reading this, please fix this: I will be happy to pay Slack on a different plan which considers the use of Slack as a collaborative platform for an OSS community.

1: https://github.com/typesense/typesense

Ekaros2• 4 years ago

Discord is the modern IRC. And at least you can see history there, unlike with IRC where it is just gone if your client fails.

tovej• 4 years ago

IRC is almost always logged, and if you need to log things yourself, you can use a bouncer or set up a server.

Ekaros2• 4 years ago

And if your bouncer or server fails? Where do you get the history then?

aliswe• 4 years ago

no offense, but this answer sums up the reason why Discord is more popular than IRC.

Not to say that Discord isnt deeply flawed in many respects, like client weight/resource usage, abysmal search (in server but especially DMs, coarse and clunky permissions systems, audit situation? and the very fact that using animated emojis will cost you 5 dollars per month is just stealing sweets from children, and their absolutely sickening boost (ponzi?) scheme...

leni5362• 4 years ago

Discord search is unfortunately garbage in my experience, so it's almost like not having history.

Kiro• 4 years ago

What's your issue with it? I'm surprised how well it works, how you can search for something and quickly jump to the context.

MatthiasPortzel4• 4 years ago

Several people in this thread have complained about it, but I haven't had any issues.

It's O(log n), it has fuzzy search (e.g. noun/verb forms the same word), and you can add qualifiers like `from:Author#1234`.

I can normally join a Discord server for a project, search for a keyword, find someone else with the same question, and read the chat log from that point in time.

e2le• 4 years ago

At least with IRC, many would run bots which made channel logs available somewhere that could be indexed by a search engine. Doing the same with Discord will earn you a TOS ban.

MatthiasPortzel4• 4 years ago

IIRC, scripting your own account is bannable, so you can't download the contents of servers you join. But I don't think there's any prohibition on inviting a proper bot account to download messages, provided you have admin access on the server to do so.

tluyben24• 4 years ago

I posted an Ask HN:[0] about this a few days ago but somehow it did not turn up in Ask HN. Probably my mistake. Still, this is a bad issue imho. I like discord and use it a lot, but I would just, at least for the open source projects I follow and work with , that everything is dumped in HTML so that it's indexed. When working on tech it's so valuable to be able to find architectural choices and solutions to problems later on; when they are solely in discord, they are hard/impossible to find now, let alone in a few years.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30240984

born-jre2• 4 years ago

i think it could be solved by bot that can watch message and if someone asks_and_answers question that might be useful for broader people you could do something like /makrbot mark 5 then it will publish recent 5 conversation to some read only seachengine indexable public page, maybe also anonymize usernames.

scrollaway• 4 years ago

Is there a concrete reason that we can't build a search engine for discord public content? Archive it?

We used to do this for IRC as well. Anyone remembers https://ibot.rikers.org/?

tluyben24• 4 years ago

It just needs to export to html every 24 hours and dump that on a server; then it's indexed by DDG and Google etc. It's not like that costs money or anything.

Prestoon2• 4 years ago

Good idea, and I suppose people wouldn't have a problem throwing yet another bot into their server. I'd imagine the data it's scraping to be IMMENSE considering Discord saves everything.

https://blog.discord.com/how-discord-stores-billions-of-mess...

unpopularopp• 4 years ago

Discord "won me" over the voice chat. It's just so easy to use and setup for people. I know it's a hard pill to swallow on HN but NOT everyone wants and/or can run their own TS/Mumble/Ventrilo server. That's the number 1 reason Discord became popular in gaming groups. Want voice chat for your WoW raid? 2 clicks. Going to play CSOG with your friends? Here is the voice chat channel.

Discord is not perfect for sure (the search function is atrocious for example) but more intuitive and easier to use than the other options. And you can also stream, share screen, rich embed things etc.

spaniard892773• 4 years ago

mmm I don't know, I've found myself needing to reload Discord multiple times. For voice chat with my friends I use Jitsi, it works way better.

kristjank• 4 years ago

You can get just as good voice chat on Signal, and it is miles easier to use than Discord, especially for people familiar with WhatsApp, Viber and other privacy invaders.

And all of the screenshares and embeds that Discord gets glorified over work just as well over [matrix]

3OCSzk• 4 years ago

It might be easier but I'm not leaking my phone number just to have voice chat with internet friends

charcircuit8• 4 years ago

and it is miles easier to use than Discord

No, it's not. With Discord you can just send them a link and have them join your chat / vc. They don't need to install an app, not do they need to make an account.

voidfunc• 4 years ago

Signal is a pile of crap. Seriously I am in a small chat with four other people and sometimes it just doesn’t sync messages and when it does my phone turns into a vibrating sex toy for 20 minutes.

mcintyre1994• 4 years ago

Does Signal even have some sort of channels? From their website it looks like it's just chats like iMessage/WhatsApp etc? It might be great at what it does but no Discord I'm in would work without channels.

ViViDboarder• 4 years ago

I feel like Discord is very different than Signal or WhatsApp and target very different use cases.

Signal and WhatsApp are basically replacements for phone, SMS, and MMS while Discord is meant to be more of a community with many people on many topics in many channels.

They are all quite good at what they do, but they do different things.

A more direct alternative to Discord is Matrix.

agentdrtran• 4 years ago

Discord and signal are completely different apps for very different use cases.

donkarma2• 4 years ago

yeah how long until they run out of VC funding? no chance this is profitable. i know many people who use discord as their personal cloud storage

pteraspidomorph• 4 years ago

Anecdotally, yes, but I doubt most users deliberately make themselves unprofitable. There're millions of kids who just want to use voice chat and share meme gifs. Plus Discord has been gating a lot of features behind Nitro in recent years, and they make a lot of money from Nitro/Boost purchases (it's hard to tell since they're privately owned but they might make close to 200 million this year). I suspect they can stay afloat without VC funding (though they keep getting it anyway). And their valuation is really high.

vitaflo• 4 years ago

Agreed. They also do some black magic where even with my mic wide open it won’t pick up things I don’t want it to. I could eat potato chips right into the mic and it won’t turn the mic on, but as soon as I speak it does. The vox in discord always amazes me. It seems to always know what I want to transmit and what I don’t.

mabbo• 4 years ago

Discord is a wonderful program for real-time communication and asynchronous conversations. But are either of those use-cases how you want to provide a help system?

Imagine if Stack Overflow was ephemeral. If once you asked a question, the question and answer slowly faded into nothingness for everyone who wasn't actively on the system when it was asked? And anyone who wanted help had to ask again, while the experts rolled their eyes going "Ugh, we answered that like a dozen times already!".

It's a different use-case. It requires a different tool.

pictur• 4 years ago

I think this is a serious problem for the companies you mentioned. Some questions are asked maybe dozens of times and there is no written answer anywhere. or this is the correct one i don't know but it's a weird problem.

pharke• 4 years ago

Couldn't this be solved with a service that automatically archives Discord chat in a forum format and hosts it online?

xigoi6• 4 years ago

At that point, why not just use something else?

cyborgx7• 4 years ago

Discord being a black hole for information is a feature, not a bug. It's for in the moment communication with some asynchronous applicability. But if you use it as your primary source for community-created information, you're using it wrong.

pndy2• 4 years ago

I think that feature makes quite obvious why Microsoft was interested in purchasing Discord - that would give Redmond an enormous amount of information to mine through every second, every day

wheresmycraisin• 4 years ago

1) It's not worse than IRC or Slack, and in some ways superior since it has a lower barrier of entry (IRC is... IRC, and slack user management/invite system is weird) 2) When was recording of live, synchronous communication ever meant to be a repository of information? Do people complain that audio transcriptions of group discussions are an inadequate replacement for purposely written documentation? There's a reason you take notes during a meeting.

Hnrobert42• 4 years ago

I periodically see complaints like this posted here. I wonder if I am in an information bubble.

Are HN readers, a more traditional forum, biased against non-traditional fora? If nothing else, it would be hard for to post a link on HN to Discord discussion about the advantages of Discord, where, presumably, such a discussion would most likely transpire.

inopinatus• 4 years ago

One can hardly describe Discord as non-traditional, since there are no new ideas on display. It’s well executed for the needs of a particular segment, that’s all.

genewitch3• 4 years ago

we were doing what discord did back on AOL and msmsgs.exe!

derbOac2• 4 years ago

In some ways in fact the problem is that Discord is too traditional.

derbOac2• 4 years ago

I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm tired of proprietary, centralized communication systems. What I want is open, accessible, and decentralized or at least federated, or something that someone can start up an instance of. I don't care if you want to start your own server, or use something hosted, I just want it to be the case that someone can.

Traditional forums aren't networked. It's not like I can mirror HN either. But I could go start a forum somewhere if I wanted, and there would be a record of posts somewhere.

Discord kinda runs into two problems for me: it isn't an open decentralized protocol, and it seems like it's being misused or something? I guess if devs want to use it and welcome anyone to come in and see what's going on, great. But then I'd prefer they use something decentralized, and it still isn't a substitute for a forum or forum-like place.

I think your question is an important one just as a sort of perspective check, but I can articulate pretty clearly what it is about use of Discord that bothers me, and can point to very popular systems that work much better as theoretical examples or templates in my mind (for example, Matrix, Reddit, or Twitter).

xigoi6• 4 years ago

Discord is not a forum, but an instant chat app for gamers. Using it as a forum is the problem.

taubek• 4 years ago

Maybe one day Discord will have a feature to enable indexing of content by external services or to make it public.

unixfg• 4 years ago

If it's reliably used as an opportunity to improve documentation, then I can see Discord having a place and forums not being necessary. I wouldn't expect that to happen, though; I know how I feel about documenting even when I'm being paid to do it.

throwaway3snao2• 4 years ago

Furthermore, not only it's closed source but you are giving all your conversations and metadata to a private company.

It is a free data host[ag]ing platform run for profit.

Your data is safe and accessible as long as the economic incentives are aligned with that.

willjp2• 4 years ago

I agree, but it's not discord's fault. Discord is great at what it does. I find the same social issues with discord, slack, gitter, irc, matrix.org, etc. Chat may be good for the questioneer, but it's bad for search/retention. I kind of miss the prominence of phpbb.

kitkat_new2• 4 years ago

Matrix chats can be indexed by google and other search engines if set to public.

willjp2• 4 years ago

Oh I didn't realize that, thank you!

cuteboy19• 4 years ago

I have never seen a matrix result show up in google though.

genewitch3• 4 years ago

the ones on my homeserver aren't, and searching for the domain of the homeserver shows that users are in rooms on other homeservers/networks.

nfRfqX5n• 4 years ago

all they would need to do is add forum support. it’s already sort of there with threads

tester7564• 4 years ago

I disagree

there are tiny details that make forums, it aint just thread based format

boxed2• 4 years ago

Talking is a black hole for information by this metric.

I guess the author wants us to stop talking to each other too?

xigoi6• 4 years ago

How many open-source projects use talking in person as their primary form of support?

boxed2• 4 years ago

Probably more common than you'd think :)

It was the primary form of support for iommi for many years before we got anyone outside our company to try it :)

axegon_• 4 years ago

Discord is by no means perfect but we have to give it credit where it's due: It is a very fast and responsive platform. I am currently in "servers", as they call them, with thousands of users and it feels just as effortless as one on one chats. It also offers a great deal of separation as well as public options. Comparing it to slack for instance, where every chat is almost an independent ecosystem. and using more than one is always additional effort. Video calls on the other hand are second to none. The only true criticism I have is the fact that all file uploads are entirely public with no restrictions whatsoever and as far as I can tell, there is no option to change that. Still, it is my top choice of all the proprietary options by a considerable margin.

nextlevelwizard11• 4 years ago

I dont really see the benefit of having a dedicated forum for everything, sure that used to be the norm and arguably you can search forums easier, but stickied comments work perfectly fine on discord and you can search the comment history.

nootropicat• 4 years ago

I think this is a weird consequence of social media - a local maximum.

- facebook, digg/reddit and twitter kill independent forums. They are 'good enough' mostly for friction reasons that people slowly move there. I think the twitter part is unappreciated - in the past when you had one simple issue, you had to register to communicate it. Now people are likely to tag the profile on twitter with their problem. Sometimes these people remained, now that user acquisition channel is lost.

- they suck at creating communities (I think intentionally), so people don't contribute as much.

- discord is a chat app with flawless ui. As a chat app it's great at building communities due to frequent interactions and instant feedback. This means most active people do everything there, same people who would have 1000+ posts on old style forums.

The tl;dr is that forums are best at preserving information for outside access, but are inferior in making new people join and contribute, which means they are never going to proliferate again. The old optimal balance of chat vs forum is never going to return.

Arathorn• 4 years ago

Something we're trying to do about this on the Matrix side is MSC2716 (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc271...) - the ability to import archives of existing content into Matrix, and thus 'lock it open' and decentralise it for posterity: as long as one of the servers participating in that room stays alive (and the room is set up with infinite data retention, obviously) then the conversation will live on forever. (That MSC is also well worth a look for those interested in how Matrix works under the hood; MSC2716 was a surprisingly tricky problem to solve but it's basically finished now!).

Our first step will be to import all of Gitter's archives into Matrix - but we're then planning to add MSC2716 to all the existing Matrix bridges so that folks can use it to liberate chat history from Discord and Slack if desired, and avoid it getting paywalled/siloed/lost/held-hostage forever. We're also expecting to do USENET, mailing lists, forums, public IRC channels which have explicitly opted into logging... and generally archive as much possible in an open decentralised fashion, and ensure that gatekeepers can't lock up and blackhole info going forwards. After all, information longs to be free :)

karlicoss• 4 years ago

I'm a strong believer in Zulip with respect to a perfect mix between instant messaging and actually retaining information

- functionality for a public export (can also restrict to specific channels), .e.g. https://leanprover-community.github.io/archive/

- in addition to the above, they are working on a guest mode, so you can read the discussions without logging in -- hopefully that would make it possible to index without setting up a separate archive hosting https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/13172

- messages/threads have proper meaningful URLs (unlike random obfuscated UUIDs like in Discord)

- you can easily open things in new tabs -- unlike Discord, where search pane takes like 10% of the screen, or Slack where once you clicked on search result, you lose the context about the remaining results

- you can login with Github (so no need to register for many people, at least for programming-related projects)

smallerfish• 4 years ago

Zulip is great in concept, but the execution lets it down a little. "stream events" for example sounds awfully techie. The UI is not very pretty, fonts are small, etc. It's not clear where to start a chat in a brand new (or empty channel). If they focused on UI for a few months they'd have an easy winner, but in its current state I've had two separate non-techie teams look at it and recoil, and go back to Slack.

(Also, Zulip should try to compete against NextDoor - but to do so they'd need more control around content expiry once the storage limit was hit. No neighborhood is going to pay $7 per user, so the free offering needs to be compelling.)

0x_rs• 4 years ago

I hate the discordification of communities. A lot of them did not survive the modern era and moved en masse there, but the experience is miserable, and they're usually moderated in a manner that doesn't spur discussion ("move to this section for X topic", et cetera, that's just one I see often). Finding content? You have to use some weird bot or the awful search function worthy of a high school assignment website project. Besides, it's also difficult to access it from my recent experience. You can provide a valid email and phone number, validate, and it may still suspend you for "violating ToS" (?) immediately after signing up. I don't think it's suited for a lot of things that end up on there, that shouldn't really be in IM-form, but maybe it's just old-me.

agumonkey2• 4 years ago

The "human" aspect of discord annoyed me too much, there's indeed a lot of seriousness brought by the "possibilities" of the app and the spirit of today where everything has to be classified. People are becoming very tense about information, it's like music shows with smartphone filming except with admins in a chan.

redwall_hp2• 4 years ago

That's actually my number one issue with Discord: the stratification of discussion. With IRC, your "community" is a singular channel where everyone congregates and talks. It can be chaotic, and maybe you only check in and catch up so often, but it's all in one place.

Discord groups always end up with 735 channels about super specific topics. So you're not only spreading discussion over tons of channels where things will be evenly quiet and unnoticed, but you now have to go and laboriously check each of them to find new stuff. Or mute half of them you don't care about so you're not constantly being spammed with unread indicators. This also creates the "internet cop" problem, where whoever created the community (or someone they added as a moderator) feels the need to constantly yell at people for having organic discussions instead of searching for the specific channel approved for topic #365.

Basically, the whole thing seems to discourage discussion more than foster it, because people simply don't work that way. That sort of structure works for forums, but not for something happening in real time.

CRConrad2• 4 years ago

Discord groups always end up with 735 channels about super specific topics.

rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan .

The rasfwrj newsgroup was my first major internet hangout. There were newsgroups for anything and everything.

pingsl• 4 years ago

What he described is not only a Discord "issue", it applied to other modern communication tools as well. I feel Discord is better than Slack because there is no 10K searchable message limit for free accounts and ridiculous pricing model.

everyone• 4 years ago

I really like Discord, but maybe its cus I grew up without internet. If you joined some club (like geology club or something) back in the day, you would show up and ask questions and whoever was there would answer your questions and ye would chat. They wouldn't respond by simply saying "RTFM!!" or "Someone already asked this!"

I think that attitude (like on stack overflow) That they are building some kind of perfect repository of knowledge for the ages from these various question and answers is delusional and has ruined that site in recent years. Most stuff on the internet seems to be highly transitory, constantly getting taken down by DMCA or some other bullshit with new stuff being uploaded in its place. Also the questions and answers themselves quickly become obsolete as tech changes.

Also, simply RTFM is not a good way to learn. There's plenty of evidence suggesting that asking questions and interactive learning is superior to simply learning by rote out of a book. When I'm learning (especially at the beginning, I really wanna ask loads of dumb questions and chat to someone who is already versed in the subject)

127• 4 years ago

On the other hand, it's good that not everything we do and say on the Internet gets stored permanently in some database.

poindi1• 4 years ago

Discord apparently experimenting with forum features

https://discord.com/blog/a-note-on-upcoming-community-experi...

https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/04/discord-forums-mod-tools-h...

searchableguy2• 4 years ago

That's looking like spectrum.chat

cookie_monsta• 4 years ago

I am constantly infuriated by companies who sell actual products but leave user support up to some crowdsourced endless scrolling nightmare. Even if they do have a forum the topics (if they exist) will be so broad that everything gets jumbled in together. The search function is often sub par and kind of useless for new users who may not know the exact keywords they are looking for and apart from a little gamification (points or titles) you have no idea which is an authoritative answer or who actually knows what they're talking about. Ask any technical question anywhere on one of these and you're bound to get someone telling you to reinstall your operating system/reset your device to factory settings no matter how minor the actual fix is.

Give me a well-maintained wiki any day.

dgellow2• 4 years ago

Discord is so overwhelming. I tried a few month ago to join programming related servers, and holy shit, what a stressful experience! I’m not that old school but compared to forums it is just so hard to follow what is happening with all those notifications and discussions happening at the same time.

After muting all servers and channels, and only joining small-ish communities things started to become better but I cannot imagine keeping the client open and try to follow what is happening, it feels like a full time job.

Of course I may be using the tool incorrectly, people seem to appreciate IRC and I never understood what was attractive about it, outside of small groups.

canyonero• 4 years ago

I agree with this statement and am disheartened that the solution for communities (in particular developer communities) that is now winning is Discord. This is however not a new problem. Both Slack and Twitter are also black holes of information by design. Lots of interesting conversation, but nearly impossible to discover externally.

I think community maintainers are choosing it because it has the best moderation tools and community management tools compared to the alternatives.

kreetx• 4 years ago

The UI of Discord is really fast, plus it does voice and video. The problem with all the other chats is that they look (relatively) ugly, including knockout and zulip.

Perhaps if Discord had an option to expose chat histories as regular crawlable web then this problem would go away.

niblettc• 4 years ago

There’s a huge opening in the market between slack and discord for community conversation and organization. My startup is working on this right now with a web3 implementation.

searchableguy2• 4 years ago

I would love to connect and learn more. Email is in my profile.

pdimitar• 4 years ago

Strange criticism. Feels more like the person is unhappy with community managers / admins who don't know better and shoehorn Discord into everything community-related, especially where a more async easier to catch-up with media like forum would work better.

Fast-moving chat channels and forums both have their very valid uses.

cybarDOTlive• 4 years ago

I was just interested in learning about a micro blogging project from Twitter and their blog is basically empty, but the discord has a lot of activity. It's a bit jarring to see these professionals interacting on a gaming platform, and adds a lot of friction for me personally. I'm really interested in the technology and updates but not enough to sift through their chitchatting. No offense.

https://blueskyweb.org/ https://discord.gg/YmrHBhCuFa

rchaud3• 4 years ago

It's precisely the pointless chitchat that makes the UX of Discord so bad for Reddit/Stack Overflow like use cases. I'm not there to socialize!

40four• 4 years ago

For software projects, Discord isn’t my favorite either. But on the other hand, I have used it successfully for getting help, and finding previous answers to my questions. To say everything gets buried in the flow of chat doesn’t make much sense to me. Discord has a rather robust search feature, and it works well. Search for what you need, if it was talked about before you’ll find it. If not ask a new question.

jimmont• 4 years ago

Discord is like having a conversation in a loud, popular pub between happy hour ending and business peaks. Some people love it. I imagine it relates to how much hearing loss and the depth of interaction desired. Github's various features and stackexchange appear to fill the gap covering the entirety of happy hour.

emptybottle• 4 years ago

Discord channel sprawl is a strange phenomenon. It happens to each server I’ve joined, just gets worse over time.

I think park of the issue is that you cant /part a channel in discord. Every channel you have access is automatically joined, you can’t leave and you have to adjust notifications for each to avoid an overwhelming number of messages.

That and the communities are usually small-ish so you have the same people in most of the channels.

BeFlatXIII• 4 years ago

Every server eventually adds channels for memes, general off-topic, and pets.

eximius• 4 years ago

bigger communities work around this with roles to gate access, where the role is granted with bot interaction.

we could argue over what the application defaults should be, but its not unexpected the authors and users trend toward engagement being the default.

Root_Denied• 4 years ago

The solution I use to combat this is right click > mute server for every server I join, and also check the box under notifications > suppress @everyone and @here notifications. Then if I want notifications (either just the visual dot indicator or an actual ping for messages) I can do that on a per channel basis.

The only notifications I get are when I'm explicitly tagged or if a role I've opted in to is tagged. This cleans up the notification spam almost entirely, I only wish there was a way to set that as the default for any new server I join.

stefan_• 4 years ago

Even small communities can have painfully unaware, "organization" obsessed OCD people in it. They are generally the ones that keep insisting some particular thread of discussion really belongs in #xyz.

CapsAdmin• 4 years ago

A few times when trying to search for something I've stumbled upon public logs from irc bots and found the answer there. It would be nice if discord had the ability to do this for communities that are centered around some software.

justinwp• 4 years ago

My developer relations team uses Discord. For us, it is more about strategy and design questions that are often tied to the customer's particular use case. If there are common themes or challenges, we will turn it into a blog post, video, docs, etc to capture it.

Other discussions such as "why doesn't this code work?" or "this behavior seems unexpected" we redirect to StackOverflow and GitHub. Discord also serves as an activity hub for us as we have channels with automated feeds from blogs, youtube, stackoverflow, github, twitter, etc all located in a single location.

This pattern seems to be working for us.

rchaud3• 4 years ago

I agree 100% with the article. To community organizers: for the love of all that is holy, set up a proper message board with threaded discussions. Who does ultra-ephemerality benefit?

Discord is black hole for conversations with more than 5 people in general. This is true not just for software discussion, but also music, sports and pretty much everything else. In a single-purpose channel, conversations die off as the subject of discussion is constantly changing. If I wasn't online at the time, I can't bring up the same topic the next morning, because it's been discussed already.

Compare this to something like the forums on rateyourmusic.com. There are long-standing conversations about specific topics that are years old. Everything is easily searchable, and can be refined to searching inside topics. On profile pages for artists and albums, you can see links to discussions related to that artist or album. This is elegant design that's extremely user friendly. The polar opposite of that is a Discord server with with 5-6 extremely broad channels, and a never-ended series of ellipses notifying you that someone is about to post another message that will soon be lost to the void.

slx26• 4 years ago

> Who does ultra-ephemerality benefit?

It helps create a sense of community very quickly, and it helps keep it alive.

Honestly, trying to judge Discord for its ability to structure information is simply missing its point. I dislike many things about Discord, but projecting my needs or preferences onto it and saying it's bad based on that alone is quite shortsighted.

ilaksh• 4 years ago

What's the alternative? Matrix or something?

It's weird that people have gotten so down on the concept of p2p and all in on federated services. To me it's so obvious that p2p systems have a huge advantage as far as adoption possibilities.

Maybe what we need is something like Web gateways for p2p services.

Have some ideas about a distributed live forum that uses webrtc and IPFS or something but since it's such an interesting idea to me and also not fully formed that usually means other people will hate it with passion and bury the comment.. making it a total waste of time to try to develop or explain the idea.

dvnguyen• 4 years ago

Shameless plug: I’m building a QA web app where you can easily create a QA server for your projects, and users can join your server with a click. Basically a stackexchange with Discord onboarding UX. Shoot me an email if you’re interested. My email is on my profile.

password43213• 4 years ago

I use Discord in the browser. There is no way I'm aware of to tell which 'server' the notification sound came from, making the sound a completely useless annoyance.

charcircuit8• 4 years ago

It should tell you in the notification that will also show up along with the channel name, person, and message.

password43213• 4 years ago

I do not enable desktop notifications, it's just playing the sound in the browser tab. If there is some other pop-up inside the browser tab I've never noticed it.

sylware• 4 years ago

elephant in the room: discord is another set of closed network protocols with a lot of centralized/multicast/relay servers. And it is free as in free beer: the discord ppl were granted tons of money. Where those tons of money do come from? From the usual blackrock and vanguard funds or their proxies? This is probably public information, but I have not looked into that. If I want to interact with ppl on discord servers: either I have to build a google(blink/geecko)/apple(webkit) browser (which I don't and won't), or use their linux proprietary "app" which expects a massive distro with tons of big deps. The steam client is very far from expecting as much from a distro than this app, and they are both, roughly speaking, packaged/librar-ized google blink engines (libcef). Why something that much toxic for internet can "succeed" (or make a lot of noise): it is insanely easy to use, provides full voice/video calls and more, and is free as in free beer (yeah... massive free bandwidth at a worldwide scale!!).

How to do the same with "open and sane protocols" and not force ppl to use a google/apple based browser? Well it is super ez: 1 - get massive amount (I guess at least as much as the discord guys) of funding to make all the servers and bandwidth free as in free beer, worldwide. 2 - if you get 1, we'll talk about 2...

pmoriarty• 4 years ago

My main problem with Discord is its atrocious way of handling logs.

There's no (that I know of) to export channel logs from Discord, nor to log to an external text file.

That means that if I'm interested in something that was discussed at some point in the past, I have to either use Discord's crappy search feature, or manually scroll back and manually scan through text to try to find what I'm interested in.

Discord's scrollback is slow and painful.

By contrast, IRC logs are just plain text files, so I can use powerful regexes or a plethora of text search/manipulation tools to work with them, and scrolling back through text logs is super fast... especially in a decent editor like vim or emacs.

I also own my own logs, and don't need to be connected to any server to read them. Reading/searching through logs can be done completely offline.

If Discord decides to ban you or some channel/server you're interested in goes down (permanently or even temporarily), you're completely screwed. You'll never get the information you're interested in out of it.

The only substantial advantage of Discord I can see over IRC is inline images (which are often just an annoyance, but can sometimes be useful) and voice chat.

Other than that it's bloated, opaque, and a worse experience for me than IRC.

iceflinger• 4 years ago

I remember their official twitter responding to someone that exporting logs wasn't something they could/wanted to do for whatever reason so I wrote a content dumper super quickly https://github.com/IceFlinger/discord-server-dump

But its a big shame that they don't wanna include this as a built in feature since yeah exported logs are very useful.

jodrellblank2• 4 years ago

I don't know a way to export logs, but I am in some Discord channels which have a bot joined to connect them to an IRC channel in a 2-way echo. The IRC side of that could be logging everything from that channel with standard IRC logs.

"The only substantial advantage of Discord I can see over IRC is inline images and voice chat."

Inline code blocks with syntax highlighting using ```python markdown syntax; replying to a message brings a clickable line of what you are replying to which jumps back up to the previous line in the chat.

russjr084• 4 years ago

replying to a message brings a clickable line of what you are replying to which jumps back up to the previous line in the chat.

I actually really despise this feature, because it pings the user you're replying to by default and you have to explicitly turn it off as a user sending the message. "Server" admins cannot change the functionality around.

From a personal standpoint it's not generally a problem, but my company uses Discord as a support platform so we (the staff) end up constantly getting pinged when we do not want to, especially when it's for a message that we may have posted in our general "community area" a few hours ago, and someone has just now decided to reply with "lol" and it generates a ping for it.

Pinging should be opt-in not opt-out, just like when replying to someone before hand, you explicitly needed to make a conscious choice to ping them.

Even worse, when the feature was first released, literally editing your message (even if you explicitly turned off the ping) caused it to ping the other user.

It's actually against our rules to ping support staff in ticket channels (primarily because someone will either ping everyone with the staff role upon two seconds after the ticket opens - or ping a staff member to "bump" their ticket), but its not like we can realistically enforce that for reply-generated pings due to the fact that most of the time its accidental (we do ask them to turn off the ping after the first time - and a good chunk of the time people "forget" to still do so, whether intentionally or unintentionally). /endrant

joshspankit• 4 years ago

I would argue that all timeline-based communication tools are black holes for information.

How much knowledge has been lost to IRC channels, chat conversations, forum threads, and so-on?

Yes, many of us have gotten good (or even excellent) at parsing through threads to find the nuggets of information that lead us to the understanding we seek, but it’s clearly not the environment that information wants in order to thrive.

phendrenad22• 4 years ago

Discord is perfect, the only problem is backing up that information. I'm on several Rust discords. There's several orders of magnitude more discussion on there than the rust subreddit. If in 5 years the admins abandon one of the discords, and it gets taken over by trolls, and Discord is forced to ban the group, will that information vanish into the ether? Currently the answer is yes. But ideally there would be some way to archive channels to your own site or something.

mitchtbaum• 4 years ago

Hence the quote, "Issue queue or it didn't happen." That was Drupal's idiom and it still applies to projects in general.

While all of these other communication mechanisms are great, esp. for hashing things out more effectively in real time, it's absolutely critical that a summary of what was talked about make its way back here for the benefit of those who couldn't be there, including Google, and yourself 2 weeks later when you totally forget what you talked about. :P There needs to be a URL to point people at who have questions later on. However. As a text-based medium, the issue queues are an ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE medium through which to have a heated discussion about whatever. For that you turn to one of the others.

https://www.reddit.com/r/drupal/comments/1qz9l9/i_am_angie_w...

bumblebeast• 4 years ago

Discord Feels like a modern BBS from the 80’s.

.. with annoying notifications

madars• 4 years ago

The worst part about Discord is that it is against their ToS to use third-party clients (and there are reports of people's accounts being banned for them making the black hole effect worse). In particular, you can't have a client that has local chat history, local search, or just better information density on the screen:

All 3rd party apps or client modifiers are against our ToS, and the use of them can result in your account being disabled. I don't recommend using them.

https://twitter.com/discord/status/1229357198918197248

FastEatSlow• 4 years ago

I'd argue that it's not too significant of an issue, as generally most clients do a good job of presenting themselves with completely normal behaviour to the discord api. Most people are banned because of API limits, such as attempting to spam without keeping in mind the limits, (Random delays with around 1 msg/s last I tried), or there's a bug in the client, such as ripcord once causing a login loop for me. If you keep it sensible, it's fine. Most people using these custom clients know the dangers and keep information on how to get back into everything, so there's not too much of a black hole effect.

samb1729• 4 years ago

you can't have a client that has [...] better information density on the screen

A far-from-ideal means of making the client more dense is to zoom with ctrl-{-,=,0}. It's exposed as an settings option too. Rather annoyingly however it doesn't seem to reduce the minimum frame width.

low_tech_love• 4 years ago

”Every time I go to grab a mod or something on Github, have an issue and see the tickets replied to with "Closed, join the discord for help!" I want to cave my own head in with an iron.” Nothing to add!

jbirer• 4 years ago

It's not Discord's fault as much as it is the fault of lazy owners who don't know how to set up a Gitter or IRC or a stackexchange clone.

monocultured• 4 years ago

Twenty or so years ago I was running Hotline and KDX servers, and loved having "my own place" where people could visit and hang out. Recently, I started a Discord channel to rediscover some of that same feeling, but it's mostly become a persistent chat for my friends (in lieu of Messanger, Telegram, etc). Some other channels I've joined are quite quirky and fun though.

The main difference being that you could only be logged in at one server at a time – unless you had multiple client installs – and there's something nice about that limit; you have to choose a hangout and tend to engage more because of it.

I agree with the OP though – I wouldn't rely on Discord as a knowledge repo…

aaomidi• 4 years ago

People are using it as a knowledge repo and it's not indexable.

Learning from past discussions is getting so much harder.

Discord can and should fix this.

lux2• 4 years ago

We tried introducing a forum to our users in the hope of moving away from Discord for all the same reasons and ended up finally shutting the forum down to preserve the unity of having a community all in one place. Reason being, users don't seem to care about the limitations like we do and preferred Discord. The users spoke through their choice of where to post. It feels like the same reason teams use Slack for the perceived relatively friction-free ability to post, despite its equivalent issues for business communication.

It makes me think that users believe finding the answer is our problem, not theirs. Their job is just to ask the question and expect a response. Frustrating.

It's tempting to think a bot or some kind of "save this answer" feature in Discord itself would help, but bots often fail to create the great user experience we expect them to.

phendrenad22• 4 years ago

It makes me think that users believe finding the answer is our problem, not theirs. Their job is just to ask the question and expect a response. Frustrating.

If you're selling a product, and you think that finding an answer is the user's problem, not yours, you will soon not be selling a product.

If, however, you're talking about an open-source project, then I think you're baselessly assuming that users "expect" an answer. Users will ask for answers in the most convenient way (asking on discord) in hopes of getting a quick answer. This does NOT mean that they will not fall back to googling if that avenue fails.

lux2• 4 years ago

You're totally right and of course we help away. Reducing the steps to be able to ask a question is also a better user experience, hence ditching the forum. Give users what they want, including timely responses.

But the question still remains of how to maximize a user's ability to find answers on their own, for those who wish to do so. There are always gaps in documentation and I find a forum's ability to seek out past answers to similar questions way better than Discord's search, but it wasn't worth the friction.

I think the ideal solution is a combo of continually improving documentation as common questions emerge and a "saved replies" feature. Users still get a human response, which feels good, but they have to wait less time for some replies. And questions that start reappearing drive the development of new tutorials, etc.

Just found the Discord feature suggestion page for saved replies and voted :)

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600483...

jodrellblank2• 4 years ago

Again we have the two sides "everything is thrown away" vs "everything is kept forever".

This: "Every time I go to grab a mod or something on Github, have an issue and see the tickets replied to with "Closed, join the discord for help!" I want to cave my own head in with an iron." - Turd Ferguson

is not the same value as a piece of documentation for how to use a tool might be, both needing to be kept forever and surfaced in all future search results. Forum content is awful in its own ways.

Is there no system which keeps good content and poor content is deleted over time? For values of 'good' and 'poor' which mirror what people might want in search results, 'what does $error mean?' being good and 'I HATE THING, THING USERS ARE IDIOTS' being bad even if archaeologists might love it.

nickvec• 4 years ago

Never liked Discord. Always thought it was extremely confusing and cluttered. Information overload for sure, and very hard to keep track of things unless you are checking it constantly.

dehrmann• 4 years ago

Every time I go to grab a mod or something on Github, have an issue and see the tickets replied to with "Closed, join the discord for help!" I want to cave my own head in with an iron.

Shouldn't this problem solve itself? At some point, a question gets asked often enough that people realize they should document it somewhere, and lo and behold, Github issues are perfect for that.

dzhiurgis• 4 years ago

FWIW I’d take quick answer on slack anytime over bunch of outdated ad nauseum documentation in the maze of Confluence

Slack ephemeral nature is a feature, not a bug. Same reason Instagram stories or Snapchat exists.

conradludgate• 4 years ago

I'm a regular user of Discord, but only for Rust. Rust already has lots of other archival sources, so the discord is not replacing them.

It's good for playing with a new idea, or helping a beginner get their code compiling. Often we link to blog posts/stack overflow/github for further reading.

steelstraw• 4 years ago

The younger generation may see that as a feature given our cancel culture climate?

pizza• 4 years ago

What's really great about discord is how I keep running into a situation where I have random pings from the hundreds of server chatrooms I may or may not be a part of, with no easy way of telling where they came from. Great.

aasasd2• 4 years ago

I just recently got into a few old games with mods and stuff, and am having my share of sites gone up Lethe, search engines being clueless lately, file sharing sites poofed into the wind or serving a 404, and things just not behaving in my environment. Now that I'm also presented with the thought of all info being clumped into endless inaccessible chat logs, I'm already mourning for when I try to fiddle with current-ish games in ten years from now and fail miserably. Plus, If Discord itself disappears, that'll be a massive brain fart for gaming as a whole.

Individual pages for each discussion are awesome, how are people not seeing that? There are of course two sides: that keeping Discord channels is easy (I guess) and brain-dumping into the chats is effortless, for better or worse; and that searching for past info is impossible—but who thinks of that now. Good luck to me in ten years, with reading through ten years worth of chats.

(Gamers are already pretty bad at having their mod files preserved and served securely, what with shady file sharing sites that keep dying, and no checksums anywhere. And with complete absence of open-source culture—just download this binary linked in a forum comment, from a shady site, and run it with admin privileges, what could go wrong!)

minerva23• 4 years ago

Discord has (very fast) search and I've had a ton of success searching for a problem and finding answers. YMMV I guess.

Coding_Cat3• 4 years ago

As someone who was a prolific user of both I'm going to come to the defense of Discord here.

First let me say that yes there is some valid critism to be had. Mostly around information preservation, lack of indexing by search engines, barrier to entry, those kinds of things. I agree that those can make Discord a bad platform for a random technical project to use as a support forum / bug tracker / log. (though you can always write a bot for that).

However, with respect, some comments (not all!) do feel a bit like people are simply getting older and blaming technology for what are really demographic changes.

Consider this comment by Azalea on the first page has a quite a few people agreeing with it, it says

And without going all good-old days Internet you damn whippersnappers, I think the move towards chat-room style dialogues also signifies a cultural shift towards bite-sized content and quick, shallow, generally meaningless interactions. I have made a grand total of one friend on Discord servers after posting compulsively and replying to a lot of people. Social interactions on the Internet don't really have the same weight and permanence that they used to.

which wasn't really my experience on Discord, but then it also goes on to say

I miss the old days of logging into my favorite Counter-Strike: Source servers and interacting with the regulars there. Everyone on VOIP playing the same game can lead to bonding experiences, and I made a fair bit of friends on those servers. Now with public matchmaking, that old-school magic has mostly disappeared.

Which to me is that quick-fire social interaction they seemingly called shallow and meaningless. This struck me as odd because having lived trough the rise of social media and matchmaking Discord feels like a return to this old 'social' internet. Especially during these last few years, It's been great for my social life. I've made new friends and reconnected with old ones. Just yesterday I visited a friend I met on Discord.

And I don't think I'm alone: plenty of people heavily use Discord for hanging out with friends, forming gaming groups, discussing and playing together. Everything that they say is lacking in the modern internet. And not just for gaming, There's plenty of LGBT+ spaces, location based spaces, or Maker spaces too.

But one thing I have noticed, is that at 28 years old I already skew old in most spaces. Because of that I'll generally avoid spaces that don't have a reasonable minimum age because I don't really care for hanging around in spaces dominated by teens. But for those teens, and once you find spaces that fit you, Discord is a great place for fostering _community_. In a way that games and IRC/forums used to provide when I was a teen, before social media and 'matchmaking' kind of scrubbed that from the mainstream for a while.

That's why I don't think the kinds of complaints given in the quotes is realy an issue of technology, but an issue of demographics and aging.

But maybe this is just me being an extrovert with ADHD liking the shiny chatterbox with cute emotes.

VectorLock• 4 years ago

for whatever reason server admins just love to split the community across what feels like hundreds of unnecessary channels no one will ever use or look at

I see this one a lot. Server Admins love to customize their servers and the primary way they do it is by adding a thousand channels with emoji names that make them difficult to link to, and dozens of bots that have marginal utility at best and are absolute noise factories at worst.

urthor6• 4 years ago

Discord never promised, to anyone, it'd be an indexable source of information.

Funnily enough, neither are electronic mailing lists. Great effort was required to publish them for search crawlers. Electronic mail is fundamentally private communication.

Discord is a chat app for chatting with your buddies, privately. Private conversations? Remember those.

The issue here isn't that Discord is bad at its job. The issue is that it's a highly attractive, lightweight, easy to use platform.

There's simply no platform of equivalent pedigree for kicking off an indexable internet discussion community. Maybe Reddit is the closest. For all the complaints of end users, if you're trying to administer a community Discord is head and shoulders.

In the end, if you want an equivalent indexable discussion platform, make one.

And make it with more attractive features than Discord. There's lots of unattractive platforms already.

kachurovskiy• 4 years ago

GitHub works great for me - with Discussions tab being very useful e.g. https://github.com/kachurovskiy/nanoels/

Also helps that you can publish and serve static HTML/JS files in the same place. With video support added in markdown I have little else to wish for.

ayushnix2• 4 years ago

The issue is that it's a highly attractive, lightweight, easy to use platform.

It's anything but lightweight. Using Discord is one of the few reasons for my laptop fans running at almost full speed and this is when I haven't even installed their desktop chromium instance. I'm kinda suprised that someone would call such a bloated and sluggish website as lightweight. Not to mention that Discord is hostile against apps which use their API to create third party clients.

Ease of use isn't necessarily always a good thing either. A Discord community that I moderate frequently gets filled with spam messages with links to discord nitro gifts and other scams, despite our efforts to use bots and automate removal of such bullshit. The influx of large numbers of people also tends to lower the quality of discussion and before you know it, you're an unpaid warden who ends up annoying a few members of your community who end up forming hostile communities and raid your servers.

Of course, Discord doesn't really care about any of this. We've sent multiple reports with screenshots but we were either ignored or basically told that "we don't give a shit".

urthor6• 4 years ago

Machine specs?

I think you'll find that Discord is lightweight, relative to the majority of users.

Building for low spec machines has an incumbent cost upon it. Performance optimization is challenging.

Many projects I know build for the "middle quartiles," which means that if you're in the bottom 25% of machine specs nobody bothers to test/optimize for you.

A Discord community that I moderate
The influx of large numbers of people also tends to lower the quality of discussion and before you know it, you're an unpaid warden who ends up annoying a few members of your community who end up forming hostile communities and raid your servers.

This is internet moderation in a nutshell. If you're surprised and disappointed at this, administering internet communities probably isn't for you.

charcircuit8• 4 years ago

Discord is a chat app for chatting with your buddies, privately. Private conversations? Remember those.

You are missing a massive supported use case for Discord. Creating communities. Discord is designed to support servers with hundreds of thousands of users in them if not more. A public discord server with 100k people in it isn't a private conversation with your buddies.

urthor6• 4 years ago

Large private communities are just as valid a form of communication.

Corporate intranets for example, are exactly this. Nobody wants those to be publicly indexable.

gwern• 4 years ago

The problem with Discord is it fails to provide any way at all to move from chat to forum, or perhaps a better phrase would be "plazas and warrens" https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the... . Discord nails the 'fast' part but there's no way for good stuff to 'percolate up' into slower long-term mediums (https://www.gwern.net/Backstop#internet-community-design). Usenet had FAQs, IRCs had associated mailing lists & bugtrackers, Reddits have wikis, and so on. Discord has just an ever-increasing backlog. (The search functionality isn't too bad, but nevertheless, I regularly found myself searching for stuff I knew I or someone else had said or linked, and failing to find it simply because there were so many hits to scroll through snippets thereof.)

urthor6• 4 years ago

IRCs had associated mailing lists & bugtrackers

That's kind of the thing.

I don't see Reddit's Wikis, IRC Mailing lists, Usenet FAQs as "integrated" into the core experience particularly well.

Reddit Wikis are just a parallel communication channel vended by the same company. If I was going to do user journey analysis, from the core user experience of "Reddit threads" to Reddit wikis... it's not there.

Famously, nobody ever reads the Reddit sidebar/FAQs.

Someone has to essentially manually copy and update content in a wiki/FAQ. Which has gone from Web 2.0 esque content creation, to a very "Web 1.0-esque" approach.

Ultimately I feel like people are just demanding from Discord, something that IRC style communication has never provided. The closest we've ever gotten that I've seen is Slack search.

"Quick and easy to write" is honestly just perpendicular to "quick and high quality" to read.

novok• 4 years ago

I think with most chat mediums it's hard to escalate / archive a chat thread into a post somewhere that could be useful as a support reference for example. And there is nothing in discord preventing people from escalating into associated mailing lists, forms and bug trackers like IRC, it just isn't culturally done, except maybe a few with github issue trackers.

aasasd2• 4 years ago

Funnily enough, neither are electronic mailing lists.

However, email has one property that basically all chat platforms lack: each mail is presented as a standalone unit of correspondence with its own metadata, from the start. Just like with forum posts, you spend some minutes writing it, then send it off and wait for a reply—not continuously mash the keyboard, sending your thoughts nearly raw one after another. Streams-of-consciousness that are chats, are not suited to be indexed and presented as separate and complete pieces of info, at all.

DrFell• 4 years ago

If the online programmer community's collective ingenuity is insufficient to simply make what it wants, then perhaps it doesn't deserve it.

neycoda• 4 years ago

Discord is nothing new, chat forums have been around forever, but using it to replace info and help forums is not adequate. It's just chat.

jslove• 4 years ago

I am not sure why all the crypto channels are on discord. Why not an open source system like matrix?

Twitter is also so much better... but people don't DM much.

citizenkeen• 4 years ago

I probably missed the window on this conversation, but what I want is a halfway point between Discord and Reddit.

Yes, it's probably proprietary.

- I log in to one website, and I see all my forums. - I don't want to log in to seven different forums. Like Discord, I log in once and see everything. - Forums are private. Like Discord, they're not scraped, they're not open to the public. There are some very public Discords, but all of them require initial permission to access, which can be removed. - Conversations are chronological, not the weird reddit tree. - Forums don't have a permanent URL. There is no 'r/programming' or 'r/politics' or whatever. _Your_ programming community is different from _my_ programming community.

Companies keep switching their private forums to Discord because they don't have to host. What if we just had a centralized place to host a forum? That ran like a normal forum.

People could pay for 'Nitro', forums hosts could pay for QoL benefits in their forum, etc. Minimally intrusive ads. Stuff like that.

I realize it being proprietary perpetuates a lot of problems, but I feel like we nerds haven't solved the distributed <-> ease of access problem yet.

Discord is a black hole for information

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