Discord is not documentation

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/07/discord-is-not-documentation/

by edent • 3 years ago

577 289 3 years ago

tchock232• 3 years ago

There is a trend right now for startups to push everything to Discord, including all support. It is an awful experience for users/customers for the reasons this post cites.

It takes way too much time to both figure out the channel structure and where to post, as well as search to see if a solution has been posted. You also have no idea if someone will actually answer.

If you run a startup and are thinking of moving everything to Discord, please seriously reconsider. It will be a bad experience for at least some of your users.

capableweb2• 3 years ago

I also don't understand it from the perspective of the business.

Instead of having information available publicly that can be found via Google or browsing a help portal/documentation website, they want everyone to drop into a chat room and ask a question that most likely already was answered before?

It just adds further work for yourself as well. Yes yes, I know that many won't even touch the help portal/documentation and ask questions regardless, but even if 10% could be helped by self-serve support, wouldn't it be worth it to keep something like that up to date instead?

Dalewyn• 3 years ago

One of the reasons everyone hates writing documentation is precisely because nobody reads them.

So this becomes a question of whether the time "wasted" writing documentation is cheaper than wasting time answering the same question again and again and again and again and again.

DaiPlusPlus3• 3 years ago

I also don't understand it from the perspective of the business.

Is it a "Gen Z-thing"? Discord is already very popular in that segment, so if a company wants to engage with younger customers/users - or has a younger team-members calling the shots, then that would make-sense.

...just something I've noticed.

duped• 3 years ago

People are just going to post their question on your forum anyway, even if it's been answered a hundred times.

And at least with discord it's easy to source answers from your community instead of paying developers to handle support.

safeimp• 3 years ago

The majority of the time they aren’t thinking about the customer, they’re (selfishly, or naively?) thinking about themselves and how they can crowd source their support versus providing real personal solutions.

Retr0id3• 3 years ago

Google is increasingly useless at surfacing relevant documentation (it prefers SEO blogspam).

The ability to talk directly to a real human is really powerful. I'd rather it wasn't Discord, but it is the lowest friction way of putting people in touch right now - at least, those within a certain demographic.

There are many alternatives to Discord, self-hosted or otherwise, but nothing else comes close in terms of the audience you can reach.

I don't think docs should live in Discord, but I can see why they end up like that.

mooreds2• 3 years ago

We've had great luck at $CURJOB with forum software. Definitely have had folks do their own research and mention forum posts when they ask questions of our support staff. We even have an internal slack channel where we capture questions that have been asked on other media (including private slack channels and github issues) and generalize it to post on the forums. This helps future questioners.

Forums attract SEO traffic, but are more middle of the evaluation funnel, when people want an answer to a question about a specific piece of software.

I think chat is great for companies, just not communities.

Yes yes, I know that many won't even touch the help portal/documentation and ask questions regardless

It's far easier to drop a link to answer a common q and let the person read it than to engage in the back and forth to answer fully answer a question. You can always have the back and forth if the doc doesn't meet their needs.

janoc• 3 years ago

The whole point is that they don't have to answer. They hope someone else from the community will before they get to it.

It is the evolution of the mailing list then forum style "support". Make a forum, let people ask question and answer them themselves. Ideally don't participate in the communication at all yourself. Win!

op00to• 3 years ago

Even worse the “community” in the Discord gets angry and berates you for asking a question!

abe94• 3 years ago

We were considering using https://www.linen.dev/ for our own slack group for this reason - it surfaces information from these chat groups and makes it available via search. Anyone here tried them out?

RunSet• 3 years ago

There is a trend right now for startups to push everything to Discord, including all support.

Which in many cases is, effectively:

"To read the FAQ just provide your phone number to verify your newly-created Discord account even though you just verified your email address."

Previously treated on Hacker News:

"Discord is a black hole for information"

https://knockout.chat/thread/33251/1

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30311982

throwawaymobule• 3 years ago

in my experience, discord is more likely to demand a phone number after you 'claim' an account by adding an email address. and don't even think about not getting phonewalled if you use a commercial VPN.

EGreg2• 3 years ago

Why Discord?

Their interface is confusing and awful for newbies (I was one). Telegram is much better. But either way, why are people putting all their content on some third party centralized service? I don’t get it.

Aren’t all Discord “servers” controlled by one company? And why did so many projects move from Telegram, Slack etc. over to it?

judge20205• 3 years ago

Telegram isn't great for having an overarching place for everyone to join with siloed discussions for sub-categories of discussion. The point isn't "we need IM communication", it's "we need IM communication in a logical structure that matches the way we want to communicate".

Slack costs a lot of money if you want searchable history.

Matrix (https://matrix.org/) is pretty bad when you get to using it. It works, but the QOL isn't up to Discord's level.

Discord is just as easy to replace as any other chat platform if they decide to sell out or destroy their product.

tvanantwerp• 3 years ago

Putting all your community resources on Discord is the surest way to repel me from joining your community.

koonsolo3• 3 years ago

The thing is, Discord might be 99% effortless.

For me at least, I have a very young audience, and everyone wants to be on Discord. If a nice community member proposes to moderate, it's basically almost no effort.

To put it short: I experienced Discord as all pull from the community, it wasn't even my idea to start it. Other platform you push and nobody wants it. Don't ask me why it works, it just does.

wpietri3• 3 years ago

The question I'd be asking: works for whom?

Obviously, it works for you. And it works for people who are already dedicated Discord users. But unless that's 100% of your TAM, then not only are you going to be missing people, but you will have a hard time even noticing, because others will self-select out and you'll be left with a thriving community that feels good to you.

So at the very least I'd be doing user interviews across the TAM. It's legitimate to say, "Our initial target audience is only people who are already happy Discord users." But that should be on purpose, and you should have a plan to move toward the broader audience and that will include addressing concerns like in the article.

lelanthran• 3 years ago

To put it short: I experienced Discord as all pull from the community,

Survivorship bias? You're counting all the people who want to use discord as support for using discord, but since you[1] have no other avenues for the non-discord people you don't know how many users you've lost simply because you've silenced them.

IOW, you're[2] looking at the 5 people who express support for discord but ignoring the 500 who hate it enough to not use your support at all.

I think, if you're a business using discord for user support, you should should be wondering, if you've got 100k users, why are only 1k people in your discord?

[1] Not you personally; for all I know you have multiple channels, which include discord. The places who normally use discord only have one channel for users to use.

[2] Once again, not you personally.

RamblingCTO• 3 years ago

Yeah, community-driven support + documentation sucks. That's how Ory just lost me as a customer. Couldn't even get a reply from the DX dude, wanted to pay for onboarding.

A combination of both, good docs and community is where it's at tho. Big shout out to spicedb for that. The playground, documentation set me up, then I headed to the discord for more input. Got a reply and directly jumped on an intro call. That's how it should work.

vinckr• 3 years ago

Hey there, I'm the "DX dude" so you were probably messaging me in the Ory Community Slack. Very sorry about a missing response, that should not have happened! I usually take time to answer each and everyone in the community within 24 hours so apologies that I missed your message.

Ory does offer onboarding for commercial clients, for that you can set up a call in 1 click here: https://www.ory.sh/contact/ - we can kick off a guided onboarding session on the same day if you want to move fast.

sholladay• 3 years ago

The thing is, Discord is one of the few products that can “do it all” in terms of how people want to communicate.

It supports voice, video, and text.

It supports live human interaction, delayed human interaction, and automated interaction.

It supports web, desktop, and mobile.

I think it’s understandable that people want to standardize on one tool for communication, to simplify the support process and training, etc. If only we can make it accessible and easy to use, Discord would be a great step forward in many ways.

Minimizing the number of channels and giving them clear names is a good first step. A welcome message with some tips and encouragement might be helpful, but keep it relatively short. I’ve seen some servers overdo it with lengthy instructions and rules.

vkou2• 3 years ago

The problem is that it supports 'Locate relevant information' incredibly poorly. Discord is a great replacement for the chat app part of a support channel, it is not even a passable replacement for a website, or a wiki.

Search in it sucks to incredible degrees, you can't put enough good information into pins, anytime that you have more information that can fit in X channels * a few pins, it completely breaks down.

ShamelessC• 3 years ago

Not great for employees either! Have worked for a startup such as this. Developers become part-time moderators/support for an audience which tends to be far less experienced than e.g. GitHub issues. Failing publicly becomes a daily occurrence, which is terrible for morale. Site outages and the like become unmanageable instances of highly unreasonable (often free-tier) outrage.

You are basically eschewing the "wisdom" that even the giants like Google have realized which is that direct, accessible customer support for tech products doesn't scale and saying "yeah! our dev team of size 3 should be able to handle it right?"

Just to be clear, I disagree with that notion. I just think you need to hire people to handle it and didn't have a say in such matters.

aledalgrande• 3 years ago

And usually there is no responsive mods.

rPlayer6554• 3 years ago

Watch discord have it's reddit moment where they raise prices and people aren't willing to pay, but they are locked in due to hosting huge communities in it.

micromacrofoot• 3 years ago

your complaints make it sound like a forum

userbinator• 3 years ago

It will be a bad experience for at least some of your users.

It will also stop many potential users from ever becoming actual users.

I do wonder if those doing this are self-selecting for the "right" type of user.

Modified3019• 3 years ago

Worst of all, there’s no way to discover previously fixed solutions with a web search, all the help and effort are essentially obfuscated.

Discourse is what people want as a modern forum.

Two good examples are https://discourse.nixos.org/ and https://forum.level1techs.com/

efreak• 3 years ago

Discourse is just as bad. A forum should not require the use of javascript. A forum shouldn't silently remove parts of the DOM that are off screen. A forum should allow me to load an entire thread (or however many posts it decides a page is) in my browser, and use the native browser search function to find things.

grishka• 3 years ago

Another thing I dislike about Discord is how it deals with notifications. The default notification settings are absolutely bonkers. Everything is unread, all the time, everything is important, everything has red badges every-damn-where. Then whenever you join a new "server", first thing you have to do is right-click and select "suppress @everyone and @here" and "suppress role mentions". But even if you do that, the messages with @everyone @here @role STILL get the yellow highlight like they mention you personally. Broadcast mentions are the stupidest thing ever. They should've never been invented because people can't be trusted to not abuse them.

Then the message input field tries to be way too smart and is way too dumb at the same time. They've somehow broken macOS's native text replacements, iirc the thing eats some characters if your message starts with them, BUT — if you just type someone's @username and don't select the completion that pops up, the mention wouldn't work.

The UI to add reactions to messages is comically bad. It shows your recent emojis, then 5 kilometers of the custom emojis from all the servers you're on (that you can't use anyway because you don't have the subscription), and only then the rest of the unicode emojis.

Then there are all the incredibly obnoxious popups, banners and tooltips that promote the paid subscription. And the "what's new" popup. That's also obnoxious. Like, maybe, just maybe, if I'm not paying you, and have been using your service on the free tier for several years now, you should consider me a lost cause and stop raping my eyeballs with your stupid upsells in the hopes of converting me into a paying customer?

Also, my files are way too often "too powerful" with no option to have the server compress them to its liking — it's rare that I need to send a bit-perfect copy of an image or a video.

I'll be building a modern multi-protocol desktop IM client as my next project sometime in the future. Discord will definitely be at the top of the list of services to support.

roguas• 3 years ago

Ok, let's backtrack a bit.

If you have startup and no docs + complicated product -> discord is super easy first step. It also has a nice loop: if you see a question over and over, move it to faq, if its still repeated perhaps add better labeling/hints to your forms, if it still persists, damn maybe rethink your offering/product(or accept CS as vital part).

In the end I don't want to deal with meta stuff. I want a nice seamless product period. Discord while awkward is a good first thing that you should absolutely have - you can bootstrap it in 10 mins. (Depending on your customers ofcourse, if you are selling insurance to old folks, for obvious reasons it's not good)

meesles• 3 years ago

It's quite popular in the indie game community and seems to work well, but that's a different beast than software and software support.

DropInIn• 3 years ago

Perhaps the intent is to create impediments specifically to reduce support requests....

I've heard of crazier happening in the industry...

UnixSchizoid• 3 years ago

Exactly! I don’t use discord for privacy reasons and I don’t want to just to learn something that should be included in the README file or in documentation!

discordsucks6• 3 years ago

Discord IS harder to sign up to than other stuff. They sometimes force you to sign up with a mobile number and thats just a huge NO NO.

MicropenisMike• 3 years ago

The alternative is being overrun by spam, which is already really bad on discord.

What's your solution?

anthk4• 3 years ago

HTML files. Or a PDF.

vaylian• 3 years ago

That's shortsighted. GP doesn't want to share their phone number, because then that phone number is likely to be sold together with their other data which can lead to more nasty problems.

nerdponx3• 3 years ago

Documentation

discordsucks6• 3 years ago

Im aware of that and dont have a solution for that. Its not my job to provide one. The thing is there doesnt need to be one if you just document your stuff in a normal way. Also other platforms like reddit face the same problem and seem to be able to solve it in another way, so its not mandatory to survive in the net. Spam has always been an issue as long as the public internet existed. There are other ways to deal with it than introducing global identifiers which can be correlated between platforms and the "real world".

wpietri3• 3 years ago

That's not the only alternative. You see these kinds of intrusive checks on platforms that have drastically under-funded moderation/safety teams. I don't know Discord's numbers, but Twitter's total revenue pre-Musk was about $1/user/month or about $0.01/tweet. Plus there's a hunger for investor-beloved growth metrics that leaves things biased toward greasing the signup funnels. So you end up with privacy-destroying compromises like this.

2pEXgD0fZ5cF• 3 years ago

The solution would be easy: at least offer an alternative. I would gladly give you a few cents or a dollar so you leave me alone with the dishonest bullshit. Probably one of the easiest and most effective ways you could use to fight spammers, but it is obvious why nobody does it or offers the option, because they want numbers. Would be nice to at least stop the charade.

In short, no, the alternative is not "being overrun by spam".

jesprenj• 3 years ago

IIRC you do not have to sign up to use discord. When clicking an invite link without being logged in, a temporary account is created without having to register with an email address/phone number/password.

judge20205• 3 years ago

Mobile number is required if the admin of a server sets its verification level to "highest". This is often needed because spam bots are rampant and will do anything, including solving a regular captcha (which discord also employs via hCaptcha), to send spam in direct messages and channels.

discordsucks6• 3 years ago

This is one but not the only case discord uses mobile numbers. If for any reason discord figures you are a probable source of spam - they dont tell you the criteria for that for obvious reasons - discord will present you with a prompt to verify with a unique mobile number. They only tell you so after the normal email signup and the profile will be instant locked. So you are locked out on profile not on "server" level. For people not on discord: A "server" is something like a subreddit or a part of discord which is subadmined by a certain group/admin. The thing is whatever they exactly do it can flag you for any reason, not only if you really spammed the platform and they seem to use rather creepy technology to make the flagging sticky. At least flushing your browser profile and changing IPs is NOT enough to remove it, so they might be using TLS supercookies, screen resolution or whatever. Would be intresting if some privacy researcher reverses their tracking tech. I had that happen to me in the past and cant tell you what exactly caused it. It may (and equally likely may not) have been caused by an account of mine being thrown out of a "server" after pointing out some lets say inaccuracies that our student government spread. (I didnt spam the server. But it contraticted some talking points they rather not want contraticted.) This wasnt a platform ban either just a local admin action, but it teached me you really want seperate identifiers for different tasks, especially if you somehow engage with politics, cause otherwise crazy people will start following you around and discord makes it easy to track you across servers. You would probably run into the same issue if you engage with health related, nsfw or really any non mainstream content. Other reasons discord might figure you are a likely spam source might be use of a vpn or a network range they already have seen spamming. I cant tell you if they also just want to collect numbers, a blog post of then claimed they only do so to combat spam and not for advertising. At least in germany mobile numbers are tied to your real identity: To get one you have to provide ID to the mobile provider so the goverment has an easier time to spy on you if it wants to. Also you can be followed between platforms with the number. For example you would be able to find me on signal if you had my number. There are ways to firewall against this by using virtual mobile numbers (google voice or something) but they can be detected, it is work and Im not sure if they are allowed or blocked. Lastly, at a certain point you can only join so many "servers" with a free account, which will be quickly reached if every damn software project out there uses one. Though I think this is fair from discords POV. I mean in the end they need to make money somehow.

lightedman3• 3 years ago

The phone number is only a requirement in higher-security servers.

You could join mine with almost nothing verified.

quectophoton2• 3 years ago

Nope.

Discord sometimes flags your whole account to require a phone number.

It's not a "server"[sic]-specific requirement that can be disabled somewhere; it's an account-wide requirement that cannot be disabled unless you open a support ticket and pray that the person in charge of your ticket is not having a bad day.

I might have gotten unlucky with my ISP, but Discord blocking me from doing anything at all unless I give them my phone number, is what made me leave it once and for all.

Oh but without deleting my account, because I can't delete the account unless I give them my phone number.

andybak• 3 years ago

We've started mirroring our Discord to the web using https://www.answeroverflow.com/

You could roll your own equivalent but AnswerFlow has some nice features and handles issues around consent nicely.

If you're starting a Discord then I'd strongly recommend stating upfront that you might mirror content to another location even if you're not doing it now - it makes it a lot easier than doing so further down the line.

A better solution would be to not use Discord but friction, push-back from my colleagues on alternatives and a fear of fragmenting the community made this the best option for us.

The best solution might be not to use Discord in the first place but it does have familiarity in its favour (for some communities at least)

We also do maintain "proper" documentation but it's hard to capture everything and the Discord contains valuable content that's not recorded elsewhere.

toastal• 3 years ago

Or at least mirror in the opposite direction. Keep your ‘primary’ communications on something open like XMPP MUCs, Matrix Spaces, IRC–or the likes of Zulip, Mattermost. If the chat flavor of the week changes, at least home base wasn’t ran by a megacorp that could rug pull & turn off the service like they do with sanctions, or just new paywalls.

handwarmers4• 3 years ago

Meta comment: HN's knee jerk reaction when it comes to certain topics is becoming quite exhausting. Obviously a lot of the current commenters didn't even read what the article was about and just wanted to vent about the good old days of mailing lists and half-assed docs that at best had a code sample, but on average were just a "table of contents" for the source code that you'd ultimately have to read. I for one wish these projects had BBS-es in addition to Discord, but man I love just chatting with people working on the thing I am also interested in and making friends along the way.

Actual comment: When it comes to Watchy, I found the docs to be a good starting point - https://watchy.sqfmi.com/docs/getting-started . They give you the architectural diagrams, have a few code examples for some of the more common use cases, and do a pretty good job at letting you know that this is very much going to be an "adventure" type project with a lot of surface to cover.

They could expand one day and add links to articles/projects other people have made, but I am not sure many of those exist. It is sort of a niche product.

tchock232• 3 years ago

Chatting with the creators and making friends is a great reason to create a Discord. But maybe don’t push everyone there for everything?

handwarmers4• 3 years ago

I agree in principle - Discord can only scale that much - imagine having a discord channel instead of docs for Pandas . Obviously it would be best if there were great docs for everything, a lot of easily searchable Q&As + sample projects, and a forum and some form of live chat for the community to discuss ideas.

But those take a ton of time to create, and a ton of skill to write well, and I feel like up and coming niche projects that need to build a community naturally would emphasize Discord over docs.

susam• 3 years ago

I use a Matrix channel (which is bridged to an IRC channel) for this purpose. I host computing book club meetups in the weekends. While the meetup main page and notes are hosted on a website, I have Matrix and IRC channels where the meetup participants can hang out together, follow schedule updates, make friends, etc. All our communication is in text format, so these open protocols and platforms serve our needs pretty well.

The group members have the freedom to use any free and open source client or one of the popular web interfaces to join the channel and talk to each other. Should something go wrong with the Matrix or IRC network (say, the network becomes user-hostile for some reason), it is a simple matter of moving the channel to another benign network. The group members only need to point their clients to the new address.

In fact, such a thing did happen once in 2021 when Freenode went through major staff changes due to disagreements with how the network was being run. All channel operators (myself included) moved their channels to Libera in a matter of days. It took me only about 5 minutes to complete the migration and hand out the new channel address to the channel members.

anthk4• 3 years ago

Discord sucks. It's propietary and using a CHANNEL (no, they aren't "servers", educate yourselves, FFS) as a documentation source/tool it's the worst thing ever the gen-z had made. Period.

AlotOfReading3• 3 years ago

Channels and servers are different things, and both terms are used for discord. A channel is just a single text or voice space where discussions can happen. Many projects will have multiple channels each specialized to a single topic. The whole collection of these is called a "server". The docs also use the term "guild" for the same concept, as the API docs explain [0].

[0] https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/guild

handwarmers4• 3 years ago

The future is now, old man.

tredre3• 3 years ago

it's the worst thing ever the gen-z had made.

Discord was likely built by millenials given that the oldest zoomers were not even 20 when Discord was released in 2015.

yard20102• 3 years ago

Still better by 2 orders of magnitude than Slack. Slack is shit and it's evil.

dotnet00• 3 years ago

I like that Millenials have finally gotten old enough to forget their own experience and repeat the age old tradition of blaming everything wrong in the world on the next generation.

wccrawford• 3 years ago

Discord themselves call them "servers". If you want to change public opinion, you'll need to start at the source. I just double checked to be sure, and yup, that button at the left says "Add a Server".

trolan2• 3 years ago

Help me with my education. I'm just a lowly 4th year SWE major and we haven't covered definitions of servers yet.

Webster's says: > a computer in a network that is used to provide services (such as access to files or shared peripherals or the routing of email) to other computers in the network

And if a computer is: > a programmable usually electronic device that can store, retrieve, and process data

How is it not a server? It is a computer, it is used to provide services, it's programmable and electronic, routes content... Do you have to assume each discord instance is running in its own container for you to consider it a server? It serves things.

lucb1e• 3 years ago

I use 'community' because, as someone else mentioned, 'channel' is already in use as a word and an invite-only collection of chat rooms where you can often create a custom profile I think can be called a community.

Server is indeed misleading and inaccurate, though I do fear we lost another war: hacker now means cracker, cloud now means foreign server, crypto now means cryptocurrency, ping used to mean Blackberry Messenger, you name it; these things come and either stay or go again... it might be more confusing to use another term for it (I try to introduce community where possible, but the opportunities are rare) because people have to (be able to) figure out from context what you're talking about.

ecf3• 3 years ago

Discord doesn’t have threading for messages. It deserves every ounce of hate it receives.

kaycebasques4• 3 years ago

The Discord instances I've used do have threading. Maybe it's a configurable setting or maybe it's only available in paid versions of Discord. I have heard lots of complaints that the design makes it easy for people to miss that feature.

More broadly, it seems to be a common problem in chat UIs, regardless of what particular product you're on. I think there is a segment of internet users who have been online for a while now and are used to web 1.0 chat rooms where there was only one way to send messages. They do not have the muscle memory of using threads. That's why you see so many dangling responses that should not be standalone messages but rather should have been part of the thread.

Zetice2• 3 years ago

Yes it does?

diath• 3 years ago

You can hover any message and press "Create Thread" which creates a separate threading for that specific message where people can participate.

haunter2• 3 years ago

HN's knee jerk reaction when it comes to certain topics is becoming quite exhausting

Yep you can guess comments all the time just by the title alone. There are certain topics that triggeres a lot of people here and no matter what the actual submission is about (they won't read the article either way) they just post their preoccupied comment. I mean when someone makes a throwaway "discordsucks" to comment that says it all.

discordsucks6• 3 years ago

Honestly, my comment was pretty balanced imho. Discord does provide great UX for what it is good at. That is gaming communities and day to day chatter and such. I even think it has a huge lead in that regard other than maybe being a bit slow on weaker hardware - probably cause electron. It just has inacceptable entry barriers for documentation purposes by collecting your data and severe limits on how much content can be accessed and more importantly retained. I spare you to repeat myself on why I think so. Especially open source projects shouldnt make it a requierement to hand over your data to a entity which has recently been fined for GDPR violations in order to use them.

dcw303• 3 years ago

There should be a good opportunity for whoever can implement an LLM that listens in on chat platforms like slack and discord and constructs a wiki from it.

Bonus points if it also chats back with answers to questions, linking to the docs as needed.

mdev23• 3 years ago

This is why I’m working on an AI discord docs/support bot: https://recurai.com/discord

Reach out if you’d like to get it set up with your server -> contact@recurai.com

vikmals3• 3 years ago

There is also embedchain which you can use in conjunction with a discord bot (create QnA pairs, feed them into embedchain along with your documentations).

I don't know how recurai works under the hood since the discord invite link is broken and there seems to be no documentation on it, so not sure if its worth paying for it.

vikmals3• 3 years ago

Interesting, I've experienced the opposite. People would join the discord server and ask questions that are already answered in the documentations, so you're ending up just sending them the link.

kaycebasques4• 3 years ago

This is close to an ideal outcome, IMO. For us technical writers it's a sign that we're doing our job correctly when support/software engineers answer customer questions by linking to our docs. It's viewed as a good thing because presumably it wasn't too much work for the engineers to find and send that link. Much less work than recreating ad hoc explanations for the same question every time that it comes up, at least.

If something feels off about the situation, you might argue that it could be a symptom of suboptimal design. I.e. "this is covered in the docs, why aren't customers finding it?" But in my experience there will always be a subset of new, inexperienced who default to asking for help in the forums. Once they see that the engineers keep linking to the docs to answer their questions, they usually get the hint that they should just check the docs first.

richbell2• 3 years ago

The Internet is flooded noobs. You don't experience the people who don't join your Discord because they've already read the docs.

donmcronald4• 3 years ago

Yep. Reading the docs first used to be expected and they were worse and harder to find in the past. There’s a lot less willingness to make a solid effort before asking for help these days (IMO).

I can’t even count the times I’ve solved my own problem by spending an afternoon trying to build a reproducible example.

CaptainFever• 3 years ago

This is why you have a bot you can use to easily answer FAQs.

mynameishere• 3 years ago

I am confused. Why would anybody use Discord for anything other than...well, I don't know. I guess the same thing the old Yahoo! chat rooms were for 20 years ago.

haunter2• 3 years ago

Why would anybody use Discord for anything

It's a replacement for Ventrilo/Mumble/Teamspeak. At the time (and still) there were no voice chat + text chat service integrated into one that can be used for free both on web, desktop, and mobile.

crtified• 3 years ago

I don't use it, but have done in the past, and can see why it became popular.

Textual communication is nothing new.

But a relatively platform agnostic system which enabled anybody to quickly set up a room, or form and administer a private or public group, while also covering multimedia like voice comms and file sharing, in a modern and arguably elegant package, well developed even 5+ years ago, it's clear why it gathered a following in it's own right. Successful business strategies played a large part in the extent, of course.

The fact does remain however that textual communication is nothing new, and content in Discord is subject to the same old principles of merit and efficiency with respect to data format, usage, and availability.

gochi• 3 years ago

I see a lot of talk about Discord being the latest evil, but really nobody is actually tackling the underlying problems that causes people to use Discord for reasons it's not well suited for.

Open source projects will rely on Discord for more than ephemeral discussions because they're too swamped to dedicate resources to proper documentation or a readme. It takes too long to keep information up to date, nobody wants to write it, and those that do want to write it tend to not be great at really understanding the project. "Edit on Github" links work for larger projects almost exclusively it seems as nobody uses it to help out smaller projects struggling with docs. Documentation is a hard problem! It requires all hands on deck, yet people treat it like one person can go off in isolation and come back with great docs like a novelist. So they pin a comment on Discord for FAQs, they section a channel off for admin-only docs in progress for stuff they eventually move to a Github wiki of sorts.

Also interestingly enough, the project he links does have a lot of documentation, even has wikis full of links. They're adequate enough as docs. So I don't know what he would even have to go into Discord for. He can submit Github issues as well to the multiple repos they have linked.

I don't believe businesses are exclusively moving support to Discord, but again the ones that do rely on Discord are already using it for ephemeral discussions so they just add in casual support to the mix because they are not going to opt into extremely costly support systems. It's easier, counterintuitively, to provide support through Discord than it is to run the likes of Intercom especially at a smaller scale. How else are they supposed to prove direct support for people who don't want to search through the Github?

Now that two core problems are out of the way, we can talk about why Discord thrives. People are ok with Discord being ok at everything but not really excelling at those tasks because they want a hub. They want a place with one account they can get support for an open source project, and then talk to their game friends, and then look up job applications in another server. This is why they don't care about the official site or sending an email, Discord is good enough.

All this to go against the grain and say: Discord is fine as documentation. Not enjoyable to use for that purpose, but fine. Do yourself a favor, and contribute to some docs.

vikmals3• 3 years ago

I've joined the project discord he's ranting about, seems like all the questions he asked could be answered by following through the docs or actually reading the code (or by using the search function on github). Discord is just a place for asking questions and having someone else to do the research because most people are lazy.

simonw2• 3 years ago

There's a cultural/process hack that can really help here: be meticulous about turning questions in Discord into updates to your documentation.

If you do that, Discord can be a powerful accelerant to the quality of your project documentation. But you have to be disciplined about it!

le-mark• 3 years ago

This is the key. If I have to do my job and monitor slack discord mattermost all day, I’m not doing my job. Unless my job is support. It’s just one more instance of software development taking over yet another business area (support) because developers are by and large naive, opinionated, and eager to please. It happened with agile (we got project management) and devops (we got sysadmin). Ymmv.

hobo_mark• 3 years ago

Surely an LLM could parse the chat and keep a public FAQ up to date? Somebody must already have implemented this, but last time I looked I still came empty handed...

Karunamon• 3 years ago

From some experiments with a discord bot, the non-deterministic responses you get from an LLM are the big killer for that use case. Ask the model to summarize 100 lines of chat 10 times and you will get 10 different outputs, all worded subtly differently, with different headlines missing each time. (Even on state-of-the-art GPT-4)

raidisco• 3 years ago

https://recurai.com/discord

xigoi6• 3 years ago

Yeah, if you want to have an inconsistent documentation with lots of subtle and non-subtle errors, using a non-deterministic black box to generate it is a great way to achieve that.

bbno4• 3 years ago

Everytime I read something like this it's almost always because the author does not actually know how to use Discord.

There's some nice search features: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000468588-U...

And on top of this I'd push the Discord to use forum channels if they do not already https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...

Zak2• 3 years ago

I know how to use Discord. I admin a couple of servers. I know how to use its search and agree it's a pretty good search. I know how forum channels work.

I still think it's a bad substitute for both documentation or a web-searchable forum. I can't use a web search to find results on Discord. I have to log in to a Discord server and use Discord's search so it's a separate set of steps from the web search I initially did when I started trying to solve my problem.

Once I grudgingly jump through those hoops, if the server admins and users are actually using forum channels, I might find reasonably structured results, but they often aren't. When I have a technical issue with a software project, I would like proper docs, then a proper forum (Lemmy might be a good option as of summer 2023), in that order. Real-time chat, whether it's Discord, IRC, or Matrix is a distant third.

zokier2• 3 years ago

But if you can't even be bothered to do that, perhaps you shouldn't be releasing a product in the first place?

That is simply unreasonable gatekeeping; Discord might not be documentation, but having documentation is in no way mandatory for releasing your thing into the wild.

kaycebasques4• 3 years ago

There was a thoughtful comment [1] along your lines in the discussion about Diataxis a couple weeks back. The author basically argued that in early stages of a project, certain types of docs aren't necessary or even that helpful and are therefore not a great use of project collaborator time & energy.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36611205

kjkjadksj7• 3 years ago

Im sure airbags are similar for prototype cars re: costs. We sill do it though because its common sense.

nobody9999• 3 years ago

but having documentation is in no way mandatory for releasing your thing into the wild.

No. It's not mandatory to have documentation (or even, gasp, good documentation), but easy access to quality information about functionality and usage significantly enhances the UX.

If you're actually charging money for your product, especially if it's a product that isn't strictly for tech folks (e.g., IOT devices, end-user applications, LOB application frameworks, etc.) you better have some decent documentation or you're asking for a world of hurt.

With Discord (bots notwithstanding), you need actual, meat-based agents to handle the support channel(s). Providing quality documentation reduces the support load, and over the long term, likely reduces support costs significantly.

What's more, making folks jump through hoops to get answers to questions, most of which are about ordinary usage/configuration/dependency/etc. options is not a good look.

I'm not rejecting Discord and similar environments as support channels, but we should use the right tool for the right job.

As an old guy, I remember the DEC days, and as Ken Olsen put it[0]:

   One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How enthusiastic
   is our support for UNIX?
   
   Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago.
   Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines. Ten percent of our
   VAXs are going for UNIX use.  UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand,
   easy to get started with. It's great for students, great for somewhat casual
   users, and it's great for interchanging programs between different machines.

   And so, because of its popularity in these markets, we support it.  We have
   good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s.

   It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run
   out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and will end
   up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming.

   With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly
   check that small manual and find out that it's not there.  With VMS, no 
   matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation 
   -- if you look long enough it's there.  That's the difference -- the beauty 
   of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there.
   
   -- Ken Olsen, president of DEC, DECWORLD Vol. 8 No. 5, 1984
   [It's been argued that the beauty of UNIX is the same as the beauty of Ken
   Olsen's brain.  Ed.]

Now, Olsen was wrong about Unix/unix-like platforms. But he was right about documentation, especially in a business context.

These days, of course, you don't need physical, paper documentation and that's a good thing.

Would you rather have to connect to a Discord channel (assuming you know the right one to use), have searches for similar issues return copious useless results, watch your question/issue slide off the page (potentially) with multiple other conversations going on, and wait for someone (who may or may not have a clue) to attempt to answer your question or,

open a browser tab, search the indexed documentation and quickly see all the relevant options, capabilities and/or specifications?

Now get off my lawn! :) :)

[0] https://motd.ambians.com/quotes.php/name/freebsd_fortunes_2/...

Eumenes3• 3 years ago

Discord attracts a weirdo community of young people into anime and furry stuff .. Slack, whilst not my favorite, is way more professional and enterprise. Don't understand the developer evangelist stuff moving to Discord. Maybe if you were a gaming company or made some gaming mod, but for a web product/tool, big fail.

lightedman3• 3 years ago

Discord is far, far superior to slack (except in actual product parity between mobile and desktop.)

Eumenes3• 3 years ago

It may be a superior program/app, but its use case was not built with business/enterprise in mind.

qwytw2• 3 years ago

Slack requires you pay per account and the free tier is even worse than Discord since every message is deleted after 90 days...

Eumenes3• 3 years ago

You can join Slack channels as a free user ... Devrel teams usually have a budget to manage their communities.

rcme6• 3 years ago

I used Discord for support at my last company. It was amazing. It takes a while to bootstrap the community, but once you do, it becomes a huge asset. Here are the biggest benefits:

1. Real-time user feedback. Discord is conversational. If someone gives feedback on your product, you can quickly have a conversation about the exact issue they're facing and you can propose solutions to see how they feel.

2. User retention. When users have such immediate access to the product's developers, it makes their opinions feel helpful and useful and drives user retention.

3. User collaboration. Once your community gets big enough, users start to collaborate together. This might be directly in the product (if it's a collaborative product), but can also take the shape of brainstorming improvements and feedback.

4. Community help. Over time, members of your community becomes experts in your product and they help newer users onboard. This frees up a lot of dev time that would have been spent providing support.

Personally, I find the opinion that "it's not indexable" a little silly. How many times have you searched an arcane error and been brought to a mailing list? More often than not, the indexed email never received a reply. If it did, the answer is unlikely to solve your problem. Combing through conversations is not an efficient means of documentation. We use our community feedback to get a lot of signal about what's missing from our documentation and then update it accordingly. 10 users came in this week asking about feature X? That means we need to update our documentation, etc.

isoprophlex• 3 years ago

The "its not indexable" used to be a lot less silly but I'm afraid you're entirely right.

We have a web that has itself become almost unsearchable (due to SEO spam, google shitting the bed with their search quality in general, everything becoming a walled garden, everyone jacking up API prices/hoarding their data against LLMs)

I think that the death of the searchable web in general is to blame, and is driving this shift to Discord. Not so much the individual developers, for them its a net win as you say.

We need the "ozempic web": 2023 scale but lighter, indexable, un-walled, with less bullshit filler and attention grabbing monetization. Until that happens, we can hate the players all we want but it's the game itself that is crooked.

kaycebasques4• 3 years ago

There are two key differences between what you're describing and what Terence Eden is describing:

1. You have succeeded at integrating Discord into documentation processes. You get feedback on X and then make sure to update the docs to discuss X. Eden is saying that a lot of projects just answer about X in Discord and then never get around to updating the docs to discuss X.

2. Your team responds to Discord messages promptly. A lot of teams drag their feet or don't respond whatsoever.

asynchronous2• 3 years ago

Sure, maybe for straight support items or collaboration but for actual _documentation_ if it only lives on your Discord that is a straight sin

Salgat• 3 years ago

For support? Absolutely. For documentation? Absolutely not.

donmcronald4• 3 years ago

Personally, I find the opinion that "it's not indexable" a little silly.

How is that silly? I know there’s threading now, but it has to be used by everyone. If you find someone that asked the same question you have, but without a reply, is it unanswered or answered out of the thread 1000 messages down the page? Without threading it’s a disaster.

How many times have you searched an arcane error and been brought to a mailing list?

Tons, but forums were even better. I never get answers, or at least good answers, via Discord or Slack. It barely takes anything for my question to get pushed up the page and then no one sees it. If someone does answer, it’s often a naive, enthusiastic person that doesn’t even understand the problem I’m having.

I used to post a lot on forums. I’d post well tested, reproducible examples that exactly demonstrated my problem. I’d also take an “ask a question, answer a question” approach where I’d skim the first page or two of unanswered questions and leave a reply if I knew something off the top of my head.

Almost every Discord or Slack “support” channel I’ve tried is terrible. They’re a way for companies to reduce support by shifting the expectations towards ignoring users. Drone (CI) did this recently. Their Slack channel is nothing but users asking questions (at least for the several days I saw before unsubscribing from emails).

I think the real reason Discord, etc. are popular is because it’s low effort. No one expects you to come in with a fully baked example. It’s a conversation. So instead of the old expectation that you’d come prepared with a concrete example of your problem, you just blurt out some half-assed question and wait for someone to prompt you and hold your hand through the whole issue.

The price for that is the loss of people that want to participate in a high effort community rather than an emoji filled meme-fest with content splattered at mile-5 on the 1k mile continuous scroll. At least that’s my opinion.

rcme6• 3 years ago

Tons, but forums were even better. I never get answers, or at least good answers, via Discord or Slack. It barely takes anything for my question to get pushed up the page and then no one sees it. If someone does answer, it’s often a naive, enthusiastic person that doesn’t even understand the problem I’m having.

People on forums were free to ignore your posts as well, but they didn't, because they cared about their users. Discord isn't the cause of indifferent dev teams.

alwaysbeconsing• 3 years ago

We had a brilliant, visionary solution to this whole problem. It was called Stack Overflow. Real questions with actual answers, no faffing about. Tragically it has been dying a slow death for seven or eight years and as of now looks like it will just be milled into LLM food.

charcircuit3• 3 years ago

Discord servers can have forums in them if you didn't know

snthd• 3 years ago

How many times have you searched an arcane error and been brought to a mailing list? More often than not, the indexed email never received a reply. If it did, the answer is unlikely to solve your problem. Combing through conversations is not an efficient means of documentation.

Usually it's a stackoverflow post or an issue on a bug-tracker. Discord redirects information away from those open venues. Sometimes the answers are how I discover the project.

On the other hand I care about FLOSS and not startups with proprietary code, so it may just be a different thing (mainly customer focus).

Buttons8403• 3 years ago

This seems like a matter of perspective. As the product owner, having an active Discord would be amazing--easy dopamine hits everywhere.

It's selection bias. Of course the conversations the owner participates in turn out well. What about the other conversations? What about that question that just nobody responded to and 3 hours later people start talking about something else and buried the question? Well, the company never saw that question. The company does not see what it does not see--selection bias.

rcme6• 3 years ago

Why would we miss a message?

Zak2• 3 years ago

How many times have you searched an arcane error and been brought to a mailing list?

When I search an error message, I'm usually brought to a mailing list, forum, Reddit, or Stackoverflow - often all of those. More often than not, one of them has either a solution or a clue that gets me closer to a solution. My problem gets solved and I don't have to waste someone else's time.

bartwr• 3 years ago

As a user of a product, I do not want to be a community of random people and flooded with unproductive discussions.

I do not want to be refreshing mostly-synchronous chats and if missing a day, missing important information.

I want companies to respect my time and attention.

that_guy_iain• 3 years ago

Then don't use the chat support. You don't need to use the chat support to be a user of a product.

ofslidingfeet2• 3 years ago

Discord overall is antithetical to the web's foundational values and yet another thing where a "moderator" culture has emerged that cannibalizes user interaction

davely• 3 years ago

I feel like it harkens back to the days of lurking around IRC, chatting with randos about all sorts of stuff. I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment from it. The main difference is that conversations are persistent and you can (sort of) search them.

That said, pretty much every popular modern website is antithetical to the web’s foundational values, with persistent user tracking, monetizing everything, walled gardens, etc. It’s not a Discord exclusive problem.

ofslidingfeet2• 3 years ago

Funny story: I recently received an email from discord threatening my account with suspension because I had simply lurked a server they found to be rule-breaking. I had forgotten about even joining it until I saw the email.

mepian• 3 years ago

Discord's search is astonishingly horrible. Users have been complaining for years about it, and it's not improving. This alone disqualifies it from being useful as documentation.

atribecalledqst2• 3 years ago

I came here to say this. There's so many things wrong with it:

1. If a user left the server, you can no longer specifically search for stuff they posted.

2. Even if a user is still in the server, it can still be hard to search for stuff they posted because Discord search seems to only sometimes know about all the current users.

3. It breaks if you search for something with a lot of hits, and try to go back to the first page (i.e. the earliest hits). For example it's not possible for me to jump to my first message in some servers.

4. Can't search within specific threads

5. Something about how the text search works itself has bothered me in the past, but I can't find a good example of what's wrong with it at the moment.

drabiega• 3 years ago

Discord's text search isn't exact, which can be a big problem sometimes. For instance, I was in a discord for a game mod recently which had questions asked about the terms 'element' and 'elemental', which were two very different topics. You simply can't narrow your search down to just one of those. Even searching for "elemental" brought up every usage of "element".

esafak4• 3 years ago

Because they expect you to lurk all day and chat, not search and get back to work. Engagement (wasting time) tends to be a desirable quality at these kinds of companies.

filleduchaos• 3 years ago

Why would Discord, a product created for gamers to chat/talk to each other while playing games, prioritize anyone's need to search and get back to work?

dagmx• 3 years ago

There’s four tiers of support channels imho and I think the issue is that people try and push discord as a solution for all four.

- documentation is meant to be official and the best effort representation of what a user should know from the perspective of the dev. This should be easily searchable from a search engine.

- forums where support questions come up that may or may not be answered by the documentation. This is still externally searchable which makes it a great secondary form of documentation.

- community chat which acts like a forum but allows for faster and more ephemeral solving of issues. This is great because it’s more interactive but hard to search for newcomers experiencing issues that have been brought up before.

- 1:1 support which is more focused but still not searchable, but allows for more sensitive discussion.

The biggest issue for me is that the forum and the 1:1 support tends to have fallen by the wayside with chat replacing them. But the lack of search engine integration and low history limits means that it’s really inscrutable to people who are trying to solve an already solved issue, but now must join the community and waste everyone’s time with repeating the same thing again.

there’s a place for each of them, and I think too many projects try and treat one as a silver bullet

mnd999• 3 years ago

In truth, Discord is no harder to sign up to than Slack, Matrix, Gitter, IRC, or whatever

Not true, they demand phone numbers, make you fill out captchas and generally try to grab as much identifying data as they can get their hands on. It’s a pretty scummy app all round.

RulerOf• 3 years ago

they demand phone numbers

It annoys the absolute shit out of me that this has largely become "acceptable" for SaaS products. I don't want to be identified by a phone number, and I don't want to perform a login by proving I can receive a text message.

I want a login form that can be completed by a password manager.

toaster_fcker• 3 years ago

what about the verification proccess then?? some servers are bullshit wanting to be verified by phone number

n_ary• 3 years ago

The irony of this behavior is that, Discord’s own support channel for non-paying users are only e-mails and there are no actual discord channel to report discord issues.

Disclaimer: To best of my knowledge. I tried reporting bugs but it was always e-mail with scripted responses(reboot device, reset router, reinstall client, factory reset device).

gbear605• 3 years ago

They have a Discord server for creating integrations with their API, which is probably the most similar usage.

spywaregorilla• 3 years ago

I've needed discord documentation for unreal engine, several niche plugins, and a few video game mod communities. The experience is way better in my opinion. The hard part of finding information in a new field is formulating the question, not finding the answer. Talking to people who can help you formulate the question is great. Most documentation for things is pretty bad for hard problems. You want some barebones stuff, sure, but most projects have this.

The watchy example looks fine to me: https://watchy.sqfmi.com/docs/getting-started

I'd rather post a question and wait for a reply than waste time trying to find answers on dead forums and bad docs.

WirelessGigabit• 3 years ago

The other part is that many companies consider Discord as being a malware source and thus block it.

Great, I have an issue which may be a bug, but you're only supposed to post confirmed bugs.

Guess I'll disable VPN. Need to do that anyway to read documentation on SourceForge.

0 accountability in security.

nativeit• 3 years ago

I remember when I was given CorelDraw in the mid/late 1990s and it came with 3 volumes of manuals, several hundred pages of documentation, in rather nice paperback with glossy color pages.

nazgulsenpai• 3 years ago

Somewhat related tangent -- while I have issues with Discord as a platform, I do find it to be a very friction-less way to get a community together easily. But since it has consumed so much of the conversation on the internet, it is quite concerning that centralizing all of this knowledge and culture in one, closed, proprietary space will inevitable lead to that Reddit moment when unpopular moves are made from the underlying business and everyone suddenly realizes they fucked up. It was especially strange seeing Reddit subs during/after the blackout funneling users into Discord communities.

brianjking• 3 years ago

I'm just into this epaper watch this blogger writes about. Anyone have any experience with them?

willsmith72• 3 years ago

I feel this. Lately I'm using Remix as my web framework, but most of the discussions and issues are had on discord. This means they're not searchable via Google, and even in discord, the search completely sucks.

There's so much good info which is really hard to access.

034jtoa3j94r5• 3 years ago

Also, Slack is not documentation, for all of the same reasons. I'm working with my company now to improve documentation across the organization. We're an old startup (takes a very long time to get to market) and in the past quarter I've led two projects where I've spent weeks trying to answer questions about old code, sometimes finding that the original author is no longer at the company and no documentation exists or the original is still at the company but literally doesn't remember writing the code and no documentation exists. And each time people tell me there are Slack conversations explaining everything ... somewhere. No. Every project, every application needs a design doc before and a user's manual after and they actually need to get maintained.

danpalmer• 3 years ago

Chat is not documentation.

So I hit a blocker, how can I solve this problem? I do a cursory look over the implementation to see if I can figure it out, but it's an unfamiliar codebase. So I check the docs and there's nothing except a "join the Discord community" link. So I open Discord, install updates, do the custom email-based 2FA dance, agree to the changed T&Cs, dismiss a Nitro banner, agree to the server rules, and join #general. I write up my question with all the context I can and post it. No reply. So I crack out the debugger and step through the library/framework/etc one line at a time figuring out what's going on. I set up my own editable copy so I can add logging and try some fixes, eventually after a few hours I find that X just doesn't support Y, or that I have to pass in the value encoded in Base 47 or Latin 1. Three days later at 1am I get a dismissive response on Discord telling me to refer to a conversation that happened 2 weeks previous to me signing up.

Chat massively shifts the burden on to users both in terms of figuring stuff out themselves, and in terms of providing support to each other. It's no substitute for documentation, particularly in the world of asynchronous working. We think it's good for async working because you can reply asynchronously, but it's not because you can't unblock asynchronously.

In ~8 years of working with Django (split over the last 12 years), I think the only time I used a debugger on Django code was when I found a security vulnerability and needed to be certain of some very low level details. In ~5 days (over a month) of a hobby project with a project that encourages Discord for documentation I've had to use the debugger 3 times to figure out what's going on.

thealienthing• 3 years ago

This post says everything I’ve been feeling. Ive been doing a lot of work with the Dronecan/UAVCAN protocol and nearly all their documentation is relegated to a Discord channel with no discussions about problems I’ve been trying to solve. A LOT of people have asked the same questions I’ve been asking and not one person has responded. Probably because their questions are ignore for a short time by busy people and then the questions are buried in a deluge of other questions from users. No doubt people have solved the same problems I’ve been coping with but have neglected to post what they’ve learned because discord does not allow you to make focused threads on a very specific topic without the content being buried. I’m getting more frustrated that projects are ditching the tried and true old school forums of yore where conversation can be focused and easily found.

fsniper• 3 years ago

Discord, or any IRC analogue for that matter used as documentation is same as saying, "hey look we have a cantine in our head quarters, if you have any questions pop and ask on a table thats designated for that purpose. And this way you will reach all our users that have similar issues!" A modern day direct democracy assembly.

d-cc2• 3 years ago

With chatgpt you can have the documentation write itself. Far superior to nothing for sure.

dbg31415• 3 years ago

Discord is good for real-time chatting -- both text and voice. It's pretty horrible for finding old conversations, unless you know exactly what you're looking for (and even then there's a lot of manual sifting).

I mostly love Discord. It's better than Teams, better than Slack... but it's not a replacement for a well-curated Wiki, or even a Reddit thread that I can find via Google search.

juliangmp• 3 years ago

Discord and its consequences have been a disaster to the human race.

Or the internet at least.

cabalamat• 3 years ago

In terms of the 4-document model, I find a lot of software systems (libraries and frameworks), while they are good at providing tutorials and an API reference, they are a lot poorer at providing an Explanation.

What I want to know when learning a new software system are what are the main classes/concepts in it and how they relate to each other.

okwubodu• 3 years ago

Discord is the most prevalent and lowest friction communication app for the highest portion of the relevant audience, and will only become more so with every new (younger) developer cohort.

The average 16-34ish year-old probably-male developer that owns a PC with a discrete GPU almost certainly already has Discord installed, and does not perceive any undue burden from being "forced" to use an app they already use regularly, for better or worse: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1327674/discord-user-age...

In my opinion, the best solution is Discord getting ahead of this and letting admins make in-server threads visible to the clearnet.

dontupvoteme• 3 years ago

A ~50 german colleague of mine asked me recently what the hell Discord was and I couldn't come up with a good explanation for him that wasn't

"uhh It's IRC but with pictures and far worse."

Next time I am simply going to answer that it's an NSA longrun project. Because that even if it isn't, it probably will be.

ouraf• 3 years ago

Isn't discord attachment security really lax? In a "anyone with an image or file link can download it regardless of connection to the server or role" level of lax?

You'd need to be really bold or poorly advised to consider that role

phendrenad2• 3 years ago

Counterpoint: Discord has awesome search features, and joining is painless. Everyone already knows that Discord is the new way to communicate with a business, so everyone knows that the best way to get answers is to (1) Join the official discord (2) Use the search to see if someone has asked a similar thing before (3) If not, ask and people will answer helpfully.

hammeringnails• 3 years ago

I'm perplexed about the wider community's strange enthusiasm for Discord. As another user noted, fundamentally it's IRC with multimedia. Why are people promoting it so enthusiastically? Even if we accept the very controversial idea of 'Get Support On Discord!', the actual product itself is nothing special. It's only a marginal improvement over other similar products we already had. All of this is leaving aside very real concerns about how user data may be used in the future.

bloopernova• 3 years ago

It's IRC with multimedia that someone else manages but you control who can use it.

And a lot of people who use it have never used IRC.

And it has an app that has the same name as the service. That makes it a whole thing, like Instagram or TikTok. It's really eye opening to see the number of people who never considered that reddit the app is a separate thing to reddit the service/site.

The wider IT community is still very much a small niche. We often forget that.

holler2• 3 years ago

the actual product itself is nothing special.

I wouldn't agree. Aside from Slack, Discord built the next highest quality browser-based chat and voice app, targeting consumers vs enterprise. It's well engineered, reliable, and has a simple user interface (mostly).

tiffanyh• 3 years ago

Chat is about the only thing Slack does ok.

Video & voice on slack is pretty bad.

rcxdude2• 3 years ago

Because they were seemingly the first ones to a) get that combining these features together in a way which is easy to use and administrate was valuable and b) implement them somewhat competently. Most of IRC and the various other alternatives commonly mentioned are stuck on A even just for plain text chat before you get to multimedia, and most would-be competition that gets A either fails at B or got there too late. Privacy concerns are so low down the priority of users that there's pretty slim chance it will be enough to sink discord's first-mover advantage.

jlokier• 3 years ago

IRC with multimedia that works so well people use it all the time, and persistent message history and being able to see messages from before you joined a channel are very useful!

That would be enough by itself.

But it's so much better than IRC in so many ways. Sure, you can run your own IRC bouncer for Libera on that "shell account" or AWS micro-instance you're always running anyway, but who except the nerdiest wants to do that? Even then, you don't get to see past messages when you join another channel, unless there's some history bot or archive page, both of which are clunky. Also don't forget to do the NickServ rituals with each network. And you still don't get good multimedia, which most users expect now as normal communication culture.

Throw in a good UI (compared with alternatives except maybe Zulip, and not including search!), link previews where the sender knows exactly what the receiver will see, markdown-style message formatting, enough metadata to link replies, and succinct emoji reactions that don't spam the channel, and if you feel like using them audio and video conferencing that just works with no additional setup.

I say all that as someone who used to use IRC daily, including running an archiving bouncer and admining a community channel, but I no longer bother. Admittedly because I was busy and ill for a while I lost my registered NickServ username (it expired), which also ended up breaking channel admin, so that was a bit demotivating. When everyone left Freenode for Libera, I just stopped using IRC.

I also say it as someone who strongly agrees with the Discord complaints about projects using it in such a way that most of their useful documentation is being continuously created then effectively lost now.

To Discord's credit, they made a great quality, polished product with an understandable network effect. But it's a shame it's not easy for projects to make their channels publically archived and searchable, and of course it's a shame it's neither an open network nor an open source product. And that the search and search UI are awful.

I'd say given the types of projects I see using Discord (mostly open source, even the commercial ones), Matrix still has a chance of taking over eventually, if Discord doesn't open their network somehow. But there's a high friction against it, both for existing projects because their chat history and users can't be transferred, and for new projects because of their need to meet users "where they already area", i.e. on networks (Discord, Slack, Telegram etc) where the users you want tend to already have accounts and apps already running.

LrnByTeach• 3 years ago

In my opinion LLM based document search tools such as OSS Quivr may be better suited for documentation search for startups.

A highly customed Quivr with one of the 'Open Source LLMs' may provides great 'semantic search' for product documentation.

https://github.com/StanGirard/quivr Dump all your files and chat with it using your Generative AI Second Brain using LLMs ( GPT 3.5/4, Private, Anthropic, VertexAI ) & Embeddings

matt_j• 3 years ago

Gen-Z grew up in a world where the old, searchable internet was already dysfunctional and overrun with siloed apps. I think most of them don't know what they're missing. It's no big deal to do documentation in Discord for them, and I can even see a few pros (comments, chat, pins, multimedia, likes/emojis). At the very least, the format aligns with things that are already ingrained in their minds.

Personally, all of that can go to hell, just give me documentation generated from source on a static site and get out of my way.

janalsncm• 3 years ago

Discord should be a last resort when documentation fails. People should be able to RTFM, and if they’ve come to Discord that means that either 1) they didn’t RTFM or 2) the answer isn’t in TFM or 3) the answer isn’t clear from TFM in which case your writing needs to be clearer.

So when people are asking questions in your Discord, you should loop that answer back into your documentation.

cainxinth• 3 years ago

I signed up for Midjourney recently. Not for work, just to test it out. It is indeed amazing and clearly the best image transformer right now. But I find it terribly annoying that it’s only accessible on Discord.

So much unnecessary scrolling and interface visual overload.

nickgo• 3 years ago

(Plug) This is one of the core issues we look to solve at Inkeep (inkeep.com). Especially for technical products, knowledge is not just in Discord or docs, it's also GitHub issues, StackOverflow, forums and more. At Inkeep, we ingest all of that content from all these different sources and use LLMs to power both search and chat. The goal is that you as a user can quickly find answers to your questions regardless of where that answer may happen to live. By focusing on one product at a time, we can create higher quality search and chat than a generic search engine like Google or ChatGPT with Bing.

We're now powering AI search and chat for over 100+ companies. If you're a product owner and want to see it live for your content, give us a ping at hi@inkeep.com. If you're a developer and would like this for a product you use often, let us know here: https://inkeep.typeform.com/pleaseIndex. We'll create a chatbot you can use for free.

stefek99• 3 years ago

Search function? I always use search... Much faster than trying to put stuff in docs.

Discord is not documentation

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