Stop Using Discord

https://malenfant.net/@didier/112528487189999791

by ColinWright • 2 years ago

259 236 2 years ago

beretguy2• 2 years ago

The rest of the quote:

Stop using Discord for anything else than just chatting. Stop dumping knowledge into a black hole. Use forums. Use the open web. Future nerds will thank you.

Rinzler89• 2 years ago

Yeah I also hate technical discussions on (legal) hacking and tinkering happening in some obscure Telegram or Discord groups that you only find out if you know a guy who knows a guy who found the Discord link on some Reddit post. WTF?!

I get the need for non-open communication channels if you want to stay away from Nintendo's lawyers or something but otherwise come on, just have the discussions in a more open place FFS.

I also hate Reddit but at least it can be reached via search engines.

CM302• 2 years ago

This is the key part here. There's nothing wrong with using Discord to chat about random stuff. If you're talking to your friends about your latest night out or playing online games with a community, then Discord is fine.

The issue is how some communities use it as a wiki, documentation and forum replacement for information that should be available on the public internet. This is a huge problem for speedrunning and modding communities, which seem to love using Discord and Google Sheets and other awkward 'must know the link to access' tools for information that should probably be in a wiki somewhere.

sneak4• 2 years ago

This is untrue. Talking to friends in DM on non-e2ee platforms normalizes ubiquitous surveillance of friendship interactions and makes all of society worse.

Don’t be reachable on non-e2ee DM systems. Delete your account.

koolala2• 2 years ago

Some people like "privacy" or rather - natural emphemeral communication. Discord is instead... a living shared community memory?

dimitrisnl• 2 years ago

Valid. I migrated a Rails codebase from Webpacker to Vite. All the help I needed was hidden in an obscure Discord server. Nothing on GH.

Insalgo• 2 years ago

Any recommendations for a free engineering community forum?

alanbernstein2• 2 years ago

phpBB

eviks4• 2 years ago

that's the one without per-post reactions and a weird markup language builtin?

mikl• 2 years ago

https://www.discourse.org is great, best forum software I ever saw. You have probably used it already somewhere.

They have a paid hosting offer, but you can also self-host it for free. And it’s open source.

Groxx• 2 years ago

Managed forum hosting from $50/month

Yeowch. $50/mo is a huge cost for anything that's not making money.

5424583• 2 years ago

I don’t get the love for discourse. I’m not one of those “every webpage should work without JS” purists, but Discourse seems intent to reinvent basic web features with JS and has some performance issues and as a consequence of both often (maybe when hitting something not in cache?) takes ages to load during which time you get nothing but a poorly-styled loading throbber, you can’t even read the content as it loads in. Even official instances are incredibly slow at times. One topic on https://meta.discourse.org/ just took over 30 seconds to load for me. Discourse just feels somewhat overengineered.

Also anything that’s $50 a month doesn’t compete at the low end (which is where most OSS discussion hosting would exist) with Discord, which is free.

poulpy1235• 2 years ago

Discourse is nice but only orga making money can use it

Vvector• 2 years ago

$50/month for the basic hosted option. Self-hosting requires skills and resources not available to everyone. It's very easy (and free) to start on Discord. Then if it takes off, there is too much friction to move to Discourse.

chrisjj4• 2 years ago

Discourse seems great until it isn't. E.g. sticks on a unremovable banner obscuring your content.

yownv• 2 years ago

SimpleMachineForum

kaathewise• 2 years ago

I haven't self-hosted any, but I enjoy using Flarum [0] forums. They load faster than Discourse ones and feel snappy.

[0] https://flarum.org/

jslakro• 2 years ago

https://github.com/flarum/flarum (PHP) https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB (js)

gardenhedge• 2 years ago

Agreed. I also find it to be a terrible ux so I am bias

RyJones2• 2 years ago

We (Hyperledger) got a ton of positive feedback from our blind users when we moved to Discord. Apparently the UX is extremely well laid out for screen readers.

gostsamo2• 2 years ago

I'm blind and I don't like Discord. They implement accessibility well, but they, Slack, Teams and the like have decided that I need to know the sender and time stamp of every message in the chat. Read to me for every message.

Jumping between screen sections is annoying because lists and headings are too nineties and the hell with them.

Captchas? Should I mention that for some reason they disliked one of my logins and put an inaccessible captcha? Maybe your unhappy blind users are still locked out and can't tell you for their issues. Good that I was registered with a gmail account and circumvented them by adding a dot in the email field.

Those are personal experiences and I don't know your previous solution, but for me Discord manages to be annoying in a very specific and unnecessary way.

newsclues• 2 years ago

Discord and Reddit are terrible dark holes of knowledge

sampullman• 2 years ago

At least reddit is indexed by search engines, right? I find that for a significant portion of my searches, appending "reddit" cuts through SEO/blogspam results and I get an answer without having to wade through too much nonsense.

fireflash38• 2 years ago

For now. How long until they put it behind a sign in barrier ala Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, etc?

gl-prod• 2 years ago

You can find info in Reddit, Discord is a black hole

bmacho3• 2 years ago

Reddit you can save with archive.org if you want.

deafpolygon• 2 years ago

Meanwhile... the mastodon page takes over 3 minutes to load.

I don't know of any pre-2010 forums that are still functional and searchable.

BSDobelix• 2 years ago

I don't know of any pre-2010 forums

https://www.vogons.org/ ->Since 2002

https://bbs.archlinux.org -> Since 2003

And so on, just to name two important ones.

yvdriess• 2 years ago

somethingawful

dotnet002• 2 years ago

The OSDev forum (forum.osdev.org) has been around for a while

Digit-Al• 2 years ago

That's odd, it loads in a fraction of a second for me; and I'm on a mobile running android Firefox. Plus I'm on hotel WiFi at the moment.

GrantMoyer• 2 years ago

The game specific DarkMatters forums has been around for at least 10 years. I personally used it to resolve an issue I was having, when I found a thread[1] by web search. Some nice people helped the OP troubleshoot over almost 2 years until with their help the OP eventually found the issue and explained the fix.

Then the thread went on for a couple more years helping people with similar issues for whom the orginal fix didn't work, until eventually another fix was posted. That other fix was copied over from another forum.

[1] https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/23158-help-s...

Svip2• 2 years ago

Where is the Wordpress.com (i.e. commercial hosting) for forums? I maintain a SMF forum that's lasted since 2000, but I get why most people aren't jumping into creating a new forum, because it's rather tedious compared to Discord. Hell, better ask instead; where is the Discord but for forums (real ones, not Discord)?

CharlieDigital2• 2 years ago

Isn't that just Reddit?

beeboobaa3• 2 years ago

No, on reddit you are subjected to the reddit administrators their policies. You have no real control. The user interface is also awful if you're interested in content older than a day.

Svip2• 2 years ago

Mostly, yes. Particularly in the terms of "Discord-difying forums". But you cannot have multiple subforums for your community on Reddit (unless you do something weird with subsubreddits, but those won't be clearly visible). Discord allows you to have several channels. Additionally, I'd like an alternative that isn't threaded like Reddit and HN. Threaded communities have their place, but classic chronological topics also do.

hprotagonist5• 2 years ago

discourse has a few commercial hosting platforms. communiteq is one i’ve used.

sneak4• 2 years ago

I use communiteq for my website’s hosted forum and am happy with them.

lobsterthief• 2 years ago

It’s called Discourse and it’s really great

bogwog2• 2 years ago

I don't know what it is about Discourse, but I can never get into it. Maybe it's the UI? It feels like a disorganized mess to me.

animaomnium• 2 years ago

If you're looking for the same sort of walled-garden corporate-degen vibe, try reddit? They even have nested conversations, like on Hacker News! /s

But seriously, Discourse is good forum software. You can self-host it or pay for a hosted instance. An example instance is IRLO, https://internals.rust-lang.org

asplake• 2 years ago

Circle?

rglullis• 2 years ago

https://flarum.org/hosting

segmondy• 2 years ago

folks have used such communication channels for a long time. there were folks using bbs chat instead of bbs forums, folks using talk instead of mail, there were folks using irc instead of web forums. there's always room for both.

poulpy1235• 2 years ago

I totally agree, and also stop using FB groups it's even worse.

But the issue is no replacement is proposed by the author.

Discord has the advantage of:

- being free

- being maintained by someone else

- being used by a lot of people, so no need to create a new account for many users

- being very useful as a chat and growing organically as support from there

I don't see many competitors available. For example discourse is paid 50€ per month for 100 users maximum, which small project can pay that ?

Edit: I rarely see FB mentioned on these debates but it's probably by far the biggest place used for forum. I'm a member of several 10k+ groups. Even discords don't come close of it. The official bambulab group is 60k people, the hiking group of my area (1 million inhabitants max) is 30k people. The numbers are insane, as is the information invisible and lost

hprotagonist5• 2 years ago

libera.chat is free. the network doesn’t compel registration, even! (though some channels do)

hu35• 2 years ago

unfortunately, irc is not a replacement for discord.

poulpy1235• 2 years ago

It looks like a small IRC-like chat, not a replacement for a forum and not even for discord-as-a-forum

consp2• 2 years ago

FB groups it's even worse

You can't even view them partially anymore since you illegally have to give up your rights to do so.

wavyknife2• 2 years ago

Hello! I work for Discourse, it's open source so you can self-host most sites on a cloud provider like Digital Ocean for ~$20/mo

poulpy1235• 2 years ago

I actually enjoy Discourse, it's the best software for forum that I encounter as a user, but someone who wants to create a forum using it must either pay at least 1200€/year or know how to manage a server, including securing it. I'm not saying that the price is not justified (it is) and it's great that it is free software for anyone to install it, but for most non pro usage it cannot compete with discord.

Phiwise_• 2 years ago

Side note: I really dislike how shortsighted many orgs are with the extreme level of "go to your customer" that led to using the persistent IRC client I used to banter during game nights with my friends a decade ago as an all-encompassing support and outreach forum. Forget forum admins. Forget the future. Forget the "open web". It's dysfunctional right now for me, the current target market of whatever product you're selling or program you're running. I'm alienated from whatever your thing or community is by how badly Discord works for over twenty people, so I don't engage with you, and I must imagine many others feel the same way. Surely someone's aware of this in your org? Was the single-digit man-hours saved by not spinning up a FOSS forum or starting a subreddit really worth this? Who made that calculation? /rant

lulzury• 2 years ago

I don't like Discord as much as the next person, but people use Discord because it's convenient. Why do people prefer Discord to IRC when the latter is free, open source, and indexable?

morjom3• 2 years ago

You already answered yourself. Convenience and because your friends are already there or because that one thing hosts its forum there.

dotnet002• 2 years ago

Flashy UI, channel grouping, custom emoji, server side persistent logs and now the network effect of most likely not having to ask someone to install and learn the ins and outs of another program.

Matrix comes the closest to fitting all the same requirements, but I've only ever managed to get one friend to regularly use it, and even then we only use it between ourselves and not to participate in federated matrix servers.

benoliver9992• 2 years ago

If you are offline on IRC you don't get messages.

I use a bouncer etc but that's more than the average person should have to worry about. There is https://www.irccloud.com/ but I fear it's too little too late

Having to create an account on every IRC server is also not great.

I use and love IRC, but I get why centralised services take off. It's just a shame it's a sucky one like discord where everything just goes into a black hole.

miah_2• 2 years ago

Not getting messages when I'm offline is a feature.

Suzuran• 2 years ago

Cheap and easy cross-platform session persistence without the hassle of maintaining a bouncer.

miah_2• 2 years ago

I use irc primarily, but use Discord for D&D. Voice chat, plus screen sharing. Our DM shares their screen with the map, we use voice to play, and text chat for sharing details about initiative etc.

We could probably use mumble and sometime else. The screen sharing part could probably be jitsi. It's just been easier to get everybody playing our game on discord as they already have it.

jlpom2• 2 years ago

Because of real-timeness (you don't need to refresh a webpage, you can see if someone is typing). I am not aware of a forum software that have this feature (I don't know them well, so I can be mistaken). But most of the time you don't need it.

vlan0• 2 years ago

but people use Discord because it's convenient.

This is it. The brain is wired to expend the least amount of energy possible. Online communities of the past were held up by the few. Those willing to do the work.

CivBase2• 2 years ago

Features. Is there any other tool that offers persistant text, voice, and video chats plus screen sharing?

I've gone looking and there is simply no alternative with core feature parity.

Ekaros2• 2 years ago

There is, but who wants to use Teams or others for hobbies...

In the end there is nothing special about Discord, but it does most things people want well enough.

michaelt4• 2 years ago

Why do people prefer Discord to IRC when the latter is free, open source, and indexable?

I am an IRC lover, it's a classic platform.

But my classic IRC platform needs someone to host the server.

And it needs NickServ to add on the missing persistent usernames.

And it needs ChanServ to ensure opers don't lose control of the channel.

And it needs a bot so you can leave messages for offline users.

And it needs some sort of third-party image hosting and file hosting.

And you need something like irssi+screen if you want to see messages that arrived while you were away.

And you need to rename yourself to michaelt_afk when you're away.

And you need some way to block spammers and other unwanted bots.

And if your channel wants a browser-based option, someone's going to have to figure that out.

And you've got to take care not to reveal your IP address for DDOS by griefers.

And of course the normal ports might be blocked at work/school/college, maybe you'll need a workaround for that.

IRC has solutions for all these problems, but not particularly easy solutions. Discord/Slack/Microsoft Teams have succeeded by fixing all the weaknesses of IRC that we IRC lovers have been working around for decades.

NemoNobody• 2 years ago

Ok... does Mastodon always take that long too load? That's not really viable considering the page I ended up on had essentially only textual content - like an old website from way back.

Then I read a Geocities suggestion - something from my elementary days

Discord is actually pretty cool - a walled garden but no different than the rest of the internet.

Google won't send anyone to forums or blogs/personal sites anyways, so this isn't really advice at all

chrisjj4• 2 years ago

Google won't send anyone to forums or blogs/personal sites anyways

Oh? It does here.

jlpom2• 2 years ago

No, I think it's the instance

r4indeer• 2 years ago

Mastodon is decentralized / federated, so the page load time depends on the instance you're visiting.

Andrex• 2 years ago

Mastodon will continue to suck as long as their default client refuses to support noscript access.

Google won't send anyone to forums or blogs/personal sites anyways, so this isn't really advice at all

They had that capability in the past, and may again in the future, to say nothing of possible competitors focusing on forum or blog search specifically.

Discord is a black box and that data will be lost forever. That's different from publishing on the public web.

NeutralForest3• 2 years ago

I feel like we have this discussion every month, one way or another.

People use Discord because it's useful and they like the experience. Discourse is nice for purely written communication but if you want to setup a call, direct message and, more importantly, write bots (presentation, topic organization, news, modding, now even AI Q&A); people will fall back to Discord.

Pointing at Discourse when it doesn't have the same value proposition and blaming users is just not useful at all.

chrisjj4• 2 years ago

People use Discord because it's useful and they like the experience.

Let's fix that.

Discord-using people use Discord because it's useful to them and they like the experience.

NeutralForest3• 2 years ago

Ok? That's just being pedantic. The point I'm trying to make, is that we need to find why people use Discord and offer something better for our (devs+technical users) use case; that'll also need to go the existing network effect.

ramon156• 2 years ago

If I'm honest, those say the exact same thing to me, and doesn't de-power the argument

kwanbix• 2 years ago

I have been using computers for 40 years and I cannot see a single feature of discord that I cannot have on a forum or even reddit. In fact, the UX of Discord is abismal.

NeutralForest3• 2 years ago

Then you're not the public they're targeting but if we want things to change, we need to be cognizant of why people like Discord.

hyperfuturism• 2 years ago

You clearly don't have the live chatting feature in a forum or on reddit. I'm assuming it's a tongue in cheek comment, and not to be taken literal, but there are many features that Discord have that other products do not.

least• 2 years ago

Forums sometimes do have (crappy) live chat experiences. Their main selling point is that they have easily searchable, indexable, and navigable threads that are usually pretty well organized into distinct topics.

The UX on Discord is excellent. That's why so many people, including nerds that used to happily use IRC and Mumble, use it. It's easy to create your own server, administer it with granular permissions, and to invite your friends to it. You can instantly start voice and video calls with screen sharing, for free. It's also a live chat with excellent formatting capabilities and has multiline support, unlike IRC (unless this has changed recently?), which makes it much better suited for technical questions involving code. Oh, it also has actual code formatting built in so it's actually legible (though this remains a feature underutilized).

The problem with discord is it's just not visible outside of discord, it can't be indexed, archived and searched through other means, and is vulnerable to the whims of the server owner. It's also not very good at being a forum replacement because its threading capabilities and UI wasn't designed for that purpose, so it feels bolted on (because it is).

Klonoar• 2 years ago

One of the most wildly successful chatting platforms of the modern era is not objectively “abysmal” just because it does things differently than your 30 or so years of understanding.

People on this site really confuse this issue: your dislike of Discord is an ethical one, because it goes against what you believe a chat should be (free/open/whatever). Most people unfortunately just don’t give a shit.

lairv• 2 years ago

What I like about discord is that, in my experience, it lowers the barrier of entry to get a reply on an issue. On forums or GitHub issues, you usually need to be more formal and thoughtful in your posts, you don't want people on stack overflow to tell you that this is a dumb question, and even then you might wait days or weeks for a response. The instant chat format encourages people to simply reply even in informal ways

Of course, this isn’t always the case, your messages can still go unanswered for days. But in my experience, when I see that a project has a Discord, I now think "Great I might get an answer". And this doesn't dismiss all the cons that others have already mention

badsectoracula2• 2 years ago

Forums and reddit do not have chat[0] and video calls/streaming. The real alternative to Discord is IRC, Matrix, etc, not Discourse and phpBB or whatever.

[0] hacks aside

nehal3m• 2 years ago

I don't see Discord as a replacement for forums, but as a replacement for TeamSpeak/Ventrilo. The chat is an added bonus.

As far as I know there is no other voice communication program that handles voice channels TeamSpeak style with a chat box next to it. If there is one I'd jump ship.

theshrike795• 2 years ago

Voice and video chat on a forum? How would you do that sensibly? Embed Jitsi?

Paradigma11• 2 years ago

Voicechat, Videochat and Screensharing?

badsectoracula2• 2 years ago

Indeed, Discord is chat, Discourse is forum.

That said, most people use Discord because other people use it and there is much less friction to add a new "server" (i hate how they use that term instead of something like "community" or whatever) alongside those you are already part of than making a new account to yet another site.

I know i'm using Discord mainly because the people actually go there. I used IRC since the 90s but for more than a decade it has been channels with 15-20 people all of whom are AFK and idling via some proxy bot or whatever with the occasional chat now and then by a couple of people (Discord also has a lot of idlers but it has 10x more people too so that couple of people becomes 20 people). IRC not having server-side storage of discussions does not help because i can't login to a channel, ask/answer a question and leave later. I know some people like that lack of permanence but personally i find Discord much easier on actually making or even starting discussions (e.g. i might respond to a message someone left 8 hours ago which is seen by someone else right after i post it and starts a discussion - this only happens because i was able to see that 8h old message). I know IRC supposedly added optional support for this recently but i don't know anything that uses it (and even then it wont solve the "people go to Discord" problem since other services like Matrix already supported that for years and people do not go to Matrix).

Kiro• 2 years ago

Stop Using Mastodon.

thefz2• 2 years ago

Right. Page took 10 seconds to load.

azangru3• 2 years ago

What would you rather see people use instead?

gaws• 2 years ago

X, the everything app!

outime2• 2 years ago

It will be as useful as other HN campaigns: stop using WhatsApp and use Signal, stop using Chrome and use Firefox, stop using Twitter and use this OSS alternative with 0.1% of the users, stop using Reddit, stop using Kubernetes, etc.

skeeter2020• 2 years ago

What's your alternative action? I tend to agree with you, but personally I've tried to stop pointing out problems without providing solutions; failing at something is better than preemptive surrender.

adamtaylor_13• 2 years ago

Surrender implies there’s something inherently wrong with these alternatives. Something a lot of people just don’t agree with. I agree with you that it’s helpful to be proactive, but the incumbents are there for a reason: at one point a large consensus agreed they were the best for doing X, whatever X might’ve been in that situation.

Maybe that’s changed. But a lot of folks don’t think so. Twitter is useful precisely due to its network effect. That’s why I’ll never move to mastodon. Doesn’t make sense for the reason that I use the tool.

outime2• 2 years ago

I'm not suggesting surrender, but I want to point out that a significant portion of the HN crowd seems to have a very specific perspective that doesn't align with reality. The average Discord user (hence, the largest percentage of the userbase) prioritize convenience, whether they're regular users or server creators. They don't care about being indexed by Google - they just want to connect quickly, chat, play games together, and so on.

This convenience-driven mindset extends to technical communities on Discord. Creating a server there is as simple as clicking a couple of buttons, whereas setting up a new forum requires significant technical effort and ongoing maintenance, besides $$$. These practical aspects are often overlooked in discussions, hence the failure of all these campaigns lead by a bit too technical people i.e. those who are willing to spend time researching alternatives and enduring their particular pains, and don't care about networking effects.

To challenge Discord effectively, create something equally convenient yet superior (like being indexable by Google). Wait for Discord's deep enshittification and seize the opportunity then. If it's not as convenient, don't expect users to switch. The average user won't invest time in learning new platforms when they can get everything faster and for free elsewhere.

Arch-TK• 2 years ago

Yes, please stop using discord. But also maybe stop using discourse.

Nothing is more off-putting about an open source project than seeing that discord is the main support forum.

I am in the fortunate position of being able to just solve my own problems by myself most of the time, but sometimes it genuinely is helpful to talk to someone about it.

If you're an open source project, please use IRC, or matrix if you absolutely must.

If you need a forum, well, discourse is not the worst option, but honestly no idea why forums need a tonne of javascript, a re-implementation of basic browser functionality like scrolling, and to override your keybindings. A mailing list is the ideal option. If you really must have something web based, I don't have any recommendations other than "please don't use discord, at least not unless you feel actually satisfied with its search functionality". You can self host a forum on a cheap VM and require some kind of user signup to try to mitigate the inevitable spam.

nicoburns• 2 years ago

Zulip is a good middle ground here. Open source, browsable without logging in (if configured to be), and much better UX than IRC (or god forbid Matrix which has to be about the worst chat software I've used).

kunley• 2 years ago

Valid points.

By the way, maybe this is naive, but what's wrong with Github Discussions?

Springtime2• 2 years ago

Ultimately someone has to pay for things. Many communities have apparently decided they don't want to use even modern forum software and become a webmaster, along with avoiding the costs and time associated, or use someone else's existing forum (which may or may not suit their needs).

The quite liberal free file attachment limits (25MB each), ease of communication and ironically the fact Discord is closed off in nature means it's quite attractive for people to more easily share things that would require a separate file host normally (it's an almost universal experience that forums usually have meager attachment caps).

I'd be quite interested in an article that understands Discord's benefits and use cases and then approaches a critique and alternative solutions to address it in a more open web friendly way.

iforgotpassword2• 2 years ago

I tried discord only once, but to me it was a disorganized chaotic experience. People seem to really think that well organized faq sections on traditional websites and properly searchable and indexable forum threads should be replaced by "just search through two years of chat backlog on discord". Or something like that.

slimsag• 2 years ago

I run a large discord. I am in several large discords. I do not know anyone proposing replacing a traditional FAQ with discord.

If anything, I would argue discord tends to improve website-based documentation because people ask the same question over and over again, leading to a need for a quick way to link the answer.

Who do you think is replacing FAQ's with Discord?

theshrike795• 2 years ago

I have the same feeling about Matrix - and I've used IRC since the 90s so I'm used to jank.

Discord has a clear segmentation where a "server" (community) has multiple "channels" (and "forums").

I can easily context-switch between servers. With Matrix there is no clear way (at least to me) to get all channels from a specific context - that is provided by someone else. I can of course manually organise channels somehow, but that's not what I want to do.

Example: When I join the Retro Handhelds community[0] on Discord I get access to a huge amount of channels, created by the server admins. I then have a fancy UI (Channels & Roles) where I can pick which specific retro handhelds I am interested in (RG35XX and Anbernic) and it hides the other channels from my view.

There are no other tools that can do this currently. Matrix has the technical capability, but their insistence on making the client NOT-Discord is getting a bit tedious.

I WANT to like Matrix, but they're making it so damn hard.

[0] https://discord.gg/retrohandhelds

soerxpso• 2 years ago

People seem to really think that well organized faq sections on traditional websites and properly searchable and indexable forum threads should be replaced by "just search through two years of chat backlog on discord"

Nobody thinks that. Creating and maintaining a traditional website with a well-organized FAQ section requires non-zero effort. The discord backlog is already there on accident. This thread comes up every other month and is always full of people who seem to imagine a project lead sitting down to weigh pros and cons of possible options for their FAQ, and settling on, "I think we'll use Discord!"

Documentation lives on Discord for the same reason that so many companies have critical infrastructure running in Excel. Nobody sits down, evaluates tech stacks, and decides, "I think this part should run on Excel." It runs on Excel because the guy who initially wrote it was already interacting with a CSV file in Excel and didn't know how to do much else, or didn't want to spend the effort for something he thought might be a one-off job.

lamontcg• 2 years ago

I'm actually a moderator on a discord. We have a lot of FAQ pages (generally wiki pages on various GitHub repos) that a discord bot will send you to in response to various different commands. Occasionally I use search to find a chat that I personally had with someone X months ago, and it usually works if I can find the right search terms. I don't think it is any worse than IRC with chatlogs (arguably might be better depending on how well indexed the chatlogs are).

And the fundamental problem is that social chats are noisy, and you should never be using them for knowledge retention. And web forums aren't a replacement for social chat. And 99% of the questions and answers in there are from newbies and are covered in FAQs and are just noise anyway. You can't index your way out of a horrible noise problem.

They also do serve a purpose because as one of the subject-matter experts (who is a single-point-of-failure/final-escalation level), I don't have to get involved in most of the discussion. There's usually dozens of people on the server who can answer the easy questions, and I can monitor for people hitting real bugs that actually need fixing.

fennecbutt• 2 years ago

Discord is meant for gamers playing games. Who tf cares what happened 2 years ago in that context.

Here's the key: if I use something for free, I don't expect anything from it.

opensource4ever• 2 years ago

matrix.org allows 100 mb attachment. It is federated, which means you can move your data to your server if you like later. There are many clients and server implementations now and it is e2ee.

thatloststudent• 2 years ago

More importantly, it is indexable by search engines (if you use view.matrix.org). But it's not as simple to use as discord quite yet. I say this as a self-hosted matrix user, but it's not quite as simple to call someone else (until element call becomes a thing) or use custom emojis, to show a few problems.

mtndew4brkfst• 2 years ago

I dip my toes in regularly for the last two years. Every time I do, Matrix has been an extremely janky experience with negligible command of good UX principles. It's awful, and I'm only trying to use two devices.

If folks want to convince less ideologically motivated people to switch and support The Cause it still needs so much TLC. It's barely competing on table stakes features for a chat platform.

joenot443• 2 years ago

My sad realization is that in today’s nerd world, there just aren’t that many teenage webmasters. Unix and DNS and Apache just aren’t very sexy or fun to learn when the other cool kids are playing with LLMs and Flutter and WebGL. Obviously _we’d_ prefer if they learned to setup vBulletin and do it our way, but when Discord is free and all their friends are on it, it’s a tough sell to the other nerds.

It’s not a “kids these days” grumble, just an honest observation that some computing skills are slowly being lost generationally, and it’s hard to say that anyone’s really to blame.

lovethevoid• 2 years ago

There’s also a mismatch in incentive. Before you would become a webmaster and foster a community with your friends, now even if you try, your community will just be botted, content scraped, and rehosted on bigger platforms that have giant conglomerates behind them. An example of this is that Fandom site which is abhorrent but has ruined many fan sites due to alternatives being squeezed out.

You have to effectively create your own closed off platform to avoid those shortcomings like discord so might as well just use it (or Matrix etc).

hammyhavoc• 2 years ago

I don't know if skills are actually being lost. Skilled kids were always an anomaly when it came to tech on a meaningful level.

You might even be able to argue there's greater skills than ever before as compute is so cheap and FOSS is so readily available.

I was 1 of maybe 3 nerds in a school of 2500 people, 20 years ago. Being smart wasn't deemed to be cool, computers weren't cool—doing well in class made you a "swot".

The people who do productive things with tech for their own enjoyment and curiosity has always been small relative to people who just "consume" as an end user.

What is being lost is electronics design skills, despite KiCAD et al being available. Also not much interest in FPGAs and DSP from younger demographics, but at least MiSTer got some younger folks into FPGAs, but unfortunately, prices went through the roof to even get a foot on the ladder.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan• 2 years ago

Those kids are building Discord bots now.

roenxi• 2 years ago

the fact Discord is closed off in nature means it's quite attractive

This phrase was in context of sharing moderate amounts of data, but I think the un-indexable nature of Discord is a feature in more ways than that. The public internet has become decidedly less tolerant over the past decade and I can see why people would want to retreat from it and form more isolated communities.

I thought Parler back in 2021 was an interesting case study. From a simple game theory perspective, any group with minority opinions should probably not be organising in public. Majorities are pretty brutal to people who do not conform. We seem to be entering a tense era, so something like the Holocaust or the Chinese Land Reform Movement is not out of the question in the next 50 years. Pseudonymity is a good start, but even better is not having publicly available records of what was said so the bureaucrats don't know what to deanonymise.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites

skydhash3• 2 years ago

It’s free and easy to setup. That was the same as Facebook, Twitter,… and that’s because corporations have money to throw at the problem. The issue is that their intention is not the same as the users and after a while, the illusionary cooperation stops. And then, the communities collapse and a whole part of the internet goes dark.

The other part is that Discord feels much more like a club than a library. It may be nicer, but no one is interested in popularizing information. Instead you have to hope to be heard by the experts. And that’s after the requirement of being a member. A forum is open to anyone on the internet, who can consult the interactions anytime they want. And information categorization is already done.

The real danger of Discord is that people want to use it for everything and forget to offer other means of communication like a Wiki or a bug tracker. Imagine if Arch Linux was only present on Discord.

The alternative are still the same as it was ages ago. Host a forum software yourself or pay someone to do it. And build a Wiki to answer the most requested information. Relying on free products from companies is not the correct decision if you care about permanence.

barkerja3• 2 years ago

I use Discord quite a bit in the Elixir community and find it quite useful. Messages are persisted. There's a wonderful forum feature now built into the platform; and it's all searchable with a pretty robust filtering mechanism.

And with an active server, there's typically always someone around to help you chat through a problem almost immediately.

I understand the sentiment, but it does seem misinformed.

Slack, on the other hand. Absolutely! Stay away for anything related to knowledge-base.

Nevolihs• 2 years ago

A single example of it being done well doesn't have any bearing on all the issues stemming from the use of Discord as knowledge bases, wikis and documentation.

Out of curiosity, is any of that useful information on the Elixir Discord available to be searched for with Google or any other search engine?

barkerja3• 2 years ago

Out of curiosity, is any of that useful information on the Elixir Discord available to be searched for with Google or any other search engine?

It is not, and that is the one major knock against Discord. But see my response above about that.

moooo992• 2 years ago

I don’t think the sentiment is misinformed.

I understand your position and I’ve had pleasant experiences on discord in the past with people being very willing to help. However, the help I received for my problem is basically impossible to discovered for anybody else (in fact, I have a hard time finding this thread myself).

Discord is really great for realtime interactions, wether that be chatting or talking. But it absolutely sucks at retrieving information generated in the past. It’s not search engine indexable and the discord search itself usually isn’t of any help either.

On conventional forums on the other hand, I have learned so much from reading threads from the past. Recently I’ve been diving a bit deeper into construction and I’ve found a forum in my native language. There are so many treasures there: experts from the field sharing experiences and advising on issues, people linking relevant threads, people asking questions and whole threads evolving from that. Sure, there is quite a bit of „toxic“ forum interaction as well, but there are so many gems that would absolutely be undiscoverable if the same interactions would happen on discord

codingcodingboy• 2 years ago

I am already distracted enough and now you are getting me interested into construction!

barkerja3• 2 years ago

On conventional forums on the other hand, I have learned so much from reading threads from the past.

I agree, this is a great value. I don't argue against forums, they need to exist.

I was just pointing out that Discord, in my experience, has not been a place of disdain like the original post claims.

Discord has done a lot of work to help foster a good community for all types, especially for the software development communities. If you haven't yet experienced Discord's forum feature, it's worth at least exploring. Here's an example from the Elixir community: https://share.barkerja.dev/4o8Ozk.png

If Discord ever did decide to make this content SEO, what then becomes the major point _against_ something like Discord and your traditional forum?

thefz2• 2 years ago

I use Discord quite a bit in the Elixir community and find it quite useful. Messages are persisted. There's a wonderful forum feature now built into the platform; and it's all searchable with a pretty robust filtering mechanism.

Still have to register though and the content is not indexed by a search engine.

morjom3• 2 years ago

Use a matrix bridge to discord instead.

Jokes aside the discord ux is good enough for the average user, it already has chokehold on its users and there is no equivalent.

I would also prefer things to be easily searchable, archivable etc but consumers consume.

giancarlostoro• 2 years ago

there is no equivalent.

Guilded has entered the chat

lou1306• 2 years ago

Point is, if you are using it as a tool to reach out to your community it's mostly okay, but if you are doing support or documentation up there you should really really think twice.

In this instance: Amiga 600 Discord where we post pics of our cool Amigas good, Amiga maintenance and schematics hidden in God knows which channel on God knows which Amiga Discord server bad.

Best of both worlds: if someone asks question on a Discord and you know the answer, write a blog post (or whatever, as long as it is on the open Web) and link it back! You are guaranteed to have at least 1 readerr which is wildly above the average blog post lol

michaelt4• 2 years ago

it already has chokehold on its users and there is no equivalent.

There are plenty of equivalents - Slack, Microsoft Teams etc offer the same IRC + persistent messages + searchable + persistent user accounts & admin + multi-device + image sharing + file sharing + spam protection product.

They're just even worse, by most of the metrics that make people hate discord.

ourmandave• 2 years ago

I'll never use MS Teams for personal stuff because it's way to work adjacent. The fear of a mis-click or wrong login is to stressful to even start.

morjom3• 2 years ago

If they're worse are they equivalent?

consp2• 2 years ago

Discord has succesfully claimed the word server out of it's meaning and giving people the idea it is "their server".

It's not your server, it's not even a server at all.

doommius• 2 years ago

tbh on the backend they're called guilds:

https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/guild

sneak4• 2 years ago

Stop using Discord for “just chatting”, too. It’s not end to end encrypted and Discord and whoever acquires them can read all of your chat logs, including DMs, for AI training or whatever else.

Friends don’t talk to friends on surveillance platforms.

stnmtn2• 2 years ago

Are forums not this way as well?

sneak4• 2 years ago

They are, but most people don’t expect privacy in forum DMs, and forum site DMs aren’t usually used that much.

Lots of people mistakenly assume their DMs on Discord (and their iMessages) will be private.

koolala2• 2 years ago

They forgot the Discord original amazing much better RFC pattern that lets anyone make channels about anything and connect any server, computer, or person together: Internet Relay Communication

anymouse123456• 2 years ago

This.

"Join my Discord" is a 100% hard pass for me.

Every time I've made an exception, the entire experience is a net-negative.

Half the time, I can't even get authenticated and then once I'm in, everything is awful. The notifications, the constant chatter, the dozens of topics, the useless search, it shocks me that anyone over the age of 14 uses it at all.

Add to all the broken basics, the fact that your data is now locked away in a vault that will absolutely disappear at some point in the not-too-distant future, and it just makes no sense at all.

robertlagrant• 2 years ago

I do find it very strange. It assumes I've been "invited" when I just clicked on a link to join from a website. I can't tell why I am or aren't logged in when I join. It's full of animations.

Maybe it's the Gen Z take on IRC, but it seems a bit much. The client is very smooth in performance, though, which is nice.

ziddoap• 2 years ago

it shocks me that anyone over the age of 14 uses it at all.

Really? I'm in my mid 30s and am in a couple servers with a bunch of 30-50 year olds. I don't know of any better platform to organize and play DnD with voice chat and screen sharing. It's also great for when I play larger online games with a group (e.g. World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy) as we have a guild server to organize absences, socialize while not raiding, etc.

If you have a suggestion for a better way to voice chat, screen share, drop in and out of conversations, etc. I'm all ears.

For what its worth, all of your complaints (except for search, which really does suck) are easily addressed.

viraptor2• 2 years ago

I don't get this:

The notifications,

You can turn them off

the constant chatter, the dozens of topics

Topics are there to limit the messages to just what you're interested in, cutting down the chatter.

If you expect it to be anything different than discord, you'll be disappointed, but there are communities where discord/slack/mattermost model works fine.

iteygib2• 2 years ago

"Add to all the broken basics, the fact that your data is now locked away in a vault that will absolutely disappear at some point in the not-too-distant future, and it just makes no sense at all."

Who cares? Why do you want to record every single thing forever? Do you write down every single thing when you converse with someone in real life?

And you really can't figure out how to use Discord, when a 14-year old apparently can? Maybe it's time to retire.

pwillia7• 2 years ago

yeah any complaints about UX should be seen as boomerism and fought against with your full might with no reflection on the critique. When the water wars come and you have to learn to use a slide rule -- remember this day.

theshrike795• 2 years ago

it shocks me that anyone over the age of 14 uses it at all

Our group of 40+ old farts uses Discord exclusively, because we can do it all under the same roof.

Want to chat about stuff, we've got a few channels just to keep them contained (one for each RPG campaign we're playing and separate ones for the few PC games we have time for).

Need to chat during an online game? Discord has video and voice chat as well as screen sharing.

Want to keep a log of a RPG campaign? You can do a "forum" post about it after every session, it's all there in a nice format under the same platform.

When we play online games, like Helldivers 2, everyone can use Discord for voice even when I play with PS5 and the others are PC players. Discord works cross-platform.

scruple• 2 years ago

Exactly the same experience here in the same demographic. In this friend group, we all have kids and wives and pets and jobs and everything else, but we want to still try to do stuff together. Video games, DnD (though we play PF2E and OSR stuff), we do some book club stuff, we talk about sports and our hobbies, we talk about our kids, our personal and professional lives... We can do text, voice, and video. It's been a great experience for us. We do meet in-person every couple of months for a DnD session but that's typically as often as we can manage with 5 busy schedules to juggle.

swayvil2• 2 years ago

I dislike it. Clumsy and noisy. Just bad.

jimbobthrowawy• 2 years ago

Still moderately surprised there isn't an option built into discord to make certain channels public for reading/indexing.

I have seen one site that seems to enable it by adding their bot to your "server", but it's only on a handful of programming-focused ones.

dools• 2 years ago

I remember a similar sentiment being expressed in IRC chats back in the day, ie. that it was way better to use mailing lists because they publicly recorded all the problems and solutions.

cl3misch3• 2 years ago

I'm not the first to say this, but Discord is essentially IRC. It's great for ephemeral chatting and arguably the best platform for that currently. The content on it is not indexed and not discoverable with web search engines.

I have been wondering: is it even possible for a platform to fulfill both needs?

For searchable, "forum style" discussions, we already have a large accessible platform: Reddit! I genuinely ask myself: why is "Join our Discord" much more popular than "Join our Reddit"?

I personally prefer "forum style" discussion over "IRC style" discussions, but the polularity of Discord even in technical circles proves to me that a lot of people like the IRC style of communication.

ThrowawayTestr3• 2 years ago

You can have both. The forum I use also have a irc-like chat section.

cl3misch3• 2 years ago

Do you care to share what forum that is? And is its irc-like chat section searchable? Otherwise it is just forum and chat available under the same domain. But information in the IRC section is still ephemeral.

michaelt4• 2 years ago

I genuinely ask myself: why is "Join our Discord" much more popular than "Join our Reddit"?

Let's say the maintainers of Foo and the Debian Foo package disagree on which plugins should be in the default install.

If they have that discussion on a public forum, maybe unhappy people get directed to the conversation, or someone decides to parade a comment around twitter and link it from HN so everyone can see what an asshole you are. Quite possibly with your real name attached.

But if you have the same discussion on Discord? Much harder for people to link to, once it's scrolled off the screen it's practically forgotten, and almost nobody uses their real name. And you don't see people screenshotting Discord posts anywhere near as often as they screenshot Twitter posts (although it is possible, of course).

I can see how an open source maintainer using their free time to provide unpaid support might find the latter more pleasant.

aaravchen3• 2 years ago

Reddit has become almost defunct in my experience, onky useful as a historical reference since virtually no new content is getting added to it for anything I follow, use, or have interest in. The alternatives mostly aren't, they either segment across servers (federating identity but not topics), or are a little-promoted-and-used forum with the standard 90s interface that scares away newcommers.

I'm _still_ looking for a Reddit replacement that has sufficient community to make it at all useful, since Reddit died.

davikr• 2 years ago

Let's go back to Usenet.

ThrowawayTestr3• 2 years ago

When you do find a community that you enjoy, make sure your support it. I donate $10 a month to the small forum I frequent. Hosting ain't cheap.

anonzzzies• 2 years ago

Let’s please get back to forums for knowledge. I am/was in discords where very deep tech talks are shared and then it’s closed suddenly; all is gone. It’s depressing. It’s very terrible. People said here before ‘but you can index it like irc’; lovely, but we don’t now, do we? At least not in any structured way.

Chat fine, do deep discussions that could benefit people months, years and decades from now somewhere else.

bogwog2• 2 years ago

I've been on Discord channels where the mods are constantly getting pissed off because people keep asking the same questions, so much so that they ban people when it happens.

I'm starting to think that this is part of the appeal. Having an emotional outburst and power tripping is fun for some people, and Discord provides ample opportunity to do it (+ in real-time)

However, I will admit that I much prefer seeing that a community has a Discord channel over being exclusively located on Github/Gitlab issues.

cjbgkagh• 2 years ago

It’s a change in culture, people are asking questions a lot more instead of doing their own searches for information. Then they get mad at me when I point out that google provides great results for that exact question and they should have started there. It seems to be an attempt to outsource their thinking to other people.

iteygib2• 2 years ago

I don't understand the issue here. The author of the post is mad because people have the choice to not publicly discuss things? Why do they owe the author their conversations? Is this AI/data scraping related and the author is mad that they can't get a portion of data out there?

pavel_lishin2• 2 years ago

The author is mad - rightfully, in my opinion - that many projects use Discord as a defacto knowledge base/documentation/support hub, instead of setting up something that's much better suited for it.

Of course people can privately discuss things, but if you were asking for help with your car, would you prefer that someone tell you which manual and page to look at to solve your problem, or to invite you to their car club that meets on weekends because Timberly probably knows how to solve that problem, and will probably be there next weekend, unless he's not?

pavel_lishin2• 2 years ago

Can we change the title to "Stop using Discord for anything else than just chatting", which more accurately reflects the author's point?

cl3misch3• 2 years ago

Stop dumping knowledge into a black hole. Use forums. Use the open web.

I feel like there are two discussions to be had:

(1) Discord as a commercial platform vs. open web; (2) Discord as an IRC-style platform vs. forums.

For me, only (2) is about the point of OP of "dumping knowledge into a black hole". It's a black hole because it's IRC, not because it's commercial.

gbrindisi• 2 years ago

Current gen LLMs are trained on reddit, stackoverflow, etc. Discord is sitting on little data gold mine ready to be sold to train next gen LLMs.

alimoeeny2• 2 years ago

I think this is a big problem we are going to face soon. And I wish I had a solution for it. For example, recently I've been using Haxe + Heaps.io for a game I am working on. And unlike their docs on the web, which is out of date, their discord community is vibrant and VERY VERY helpful and friendly. Which is both heartwarming and sad. Sad because all of this knowledge and advice is hidden from the public web.

bachmeier2• 2 years ago

The D language forums[1] are a good example of an alternative approach. I don't know what their server/storage costs are, but all that information from the last couple decades is easy to find with a search. The forum is fast, it doesn't require registration, and it's open source.[2]

[1] https://forum.dlang.org/

[2] https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

hu35• 2 years ago

Snappy and simple! I like it.

I wonder how they deal with spam if anyone can post without being logged in.

bachmeier2• 2 years ago

A few pieces get through the filter, but they zap it as needed.

azangru3• 2 years ago

Has anyone remarked on the irony that this appeal to stop using discord, because it isn't searchable from the outside, is published on mastodon, which is also not searchable from the outside?

I tried to google for things I had earlier seen on Mastodon, but was never able to find the relevant post again. Even modern-day Twitter, which is impossible to just browse these days, is more googlable.

viraptor2• 2 years ago

on mastodon, which is also not searchable from the outside?

By default. You can turn on indexing for your account if you want to.

azangru3• 2 years ago

Does this mean indexing within the database that drives this Mastodon instance, or indexing by web crawlers such as googlebot?

Springtime2• 2 years ago

My understanding when I looked into this a couple years ago is the optional wider scope search is only possible to enable for one's own posts/account and while logged in[1], but still limited. At a server level the only search possible (using the regular Mastodon) is for user-added tags on posts rather than full text and this was an intentional decision[2].

I'm not familiar with indexability outside Mastodon instances, though can't really recall coming across them naturally in search.

[1] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/elasticsearch/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/yv1cl4/global_sea...

Edit: updated with links from my prior research.

eviks4• 2 years ago

This post is searchable, so no irony

j16sdiz• 2 years ago

The main complain here is lack of archive/history of what was on the internet.

Discord is a big offender, but it is not alone.

Consider: Google Plus, Usenet, Facebook.

erremerre• 2 years ago

Everyone saying use forums.

Like yeah, forums are great if you want to search something and find. But... Have you actually make an account and ask about your problem?

Because I have, in reddit, specialised forums, and other forums, make an account and try to post.

You have stupid limitations with your new account, most of them, do not impede you asking your question, but it does at linking image, video, or link that would help explaining your problem.

You have to create an account for that specific forum. If you are on Reddit you need to deal with automod, who deletes your post the second you press send. Often without a warning, a real reason, other because you asked for help, please check the wiki. (Yes, my problem is not there)

Then there is the second part, the community. Most of the time, if you overcome that situations, your post get no answers. Sitting there until it reaches the end of page 1 on the forum, and then it is forgotten forever.

Discord is easy, you go, connect with your account, have some rules displayed, accept it, send a chat message, you might get an answer or not, most of the times you do, although is not helpful.

So yes, Discord is a sinkhole of information. But the experience is way better, even if it is a shitty mess.

edwcross2• 2 years ago

I once wanted to join the NixOS Discord. But of course people just call it "Nix", so I googled "Nix discord" and followed the first link ("NIX Official Discord").

Some of the channels seemed a bit weird, especially one full of memes, somewhat 4chan-like. It took me a few minutes of reading (and a few gross right-wing memes) before I realized that the Discord I joined had absolutely nothing to do with NixOS.

The complete opaqueness of the process makes it impossible to know anything at all about the community you are about to join.

edwcross2• 2 years ago

By the way, when I actually joined the "real" NixOS Discord, and asked a few questions but got no answers, I realized it was better to be on my own. I don't know if there was much useful information inside it, but I can see how it can help kill an open-source sofware community: you either arrived early and had the time to digest the information, or you end up having a very bad experience trying to search for the information, trying to understand how the community works, which channels are useful and which are not... so you choose between being the chatty noob who annoys everyone, or the silent lurker who spends hours looking for information or waiting for a reply.

ziml77• 2 years ago

I love Discord... for chat. I refuse to join servers for projects that are using it in place of a forum.

I want to be able to browse the existing information without needing to announce that I'm looking (people joining a server may be announced in a specific channel and you are added to the user list) and without implicitly signing up for notifications (you get the chat notifications unless you make sure to mute the server and suppress @mentions). I want to be able to search for information without trudging through loads of BS chatter and interleaved conversations.

Traditional forum software is great for this. Please use it!

TheRoque2• 2 years ago

178 points, 145 comments in 2 hours, how did this disappear from the front page ? Anyways, my biggest concern for discord is their unclear business model. They have a ton of free features (unlimited video and voice streaming, unlimited messages, accessible forever, including uploaded files). But they are free. How do they intend to pay for all this ? AFAIK, their paid stuff (Nitro, goodies, and other features I couldn't care less about) don't give them much. So my concern is that someday, as we'll see an update to the EULA stating that all the data stored forever is now sold to OpenAI or something like this.

yodon• 2 years ago

It disappeared because people disagree on whether to upvote or downvote comments. When the HN algorithm sees signals like comments receiving large numbers of upvotes and downvotes simultaneously, it interprets that signal as "this post is controversial." HN explicitly and intentionally downranks algorithmically identified controversial topics in order to reduce the odds commenters behave badly (which is disproportionately more likely in controversial topics).

The HN algorithm is intentional about a primary goal of driving well behaved discussions, even knowing that means important controversial topics getting downranked.

TheRoque2• 2 years ago

Interesting, thanks for the insights

hu35• 2 years ago

That doesn't explain Apple related flamewars staying in frontpage for up to more than a day.

swayvil2• 2 years ago

178 points, 145 comments in 2 hours, how did this disappear from the front page ?

Seriously. What's the probability that invisible masters gave the censor order?

Iuz• 2 years ago

They won't stop using it. It's simple as that. Should'nt we be doing something to scrape discord servers, push information to a acessible place instead of this? Is that doable?

alimoeeny2• 2 years ago

I recently learned about https://www.linen.dev/ which is claiming to fix this issue by "Make Slack and Discord communities Google-searchable" An example use by the Haxe community: https://www.linen.dev/s/haxe/c/haxe

Ekaros2• 2 years ago

Why isn't lot of information just inside the project repositories for open source projects? It is text thus space it takes is trivial. At least if images are not needed. It would be versioned so stay in relatively sync with versions of code at time. FAQ and basic configuration things for commonly asked questions could be easily be stored in documents. Why is this not being done? Wouldn't it be trivial amount of work?

astromd• 2 years ago

Discord isn’t the right tool for a knowledge base, but it’s great for communities. I run several servers but I wouldn’t recommend it for developer projects.

donkulous• 2 years ago

Please tell me where I can download the server binary to run my "Discord Server."

Oh wait, I can't? So it's not really "my" "server"?

I would have a very different take on Discord if I could host a server myself and ensure that what I and my community have built won't be deleted at the whim of the corporation or threat from a lawyer. There's no offline backup where you can just spin everything back up on a different host.

And to those that think an obscure "invite" link will protect you from Nintendo's lawyers, you're living in a different reality than I am. Discord, a registered company with a lot to lose, will throw you under the bus in a heartbeat to lawyers or law enforcement.

The current generation is way too comfortable with technical stuff being abstracted away behind pretty cloud based interfaces and Electron apps.

jhanschoo• 2 years ago

I don't understand the need to move away from discord. It seems to me that you can have your cake and eat it too if you 1. Have your community accept a TOS that allows you to reproduce and distribute content that they contribute to the server, and 2. have a bridge or logging bot to mirror all conversation on the server.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

Related from a few weeks back:

Stop Using Discord

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40371595

lacoolj• 2 years ago

Discord has features similar to these forums with their threads, etc. Might be worthwhile to pose a feature request that allows these threads to be public and searchable (or at least crawl-able).

The chat logs, etc clearly would be a problem but these isolated areas could be prime candidates for a bridge of this gap.

tmaly• 2 years ago

It use to be join this Facebook group, now everyone is pushing private discord servers.

I think the old phpBB was way better. But if there was some type of way to output the static html, it would benefit everyone in the long term.

crtasm• 2 years ago

Does anyone here run a Discord to IRC bridge? I'd be interested to hear what you're using and your experiences.

xtiansimon• 2 years ago

This 78 word Mastadon post is more an Ask HN—discuss.

Sure. Using Discord as a help community for technical issues seems like a bad idea on the surface.

But that’s not why I use Discord for technical issues.

I’m prolly a year and a half behind on what’s what (my last big project ). For me StackExchange was the place to find answers to specific questions.

Discord (and Reddit because discussion is permitted) was the place to go to find guidance when you don’t know where to start.

Sooo, Id rather say use Discord, use what works—but write and share back your knowledge to the searchable communities mentioned by the author.

The easy way to do that is write the question that you should have asked to those technical communities and answer your own question.

rkuykendall-com• 2 years ago

I run a forum (for many, many years) and a Discord (for a few years).

The Discord works perfectly and always has. It's completely free and easy to use.

The forum is expensive, complicated, and usually broken. or hacked. or full of spam. It's going to cost even more money to fix. Nobody wants to work on forums, much less me.

Good riddance.

Stop Using Discord

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