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Comment by bluetidepro | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's just me (30-something year old male, big into gaming), but I love when I see forums on Discord. I think it's way better to use a system I am already signed up for. I don't want to sign up again for a million different forums like the old days. I also love the new threads feature by Discord to keep convos more concise and isolated. That has helped forums on Discord a ton. It's also nice that I can join a server, get my answer, then leave that server with no lingering email sign up for some one-off forum that I'll never visit again, and then I get bombed with emails after I'm done. And when I leave, it's worth noting my comments/questions are still on the server for those to find via search if they join after I'm gone [1].

I know a lot of people in the comments seem to hate Discord for this, but I personally love it. I guess I'm just saying this as a reminder that there are always others that do enjoy the other side. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[1] It's worth noting that I guess this is a Discord server specific setting, so that could vary I suppose.

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I'm in the same demographic as you.

The reason why I hate Discord as a replacement for forums is because I find it very hard to find whether my specific issue has already been discussed, and if I find something, it's quite hard to follow the intertwined discussions.

You're talking about a threaded-feature, I'm not familiar with that, maybe it helps. My latest experience with discord was around spring of this year, with some tokio(-rs) related projects.

But I find that something like stackoverflow or "Discussions" (not sure what the name of the app is, but many projects have them) are much more practical to use when you need to look up things.

It seems to me that with Discord, the way it works is you show up and ask your question, as opposed to searching the archives to see whether someone already asked it before.

That reminds me of Reddit's endlessly repeated questions. Possibly there's a large audience that refuses to look for an answer prior to asking a question? Almost an expectation of free "service".

That might result in a preference for Discord. With a refusal to research it's free developer tech support.

Well, that would explain why "users" prefer it, but not why "developers" prefer it.

I'm not involved in any large open source project, but I'd expect I'd rather not answer the same question over and over. I'd therefore choose a platform which doesn't incite that behavior.

I see a lot of communities on Discord will use bots that recognize keywords from commonly repeated questions. The bot then spits out the answer typically associated with that question. It seems to be somewhat helpful that way.

I've also seen similar done but with a bit of manual intervention. Some kind of support/mod person will see a repeated question and use a command to trigger a canned answer to that commonly asked question.

Or say they want log files, they would trigger a canned message from a bot explaining how a user can get that info.

In some sense it almost works like a support chat on a webpage. The support agents have canned responses and can link out to support articles.

To be fair to Reddit reposters, it's on-site search is terrible. OK, it's still probably laziness 93% of the time.

> I find it very hard to find whether my specific issue has already been discussed

That's exactly the issue I have. I even find it hard to find discussions I participated in. The scenario is that you discuss something (technical) and it almost works, but not quite with the improvements you're interested in being planned. You wait 3 months and go back to see if anything has changed and you have 3 months of a single, infinite scrolling page to sort through to see if the topic has come up again.

The threading support in discord will be interesting to see. I wonder if people will seek out historical threads and add to them or if you'll end up with an eternal September type situation where everyone gets fed up from answering the same questions over and over and starts screaming RTFM.

> I even find it hard to find discussions I participated in.

Are you aware of the from:@my_discord_name, in:#my_channel_name has:kind_of_content search keywords ?

I think you hit the nail on the head. The reasons Discord works well for you are unfortunately ... why it won't work for me. (I'm a late 30s male, but, I don't play video games. Nothing against games or gamers, I'm actually jealous! Just never found anything fun since Zelda and Tetris)

I loathe seeing something I'm interested in, something math/science or technology oriented, on Discord. Quoting, and agreeing with you, "I think it's way better to use a system I am already signed up for." I don't want to sign up for a friggin Discord, or a Telegram, or a Slack, or a Whatsapp, and who knows how many other variants of IRC, just to find information!! I have "account fatigue".

I already have a web browser!

Why should I create an account on some closed source platform (that will probably collapse in 5-10 years like all of them), and learn yet another style of markup and communication and lingo...

It's much better for this information to be on a webpage, possibly a web archive of a threaded email list, or a subreddit. I can read the thread, get my answer, then close the tab without carrying around a basket of one-off bullshit accounts I created to join a plethora of chat rooms. And when I leave, it's worth noting that the comments/questions are still on the page, and indexed by a search engine for those to find after I'm gone.

Compare with discord, where it's ephemeral and behind a walled garden. Even worse, I think proliferation of discord chat rooms might suck the useful people and information away from areas of the internet I can easily access, and hide them somewhere hard to get.

I'm appreciative of your comment and glad you made it. It's good to be reminded that kindred others enjoy the "other side", but remember it slices both ways. :)

"Discordization" makes it more convenient for you, but at the cost of making it less accessible for others. I suspect the bulk of your happiness with it derives from your early presence in the ecosystem, not because of any strengths of the platform itself.

A possibly better solution would be something that doesn't put up any barriers to entry for any of us. :)

> Compare with discord, where it's ephemeral and behind a walled garden

Discord chats are persistent.

I'll repeat what I wrote a few comments up ..

Couldn't the solution be a mastodon instance/server?

If people used careful tagging combined with search, it might enable all that seeking for help online, but without signing on for another forum every time they're dealing with a new topic.

Most of the Discords that I have joined aren't game related at all.

> I don't want to sign up again for a million different forums like the old days.

"Sign in with XYZ" exists on every serious website.

> I also love the new threads feature by Discord to keep convos more concise and isolated. That has helped forums on Discord a ton.

It helped because it's a forum feature, not a chat feature.

> my comments/questions are still on the server for those to find via search if they join after I'm gone

Nobody will ever see the answers, they'll ask again

Yeah, what we have here is a failure of the post-GenX generations to understand how things work, and to not consider the ramifications of entrusting years worth of discourse to one platform.

Because they never had to find a lengthy guide on how to implement something on a Rails blog that disappeared and took its information to the grave with it.

I find quick answers through web searching literally all the time. The walled off nature of discord and similar semi-private messaging platforms is a huge downside in disseminating information and I don't see how anyone could think otherwise.

Yeah, this is the other thing that is bonehead about this. Forums at least got indexed but the discoverability of useful discord servers is impossible for information you cared about. A forum is still useful when indexed and you don't sign up and login, and you also can find the fringe discussion/subforum area you actually care about and sign up and join in then.

Discord is an information/knowledge blackhole. Information goes in and never comes out. The amount of times I've searched for info and found it on some obscure forum I've never heard of before is staggering. Like, where the fuck would I be without xda-developers and its massive font of knowledge spanning back a decade, which is organized by device and topic? Like, Discord simply cannot replicate that, yet every community is defaulting to it.

There are a bunch of technical products I repeatedly come into contact with that have coalesced around Discord instead of a forum, and it's a huge pain in the ass to find any information that I need.

> Nobody will ever see the answers, they'll ask again

Which is part of the point anyway, it's "people new to tech/young people" culture to never search for things by yourself and always ask. That's why so many people use discord.

Will Discord even be around in 20 or even 10 years or will all that information be lost? Can people find that information in the Discord by googling now?

They're not exactly keen on allowing you to get your data out today let alone in 20 years https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600351...

I feel like there's an interesting irony here (on HN, not in the particular link you shared). In a thread where folks are discussing how they like/dislike how companies shutter their forums in favor of Discord, you then see how Discord themselves use a more traditional thread based tool to manage their own support site rather than using Discord itself.

Why wouldn't Discord's support site say, "Meet us in the Support Discord"?

If you have an issue starting discord then it would feel wrong if the only way to contact support would be via discord.

Discord never really advertised themselves as a good tool for support operations of large companies did they? They have mostly always focused on a more community focused side of gaming. Like one of their recent bigger features is that you can add a University you attend and verify your account via your uni email. You then get access to a hub that displays all the different Discord servers people have marked as being associated with the school.

So now I can easily find a ton of clubs Discord servers and join them. These clubs would not be suited for a forum at all and they make more sense in a more "live" kind of setting. I see people in these club discords doing voice chats and streaming games to each other all the time.

It seems like this is more the target for Discord, but a lot of people have repurposed it for their own things like using it for their companies chats and support. It's no surprise that you need to use a ton of bots to make this better supported as Discord so far hasn't really focused much on that side of things.

Discord very-much seems like a younger generation kind of tool and a lot of older people come to it and try and make it fit other purposes.

Reading another comment about someone whose company used this for their internal communication is just crazy. While yes it is a good platform they should have known it was a poor choice with having their historical chat history locked into the platform.

This is true of any PHPbb-style forum as well. If the site goes offline, there will be no statically generated archive available.

At least a web forum can be spidered by search engines and the Internet Archive. The forum may go bust but its content may live on. With Discord, once they go bust all of their data will likely disappear. There's also no way for me to search a Discord server without being in Discord. I can find some nugget of information on a web forum without having any prior relationship to that forum.

I personally think from a privacy standpoint I actually like that the chat messages I post on Discord aren't logged and archived on some random websites. Maybe this is because I don't use Discord like a forum, but I use it more like it is a live discussion. Just like if that discussion happened in person you can't really go back on it unless it was recorded somewhere. In the case of Discord you can go back on conversations, just not via a search engine.

I think any important and useful information should be stored via other methods. And I actually have seen this done as well. I've seen common answers to questions that will get added to some kind of FAQ style page online and that will be linked to when someone asks that common question.

Discord is pretty focused still on the gaming/community side of things and I think it does this part pretty well. I have seen it used to supplement many things. Many game servers have a Discord associated with them. Twitch streamers have their own Discord communities. Each game typically has at least one main Discord for it. Discord now supports discovering discord servers for clubs at your University. But in all of these cases I am mentioning being able to search this from a Google Search is not important. In fact in some ways I think it's preferred from a privacy standpoint to not have random chat messages I send be archived on random sites.

I think the problem is that people are trying to use Discord for purposes it wasn't really designed for. So it's funny when these people then complain about it.

> I think the problem is that people are trying to use Discord for purposes it wasn't really designed for.

This is my problem with Discord-instead-of-forums. I completely agree with your privacy point, I don't want or need every word I type recorded and crawled by every search engine. Ephemeral conversations are useful and important.

It's incredibly frustrating when a Discord server is the only avenue for help with a project. Discord, even at its best, isn't discoverable and is barely searchable.

It's not necessarily a new problem though. Ten years ago it was "find us at #projectname on Freenode". Before that it was join a mailing list.

What's amusing in an annoying way is groups are running into old problems but not learning from old solutions. FAQs were invented because online conversations weren't necessarily persistent. If you joined an IRC channel, mailing list, or followed a newsgroup at time t there was no guarantee you'd have access to any conversations that happened at t-1. So people would make curated lists of common, that is frequently asked, questions. These would end up posted regularly to those ephemeral communications or added to a persistent presence (web, FTP, etc).

I'd be far less annoyed by "join our Discord" if someone involved would persist some common or just novel questions to a persistent FAQ that's discoverable on the Web. It might not be as good as a wiki or forum but it's a lot lower friction than joining a Discord server to ask a question a hundred other people have asked.

I had a seven year old forum get deleted with no backups. Internet Archive saved virtually nothing and there is no way to search it. You have no clue which of the snapshots have saved a certain page of any topic or if any snapshot includes it at all.

With Discord you (or any user) can at least run one of the various off-the-shelf logger bots. And someone would still have to make it available, and who knows how nice it would be to consume, probably not very.

So I'm not sure either have much advantage here if the origin dies forever.

I'm sure even if they fold, the info will be sold to some group for ML at the very least.

The company I work for is in the process of migrating internal chat away from Discord to something else. It's a fully remote company, so chat is really important.

I think most people like the Discord interface enough. That's not reason to leave. The migration away is because it's an open source company, so Discord is poorly aligned with the company's values, and there is a constant search for better, more open alternatives. (They are migrating away from Google services as well.)

I really like the Discord interface for real-time chat. Nicer than Slack or IRC (and I'm comfortable with IRC, I used to be active on it in the old days).

The Discord GUI on top of a "modern IRC", specifically with publicly archivable channels, would be great.

But the way high quality information is constantly being posted then lost forever in practice is a big loss. Searching within Discord works if you know exactly what you are looking for. But you have to know, and wider searches such as with Google or any other tool that look through the rest of the company's online materials will never find the content in Discord. That's unfortunate as Discord tends to be where, by far, the highest quality and quantity of information is.

As a result of the company's migration away from Discord, we expect an abrupt discontinuity, as the new platform won't have access to the old Discord conversations. Then all the years of high value content people have put into Discord will effectively disappear, as nobody will search Discord when they aren't even using it any more.

What we'd really like is a gateway that allows the Discord content to be available in other platforms, generally searchable on the company's intranet, and on the internet for public channels.

If our Discord content was more openly accessible and shareable, even while using a closed source product, we might not be migrating at all. We'd probably let people choose their preferred client instead to access the shared real-time content. But it's not that accessible, and it's unfortunate so much expert knowledge will be lost in the migration.

An interesting web-based IRC client I've been looking at was The Lounge. You might like it.

https://thelounge.chat/

Also, at my company we've really enjoyed Mattermost over the years. The main chat platform is open source, they make money by selling a paid enterprise plguin suite. All your messages are in a database you control, you can translate them to whatever you want.

You should look into Discourse. It's great for internal use aswel as public usage. Real example on their own meta: https://meta.discourse.org - I even use selfhosted instance for personal stuff.

Lots of customizations possible to make it to suit all your needs.

I say this as someone who uses discord heavily for a couple of hobbies: I truly detest discord search. I'd be more accepting of this trend if search wasn't hobbled; please, for the love of zeus, honor the difference between "normal" and "normals" in channels about 3d modeling.

Remember OpenID (from before it became a OAuth variant)? The premise of an universal identity from any IdP usable anywhere would've worked just as well.

Discord|Slack, are the best all-around tools if you had to make a decision around one tool, and one tool only for a group of people. Discord being stronger for games, and Slack having insane integration capabilities and enterprise-enterprise communications provided the business partners are also on Slack, via their own corporation workplace or GRID plan.

However, Slack|Discord individually are vastly inferior individually to:

A Wiki (Take your pick)

Text Based Chat (IRC/XMPP, you choose a client)

Forums (Take your pick)

Voice Chat (Mumble&Murmur/Teamspeak)

Video Streams (Twitch/Youtube/Others)

Mapping Strategy Apps (Take your pick)

Tying this together with a common directory or identity service makes it really integrated, so you don't have 5k identities, but you may have credentials per service. This is what you see many mature gaming organizations doing. Of course, this is serious gaming and less accessible so less idea for a completely open "just join our discord" type community.

I've been building an intuition that we can't just pick. We need all of them.

Text: Chat -> Forums -> Wiki

Video: Twitch -> YouTube -> Movies

Voice: Discord -> Podcasts -> Books on Tape?

Which can be summarized as, in how long the information lasts:

Media: 1 minute -> 1 day -> 1 year

Left side is experimental for people who absolutely love the activity, right side is high quality and condensed for people who just want the information. As the right side has higher standards, it will be more correct but less up to date. On things that are rapidly evolving you might want to drop down to a lower level.

What we need is for it to be as trivial as possible for the information that is happening in chats to make its way to forum posts in a cleaner format, and eventually into wikis where all experimentation has been refined into just truths. All of this needs to be open and so we can't have 9 different services all trying to hold their section hostage.

I think you’re right.

As information moves from idea to discussion to documentation, choose the right tool for the job. Chat systems like discord, or even an email list, are useful for ephemeral discussion and working things out. Once a concept stabilizes, move it to a wiki that is organized and edited to be a concise, focused document.

Oh, thank you for giving me (idea, discussion, documentation), I love it.

One of the key insights when you view the model this way is that people are always trying to avoid "filter bubbles", but it's actually totally okay to have filter bubbles in the idea stage, which should open up in the discussion stage, and should be totally gone by the documentation stage.

So one chat community -> one wiki community doesn't make sense. You want sub-communities that can come together to groom the information as it matures.

Can you elaborate on the “filter bubbles” concept?

The wiki entry on it is fairly complete[0].

Another way to look at this is Breadth First Search vs Depth First Search. DFS moves fast and tries to find new ideas, BFS moves slow and makes sure it's taking the correct path. Think about Chess bots that need to go very far down the search space to make the next move.

It's okay for the idea stage to be bubbly. It helps them come up with ideas. if the wiki stage is of all one mindset, you have an issue.

Further thinking since I made this post, I realized when thinking through this model, no wonder why the internet is so toxic. Most people, the less experienced, who should be reading verified Wiki-level information are reading Facebook and similar, a Chat-level discourse. No wonder disinformation flows.

Of course it makes sense why. Unverified stuff is simply more exciting than known stuff that's been filtered of all of the impossible stuff. How do we get most people to read boring wiki entries? Read textbooks?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble

I do agree that is the right way to do it.

Unfortunately, for a gaming organization it really brings to the fore the need for knowledge management, and discipline around what makes its way into the Forum, to a Sticky on the Forum, and from there, to the Wiki as Doctrine/Policy. Kind of comedy how much this needs to resemble RL organizations

> I love when I see forums on Discord

I don't even consider it a forum. I consider it chat. I think there's really two different products.

I don't mind discord for chat, but it's awful as a question / answer support system. Slack is the same thing. I think the reason they're popular as a support destination is because lazy people that don't want to make any effort can pop in, ask a question, and get an answer.

I'm not calling you lazy BTW.

My biggest issue is they don't scale and it's really hard to find historical information. The chat is usually cluttered with simple information and one huge, de-threaded, infinite scroll is almost impossible to navigate in any reasonable manner (at least for me).

That said, I think discord could get better with the new threading feature. As people create high quality threads the moderators could pin them and categorize them. You could even create categories and let users create and manage their own threads. Oh wait. That's a traditional forum. Lol.

Based on the very few discord servers I've joined, I think the biggest thing that makes it useful is that it isn't saturated with dumbasses (yet). For example, the Cloudflare discord for Workers / Pages seems to be a smaller, more informed userbase than the forums. I think some of the devs might even hang out there, but I imagine that'll stop if they see mass adoption and the same questions get asked repeatedly.

Gotta be you, gotta be the personal preferences because I'm not that fond of Discord. I'm within same age and similar interests.

The good side of using Discord - or similar chat platforms is that interaction seems to be faster than on forums but by a cost of being buried under memes or all sorts of unrelated information and messages. Then, there's also the issue of longevity of information on Discord if server beside the generic social operation is being used as a way of support for the community; the ticket systems are in most of the cases temporary - your issue once resolved is being deleted and you cannot access it again.

The advantage of forums - at least for me, is that information on these is within the reach of every person by a standard search engine; you can "comb" through stuff globally or by using local forums search feature. You don't need to be on particular forums to access it, unlike on Discord. But there are of course downsides like limited access to content (register to access links, images) or search engines not being able to index all stuff.

I'd personally prefer if Discord would be used as complementary tool for any community and not as the replacement of forums.

Not sure if reddit with its subs counts as forums or more as an content aggregator with commenting feature. But still, some communities use subs as one of official communication channels or unofficial but with "blessing", or as an unofficial alternative to official forums (the r/guildwars2 vs official strictly moderated forums case).

Discord has recently just started banning political undesirables.

They did that last June in a couple of mass ban waves. Who are they going after now?

A gaming YouTuber named Spike Viper had his community banned because he's working on building a competing service to Discord.

TheQuartering was banned yesterday after appearing on a stream with Alex Jones.

I actually agree, we use discord for our team and at the start i wasn’t happy about it. But after a while got used to it and now think its great. A lot of people in this thread saying its hard to find information in discord and disagreeing but ive never had any issues finding stuff with the search function.

I think as the web and search engines have deteriorated things like discord, telegram and twitter have become the places you need to navigate to find information. If you want to learn how a brand new framework with zero docs works you need to ctrl-f their discord and ask questions there, its by far the quickest and easiest way

Forem[0] is trying to solve this with a browser extension. Looking promising!

[0] https://www.forem.com/

We (I work for Forem) have an opensource selfhost installer [0] so you can have total control over your data and community too.

[0] https://github.com/forem/selfhost

> It's also nice that I can join a server, get my answer, then leave that server with no lingering email sign up for some one-off forum that I'll never visit again.

Wondering if https://sqwok.im would fit this use case? Each post has a built-in chat room, is public and doesn't require a login to view on mobile/desktop web.

I get your point. Signing up for yet another forum with confirmation email, password and so on ... totally annoying.

Couldn't the solution be a mastodon instance/server?

If people used careful tagging combined with search, it might enable all that seeking for help online, but without signing on for another forum every time they're dealing with a new topic.

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