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Comment by vladvasiliu | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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 ?

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.

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