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Comment by zeepzeep | Hacker News Reader

> 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

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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.

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.

> 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.

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