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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.

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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.

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