Comment by thrdbndndn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thrdbndndn | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I prefer forums due to similar reasons, but I found asking questions as a user on Discord more "successful", so to speaking.

On a forum, the chance of your question being totally ignored is much, much higher. Some do have some staffs that seem to be obligated to reply, and they will just.. copy and paste some templates.

On Discord, even the devs and staffs are not always there to answer questions, there are often enough other users that can help you, and they are willing to discuss with you if details are not clear (as soon as you're polite). Even though they don't always solve the problem, you can tell someone actually looked into it. And all these happen in real-time, without at best half day delay between each exchange (it helps that Discord is hella popular so lots of people are online all the time, and the chance to notice your message on a server they're in is much higher. Can't say the same for any random forum.)

I still prefer GitHub issues, but after that, Discord. Forums (or the communities it normally forms) really don't cut it.

I totally agree, and I believe that was also the reason why IRC was so successful in F/OSS communities.

Traditional thread-based forums are great for archival but also seem to encourage a full-sized post, which is a conversational barrier by itself and also limits the potential engagement by reducing the number of people willing to reply. It doesn't seem to me that the discouragement of short posts is inherent to forums though, for example traditional South Korean forums had been traditionally evolved from BBS and had a strong dichitomy between posts and comments, so short comments and quick reactions were norms (longer replies are typically posted separately in a post). GitHub issues seem to be somewhere between those different models.

This. I help moderate for the community surrounding Obsidian.md. We have a discourse forum, a subreddit, and a discord. The discord is by far the easiest place to actually get help — and not because the forum isn't active (it is) but because it's real-time and there's always someone around.

Whenever I have to go find a forum for a product I'm using that doesn't have a discord, I have to twiddle my thumbs for a day before maybe getting asked a clarifying question.

Sure, there's a "static knowledge base" but in my experience, most search features suck for figuring out if something has already been asked before, but at least discord doesn't make you feel dumb for not having found the old relevant thing already. Plus, it's a lot harder than it used to be when I was active on jcink boards to actually trawl all the new content (a problem for me because I write the community newsletter every week — consistently the one thing I don't actually read all of is the forum. I'm able to keep up with everything else, including twitter).

I understand the value of threading, but don't underestimate the value of linear, chronological thought, either. As a moderator, there's a lot of emotional relief in being able to be sure that I saw everything, and didn't miss a new comment in a thread I stopped reading a week ago.

+1. Also, IMO many users already use Discord for other purposes, so they're more likely to check your project's channel while checking other things. Meanwhile, nobody really goes out of their way to look at a project-specific forum, not until that project build sufficient momentum.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com