Discord is a black hole for information
knockout.chat
knockout.chat
The problem arises when you have people that just now-and-then hop into the Discord. These people are not in the "clique" so they don't feel comfortable talking/discussing too much in the channels, and they also really have no clue where to go for any of the lost information these super users don't even think about. This is probably why I never really use Discord except for voice, since I just don't get anything at all from reading an endless chat log. It's like being someone stepping in to a tight knit friend group with a long history and no way of looking into it.
Discord will most likely have to figure out how they can keep it so that it works for these super users, but somehow make the information organized for people that aren't hard core community members.
Edit: Wrote "clique" wrong
Past discussions are invaluable for providing context. The worst thing that can happen to a (technical) discussion is new people repeating points that have been resolved already while the discussion has since moved on.
Admins and regulars alike may waste time and screen space repeating past conclusions, something a quick forum search avoids.
Your only hope is to have a curated, wiki-like resource that you point newcomers at, maybe with an IRC bot to easily reference it from the chat.
These people annoy existing servers members and get angry replies because people are so tired of answering the same basic question multiple times a day.
Some servers have created processes where you can only access the FAQ channel until you prove your knowledge, and only then you can enter ‘general’. That clearly shows that something is wrong with content discovery on Discord.
From the numerous Discords I'm on, this problem is either fixed by making the members answering have a mindset to always help, or by using a bot with canned responses.
I've been in programming IRC channels since the late 90s. People asking the same questions as someone else asked the day before was the norm back then too.
In fact, Discord is better than IRC in this regard, because it has history in the client. You can easily search what's been written by a member or in a channel. I've used it many times to find relevant information in the Home Assistant server and similar.
You also get the history when you join, so you immediately get some sense for what kind of channel it is. Is it very active or not? Are they discussing relevant things or not?
IRC has none of that. Sure some built bots that recorded the conversations, but you'd have to know where to find the logs. When joining a channel it was blank. In fact I did this just yesterday when I had some SystemD question, and hopped on their Libra Chat IRC channel. Took me a few hours to realize this was a dead place.
That being said, I do think open source projects should consider alternatives like Gitter.
With the huge difference that IRC did not have chat history, unless you used a bouncer
Sure, you could set up bouncers and whatnot. But it's a barrier that Discord doesn't have.
I think the main difference is that on IRC you'd usually be invited to a specific channel and you'd slowly work your way to other channels as your interests grow. If a given channel has too much activity and is too "off topic" you'll usually find like-minded people who'll just fork to a smaller, more manageable channel. But on Discord you're invited to what they abusively call a "server" and from there you usually see dozens of groups with various purposes and features and you're bombarded with gifs and notification icons all over the place.
I think I agree with you, if I was an ~18yo right now and was willing to invest time into a community I'd love all this... stimulation. But as a boring old 35yo it's just overwhelming and feels like the signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal.
If you truely wish to depart you need to leave the server and to return isn't an easy task; as to be able to get back in to the room you need the invite link which has it's own set of caveats. At the same time people tend to think your gone for good.
Unlike IRC where if you desired to step away, you could close the channel and reappear at your own leisure and still continue where you left off. If you returned regularly you end up being known as a regular. IMO the current pitfall of IRC is that it's plagued with idling.
And the days where I could post my own non-https link to a funny image are gone; it feels that most are now self-conscious of cliking linked-content from none-mainstream sources. How did we end this way?
I'm not getting any messages, but I could get some at any moment. And then I'd have to choose whether to respond immediately or not. And, while I'm not responding, some part of me is wondering what the message's level of urgency is.
It sucks. Exiting Discord entirely for some portion of the day when I don't feel up to being "on" literally feels like going on vacation without your phone or something. My brain can finally relax. https://youtu.be/E2-AnDdgIF4?t=17
Try it, purposefully leave your phone at home the next time you go to the grocery store and see if you feel anything weird.
It's modeled off of IRC / Mumble / TS / Vent terminology. A server is home to many channels which one can join.
That seems more than a bit ridiculous.
Discord's selling point isn't really being a "better IRC", it's the voice chat. It's a better TS/Mumble/Ventrillo. Low-latency, decent audio quality, push-to-talk or an actually functioning level detection, with an easy to use interface. It's "Chat for Gamers" for a reason, not "IRC with history".
Discord is voice chat, with text as a nice extra, and with image/file sharing and screen sharing and emoji/stickers/profiles (these are attractive to some people). IRC is text only. TS/Mumble/Vent were all voice chat, with really awful text chat interfaces (TS was sort of OK, Vent may as well not have had text chat).
I don't think Discord is good as an information archive, and I'm not terribly fond of seeing FOSS projects using it as a primary means of communication, but it's great for gaming compared to what we had before.
They're riding on the network effect that they won with zero-friction user adoption, startup capital and a client that was okay at the beginning. Now the client is pretty darn good, they're basically AOL Instant Messenger now, except people actually want to pay.
As an aside: Hopefully their security team is phenominal, they are gonna need it. Personally, I'm extremely distrustful of Discord's future CIA (infosec term) of their service.
Why do I think Matrix isn't going to win after a client polish round or twelve? Well, its a little bit weird to say iPhone users who will have to wrap their head around one or two concepts about bridging and so forth, as opposed to Discord who has an API and a business unit dedicated to interoperating it with other services. Why would Facebook link to Matrix bridges when theres no money at all?
Why has slack not achieved this? the onboarding flow wasn't/isn't as easy and it is definitely targeted to business or institutional use would be my guess. Casual users like blinking tiny gifs of :kappa: and the gamers are already there.
Why not use Slack?
Slack is a worse product in almost every way, but it does have better search than Discord if you pay 850 yen per person per month. Do you think that e.g. the Sorbet slack or the Zig community discord should pay 850 yen per person per month for any random person who wants to discuss their open source project?
I don't know if this has changed, but they were originally called guilds.
This is why it's users refer to them as servers.
They separated those terms a long time ago, even before the second-hand app
Just gonna go ahead and call it, it’s dead. Gifs are required. Even in the Slack I manage for work for a large team the primary request is we add giphy.
We just bullshit and game. But not that well. So it fits a lot of people’s style.
"Matrix? Dude just get on Discord we're forming a party right now."
Discord definitely wants it that way, they are for sure thinking about the moment when you are trying to get in game fast and easy, and nobody cares to switch their platform, especially to something unfamiliar.
The thing about the limbic system is that you're gonna feel the pull to just come along. If your casual game group is just doing that, its a pretty hard sell when everyone already is using Discord and if they arent its extremely fast to begin, well known and even works in a browser.
If by egotistical you mean believing oneself to be better and more important than others, I disagree: I've had this exact experience, what would have been egotistical would be demanding they use mumble or matrix instead of the thing that already works for everyone.
With discord, you search for a server that interest you, for example "city xyz gamers" and then you disable all notifications unless they mention you.
Then you browse to your hearts content and turn on mass notifications for the rooms you do like to see.
I'm only really super active on two or three of them though.
You don't need to absorb everything on every server and their are plenty of ways to control what notifications you get.
I don't think making a vague claim that it's for young people only is useful.
It's annoying that it can't show the server names down the left... only their icons.
I can't remember what they all are, so I need to slowly hover my mouse over them one-by-one every time I'm trying to find a certain server.
We use it extensively for hosting chat related to role-playing games that I’m involved in, along with the voice channels for when we’re having an actual game. Character sheets are hosted on RPGSessions.com, with bot links to our Discord channels.
For that use case, I think it works pretty well.
I'm also strongly of the opinion that tying core business functionality and information transfer to a third-party chat application is a massive footgun, and other than the fact that I use it out of business needs and not just for voice, I think s/Discord/Slack/g applies. I've both heard Discord described as "Slack for hobbies" and Slack as "Discord for the employed" (although obviously it's not a perfect distinction and I've seen e.g. Netrunner groups on Slack and e.g. some startups communicating through Discord).
That said, the number of teams and departments I have either encountered or heard about from engineering friends elsewhere whose primary - and sometimes only maintained - deployment interface is a Slack command clearly means that I'm the dumb one for trying to work the UNIX philosophy into most of my life's tools and nobody else is blinking twice about vendor lockin and memoizing solutions in a chat application. I just try and take any question/answer that was sufficiently obscure or anything asked more than once and shove it in an "OAQs" ("occasionally asked questions") on Confluence or whatever the knowledgebase application du jour is, but it still feels like teardrops against the ocean sometimes.
I do think a modern chat app is a value-add for fast moving (tech) companies. It is a nice hybrid between sending an email or knocking on someones door for a chat.
And as for the 'chat commands', they're usually just thin wrappers around the UNIX style tool. It's maybe not the most reliable way, but it does have a low barrier and there's not much lock-in. I used to have my server email myself whenever something needed my attention, but now it'd probably use a Discord bot for that.
However, I still wouldn't use it professionaly. the lack of self-hosting (privacy) and archival(bots can solve this pretty easilly) and restricting DMs (see slacks previous issues) makes Discord unsuitable.
Slack doesn’t have a self hosted option either. This doesn’t stop literally every company on it from using it. This argument is a purist mentality. At some point you have to use someone else’s servers, or invent everything yourself.
Self hosting doesn’t even give you control, the app owner can easily put command and control software in the server image and still do whatever they want. Don’t pay your license fee? Good luck getting the keys to your encrypted data store.
The first two are easily indexed by google, so that's one advantage. Twitter has a site-wide search. Discord doesn't (yet?) have such a thing, but I think the focus being private communities might keep that from happening... unless they get bought out and some MBA says "how can we better get clicks?"
Different USPs, or pseudo USP as it's a weak U, more a network effect.. The USP of Facebook being closing a circle Facebook controls around you. Of Reddit being indexable/discoverable communities/interests, of Stackoverflow focused, transactional answers. Of Twitter being bullied into change from their earlier premise to serving bigmedia noise. Of Discord wasting users time for the reward of 'being part of..', that's their USP and Discord would die without the waste time through repetition that holds membership (for now).
If I want to share something cool then I'd rather post it on a forum because you don't need to be only at that exact moment to see it. If I want to report a bug then I'd rather use a forum. If I want to ask questions then I'd rather use a forum.
I love Discord, I think it really disrupted the industry. But a real-time chat app is not a replacement for a community forum.
Reddit's redesign is annoying and their own search isn't great but the alternative sources for a lot of communal information is completely inaccessible. I cannot search Google for Discord conversations and get information about my Lenovo laptop's rear thunderbolt port misbehaving, even though I witnessed that conversation take place multiple times on the unofficial Legion Discord community. If you're not on Discord and sort of active in a community it might as well not exist.
I've already gotten one or two comment replies to some years-old comments of mine, and I was able to help answer their questions.
Reddit is cancer. Their karma system is ripe for abuse, and a great majority of their mods have power issues and ban for frivolous reasons. Reddit is just a joke for any real conversation.
Something about knowing this flame war is for the permanent record (and the fact it keeps getting bumped) just seems to drive people off the deep end.
On the other end, this is much easier on forums. You can fire a war, and bump the thread again next day you come back. Without the admin kill the thread, this can goes forever.
if anybody wants, then he can save it easily
also forums tend to be as anonymous as discord, so idk.
One thing I never understood is why so many forums neglected to implement sage functionality like what you have on imageboards. There would never have been bans for so-called 'necroposting'.
Personally, I’d rather look at an enriched summary than the original chat log in most cases. Can somebody get on this please :)
Within those parameters discord does work well. Nothing else has the necessary creature comforts (by default). I think most of my friends have misgivings about discord, but I don't think there's anything else that fills this niche well at the moment.
Big discord servers are a completely different world, I don't understand how people put up with that.
Seems fairly simple to perform simple keyword searching, just like Slack.
The sheer volume can be overwhelming too. I went on the Zenith (VR MMO) Discord the day after release to ask a question and I found it to be useless. The channel was moving so fast that 2 min after I asked my question I couldn't even find it and had to search for it. There's no way to follow something going that fast (at least for me) and a lot of the chatter is tangential, so in addition to being poorly organized the signal to noise ratio is low.
And what if they don’t click the thread button? You’re back in the same problem. So the issue isn’t with discord, it’s with users.
Time passes by, memories fade away and sometimes you have to find that very piece of information you remember it's somewhere in there. I had to look for information on forums I was active in ten years before. Some of them were there, easily searchable or not, some went away. It seems that Discord is on the hard side of the searchability spectrum.
1) No concept of isolated identities for each server (or group of servers).
2) I use Discord maybe once per week, and every time I do, I have to log in again. The phone app quietly disconnects after a week or so.
3) Hard to find messages I have been mentioned in. I think there's an "inbox" that clears itself out after X days.
4) Pollution, mostly visually (can't collapse certain elements).
People use Discord for work chat?
Because of that all of our internal staff discussions takes place in Discord, in channels that can only be seen by the "Staff" role (though modded Discord clients can show these channels' names - because channel listing, both voice and text based, seems to have been relegated to client-side so the server just sends ALL channel names, but not the actual contents unless you have the role since that is checked server-side).
While we do have a system that management based staff are invited to (I won't name it because NDA, but it's incredibly easy to guess), but it is only used in case there's a *massive* Discord outage and the staff end up in an extended communications "blackout" because of the outage - however it has _never_ actually been used, at least in the time I've been part of it.
Do you perhaps have multiple sessions of discord open at the same time? I only get the login when I accidentally open discord multiple times, otherwise I never really get asked for a login.
I really do not like it for communities, there's too much noise and too many annoucements.
I kind of want to run two instances, but this is apparently a ban-able offence.
As far as I'm aware, Discord usually only hands out bans for this when you use an alt-account to ban evade. Though I can certainly understand not wanting to risk it if you use it for work (I'm affected by this as well).
We had a discussion on Firefly earlier, and I've just written the first small peice of Firefly documentation, introducing the new capability-based async/await inference: https://www.ahnfelt.net/async-await-inference-in-firefly/
You said to reach out by email, but it's not showing up for me on your profile. If you're interested, there's also a draft on part 2 here: https://www.ahnfelt.net/p/ce19cc5c-d18c-452f-86c3-85a920e748...
Thank you :)
If I were trying to subtly encourage pounding out content free crap, I would probably want people to use difficult to search, non paginated scroll feeds as much as possible.
Discord might be a black hole, but Discourse has some of the same properties. Facebook is the same way.
Anything that funnels people into multi-thousand post individual pages is going to lose information.
Old proboards forums, github issues, and wikis don't have this problem. Content is in smaller blocks that can be linked to easily, and there is a strong culture of keeping topics focused. You don't have multiple unrelated conversations in one place.
You can jump to the end or beginning of a thread when quickly skimming to see if it's relevant.
And you can see all threads in a given time period pretty easily with pagination, when you want to understand the larger picture at a point and time.
These are all things that are useful both for a sense of community and for technical work itself.
I never lose info like I do in discord
Maybe a time-based tree structure would improve how we use slack for example.
Navigation through a time based ToC seems like a compromise but not one I love
Even with deletion, and traditional pages, you could make pages immutable in several ways. actually creating explicit page objects in the database, saying "page 40 starts at N time and goes until the next page object"
I think you're mistaking the type of content on Discord/Facebook as a byproduct of the design of their platforms.
Upvote oriented forums are the internet's equivalent of academic citations.
GitHub issues have more than a sprinkle of the "middle managers preening themselves in meetings for status" vibe.
They both have the same property: end users displaying individual dedication to writing thoughtful comments.
People do not come to Discord/Facebook to discuss weighty topics, with highly edited well thought out answers. They are there to blast nonsense after a long hard day at work.
And that's okay, we all do.
Anecdotally, I find Discord search still fairly easy to use. It's an extremely similar experience to what I have to do to wring answers out of the mitts of Google, Splunk, Slack search, grep, or any other search bar I've encountered.
Like grep, you just have to put in the effort upfront to learn the search filters. In fact it's far easier to search Discord than picking up regex and grep ever was.
- functionality for a public export (can also restrict to specific channels), .e.g. https://leanprover-community.github.io/archive/
- in addition to the above, they are working on a guest mode, so you can read the discussions without logging in -- hopefully that would make it possible to index without setting up a separate archive hosting https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/13172
- messages/threads have proper meaningful URLs (unlike random obfuscated UUIDs like in Discord)
- you can easily open things in new tabs -- unlike Discord, where search pane takes like 10% of the screen, or Slack where once you clicked on search result, you lose the context about the remaining results
- you can login with Github (so no need to register for many people, at least for programming-related projects)
(Also, Zulip should try to compete against NextDoor - but to do so they'd need more control around content expiry once the storage limit was hit. No neighborhood is going to pay $7 per user, so the free offering needs to be compelling.)
Discord groups always end up with 735 channels about super specific topics. So you're not only spreading discussion over tons of channels where things will be evenly quiet and unnoticed, but you now have to go and laboriously check each of them to find new stuff. Or mute half of them you don't care about so you're not constantly being spammed with unread indicators. This also creates the "internet cop" problem, where whoever created the community (or someone they added as a moderator) feels the need to constantly yell at people for having organic discussions instead of searching for the specific channel approved for topic #365.
Basically, the whole thing seems to discourage discussion more than foster it, because people simply don't work that way. That sort of structure works for forums, but not for something happening in real time.
rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan .
The rasfwrj newsgroup was my first major internet hangout. There were newsgroups for anything and everything.
>All 3rd party apps or client modifiers are against our ToS, and the use of them can result in your account being disabled. I don't recommend using them.
A far-from-ideal means of making the client more dense is to zoom with ctrl-{-,=,0}. It's exposed as an settings option too. Rather annoyingly however it doesn't seem to reduce the minimum frame width.
I can see the other side of course. There are a few things that are repeated questions or useful content that may benefit others. I try to push that stuff into GitHub or add it to the docs. I've also thought about recording the Discord channel and publishing that too, so that the search engines get it. I am afraid that that may scare people away though. If you feel like everything you ask (even with you pseudonym) is recorded forever, you are more afraid to ask stupid questions.
Though I do feel that that splits the community even more. I do agree with he author's point that having too many communication channels split the people unnecessarily.
Or you can just spin another Discord "server" which you already know how to do and not have to worry about hosting anything.
TBH it’s kind of weird to hear someone bemoan running a raspberry pi on hn. You could also use Digital Ocean for $5 a month, I think they have a one click Discourse install. I guess running your own stuff is old fashioned.
Evne with digital ocean you still need to worry your server and keep it up to date which again takes time out of your actual project.
I don't see what problems you people see with Discord. Yeah you can't take all of the conversation data with you, but is that really what you would even want? I don't know what kind of projects you are running where forum is so much superior to discord.
different people will like different things, but chat is transient
an hour a month on server maintenance isn’t going to make or break anyone’s project, but if you don’t like tinkering with things there’s nothing wrong with that
can you give example?
https://users.rust-lang.org/ https://discuss.emberjs.com/ https://github.community/
1. Depend on proprietary service that silos data
2. Service changes price or shuts down or does something unpopular
3. People migrate to a new product baiting people with a free offering
4. Go to 1
We never should have left self-hosted bulletin boards and IRC. Hosting is cheaper and better than ever.
why is a forum so much better than a chat and FAQ? I really can't see the problem you guys are trying to fix here.
It's PHP, but requires composer so not as easy to setup in shared hosting as old forum software like MyBB et al.
Not that I would ever want to subject myself to shared hosting again, but I'm pretty sure you can run composer on your local machine to install the dependencies and then copy everything over, right? You've got to pay attention to what PHP modules are or aren't available on your shared host, but usually that's not too big of a problem.
Composer on shared hosts is a challenge, mostly involving retrying until it works. That's why I fetch most dependencies locally. Sometimes I mess with the dependencies a bit when a specific dependency requires information about how the operating system is configured, but most of the time that's not necessary.
It's open source and open (decentralized) - and can be indexed by search engines if you set the discussions to public
Matrix can also be bridged to Discord, so you wouldn't split the community.
There's been quite a few cases where the only hit for an obscure error message I could find was some kind of Gitter chat, but I've learned to not even bother with those results.
Search engines also have trouble working with chat messages and even modern forums like Discourse. When you click a link you will have to spend significant effort trying to find the highlighted text, something that was a lot easier back in the static HTML days. You have to let Javascript do its fetches and queries to get the information supposedly found somewhere in the page, and it doesn't always load so you may need to scroll to the end to get the rest of the discussion, making "find in page" useless. Discourse tries to solve this by providing heir own control+f handler which is somehow even worse.
I understand the want for more and quicker interactivity. It's a better experience for the person writing the question or the response. This comes at a massive cost in readability and knowledge transfer, though.
From there it's no longer a Discord problem, as you just need to export that data somewhere. There's bots which already partialy do this. There's bots that log edits & deletes for moderators to review and bots like TicketTool (https://tickettool.xyz/) let you create special one-off channels (tickets) that you can export to html on closure too.
Always scared to earn a ToS ban using something like this though.
One reason more to stay away from Discord, which can keep your data and metadata forever.
You are right though that GitHub is at least accessible read only without an account.
The Linux kernel-dev mail list archives might technically be accessibly by anyone, but they're still not going to come up in a web search. And IRC history isn't stored at all.
And if you really need some piece of information in the Discord server, you can join the Discord server and search for it, all you need is an email.
I've been using Discord for a couple of years and greatly prefer it to forums or IRC.
I honestly think that this issue is vastly overstated in the case of Discord. I've seen any number of even non-technical applications that could literally put, in bold, flashing text, "click here for setup instructions" right next to the download button and people would still be asking on Discord how to drag and drop or how to register an account or whatever inane setup procedure the application entails.
It's an issue with the people, not the format.
EDIT:
> If you feel like everything you ask (even with you pseudonym) is recorded forever, you are more afraid to ask stupid questions.
Ha. Funny. In my experience, this isn't a deterrent.
For a not-quite-relevant, but nonetheless elucidating, example, see: Any number of celebrities on Twitter who have said something insanely stupid and later said "you don't think about how the things you say are going to stay up there forever."
Social networks do a really good job of making permanence feel ephemeral to the average user. To those of us who know better, this is a strange concept, but the reality is that people don't really think about or care whether someone will judge them for their stupid questions in five years or so.
Pseudonyms were less of a problem when you could use a different pseudonym in each forum, while on Discord/Reddit you are mostly confined to a single identity for all forums.
Having a barrier of entry in the form of having to sign up to a custom forum to participate on threads had its problems, but was useful in preventing spam and low-effort content. Most larger Discord servers I've been in try to replicate this property by requiring some sort of authentication for new members to be able to even look at the discussions on most of the channels.
Discord seems to stand on the middle ground between a shout-box, a message board and social media walls: like a shout-box, discussions are ephemeral and non-paginated, and not indexed on the web; like a message board, you can look up older messages; like social media, it nudges you into using a single account for all your different interests. I can see how this combination can work for some people and for some purposes, and I use it myself, but I much prefer the days of message boards and IRC.
How would that even work?
google indexes something under forum.com/ and you enter it and have to scroll forever?
...and I'm probably not going to join your server to ask questions or get help. If I can't get help via your git platform or shoot off an email, I'm probably just going to not use the software.
Gitter, for all it's flaws, is ok for this case. The effort to join is very low.
Discord is a whole beast. Every server has a gauntlet to join with a dozen bots and channels, and then Discord over-notifies you for every message until you tune it down.
I have no issue joining a Discord for technical assistance.
This isn't helped by the infuriatingly opaque 'Invite Invalid' screen that is shown whenever I follow any invite link, for which the help link doesn't even include the case of being seemingly IP-range-blocked across all of Discord.
Doesn't give a great impression for any of the large open-source projects that are the main reason I follow such links.
Discord is not perfect for sure (the search function is atrocious for example) but more intuitive and easier to use than the other options. And you can also stream, share screen, rich embed things etc.
And all of the screenshares and embeds that Discord gets glorified over work just as well over [matrix]
I just went through the sign-up process and no phone number was required though, only email.
No, it's not. With Discord you can just send them a link and have them join your chat / vc. They don't need to install an app, not do they need to make an account.
Server owners are able to configure a verification level. When on the lowest verification level (which is the default setting when making a server) new users without a discord account can join by simply typing the nickname they would like to use.
Several OSS projects that I've seen even have sophisticated bot protection and code of conduct agreement schemes that will hide the useful channels until you apply reactions on verification messages.
IRC channels used to keep public logs. Can we at least have parity with that?
Signal and WhatsApp are basically replacements for phone, SMS, and MMS while Discord is meant to be more of a community with many people on many topics in many channels.
They are all quite good at what they do, but they do different things.
A more direct alternative to Discord is Matrix.
Funnily enough, neither are electronic mailing lists. Great effort was required to publish them for search crawlers. Electronic mail is fundamentally private communication.
Discord is a chat app for chatting with your buddies, privately. Private conversations? Remember those.
The issue here isn't that Discord is bad at its job. The issue is that it's a highly attractive, lightweight, easy to use platform.
There's simply no platform of equivalent pedigree for kicking off an indexable internet discussion community. Maybe Reddit is the closest. For all the complaints of end users, if you're trying to administer a community Discord is head and shoulders.
In the end, if you want an equivalent indexable discussion platform, make one.
And make it with more attractive features than Discord. There's lots of unattractive platforms already.
Also helps that you can publish and serve static HTML/JS files in the same place. With video support added in markdown I have little else to wish for.
It's anything but lightweight. Using Discord is one of the few reasons for my laptop fans running at almost full speed and this is when I haven't even installed their desktop chromium instance. I'm kinda suprised that someone would call such a bloated and sluggish website as lightweight. Not to mention that Discord is hostile against apps which use their API to create third party clients.
Ease of use isn't necessarily always a good thing either. A Discord community that I moderate frequently gets filled with spam messages with links to discord nitro gifts and other scams, despite our efforts to use bots and automate removal of such bullshit. The influx of large numbers of people also tends to lower the quality of discussion and before you know it, you're an unpaid warden who ends up annoying a few members of your community who end up forming hostile communities and raid your servers.
Of course, Discord doesn't really care about any of this. We've sent multiple reports with screenshots but we were either ignored or basically told that "we don't give a shit".
I think you'll find that Discord is lightweight, relative to the majority of users.
Building for low spec machines has an incumbent cost upon it. Performance optimization is challenging.
Many projects I know build for the "middle quartiles," which means that if you're in the bottom 25% of machine specs nobody bothers to test/optimize for you.
> A Discord community that I moderate
> The influx of large numbers of people also tends to lower the quality of discussion and before you know it, you're an unpaid warden who ends up annoying a few members of your community who end up forming hostile communities and raid your servers.
This is internet moderation in a nutshell. If you're surprised and disappointed at this, administering internet communities probably isn't for you.
A ThinkPad with Ryzen 3500U, 16G RAM and NVMe SSD.
> I think you'll find that Discord is lightweight, relative to the majority of users.
Sorry, Discord is nowhere near the concept of being lightweight. I use both web based and desktop IRC clients and none of them make my laptop sound like it's about to be launched into outer space. Sure, they may not have all the features that Discord offers but both of them let me talk to thousands of users, which is what I expect.
Again, third party clients would definitely help here but Discord is hostile towards them. Spotify is a good example in this case. Their website is just as sluggish but at least I can use several desktop and terminal clients and not worry about buying a better laptop or more RAM.
> This is internet moderation in a nutshell. If you're surprised and disappointed at this, administering internet communities probably isn't for you.
I'm more suprised and disappointed with Discord than this behaviour by people on the Internet. Their rules say that they don't allow spam and raiding servers and even when we provide detailed screenshots of people talking about raiding us and leaving spam on our servers, they don't bother the least bit about taking any sort of action. The only response that we got from them, just once, after sending them multiple reports was "ban them". No shit, I didn't know I could do that, thanks Discord.
You are missing a massive supported use case for Discord. Creating communities. Discord is designed to support servers with hundreds of thousands of users in them if not more. A public discord server with 100k people in it isn't a private conversation with your buddies.
Corporate intranets for example, are exactly this. Nobody wants those to be publicly indexable.
That's kind of the thing.
I don't see Reddit's Wikis, IRC Mailing lists, Usenet FAQs as "integrated" into the core experience particularly well.
Reddit Wikis are just a parallel communication channel vended by the same company. If I was going to do user journey analysis, from the core user experience of "Reddit threads" to Reddit wikis... it's not there.
Famously, nobody ever reads the Reddit sidebar/FAQs.
Someone has to essentially manually copy and update content in a wiki/FAQ. Which has gone from Web 2.0 esque content creation, to a very "Web 1.0-esque" approach.
Ultimately I feel like people are just demanding from Discord, something that IRC style communication has never provided. The closest we've ever gotten that I've seen is Slack search.
"Quick and easy to write" is honestly just perpendicular to "quick and high quality" to read.
However, email has one property that basically all chat platforms lack: each mail is presented as a standalone unit of correspondence with its own metadata, from the start. Just like with forum posts, you spend some minutes writing it, then send it off and wait for a reply—not continuously mash the keyboard, sending your thoughts nearly raw one after another. Streams-of-consciousness that are chats, are not suited to be indexed and presented as separate and complete pieces of info, at all.
Discord is black hole for conversations with more than 5 people in general. This is true not just for software discussion, but also music, sports and pretty much everything else. In a single-purpose channel, conversations die off as the subject of discussion is constantly changing. If I wasn't online at the time, I can't bring up the same topic the next morning, because it's been discussed already.
Compare this to something like the forums on rateyourmusic.com. There are long-standing conversations about specific topics that are years old. Everything is easily searchable, and can be refined to searching inside topics. On profile pages for artists and albums, you can see links to discussions related to that artist or album. This is elegant design that's extremely user friendly. The polar opposite of that is a Discord server with with 5-6 extremely broad channels, and a never-ended series of ellipses notifying you that someone is about to post another message that will soon be lost to the void.
It helps create a sense of community very quickly, and it helps keep it alive.
Honestly, trying to judge Discord for its ability to structure information is simply missing its point. I dislike many things about Discord, but projecting my needs or preferences onto it and saying it's bad based on that alone is quite shortsighted.
Imagine if Stack Overflow was ephemeral. If once you asked a question, the question and answer slowly faded into nothingness for everyone who wasn't actively on the system when it was asked? And anyone who wanted help had to ask again, while the experts rolled their eyes going "Ugh, we answered that like a dozen times already!".
It's a different use-case. It requires a different tool.
It makes me think that users believe finding the answer is our problem, not theirs. Their job is just to ask the question and expect a response. Frustrating.
It's tempting to think a bot or some kind of "save this answer" feature in Discord itself would help, but bots often fail to create the great user experience we expect them to.
If you're selling a product, and you think that finding an answer is the user's problem, not yours, you will soon not be selling a product.
If, however, you're talking about an open-source project, then I think you're baselessly assuming that users "expect" an answer. Users will ask for answers in the most convenient way (asking on discord) in hopes of getting a quick answer. This does NOT mean that they will not fall back to googling if that avenue fails.
But the question still remains of how to maximize a user's ability to find answers on their own, for those who wish to do so. There are always gaps in documentation and I find a forum's ability to seek out past answers to similar questions way better than Discord's search, but it wasn't worth the friction.
I think the ideal solution is a combo of continually improving documentation as common questions emerge and a "saved replies" feature. Users still get a human response, which feels good, but they have to wait less time for some replies. And questions that start reappearing drive the development of new tutorials, etc.
Just found the Discord feature suggestion page for saved replies and voted :)
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600483...
How to do the same with "open and sane protocols" and not force ppl to use a google/apple based browser? Well it is super ez: 1 - get massive amount (I guess at least as much as the discord guys) of funding to make all the servers and bandwidth free as in free beer, worldwide. 2 - if you get 1, we'll talk about 2...
I think park of the issue is that you cant /part a channel in discord. Every channel you have access is automatically joined, you can’t leave and you have to adjust notifications for each to avoid an overwhelming number of messages.
That and the communities are usually small-ish so you have the same people in most of the channels.
we could argue over what the application defaults should be, but its not unexpected the authors and users trend toward engagement being the default.
The only notifications I get are when I'm explicitly tagged or if a role I've opted in to is tagged. This cleans up the notification spam almost entirely, I only wish there was a way to set that as the default for any new server I join.
Give me a well-maintained wiki any day.
Individual pages for each discussion are awesome, how are people not seeing that? There are of course two sides: that keeping Discord channels is easy (I guess) and brain-dumping into the chats is effortless, for better or worse; and that searching for past info is impossible—but who thinks of that now. Good luck to me in ten years, with reading through ten years worth of chats.
(Gamers are already pretty bad at having their mod files preserved and served securely, what with shady file sharing sites that keep dying, and no checksums anywhere. And with complete absence of open-source culture—just download this binary linked in a forum comment, from a shady site, and run it with admin privileges, what could go wrong!)
https://discord.com/blog/a-note-on-upcoming-community-experi...
https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/04/discord-forums-mod-tools-h...
There's no (that I know of) to export channel logs from Discord, nor to log to an external text file.
That means that if I'm interested in something that was discussed at some point in the past, I have to either use Discord's crappy search feature, or manually scroll back and manually scan through text to try to find what I'm interested in.
Discord's scrollback is slow and painful.
By contrast, IRC logs are just plain text files, so I can use powerful regexes or a plethora of text search/manipulation tools to work with them, and scrolling back through text logs is super fast... especially in a decent editor like vim or emacs.
I also own my own logs, and don't need to be connected to any server to read them. Reading/searching through logs can be done completely offline.
If Discord decides to ban you or some channel/server you're interested in goes down (permanently or even temporarily), you're completely screwed. You'll never get the information you're interested in out of it.
The only substantial advantage of Discord I can see over IRC is inline images (which are often just an annoyance, but can sometimes be useful) and voice chat.
Other than that it's bloated, opaque, and a worse experience for me than IRC.
But its a big shame that they don't wanna include this as a built in feature since yeah exported logs are very useful.
> "The only substantial advantage of Discord I can see over IRC is inline images and voice chat."
Inline code blocks with syntax highlighting using ```python markdown syntax; replying to a message brings a clickable line of what you are replying to which jumps back up to the previous line in the chat.
I actually really despise this feature, because it pings the user you're replying to by default and you have to explicitly turn it off as a user sending the message. "Server" admins cannot change the functionality around.
From a personal standpoint it's not generally a problem, but my company uses Discord as a support platform so we (the staff) end up constantly getting pinged when we do not want to, especially when it's for a message that we may have posted in our general "community area" a few hours ago, and someone has just now decided to reply with "lol" and it generates a ping for it.
Pinging should be opt-in not opt-out, just like when replying to someone before hand, you explicitly needed to make a conscious choice to ping them.
Even worse, when the feature was first released, literally editing your message (even if you explicitly turned off the ping) caused it to ping the other user.
It's actually against our rules to ping support staff in ticket channels (primarily because someone will either ping everyone with the staff role upon two seconds after the ticket opens - or ping a staff member to "bump" their ticket), but its not like we can realistically enforce that for reply-generated pings due to the fact that most of the time its accidental (we do ask them to turn off the ping after the first time - and a good chunk of the time people "forget" to still do so, whether intentionally or unintentionally). /endrant
Disclaimer: I'm fairly new to administrating a Matrix server so I could be wrong, but the logic seems to make sense with my suggestion.
I've been tempted to index our Slack archive and make it searchable (afterall we are a search company) but I'm afraid that it's against Slack's ToS.
If someone from Slack is reading this, please fix this: I will be happy to pay Slack on a different plan which considers the use of Slack as a collaborative platform for an OSS community.
Not to say that Discord isnt deeply flawed in many respects, like client weight/resource usage, abysmal search (in server but especially DMs, coarse and clunky permissions systems, audit situation? and the very fact that using animated emojis will cost you 5 dollars per month is just stealing sweets from children, and their absolutely sickening boost (ponzi?) scheme...
No, the reason for that is more likely that all the darn generation-Z kids are deathly afraid (and therefore pretend to be deeply contemptuous) of any old-fashioned technology created by Unix greybeards.
(Now geroffmylawn.)
It's O(log n), it has fuzzy search (e.g. noun/verb forms the same word), and you can add qualifiers like `from:Author#1234`.
I can normally join a Discord server for a project, search for a keyword, find someone else with the same question, and read the chat log from that point in time.
The machine required a lot of finessing to get working properly, and almost all of the information was in discord channels.
The people writing and sharing info in those channels were of course very gracious and helpful, but it was frustrating to try and search for things there instead of on a traditional forum.
https://np.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/sknctl/discord_i...
After muting all servers and channels, and only joining small-ish communities things started to become better but I cannot imagine keeping the client open and try to follow what is happening, it feels like a full time job.
Of course I may be using the tool incorrectly, people seem to appreciate IRC and I never understood what was attractive about it, outside of small groups.
I personally think its fine that discord is a black hole. Its a voice and text chat program. Its great for instant research, instant interaction - its not for the detailed and considered laying out of some idea. Forums or blogs would be better for that.
PS Dark corporate spy note: I'm not saying btw, that Discord is literally a black hole. I'm sure they keep and measure everything and have their AI bots running over the data. The data will also be re-worked by MS or whoever eventually buys them in future, to build even better profiles of us.
It's weird that people have gotten so down on the concept of p2p and all in on federated services. To me it's so obvious that p2p systems have a huge advantage as far as adoption possibilities.
Maybe what we need is something like Web gateways for p2p services.
Have some ideas about a distributed live forum that uses webrtc and IPFS or something but since it's such an interesting idea to me and also not fully formed that usually means other people will hate it with passion and bury the comment.. making it a total waste of time to try to develop or explain the idea.
It is a free data host[ag]ing platform run for profit.
Your data is safe and accessible as long as the economic incentives are aligned with that.
> While all of these other communication mechanisms are great, esp. for hashing things out more effectively in real time, it's absolutely critical that a summary of what was talked about make its way back here for the benefit of those who couldn't be there, including Google, and yourself 2 weeks later when you totally forget what you talked about. :P There needs to be a URL to point people at who have questions later on. However. As a text-based medium, the issue queues are an ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE medium through which to have a heated discussion about whatever. For that you turn to one of the others.
https://www.reddit.com/r/drupal/comments/1qz9l9/i_am_angie_w...
Are HN readers, a more traditional forum, biased against non-traditional fora? If nothing else, it would be hard for to post a link on HN to Discord discussion about the advantages of Discord, where, presumably, such a discussion would most likely transpire.
Traditional forums aren't networked. It's not like I can mirror HN either. But I could go start a forum somewhere if I wanted, and there would be a record of posts somewhere.
Discord kinda runs into two problems for me: it isn't an open decentralized protocol, and it seems like it's being misused or something? I guess if devs want to use it and welcome anyone to come in and see what's going on, great. But then I'd prefer they use something decentralized, and it still isn't a substitute for a forum or forum-like place.
I think your question is an important one just as a sort of perspective check, but I can articulate pretty clearly what it is about use of Discord that bothers me, and can point to very popular systems that work much better as theoretical examples or templates in my mind (for example, Matrix, Reddit, or Twitter).
Maybe I was lucky, that the problem had such a clear keyword to look for. But writing an extensive documentation of ypur project takes a lot of time, and having a place where ALL people can ask questions and other people can find them is a good thing (nothing against Svelte's docs, they're amazing). Maybe Discord could improve search functionality, and a clear culture of channel organization still has to develop
The main difference being that you could only be logged in at one server at a time – unless you had multiple client installs – and there's something nice about that limit; you have to choose a hangout and tend to engage more because of it.
I agree with the OP though – I wouldn't rely on Discord as a knowledge repo…
Learning from past discussions is getting so much harder.
Discord can and should fix this.
We used to do this for IRC as well. Anyone remembers https://ibot.rikers.org/?
https://blog.discord.com/how-discord-stores-billions-of-mess...
Other discussions such as "why doesn't this code work?" or "this behavior seems unexpected" we redirect to StackOverflow and GitHub. Discord also serves as an activity hub for us as we have channels with automated feeds from blogs, youtube, stackoverflow, github, twitter, etc all located in a single location.
This pattern seems to be working for us.
Yes, it's probably proprietary.
- I log in to one website, and I see all my forums. - I don't want to log in to seven different forums. Like Discord, I log in once and see everything. - Forums are private. Like Discord, they're not scraped, they're not open to the public. There are some very public Discords, but all of them require initial permission to access, which can be removed. - Conversations are chronological, not the weird reddit tree. - Forums don't have a permanent URL. There is no 'r/programming' or 'r/politics' or whatever. _Your_ programming community is different from _my_ programming community.
Companies keep switching their private forums to Discord because they don't have to host. What if we just had a centralized place to host a forum? That ran like a normal forum.
People could pay for 'Nitro', forums hosts could pay for QoL benefits in their forum, etc. Minimally intrusive ads. Stuff like that.
I realize it being proprietary perpetuates a lot of problems, but I feel like we nerds haven't solved the distributed <-> ease of access problem yet.
I see this one a lot. Server Admins love to customize their servers and the primary way they do it is by adding a thousand channels with emoji names that make them difficult to link to, and dozens of bots that have marginal utility at best and are absolute noise factories at worst.
I think that attitude (like on stack overflow) That they are building some kind of perfect repository of knowledge for the ages from these various question and answers is delusional and has ruined that site in recent years. Most stuff on the internet seems to be highly transitory, constantly getting taken down by DMCA or some other bullshit with new stuff being uploaded in its place. Also the questions and answers themselves quickly become obsolete as tech changes.
Also, simply RTFM is not a good way to learn. There's plenty of evidence suggesting that asking questions and interactive learning is superior to simply learning by rote out of a book. When I'm learning (especially at the beginning, I really wanna ask loads of dumb questions and chat to someone who is already versed in the subject)
How much knowledge has been lost to IRC channels, chat conversations, forum threads, and so-on?
Yes, many of us have gotten good (or even excellent) at parsing through threads to find the nuggets of information that lead us to the understanding we seek, but it’s clearly not the environment that information wants in order to thrive.
Fast-moving chat channels and forums both have their very valid uses.
This: "Every time I go to grab a mod or something on Github, have an issue and see the tickets replied to with "Closed, join the discord for help!" I want to cave my own head in with an iron." - Turd Ferguson
is not the same value as a piece of documentation for how to use a tool might be, both needing to be kept forever and surfaced in all future search results. Forum content is awful in its own ways.
Is there no system which keeps good content and poor content is deleted over time? For values of 'good' and 'poor' which mirror what people might want in search results, 'what does $error mean?' being good and 'I HATE THING, THING USERS ARE IDIOTS' being bad even if archaeologists might love it.
Our first step will be to import all of Gitter's archives into Matrix - but we're then planning to add MSC2716 to all the existing Matrix bridges so that folks can use it to liberate chat history from Discord and Slack if desired, and avoid it getting paywalled/siloed/lost/held-hostage forever. We're also expecting to do USENET, mailing lists, forums, public IRC channels which have explicitly opted into logging... and generally archive as much possible in an open decentralised fashion, and ensure that gatekeepers can't lock up and blackhole info going forwards. After all, information longs to be free :)
Perhaps if Discord had an option to expose chat histories as regular crawlable web then this problem would go away.
There's still a ton of polish issues to work out, but stuff I really like that I wish I had in Discord:
- I can dictate which rooms in a space get surfaced by default. When I join Discord servers, it's really chaotic, you have this giant list of rooms you're suddenly subscribed to, and it's overwhelming. With spaces you're not auto-subbed to every single room in the space. There's even a way to search for rooms in a space, which would be a feature I would want in Discord if Discord didn't just throw every room on a server at your face in one list.
- I can import spaces into other spaces, so I can make a public space that's a composite of other public spaces.
- Nested spaces can be used for organization, they kind of act like folders. Discord sort of has this concept with sections, but Discord sections are only 1 level deep, and spaces can be nested multiple levels.
- The first thing I always have to do when joining a Discord server is update notification settings for all of the rooms I'm in, and Spaces has that problem less (although I wish there were easier ways to set notification settings for an entire space).
- A giant feature that I wish existed in Discord is that rooms can be shared across spaces. So I can have a private space in Element that is only for me that I use for organizing a set of rooms I've joined across multiple spaces. Say that I've joined tech support channels for multiple projects. I can have one space that lists out all of the individual support rooms.
- And obviously, Element spaces/rooms can optionally be previewable without forcing the user to join, which Discord still refuses to do.
----
I'm not saying that everyone should just drop Discord right now and that Element is better in every way, more just pointing out that the direction Element is moving is really positive. It's a little bit exciting to see a UX effort in Element that (while still very much in-progress and in-development) is not just competitive with Discord, but better than Discord's system on its fundamentals. I haven't seen spaces get talked about that much, and they're a massive UX improvement, one of the most exciting non-protocol/infrastructure changes to Element I've seen in a while.
Of course Element doesn't fix the problem that Element/Discord are messaging apps, not wiki platforms, and they're not going to get indexed by Google. But at least its a bit less of a black hole, even if I wouldn't advise replacing your wiki with it.
I think community maintainers are choosing it because it has the best moderation tools and community management tools compared to the alternatives.
Shouldn't this problem solve itself? At some point, a question gets asked often enough that people realize they should document it somewhere, and lo and behold, Github issues are perfect for that.
It's good for playing with a new idea, or helping a beginner get their code compiling. Often we link to blog posts/stack overflow/github for further reading.
Slack ephemeral nature is a feature, not a bug. Same reason Instagram stories or Snapchat exists.
"With the release of Granblue Fantasy Versus, many players are getting into fighting games for the first time ever. But often for new players, the genre can seem to be daunting or overwhelming. But luckily it’s easier than ever to learn how to play. All you need to get started is to just join the Discord. No, not that Discord, the other one."
Twitter is also so much better... but people don't DM much.
I guess the author wants us to stop talking to each other too?
It was the primary form of support for iommi for many years before we got anyone outside our company to try it :)
- facebook, digg/reddit and twitter kill independent forums. They are 'good enough' mostly for friction reasons that people slowly move there. I think the twitter part is unappreciated - in the past when you had one simple issue, you had to register to communicate it. Now people are likely to tag the profile on twitter with their problem. Sometimes these people remained, now that user acquisition channel is lost.
- they suck at creating communities (I think intentionally), so people don't contribute as much.
- discord is a chat app with flawless ui. As a chat app it's great at building communities due to frequent interactions and instant feedback. This means most active people do everything there, same people who would have 1000+ posts on old style forums.
The tl;dr is that forums are best at preserving information for outside access, but are inferior in making new people join and contribute, which means they are never going to proliferate again. The old optimal balance of chat vs forum is never going to return.
.. with annoying notifications
there are tiny details that make forums, it aint just thread based format
First let me say that yes there is some valid critism to be had. Mostly around information preservation, lack of indexing by search engines, barrier to entry, those kinds of things. I agree that those can make Discord a bad platform for a random technical project to use as a support forum / bug tracker / log. (though you can always write a bot for that).
However, with respect, some comments (not all!) do feel a bit like people are simply getting older and blaming technology for what are really demographic changes.
Consider this comment by Azalea on the first page has a quite a few people agreeing with it, it says
> And without going all good-old days Internet you damn whippersnappers, I think the move towards chat-room style dialogues also signifies a cultural shift towards bite-sized content and quick, shallow, generally meaningless interactions. I have made a grand total of one friend on Discord servers after posting compulsively and replying to a lot of people. Social interactions on the Internet don't really have the same weight and permanence that they used to.
which wasn't really my experience on Discord, but then it also goes on to say
> I miss the old days of logging into my favorite Counter-Strike: Source servers and interacting with the regulars there. Everyone on VOIP playing the same game can lead to bonding experiences, and I made a fair bit of friends on those servers. Now with public matchmaking, that old-school magic has mostly disappeared.
Which to me is that quick-fire social interaction they seemingly called shallow and meaningless. This struck me as odd because having lived trough the rise of social media and matchmaking Discord feels like a return to this old 'social' internet. Especially during these last few years, It's been great for my social life. I've made new friends and reconnected with old ones. Just yesterday I visited a friend I met on Discord.
And I don't think I'm alone: plenty of people heavily use Discord for hanging out with friends, forming gaming groups, discussing and playing together. Everything that they say is lacking in the modern internet. And not just for gaming, There's plenty of LGBT+ spaces, location based spaces, or Maker spaces too.
But one thing I have noticed, is that at 28 years old I already skew old in most spaces. Because of that I'll generally avoid spaces that don't have a reasonable minimum age because I don't really care for hanging around in spaces dominated by teens. But for those teens, and once you find spaces that fit you, Discord is a great place for fostering _community_. In a way that games and IRC/forums used to provide when I was a teen, before social media and 'matchmaking' kind of scrubbed that from the mainstream for a while.
That's why I don't think the kinds of complaints given in the quotes is realy an issue of technology, but an issue of demographics and aging.
But maybe this is just me being an extrovert with ADHD liking the shiny chatterbox with cute emotes.
Chat and forums/wikis should probably be integrated in one app again, like the old shoutboxes on forums.