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Comment by opdahl | Hacker News Reader

What is strange about Discord is this great discrepancy between the ones that love it and the ones that hate it. If I were to guess on the reason of why that might be it would be that Discord is probably really good for the people that are constantly on it, and don't really miss any communication going in. These people have probably been there for some time so they don't feel the problem of not knowing where the past information is, because they were there when that information was communicated and therefore never need to look back at it. These people will (obviously) recommend using Discord, since it works so well for them!

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

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I've been using IRC for decades at this point and Discord is, seemingly, a modern, proprietary version of IRC so I assumed I'd feel at home the few times I've been invited to participate on it, but in practice it was an overwhelming, rather unpleasant experience and I never stuck with it.

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.

Discord forces you to be online or nothing. You can hide the "server" within some folder but your presence is still online.

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?

Might I recommend treating it like irc in that you can idle in the server, walk away and then come back as needed and skipping down to the bottom? It’s not uncommon for people to skip in and say “morning all” in discords I’m in, even though there’s other active conversation going. The backscroll then is just used for context before you go “alright back to work for me” and then you just stop responding. There’s no longer an explicit join/quit process, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one anyways just by nature of humanity.

Why would you ever want to turn anything off? What if you need it? Then what if it couldn't hear that you need it? You need it to be able to hear when you need it. Don't turn things off.

I don't think I experienced this when I was younger, but, now, it feels like being "on" (e.g., on Discord, even if it's closed and sitting in the tray and I'm getting no messages) incurs some subconscious stress somehow.

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

you can mute specific servers and channels. I use this judiciously

Consider the recent studies that show that people's attention is reduced by their phone, even if its under their bed, even if its turned off.

Try it, purposefully leave your phone at home the next time you go to the grocery store and see if you feel anything weird.

I would never bring my phone to the grocery store. It feels good leaving in a place to get recharged where it can't be lost.

This is like idling on IRC.

You can disable notifications entirely

You can set your online status to invisible and it never shows your icon while online

>what they abusively call a "server"

It's modeled off of IRC / Mumble / TS / Vent terminology. A server is home to many channels which one can join.

In IRC terminology that was a "network", not a "server"; multiple servers worked together as part of a network (which might have only had a single server in the degenerate case) to create a unified channel namespace and it didn't matter which server you used (and yes, I know that at some point server-local channels were added as a thing using ##, but despite using IRC for a quarter of a century I never once saw anyone use them except to be weird). The term "server" used in the way Discord decided to use it is awkward and even off-putting.

>The term "server" used in the way Discord decided to use it is awkward and even off-putting.

That seems more than a bit ridiculous.

FWIW a bunch of people do seem to agree (though that isn't to say a bunch of people disagree). Maybe it is because I'm "old and set in my ways". Maybe it is because I'm just too familiar with IRC (while having never used TS nor even heard of the other two). Or maybe it is because I actually run servers for things (including IRC). But every time I hear "my Discord server" a very large part of my brain gets confused: it is a word which is so incorrectly-to-me being used--being neither a literal nor a metaphorical (via IRC) description of what is going on--that it causes me momentary confusion and then even a twinge of anger that this is what "server" means to people in 2022: a mere account on a service that isn't even themselves running a server for the user :(.

It sounds like serverless is something you'd really be in to!

In TS/Mumble/Vent terminology, there was no federation (unlike IRC), so a server was generally literally a single server hosted somewhere. All the channels, all the users, etc, went to a single machine.

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".

spot on, but you missed that critically they don’t charge for free voice. If you want higher bitrate then they charge

True, but you had to pay for a server for TS/Vent/Mumble as well, so the $5/month Discord charges for the higher voice quality is comparable (or cheaper).

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.

Matrix is a good middle ground; free and non-proprietary, but it still offers a few convenience features compared to IRC (which is a bit clunky by modern standards).

I think Matrix’s biggest issue at this point is lack of polish in its clients. If there were Matrix clients as smooth as Telegram or Discord is it’d probably take off.

I really doubt it, discord's draw is that while it makes it much easier, you don't need a brain to log in.

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.

In my experience Slack just doesn’t work as well as Discord does, generally speaking. It’s good enough to put up with for work chat, but the bar for the general public is higher.

Slack works better for finding information as bad as it is at that.

How? I look through my discord search settings and it’s pretty straightforward. I search for something a friend posted some months back and found it pretty easy. The only difficult part is knowing which server it’s on.

Discord uses default elasticsearch settings for search, so almost every word belongs to an equivalence class of synonyms and conjugations that are often not equivalent or mutually relevant in technical usage (for gaming-related use or for work-related use!), multi-word phrase search is impossible, searches including words in the stopword list are impossible, searches including programming language syntax are impossible, etc. "ide" is a fish or an Integrated Development Environment but belongs to the same equivalence class as "i'd" (contraction of "I had" or "I would", mysteriously NOT on the stopword list!) or "id" (part of the mind in Freudian psychoanalytic theory). If you go to a server concerned with programming, psychoanalysis, or fishing, and you search for "ide" or "id" you probably weren't looking for every single time anyone ever said "i'd."

So you use something designed for gaming to run a technical community, and when the search wasn’t built to handle highly complex or technical queries you complain?

Why not use Slack?

It doesn't work for gaming either. I mentioned this in my comment.

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?

If you join an open source project's slack server, you really hope that the information you want is in the most recent 10,000 messages.

> But on Discord you're invited to what they abusively call a "server" ...

I don't know if this has changed, but they were originally called guilds.

Seems like they're called "servers" now. I imagine "guilds" felt a bit too gamer centric for them after they saw how popular their service was becoming.

I've been working on a simple bot for one of the servers/guilds I'm on, and the API endpoints as well as documentation still heavily uses the term guild.

> Guilds in Discord represent an isolated collection of users and channels, and are often referred to as "servers" in the UI.[1]

This is why it's users refer to them as servers.

[1]: https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/guild

The service is still very gamer centric, Discord Nitro for instance gives you a game subscription. I really hope they’re not trying to become Slack, that will be the death of them.

Guilded is a new discord clone.

They separated those terms a long time ago, even before the second-hand app

They’re still referred to as guilds in the APIs, but their friendly name is now servers.

I too grew up on irc and now working on an alternative that has no gaming association, totally open so you can view w/o being logged in, topical, no gifs, and low friction, and planning to keep it clean and simple. https://sqwok.im

> no gifs

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.

the key thought I had is not having it end up like twitch where there's a firehose of emoji/gifs and actual conversation is diluted...

this tends to not be an issue for work slacks, as the fear of being fired for what could be considered abusive chat or procrastination would stop most of the spam.

LMAO our discord has people from 18 to over 65. It’s really whatever you make it.

We just bullshit and game. But not that well. So it fits a lot of people’s style.

This is the real answer. casual users just want to Press button->Receive bacon. If anything looks lame or hard, their limbic systems will direct them right back where their freidns are.

"Matrix? Dude just get on Discord we're forming a party right now."

That's a weird and kind of egotistical way of saying that it's a platform that doesn't ask you to invoke the Olde Magycks in order to make it do the thing you want to use it for. IRC asks you to invest before you use it, IRC needs you to care first. Discord does not need you to care about it in order to use it. It works even if you actively despise it.

Yes, you are very correct.

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.

Maybe you're not using it right (tm)

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.

100% agree down to the boring old 35 year old part. And now I work for a startup and discord is the main way we communicate with the public. Abysmal!

I'm 38 and on something like 50 discord servers.

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.

Yeah I'm on lots of servers too.

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.

As a Discord user, I don't really understand this issue. In what way is having a single channel with content on every topic less overwhelming than having specific channels for individual topics? If I want to read about a specific topic on Discord, I simply go to the channel for that topic. But if there's only a single channel a la IRC, then I would have to search through a whole bunch of conversations about topics irrelevant to me to find what I'm looking for.

Everything depends on the Discord community you’re connecting with.

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.

The issue comes frome people shoehorning Discord as a replacement for forums. Like a subreddit is a nice place for discussion and it's free. Discord is a chat app, not a forum app. It's about real time communication. In popular discords you can often just be ignored and they have to deal with the same stuff asked every single day.

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.

A subreddit is a horrible place for discussion though.

Mostly, yes, but it comes down to moderation and subreddit culture. Reddit - as a company - doesn't take moderation seriously, as evidenced by it being left to unpaid volunteers.

Trying to find a specific post on a subreddit is a nightmare. The built in search functionality is horrible.

At least it is indexed in Google. Not an excuse for Reddit's horrible search, I know, but IM doesn't even have that option.

Just use Google. Reddit's built in search is useless in comparison. Yesterday I found a great thread about suit tailors in my city. The posts were all 3 years old but fortunately the tailor was still active. Digging up this info would be impossible on Discord, because at best I'd be locating individual comments asking about the topic, then scroll down to see if anybody bothered to post a response instead of changing the topic to something else.

I would disagree, searching for a topic or question on any search engine and appending 'reddit' gets me reddit discussions that are frequently relevant to my question (game tips, bugs encountered in some software, often real user reviews for products, etc).

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.

You have to use google "site:" to have any chance at all. i don't know why reddit's search is so awful

Moderation being left to unpaid community members is a sign that Reddit DOES take moderation seriously

Not when you consider the type of people that unpaid moderation attracts. Reddit is broken.

Still far better than discord or twitter, at least for text/pictures. Audio/Video-channels on discord can be nice, though.

hacker news is also a horrible place because after a few days it locks you out from answering to responses

After years and years of making bad changes to the site, they recently did one thing right: they removed or greatly extended the period that you can reply to and upvote posts. It used to be that after 6 months everything was "archived", but now I see an open comment field on posts that are ten years old.

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.

I think this depends and varies from subreddit to subreddit. Some archive posts after a couple of months, while some are still open after years.

> Like a subreddit is a nice place for discussion and it's free.

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.

I'm not sure if "click" is intentional wordplay or not, but if it isn't, the word is "clique" FYI.

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 use Discord a lot and I agree that it's bad to use it for anything that you can't afford to suddenly lose (though people still use Google and Paypal too).

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.

> 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.

In my experience discord servers will scale up to about about 20 people at most. I don't think that's the use case model discord is trying to push, but I think there's a large long tail of small friends-only discord servers in the order of 3-20 people.

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.

About half of the Discord servers I have joined completely stalled and became ghost towns; when they did I deleted them. The bigger ones, while thriving, have huge numbers of users but are terrible for finding information that the org they represent needs to retain.

Out of curiosity, why?

Seems fairly simple to perform simple keyword searching, just like Slack.

Sure, you can keyword search easily enough, but the information you might be looking for is sometimes scattered over dozens of channels.

You can do a server wide search. Did you mean spread across servers?

The biggest problem is a lack of threading. I can often find questions matching mine, but the answers are impossible to search for because a lot of replies won't ever @ the question asker. So I'm left skimming an entire channel that includes 50 other things that I don't care about at the moment.

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.

> The biggest problem is a lack of threading. I can often find questions matching mine, but the answers are impossible to search for because a lot of replies won't ever @ the question asker.

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.

Usually you won't know what server it will be in, and usually you'll be searching from google.

User convos on discord are (thankfully) not indexed by google, so how? Did you also know google search devices are a thing and you can implement google search in your produce quite easily?

That’s basically how I use. Just as a replacement for Ventrilo or Mumble for voice chat while playing video games. It’s rather good for this use case. I think there’s maybe 10 people on our server, and I’m pretty happy with the UX.

A couple of things I personally find disappointing in Discord:

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).

if you pay for nitro you can change your identity per server

Without nitro you can still nickname yourself.

People will still see the "server you're both in" and the game your currently playing, etc. Not good for work servers.

Although you can disable automatically setting your status to whichever game you are playing though.

You can disable it globally, for all servers, yes

Use web only discord and aggressively disable permissions. This results in less tracking and spying on you

Wait. "Work servers"?

People use Discord for work chat?

Yes, most of my work conversations happen on discord servers. Discord provides a better chat service than slack, so I don't see how it would be unusual for people to use Discord over slack.

Yeah, the company I work for actually has a public Discord server for providing support (and hosting our "community" - with some exclusions due to privacy concerns).

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.

Wouldn't you use your work account? A separate account just for work?

Because I fear a ban, honestly.

Sure, if the server admin lets you

> 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.

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.

Discord is also great for people that don't mind having just one identity on the internet. There is basically no support for multi account, so your account for talking with your friends, taking classes and finding information on that video game is the same. Lots of people seem to not mind doing that, but I've always thought that this was terrible if you want to protect your identity online.

Hey, sorry for replying off topic.

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 :)

To be honest, I do like Discord, but I only really use it for gaming with friends. We set up a server and use it for multiplayer games, occasionally share memes, etc.

I really do not like it for communities, there's too much noise and too many annoucements.

I was surprised to see that it's used more and more for work, instead of Slack. At first I thought this was a good thing (Discord feels much snappier, doesn't have the same search limitations, has voice channels) but it's been awkward. There is a way to change your name on specific servers, so you can be anonymous on gaming ones and recognizable on work ones, but people can still track you across (for example with the "servers you're both in" profile feature). Changing your avatar on specific servers is also a paid feature.

I kind of want to run two instances, but this is apparently a ban-able offence.

> 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).

In the last years I saw same amount of jerks on both. Trying to get help, any form of help or giving a feedback result in same canned replies, or irrelevant comments where you can clearly see people want to have own 5 mins of the Internet fame of becoming a meme. Also, on discord you have still a chance to reply but on forums people who become mods and who clearly shouldn't have been given such task in first place, will lock your thread and you can bite the dust. It's like you'd give the mythical Karen a chance to become the manager /s.

This situation becomes obvious when you want to use the search box to retrieve old conversations. I use Discord every day, so I fall in the first category in your post. However, every time I try to find an old conversation, Discord UX and search engine make it super hard, if not downright impossible. I can feel the pain of a user who would have just arrived on the server.

I mean, people aren't really keeping up with the top posts 3 weeks ago on HN, reddit, or twitter. That's why reposts are so common.

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?"

USP, Unique Selling Proposition, a term I'm shoehorning for wan of a better one.

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).

I love Discord because people were jerks on forums and they are nice on Discord.

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.

My experience is exactly opposite. People seem to go to war when they know that the conversation will just be lost over time.

The fire comes fast for sure, but also goes fast. Unless there is enough people just to keep the war 24/7.

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.

weird

if anybody wants, then he can save it easily

also forums tend to be as anonymous as discord, so idk.

>and the fact it keeps getting bumped

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'.

But do you need to know the past discussions? I don't really see why this would scare away newcomers to a group any more than usual.

Do you remember IRC? It had similar issues.

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.

I don't necessarily agree with that. On IRC you could have a specific rule listed explicitly in the topic and newcomers would still ignore it. The idea that they would trudge through megabytes worth of text to find the info is... optimistic.

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.

I think people will generally read the log up to one day in irc/telegram/discord. Log of one day in these type of applications can be thousands of messages in a big group. Require everyone to read every message before sending a message is just unrealistic.

Discord also has a search feature, and it works across channels.

That actually done quite well compares to other message apps. The search query can be multi tags (text content, author, mention, is a file, contains link, before date, after date, at which channel) applies at same time. If you know what did you want to search, you can probably find it quickly.

If you go to technical discords you’ll find that there’s someone joining almost everyday who asks a set of questions that was aksed the day before.

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.

> 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.

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.

This always happens, people don't bother reading old info. Discord simply lowers the barrier to ask questions. It's probably a net positive overall.

> If you go to technical discords you’ll find that there’s someone joining almost everyday who asks a set of questions that was aksed the day before.

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.

You mean: is has history on the server?

Discord has history on the server, unlike IRC. This makes a huge difference when joining a new channel.

I know, I was correcting "Discord [...] has history in the client" from your comment.

> 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.

With the huge difference that IRC did not have chat history, unless you used a bouncer

Nothing stopping any client from having logs. mirc and xchat have had them for decades. Yes, they are local but do exist and serve their purpose

Sure. But when you first join there is no history which means that anyone new to the channel would ask the same questions because there was nothing they could search.

Exactly, and it won't search for stuff that was written when your client, or the bot, wasn't running.

Sure, you could set up bouncers and whatnot. But it's a barrier that Discord doesn't have.

That sounds indistinguishable from forums or subreddits, which are usually touted as superior alternatives to Discord. Your final point actually makes Discord look preferable to the other two, as Discord servers have found a solution to a problem predating Discord.

didn't unrealircd do something similar 10+ years ago?

i wish i could enable that for IRC reasonably without running my own bots and such.

> and therefore never need to look back at it

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.

Not really, people despise it for other reasons. I.e. how bloated and sketchy their privacy practices are and just how invasive it is.

It seems like AI could be setup to address this. I would think it would be insanely useful.

Personally, I’d rather look at an enriched summary than the original chat log in most cases. Can somebody get on this please :)

You are missing the meta of informational channels which are read only channels which come with information for people to reference. Past information can be collected in these channels.

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