Please stop making Discord servers for things that shouldn't be Discord servers | Hacker News Reader

Please stop making Discord servers for things that shouldn't be Discord servers

pcgamer.com

68 pointsjulianlam46 comments

I recently started seeing open source projects that respond to GitHub issues with “hop on the Discord” which means the resolution doesn’t get documented and everyone else with the same issue has to “hop on the discord”.

Why are all these noobs asking repetitive questions? Maybe it's because Discord isn't indexed by search engines...

StackOverflow is newbie hostile, Discord groups aren't. Guess what the result is. SEO code spam sites rank higher on Google than StackOverflow for the same issues, that isn't exactly helping.

I have been using stack overflow for 9 years and I still reread my post 5 times before submitting to see if anyone is going to freak out over it. And yet a lot of the time they still get closed or have someone comment “um technically you didn’t use the proper term for this so your question makes no sense.”

Discord is downright user hostile, actively gathering massive amounts of sensitive user data and metadata.

We're talking about very different things. Most people don't really care about what you're talking about, it's only a tiny minority that concern themselves with what user data is being collected.

Generally because they don't yet know what to ask. And half of what they're looking for is to be less lost: to have a human connection with someone making the struggle of learning less alone. That's why the most enthusiastic helpers of newbies are the recently-not-noobs. Who in turn enjoy having "their" space on discord to dispense wisdom from.

See also: why do cryptocurrencies have discords?

Things that shouldn't be discord servers: Everything that isn't a game guild of some sort. Even that is debatable, but I'm willing to grant it as it quite simply has very good voice isolation that you can't get in another place (i.e. mumble is significantly worse, especially on mobile).

For chat, storing knowledge, "community building", etc it is all strictly worse than the alternatives. Mostly because it's closed-source, the search is bad (as it is everywhere) and the format doesn't lend itself well to any kind of documentation.

>For chat, storing knowledge, "community building", etc it is all strictly worse than the alternatives.

What alternatives do you suggest?

Chat: IRC was good, XMPP has all the modern things folks apparently want, Matrix is the hip new chat thing.

Storing knowledge: Has a good system already (a wiki, take your pick of software). It is widely used, everyone agrees it is good. What holds wikis back is most folks insist on using really bad wiki hosts that are full of ads and javascript.

Community building: Forums (bad choice because nobody writes longform anymore, so why even have this)? Mastodon (not an ideal choice for the format, but it aligns with how people interact)? Literally anything that can be indexed and searched in a non-cancerous way gives you an advantage over Discord. If you'd ask me to do it, I'd probably go for an indexed mailing list. It's accessible to literally everyone and folks have used it to talk since the dawn of computers.

I pay for the premium matrix server and even I’ll admit that discord is vastly superior. It honestly makes matrix look like SMS in comparison. The UI of discord is basically perfect, it’s extremely fast, it has so many useful tools.

If you don’t care about open source or self hosting, there are vanishingly few reasons to not use discord. Not being indexed is a feature for many. It always mildly bothered me how my irc conversations from many years ago still show on google when searching my username.

Yes, if you don't care about privacy or freedom you may as well use Discord. That was the point to begin with, so I'm not sure what we are driving at then. Discord should not be used because it's a walled garden with all the detractors that come along with that. There's good replacements for them (even if they don't come with confetti :) ), but because they are not covered in corporate honey folks don't like them as much. To me, that seems really short-sighted. Even if I do understand it.

I don’t see what’s wrong with being short sighted. I didn’t sign a contract to use the program for 10 years. If next year the VC money runs out and the program goes to shit than my friends and I will hop to the next best. Might as well take advantage of the subsidised product while it’s good.

> the UI of discord is basically perfect

I find it way too distracting- everything is constantly bleeping, blooping, popping and animating.

Part of that is because they want to make the program fun. Microsoft Teams is what you get when you focus on utilitarianism. The program is stale and depressing, it mostly works fine but sparks no joy. While every time I use discord I feel a little better. Opening it up and seeing some confetti burst for an update makes me feel good. Even if it is silly. But when I want to get something done, its very easy to understand. If I want to create a new group, the big plus button is right on the side bar, If I want to stream my game to friends, it shows the game next to the voice chat while its running and I just press the big button. The flows are so seamless and it all just works.

Honestly a subreddit right now is a better choice.

Mainly cause it gets indexed. Who knows if reddit is going to keep it that way though.

Alternatively github discussions might also be a good tool here.

something like Discourse (old good forums?)

Not having a #memes channel sounds like not having any trash bins in the house because you expect everyone to take their trash outside to the large bin / container. What actually happens is that the trash will litter the entire house.

Do you litter your entire house or allow others to do so?

How you deal with it is make it explicit that memes (or at least off-topic memes) are not allowed (and even excessive usage of on-topic meme is frowned upon), heavily enforce that rule and invite people who want to meme to join a meme server.

At least that's how it's done in a ~10K member server and it has worked well so far. Plus it avoids lowering the discussion level to meme-level.

> heavily enforce that rule

> make a meme channel and mute it

There's an order of magnitude difference in work required here

I get some of the frustration (especially with the projects using Discord for bug reporting and worse yet, hosting builds), but I think most of the uses are legitimate.

Yes Discord is far from the best in most cases, but you can't deny how easy it is to onboard someone by telling them "just join the Discord" vs any alternative out there. ANY. I use my Discord servers for doing events, knowledge store (thanks pinned messages and mostly-functional search) and even just knowing when my favorite streamers go live (since Twitch notifications NEVER worked for me).

You wanna go back to forums? Get a nice free hosted forum service that can eliminate as much friction as possible from joining and contributing. People will use whatever they find comfortable, even when it means using GitHub issues for blog comments.

The average HN commentor seems like they are extremely out of touch. Most normal people do not care about the alleged privacy violations. They don't care it uses electron. For most people it runs fine. Honestly I know more, and I don't care much either, I think of it as an open public space and act accordingly. Most people do not want to have to sign into 20 different forums or use some archaic chat program. Matrix is nice but it still sucks in comparison. Discord voice and screen sharing is great.

To solve the knowledge transparency issue, why not just get a bot to export your discussions to an open wiki/log/github/etc if you reach a resolution. A bot could probably make it all pretty seamless.

Reading this website sometimes feels like people are extremely upset they cant make everyone else use primordial 90s software, writing everything in c and php, and also forcing everyone to use websites consisting solely of plain text files.

I think there is a legitimate concern here though. Discord, slack, etc have made it IMPOSSIBLE to get asynchronous help. Discord and slack and the other tools can help with this by allowing search engine indexing for these large public chats.

Heck even github has been fucking with crawlers indexing issues and PRs. We literally now have websites that go and make a copy of github issue and make themselves indexable so search engines can pick them up.

I legitimately don't care about privacy issues with these platforms, my only issue is that they've made self learning so much more difficult.

> Matrix is nice but it still sucks in comparison. Discord voice and screen sharing is great.

fwiw we’re in the middle of implementing this right now.

Well, nothing should be a Discord "server" in the first place. It needs to be undone, like its father OpenFeint after the privacy lawsuit.

It's cute (but tragic) that people will put way more value on immediate convenience over minimum safety, but the proportion is way overblown in it.

I'm an indie developer and see a ton of other indies making their own channels. It really is a bad fit and forums would be so much better.

I think we should setup a Discord server to discuss this.

Fuck discord

why?

My list why discord sucks:

- Their clients are fat and hungry

- Third party clients get removed

- The CEO was owner of a data collection and selling company before.

- Tencient owns to much ownership

- They don't even claim to provide any kind of Privacy

- DM Spam is horrible

- Sometimes enforcing a phone number but don't even support some major carriers.

- Some scams are using the same URLs for years. discord doesn't care.

- Personally I find the UI confusing and unproductive.

I never understood why it even got relevant outside of gaming. It's basically just a closed source, Chinese owned, privacy disrespecting IRC on steroids.

> I never understood why it even got relevant outside of gaming. It's basically just a closed source, Chinese owned, privacy disrespecting IRC on steroids.

That last part is all that matters. It's not "just IRC", like many HNers claim. It is the most advanced evolution of IRC currently available. People use it because it can do anything they want and more, all in one very convenient package. Nobody cares about externalities like who owns it and what data it collects. It works - extremely well. And it's free!

It's just a slack clone. Like mattermost or many other free clones that are just as 'advanced' the only features discord has/had that other slack clones don't have is the gaming integration stuff.

It has way more features than Slack and those others. Just the first things that pop into my head: up arrow to edit, code syntax highlighting, custom (animated) emotes, quick jump (like macos Spotlight), built-in Giphy search, the best and most reliable screen share and video calls (with voice channels, not just DMs/groups), unbeatable voice isolation and echo cancellation (better than Zoom!), very good built-in webhook support and likely the most powerful bot API of any platform.

Maybe some platforms have some of these features, but I'm pretty sure no one platform has even half. That's why Discord won.

Literally everything except video and voice was introduced with slack. Video and voice was horrible and only got really good when they already won the 'battle'. The API and Hooks were even borrowed from slack initially and only later extended.

I am not even a fan of slack and have no need for a group IM like this at all. However discord was everything but revolutionary.

Nobody ever said any of the features features were revolutionary. I don't care what they were like in the early days, or even last week. Right now, at this moment, Discord has all of these features and the best implementations of most of them them at that. And again, it's free.

Like it or not (and fwiw, I don't - trusting most of my communications to a highly over-valued VC-funded startup sounds like a recipe for disaster), Discord is damn good software!

I would hazard a guess that it is about being proprietary along with the moderation/admins not being too well liked.

It is not free software.

I mean, I hear this all the time … and yet GitHub is still somehow the standard for free software hosting.

Discord is amazing. Hands down best platform.

Sure, but it's not really the best solution for developement. A subreddit would be better for asking issues or reporting bugs imo since you have currently trending submissions on the frontpage (= many people have this problem or it's severe), flairs and rich markdown including images, code etc (i know that discord has basic markdown but I haven't seen anyone use it and the messages tend to be short).

> Bug report channels are chaos: developers and modders get flooded with complaints about bugs, then discussions of the bug, and then 10 more people reporting the same bug. If you've ever been annoyed by duplicate issue threads on Reddit or a forum, know that Discord is far worse.

And obviously you don't need to get a discord account and join the discord just to quickly check one thing

Reddit is so much less engaging. Like infinitely.

/s I suppose?

No, this is how most users feel. If you completely ignore free software philosophies, it’s hard to find anything as good as discord.

It's actually not. There are few other types of SW I enjoy using as much as discord.

Care to share?

-VS Code -Xcode -CodeRunner

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