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Comment by moepstar | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why information-heavy communities chose "knowledge storage" in the form of Discord.

Example: i'm looking to build a PrintNC - they've got a really good Wiki, however with all the options i'm a tiny bit overwhelmed, especially since for newcomers like me, there's so much to wrap my head around...

Anyways, if i could look up the answers to my questions very probably someone has asked before on a forum, i wouldn't have to join their Discord and use the (imho) subpar search to maybe find what i was looking for...

So yeah, those kind of communities would be (again, IMHO) better served if they'd use a forum - especially since that knowledge also would be indexed by search engines.

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Is it possible to setup within two minutes forum that will be hosted for free and has decent interface with minimal ads (to the point that many will not recognize them as ads)?

Right now Discord has great usability and many people have Discord accounts.

Does GitHub discussions fill those requirements reasonably? https://docs.github.com/en/discussions

An example of this - https://github.com/nodejs/node/discussions

Github discussions scale quite poorly if you have hundreds or thousands posts each day.

Also, for nonprogrammers Github is a really alien place.

And it is still proprietary lock-in.

But yes, it can be a viable alternative and at least is not asking phone number for read only access.

The discussions scale is a problem of you need people specifically triage and moderate the content. For large projects, I'll grand that this could scale poorly but for preserving information and discussions, it remains better than other options.

And yes, GitHub isn't the proper spot for non-programmers. All the workflows around it are geared to hosting a software or at least a site.

The proprietary lock-in... I don't agree with in that if that is an issue, then discord is too (and likely more). GitHub exposes the information for discussions quite easily - https://docs.github.com/en/graphql/guides/using-the-graphql-... I would be willing to take the stance that any forum that you don't host and access the underlying data without needing to go through the user facing application is lock in. With GitHub discussions, the access to the underlying data is more available than any other forum that you don't host yourself.

FWIW, from my work machine I access GitHub without issue. I can't access discord and will likely be unable to persuade such a change up the chain as Discord is largely seen as primarily chat for non-professional activities.

> The proprietary lock-in... I don't agree with in that if that is an issue

I was thinking here primarily about network effects.

Discord has almost twice the active users and probably not a great deal of overlap with GitHub. And people won't necessarily want to join a community they would join on one with an account made on the other.

I get the impression that discord users are mostly children and not programmers.

While there might be some overlap as discord users grow up and decide to keep their discord account, I'm guessing that even in that case they will have a separate github/gitlab/whatever account for their professional or unprofessional programming.

There are a ton of very active programming related channels, mostly for open source projects. It's quickly replacing freenode as the place to go to chat about projects (love it or hate it). In fact, it's markdown support for code blocks is unmatched (imo and compared to Slack/Teams/etc) and is actually very nice to use as a place to discuss programming.

Github for some reason disables search engine indexing of wikis, not sure about discussions.

The problem that they have (and other user content created sites) if indexing was on is that SEO spammers use it to dump lots of links to sites.

That you don't see this is an indication that it works and dissuading those spammers.

Consider all the nearly forgotten repos out there that you occasionally stumble over and that there are no "work from home and get $30/hour - click here" or a dozen forms of "somespam.example.com" links peppering it.

Compare that with the old Wordpress blogs out there that haven't disabled comments and yet still have search indexing (or not, but spammers don't always dig far enough to see if there's a nofollow attribute on links).

So, for the most part, GitHub isn't indexed by search engines - and its across the board for the entirety of the site. Spammers realize that it is pointless to attempt in any of the forms that they could on other user created content sites and so expend no effort at all to post spam links.

Github discussions is searchable within GitHub in that repo. For example https://github.com/laravel/framework/discussions?discussions...

The wiki is fairly useful - and again, if you are searching for content in GitHub you can search wikis ( https://docs.github.com/en/search-github/searching-on-github... ) and get only content within GitHub (without having to sift through Google search results) with arguably a more powerful query language than Google's search bar ( https://docs.github.com/en/search-github/getting-started-wit... )

Personally, if I am looking for content for a FOSS that is hosted on GitHub I use GitHub's search for discussions and wikis first before trying to search for content in google.

But this doesn't explain why Issues are indexable on Google

What's the difference between a spammer creating their own repo and creating a bunch of issues with spam links vs their own repo and creating a bunch of wiki pages with spam links?

The difference is likely the ability for the community to flag and moderate a comment rather than an entire wiki and repository.

That said, the wiki workflow, permissions, and limitations in formatting may push people who are after a more durable store of information to create a GitHub pages site which is then managed with the same workflow (forks, pull requests, and reviews) as code, along with the ability for search engines to index the GitHub pages site.

> has decent interface with minimal ads

For now, while they still in "bait mode". If experience has something to show in the web is that once they go into switch mode, the more and more ads will come, interface will become worse as in a bad Facebook clone, site will become intentionally unusable on mobile to force people to install the app (with even more ads and tracking!), every minimally controversial subject for the advertisers will be banned, platform will start requiring phone numbers ("It's just to prevent spam and recovery your password, we swear!!"), an algorithmically controlled timeline will appear to improve engagement, text or longer posts will be de-prioritized to give more visibility to low-effort easy-consumption meme-like content (that give more of the said engagement), and "out of community" content will be pushed into it.

Reddit is currently best example of this happening.

Am I too pessimistic? Nope, I just saw this happen too many times.

If you want to build a future-proof online community, be prepared to deploy and control your own infrastructure and lose the "easy to get" users. Won't the cheap and won't be easy.

Oh definitely, especially given proprietary lock-in and effects of scale.

That is why I put "Right now Discord has great usability"

> platform will start requiring phone numbers

That is de facto happening already.

People do it because Discord has a fundamentally better UX. It's bad for long term archival and the like, but it is an earth-shatteringly better UX than with traditional forum engines.

Huh? Discord has really poor UX compared to other IM services I use, like Telegram. Notification settings are so complex that it takes trial, error, and missed important messages to end up with a sensible configuration (no broadcast mentions in any shape or form, no badges unless I'm mentioned by my own username or there's a reply to my message). Every little piece of its UI is custom-built and routinely defies my expectations about how UI controls should behave. Just a few examples of my pain points with Discord:

- They somehow managed to mess up the message text field so much that my system-wide text replacements don't work. They work literally everywhere else.

- When I want to add a reaction to a message, there's an emoji picker. It shows custom emoji FIRST, and it shows custom emoji from ALL "servers" I'm a member of. It takes actual time for something that should be a nearly-instant interaction.

- There are no last seen statuses when a user is offline.

- The files. Need I say more? Not only does that 8 MB limit feel like an insult in this day and age, so does Discord's insistence on always storing the original files as-is. OK for images, but I sometimes have to send screencasts, and you never know what size it even is. I end up having to upload them somewhere else and then send a link. Your files are too powerful, my ass.

And, yes, it's Electron, and at this point I'm convinced that an Electron app just can't possibly be good, no matter how hard you try and how good your engineers are.

Discords notifications are actually are nightmare. I still have a single (1) on my direct messages link and I cannot figure out (since like 2 month) where it comes from. And that all after I had a little red dot in the taskbar discord icon for like a year which I somehow managed to get rid of.

Overall its usability is okay for me, but there are really some big quirks.

> I still have a single (1) on my direct messages link and I cannot figure out

Maybe it's a friend request?

> And that all after I had a little red dot in the taskbar discord icon for like a year which I somehow managed to get rid of.

This is the most annoying thing. I think it means you have "some" unread messages. A single message in any of the 100s of channels in a dozen "servers" you're in will trigger that with default notification settings.

> Maybe it's a friend request?

Just tried that - nope. It actually was the "Nitro - 1 Month FREE" tab below "Friends".

Never tried that before...

Forcing each question to be asked fresh also eliminates out-of-date replies. I often run into answers on forum archives that no longer work because the fast-moving software they are regarding has changed.

It's not actually that much better. It's mostly chat + sugar (aka good branding and emotes)

It took over like wildfire because it had 10x better UX than any combination of alternatives - and you definitely needed a combination to match the features. Start with the fact that it's not just chat, but also video, voice, and includes things like multimedia uploads that are a modern baseline, but still absent from many other services.

Is there someone offering decent forum hosting for free?

It's not free hosting, but Discourse is quite popular for server admins that want a modern-looking design and it can be easily ran on a big box with docker-compose. If the admins have the cash, discourse does offer hosting[0], with companies like Cloudflare doing so[1].

0: https://www.discourse.org/pricing

1: https://community.cloudflare.com/

I'll take a Discourse forum over a Discord any day (though I haven't tried Discord's new forum feature). Discourse is an evolution of a forum, while (until now maybe) Discord is an evolution of IRC. Huge difference.

> it can be easily ran on a big box with docker-compose

And Discord "server" can be setup within several seconds via GUI.

Sadly, only for tiny minority really aware of vendor lock-in it will be preferable to setup Discourse.

Seems so - although forums also seem to gravitate towards slightly more self-hosted than Discord. Which is a feature in a way - own the domain and build something real.

Discord basically won because of style over substance. I use it plenty because I don't have a choice. But there's nothing actually good about it besides the VC money they poured into going to market and branding.

All the marketing in the world isn't going to move the needle if your product doesn't solve a problem or offer a better experience for users.

To say that the success of discord was due to "pouring VC money into marketing" completely misses the whole "we also spent a lot of time and effort to build a product that was better than what was out there and solved a problem for our users."

>Discord basically won because of style over substance. I use it plenty because I don't have a choice.

This is incredibly reductive. You don't use it because "you don't have a choice", you use it because it's the best. If there was another option out there people would use it. There are plenty of choices out there; you go set up a self-hosted phpBB forum; try to maintain a live community on there; and moderate it. Or forget phpBB, try Discourse.

When you say Discord is "Style over substance" you willfully ignore all the downsides about forums that caused people to migrate to Discord/Slack in the first place. We will never have robust forum software as long as people continue to believe that the reason Discord is as popular is it is is because of "VC marketing dollars".

> This is incredibly reductive. You don't use it because "you don't have a choice", you use it because it's the best.

Not always. I hate discord with a passion because I don't want to be data mined by some corporate walled garden. Unfortunately some open source projects have taken the decision to use it so I have to in order to communicate with them. Home Assistant being the most notable one for me.

It's a really poor choice for this IMO, matrix is so much better and you can use any client you want.

In my experience when I see an open-source community use something like Zulip, Glitter, Matrix, or Slack it seems inactive relative to an equivalent hypothetical Discord community. I think this outweighs the privacy concerns.

Discord's biggest advantage in my eyes is that it makes it easy to build a critical mass of users. This makes it easy for newcomers to get answers to questions quickly.

It doesn't. You are the one heavily devaluating the need of privacy.

>I hate discord with a passion because I don't want to be data mined by some corporate walled garden.

So your disdain for discord has nothing to do with user experience, ease of use, UI, or anything else someone might consider when actually using the product, but it has to do with the ethics of the hosting company.

I can say I hate Porsche because they benefitted from Nazi regime and I will never drive one for that reason, but I'm not going to try to assert that the Ford Pinto is a better car than the 911.

Yes, "better" means different things to different people.

But Porsche's history is just that, history. If a Porsche 911 would send all my data to Porsche it would not be a very good car in my eyes.

I don't think the UI of Matrix is meaningfully different than the one from Discord though. It's a bit like clothing IMO. Mainstream users are very brand-sensitive. They buy Nike shoes not because they're good quality but because it says Nike on them. I bet it works the same way with services.

>> If there was another option out there people would use it.

This statement seems to not account for lock-in or network effects. Why do people still use Oracle products or Microsoft products like Outlook or Excel? It's certainly a big stretch to say that these things are "the best" (although Excel is, objectively, the best) unless your definition of "the best" is simply "the thing we are currently using because if there were something better we'd be using that." This seems a bit circular to me.

Why do people use Discord (or Slack) for housing information instead of bringing it into a self-hosted forum or internal database? Because people were lazy when they started and they're too lazy to port it over now and the massive inefficiencies are distributed over time and a number of users. It's a tragedy of the commons.

>Because people were lazy when they started and they're too lazy to port it over now

Some of these communities are older than Discord but somehow they were lazy. It simply can't be because Discord/Slack are better tools. The implication that there are communities working on database internals using Discord, but they are too dumb to standup Discourse is astounding.

"When they started" has nothing to do with the company's founding but when they started using Discord for this particular purpose. Consider on-prem versus cloud and not switching between them when it makes financial sense because of lock-in and inertial resistance.

Another example: I used to use a wristwatch rather than my phone's clock (this is pre-smart watch) even though just using my phone would have been more efficient. Why did I do this? Because of habitual lock-in. How did I break out of it? I eventually realized how expensive it was to maintain my watch and that there was another option that I already had that did everything my watch did. In your world and under your definition of "the best" then my wristwatch was "the best" solution for telling time despite it obviously not being the most economical or efficient. Until it wasn't, and then my phone somehow became "the best" tool for telling time in your world.

> You don't use it because "you don't have a choice"

I do.

There are many dev communities like Svelte which use Discord so I'm forced to use it although I kinda hate it too.

Strong disagree. Usability and improved UX isn't sugar.

Suuuure, earth shattering.

Discord has a low barrier to entry and continued use.

With a single account, I can join a dozen communities and easily stay up to date with them, and get an instant notification on my phone or desktop when someone answers a question I asked in any of them.

To do the same with a dozen phpbb communities, I need to create a dozen accounts and track each site individually.

> easily stay up to date with them

How do you stay up to date when there are thousands and thousands of messages generated per day or even per hour?

You can control what triggers a notification on a per-server and even per-channel basis. For most big servers, I have everything set to mute except for when people @ me directly or respond to one of my messages.

Aggressive muting of channels and servers.

> I wonder why information-heavy communities chose "knowledge storage" in the form of Discord.

They don't. Obviously chats are not knowledge storages but a means for quick communication.

I think chats like Gitter, Slack, and Discord proliferated because the realtime thing makes people feel differently vs async communication.

But, like Discord realized, chats are just terrible tools for communities built around learning and solving problems (like dev communities around a tech project). There's no collective learning anymore, no stored knowledge, etc. And the problem gets worse as a community grows.

It's because people get a really large amount of value out of real (or near-real) time discussion- in many cases more than they get out of archival reference. Forums slow down the interaction time drastically. I'm plenty old enough to remember using forums and subsequently switching to chat, and the ability to work through things and problem solve increased massively. Not being able to find things later is, well, a problem for later, so it gets deprioritized vs the problems of now.

This forum channels thing might be a middle ground that gives the possibility of free flowing interactions but with structure, and indexing as a possibility.

> Not being able to find things later is, well, a problem for later, so it gets deprioritized vs the problems of now.

Who said anything about finding things later? I want a forum because, for niche topics/questions, slow+indexed is the only way to hope anyone will be able to answer my question at all.

I can ask a question on a forum and maybe be answered a week later, by someone who's looking through older open threads under the expectation that they can still be of help; or I can ask a question in a chatroom and the people who know aren't online, chat continues, when they come online they've missed it, and so I get my response never.

It's a key difference in assumptions, mostly due to different etiquette.

When you solve a problem you asked about in a forum thread, you tend to say that. So a forum thread that remains open with no replies is effectively "left hanging", with the author still likely to be interested in an answer. So, for the people who offer help in such forums, there can be value in looking through old open forum threads / solving "cold cases."

Meanwhile, chat messages are sort of "drive-by" things, where you'll write a thing, and then, if nobody responds, leave and never come back. You were hoping for an immediate response; you didn't get it; so you gave up. There's no expectation of someone ever coming back, or seeing a response given much later; so people don't try to offer them.

...as well as the tiring dance of having to explain things over and over and...

In an ideal world, if i haven't found an answer from a previous thread on my own, i could be gently nudged into the right direction.

Mind you, i've been around on IRC for a very long time and know how tiring it can get to basically get asked the same question in different form all the time (and "having" to answer it).

Lots of forums I belong to have tons of already answered very common questions. I’ve joined a few on various topics from BBQing to NAS building. When I was building my NAS every single question I had was answered and they had plenty of stickies on various topics. IRC or discord would have been a fall back to the searchable knowledge of a forum.

The only time I had a question was when I ran into an issue with my UPS freezing up my NAS during power outages. The guy who figure it out could’ve helped faster on discord, still only took one work day of back and forth, but now the next guy can search my topic.

I think discord is a very good knowledge storage channel for newbies who are too novice to even form their questions coherently and need help to do so. Though it is taxing to help them and takes a lot of patience.

And if you are kicked you can't access any of it, including your own content you wrote there.

Yep, and that's the story of how I lost years worth of discussions and chats because Discord thought well that linking a phone number doesn't automatically allow you to verify yourself with it.

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