Discord, or the Death of Lore | Hacker News Reader

Discord, or the Death of Lore

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It’s a little unsettling to think about how much information and knowledge is being locked up in walled-garden servers on discord, basically unsearchable (discord has a search feature, but it’s pretty awful). There’s so many communities that end up moving to it because it serves their most engaged members so well, but it’s terrible for everyone else.

For example, “Voron” 3D printers are an awesome open-source design, but more and more I am directed to their discord to ask questions - many of which were, in all likelihood, asked dozens of times before. It’s great for their engaged members, who are all super helpful - but if it’s a reddit thread I can get my answer almost immediately, rather than asking, waiting and consuming someone else’s time for trivialities.

Sites like reddit at least can be readily searched from a conventional search engine, and can be crawled and stored externally in a pinch. Discord has its place, especially for game communities or other such personal things, but I’m not sure it’s ideal compared to a conventional forum as time passes and more information is built up and either lost or hidden away.

I remember chatting on the RepRap 3D Printer forums in the early 2010s, everything searchable by Google and static text. That mode is long gone now, Discord's superior UX seems to have swallowed up most of the forums.

Discord's search works great for me

The search is per-server so before you even start you need to know which server has the thing you're looking for, which isn't always obvious, and you can't search a server without actively joining it, announcing your presence and using up your finite server slots. There's no equivalent to Googling something and passively pulling answers from wherever.

Unless i'm missing something (and noting the drawbacks mentioned elsewhere re. no google search), its native search doesn't have any kind of fuzziness. You can't think of some set of terms and have it bring up a particular thing, you have to know an exact word used in it.

This means you need to know enough already just to get it to come up, and more to prune out the other 500 results if your term is generic enough. Basically, the search only really works if you want to find a specific conversation you remember (and it better be recent, given how easily you forget the specifics of things as time passes)

> Unless i'm missing something, its native search doesn't have any kind of fuzziness.

For the past couple years it's returned variations of words, eg: `installer` will return `installers`, `installed`, `installs`, `installing`. However it doesn't return synonyms. It's essentially just searching like one would with regular chat logs, except limited to searching only one server at a time.

I actually wish I could disable such matching since even with double quotes I can't get only an exact word matched (which is necessary when trying to filter a large number of results).

> it because it serves their most engaged members so well, but it’s terrible for everyone else

I join a discord channel and honestly most of the time I’m overwhelmed. There’s often a ton of sub channels for every specific thing… that aren’t very active. It’s hard to get a feel for what is going on.

I join some only to find everyone is annoyed by my elementary question, but hell if I can find any answers in discord.

I just never know the lay of the land.

The handful of highly active people do, but that’s it.

Yup - the most engaged members are usually running the server, so they optimise it for their use. Multiple channels and categories make it easy to remember context if you switch often, and prevent recent relevant conversations from going out of scope too quickly.

What began as effectively an IRC-like alternative + file hosting and voice support is now being used as a replacement for forums and I think that's where the issue is.

IRC isn't publicly searchable either unless someone was logging it and uploading them to some web server. IRC chats similarly often contain very useful info and answers.

Discord unfortunately doesn't have any native chat export feature so the best that can be done are third-party exporters, copy-pasting or screenshots which aren't ideal and don't end up being indexed as desired even if communities wanted them to be.

Exactly right.

We're complaining about a problem that was no different in the heyday of IRC.

Ultimately, publicly searchable information is a voluntary act.

IRC can be accessed by any client adhering to IRC standards which are free and open.

Discord can be accessed by any client adhering to Discord standards, which are closed and proprietary.

Nobody has an obligation to publish information for public access, nor is free necessarily superior to proprietary or vice versa, but Discord is absolutely less accessible than IRC or HTTP(S) as an objective fact.

99.9% of users don't care about any of that. Users want embedded media, custom emotes, free fully featured clients on every device they use (any client that needs a bouncer doesn't count), integration with desktop software such as games, video streaming / screen sharing, and voice calls.

Notice that every single chat software used by normal humans (iMessage, Google chat, FB messenger, etc) has most of these features, just with much lower bitrates than Discord.

For the very few users that don't need any feature they didn't have in the 90s, IRC is still around. The rest of us just add one of many text logging bots to our discord servers.

You only let users design a product or tool if they are better at it or more correctly if you are even worse at it. Users don't want fire exits or seat belts. They basically want tasty food that kills them. It if can be more tasty and kill them faster they all want it. Even better if the product kills other people but silently and far away. If it can be slightly cheaper and kill many more people you've done well in their opinion.

Of course sometimes having the user design the product or tool is the only available option. Just remember it is a terrible thing when it happens.

That's a funny comparison (with fire exits and seat belts), because IRC is none of it

Plain text protocol with poor (and optional) auth? Please where are the adults in the room

"oh but extension XYZ etc" yes and how many servers do implement that in a mandatory (and user friendly) way?

The user wants their images and reactions and I can't blame them because it's the 2020's and IRC was already limited 20 years ago

haha, I use IRC all the time but don't necessarily disagree. Imagine if we could post images to HN! Or wait...

> They basically want tasty food that kills them

What do you mean "they"? I'm the dev in this scenario and I also prefer to eat tasty food that supposedly kills me. I know how to count my calories.

> sometimes having the user design the product or tool is the only available option. Just remember it is a terrible thing when it happens

I'll continue to have my users design my product/tool every time and those who don't will get eaten alive in any market that has consumer choice. Also Santa Claus isn't real.

> I'll continue to have my users design my product/tool every time and those who don't will get eaten alive in any market that has consumer choice. Also Santa Claus isn't real.

Somewhere, the ghost of the man responsible for the iPod and iPhone is laughing at you.

Let me try...

Besides clients/users you have (not in any order): investors, employees, security, stability, sustainability, usability, education, learning curve, ethics, morality, honesty(?), the community, the environment, the economy, humanity, history...

I'm sure I'm missing a dozen things.

We already had that with Jabber.

Jabber had custom emotes and integration with desktop software including video games? I don't remember that.

Pidgin had lots of plugins (emotes too) and on integration with video games, that depended on the game and protocol. Twitch uses IRC for instance. You could use any IRC client to comment on your channel, and you could broadcast to Twitch with common tools too, by just using FFMPEG to encode your video stream to h264.

> Pidgin had lots of plugins

Maybe if they spent 1 minute thinking about their software as a product and decided to enable those plugins by default, Pidgin would be relevant in 2023.

>Twitch uses IRC for instance

That's not at all what I'm talking about, Twitch has nothing to do with Discord.

Eg your friend's Discord status shows you what they are doing in-game and many games let you join your friend's team directly from discord.

>Discord can be accessed by any client adhering to Discord standards, which are closed and proprietary.

It's worse. Official Twitter account: >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.

https://twitter.com/discord/status/1229357198918197248

In practice you can't have a client that has local chat history, local search, or just better information density on the screen, and simultaneously hope to not have your account nuked.

Like I said: Accessed by any client adhering to Discord standards, which are closed and proprietary.

Discord standards include "official Discord", which doesn't take away from the point.

It doesn't take away from the point but it adds to it. Proprietary chat protocols are nothing new but in the past alternative clients were either ignored or blocked. Now it is getting more common to punish the individual users of such clients, like Discord here threatening to nuke your account. This is a much worse situation than just "closed and proprietary standards".

In actual Discord practice, that clause acts more as a liability disclaimer. They do not actively look for and kill third party clients like, say, WhatsApp. However they have an antispam with a high false positive rate, which is tuned to almost always produce a non-spam result with their first party client.

Nah, Free Software is better than proprietary. Discord's attack on privacy and user safety are there to see.

> We're complaining about a problem that was no different in the heyday of IRC.

IRC didn't pretend that you had information stored there, though...

Discord hides this fact better by offering semi-permanence and a "search" feature, so it seems like its a real-time forum, when in fact its just slack with better video features...

Its very different. The IRC of the yester-yore was filled with people sharing links to more-permanent docs, mailing lists. Discord is filled with people under the mistaken impression they have documented anything by having a chat with a search feature, (and this is has happened to me) claiming that the "rules" are documented somewhere in a channel and why haven't I seen them, when the "rules" are in fact buried, no longer accessible, or just hidden in a wall of conflicting information.

If you have an IRC, you have a dedicated community of people who try because they must, if you have a Discord you have a group of randos at best, or at worst a delusional echo chamber.

> Discord is filled with people under the mistaken impression they have documented anything by having a chat with a search feature... when the "rules" are in fact buried, no longer accessible, or just hidden in a wall of conflicting information.

Part of this is a result of some communities not being organized well enough but also making do with fitting an IRC-like format ('servers'/channels/message buffers) into a more structured one. People are willing to compromise on having less suitable structure for denser/more important information since Discord offers such attractive and easy-to-use features in one place.

That said most communities I know of create channels devoted to rules/FAQs, though for things like lists of file announcements/releases (in eg: modding communities) it's messier.

The new forums channel feature has helped by making things sortable and more structured but those only apply to new channels not existing. The forums feature also highlights Discord has recognized how communities have been using their site like a forum for certain channels such as Q&A/releases/showcases (and why comparing it to publicly indexable forums is even more relevant since the feature set will only grow).

>We're complaining about a problem that was no different in the heyday of IRC.

so the death of lore happened essentially when textual knowledge moved from the printed, physically stored version to the electronic version that has no easy way of going and getting the verifiable source of lore for reference when needed?

sounds about right.

IRC never persisted anything so nobody used it as information source.

It's true IRC never stores anything server-side besides user and channel registration details, depending on the network's features and services.

But it is patently false to say nobody used IRC as a source of information. IRC was essential in sharing information quickly back in the 90s. Information on things like natural disasters and the fall of the Soviet Union were shared live using IRC.

The wording was bad but I mean discord stores stuff from the start so you naturally say things with that idea in mind, for later. On IRC you come and talk, it might be logged or not, it's still not part of the spirit when you get into a chan.

> Discord unfortunately doesn't have any native chat export feature so the best that can be done are third-party exporters, copy-pasting or screenshots which aren't ideal and don't end up being indexed as desired even if communities wanted them to be.

Server owners have the option for message logging bots. If communities wanted logging, they do have that option with server owner buy-in.

Arguably, difficult-to-archive by default if you aren't a server owner helps foster a safer chat experience.

How? I’m an owner.

You can google for a third party bot service, google for openly-distributed bots and host your own, or write your own.

https://www.linen.dev/

No, it fosters a less safe experience, when the behavior is hidden. For someone willing to spend just about 30 minutes, it isn't hard to have a script log in to your own account to record messages without anyone noticing.

That's against TOS, and my line of reasoning is that it helps against opportunistic and casual abuse, and there aren't really mitigations against more determined abuse.

e.g. your relationship with someone has soured. Your IRC client has your private messages with them saved in a backlog. You can access them at any time. vs. you normally wouldn't save a backlog of messages because Discord remembers your message history, and if their relationship with you has soured, they have the option of nuking their messages.

> and if their relationship with you has soured, they have the option of nuking their messages.

How is that a feature?

This is a feature because you can feel safer sending messages to people you currently trust that you are less comfortable sending to people you don't trust as much, knowing that you can delete these messages if your relationship with them starts to deteriorate and they likely wouldn't have access to them.

This is something I just can't feel. Maybe it's because I grew up with digital communications that did not have this "feature".

In more general sense, the way I see it, a message does not belong to the sender - the ownership is shared between the communicating parties, and neither one should get to unilaterally delete it for the other, much like when you send me a physical letter, I can't prevent you from making a copy of it prior to sending, but you also can't "unsend" it by taking it out of my mailbox or cupboard.

In more general sense still, I don't like things that can screw with people's sense of reality. At the very least, I hope "unsending" messages leaves a clear sign behind, because removing a message from someone's mailbox without leaving a trace is a stellar way to facilitate intentional or accidental gaslighting.

But I'm rambling again. The main thing that needs to be said:

> knowing that you can delete these messages if your relationship with them starts to deteriorate and they likely wouldn't have access to them

This is just a really bad case of a false sense of security. The other person can always make a screenshot. And if you're known to be a person that unsends their messages, or if this becomes a more common practice in general, then the other party will likely start making screenshots the moment they realize your relationship starts to deteriorate.

The messages still exist. For more serious cases, they can be dredged up from the backups by a court order, so you don't really get to unsend something and pretend it never happened.

> This is just a really bad case of a false sense of security. The other person can always make a screenshot.

Indeed, that's why I'm talking about people who you currently trust, and may not trust in the future. I will agree with you in part that there are situations even with currently trusted parties regarding certain information that it would be preferable that communication is permanent. There are modalities in communication where deletion is a feature and modalities where it isn't.

edit: The situations I'm thinking of where such communication is preferable are less like "divorce-worthy" stuff, and more like "I'm not vibing with person A well rn, I don't like that they like <trivial thing a> and <trivial thing b>", which is relatively low-stakes, but essential to friendship.

edit: here's a context I encountered yesterday; a friend (call them A) realized that some new people joined a Discord server that used to be close friends, and so A deleted their selfie pics. The reasoning (which happens intuitively and emotionally) is that if these people were slightly creepy, then they wouldn't be able to opportunistically abuse A's selfies if/when they started paying attention to A. If these people were massively and actively creepy there would be other avenues to handle that.

> There are modalities in communication where deletion is a feature and modalities where it isn't.

Fair. I think a good argument against my current position is the one made by the Black Mirror episode "The Entire History of You"[0]. In fact, I see at least two different strong points made by that episode:

- Everyone having an easily-accessible, high-fidelity, shareable record of the mundane things they saw, heard or said, stretching back years or decades, is something we might not handle well on an interpersonal level. Our cultures, habits and rules of behavior - hell, even default emotional programming - are all built on an implicit assumption that memories are ephemeral, internal, and not indexable. So e.g. any "he said, she said" argument suddenly becomes something else entirely, when either side can pull up a recording of what happened.

- Having such recordings creates a risk of someone wanting to force you to reveal them.

Thinking about that, I concede that having some conversations be ephemeral may be desirable, at least for as long as humans remain so immature that past behavior can be used as a weapon in future arguments.

EDIT to respond to your edits:

> "I'm not vibing with person A well rn, I don't like that they like <trivial thing a> and <trivial thing b>", which is relatively low-stakes, but essential to friendship.

Could you elaborate? I can't see how the ability to unsend messages would be helpful here. If anything, it feel like showing person A the door or giving them a slap in the face - a clear signal the relationship just dropped a few notches.

This reminds me of a case when I realized a certain person unfriended me on Facebook. I wasn't very close personally to that person, but we've spent years building a real-life community together, and we were (or I thought) at the very least good colleagues. I casually mentioned the Facebook thing to that person the next time I bumped into them, and they explained it away as "you know, I'm curating my Facebook friend list, every now and then I unfriend people I haven't talked to in a while; it's nothing personal". Well, it felt quite personal to me, and that explanation made me want to keep the relationship going even less.

> friend (call them A) realized that some new people joined a Discord server that used to be close friends, and so A deleted their selfie pics

Hm. That's a slightly different case though. The problem here is that the selfies weren't sent to people who joined afterwards; them having access to it is a decision made automatically by Discord. If the server was considered closer to a private conversation space, and not a public gallery, then I find it perfectly reasonable that person A wanted to remove those messages - they were trying to retroactively exercise control over who gets the message, something they should've been able to do before the fact.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You

This "feature" is placebo. All they have to do is save the data somewhere else and your "power" to delete the messages is gone. Simple screenshots will suffice.

Just as exploding messages are subject to retention by the other party. Yet the friction of doing so makes opportunistic abuse harder by somewhat trustworthy and decent people.

>somewhat trustworthy and decent people.

You have a measurement problem here. Unless you can fast forward to the end of these trustworthy and decedent peoples life and give a quick review as it pertains to you and your information, you have no idea if any of these people are trustworthy at all.

It's an exercise in probability that's impossible to measure.

If you have a social life there are people in your circles of varying degrees of trust and interests, and as people change, you want your inner life and history's exposure to them to change as well. I feel like you are treating a complex phenomenon that you can obtain regular feedback from like something that's complete-trust or zero-trust.

There has been a use for exploding messages, and there's a use for deletable messages too, despite the screenshottability by zero-trust parties.

I think that depends on whether you think of a message you receive as belonging to the person who wrote it or the person who is reading it.

Neither. I find this a weird notion. The message belongs to both sender and recipients. All of them, in case of one-to-many communication.

If there's someone least entitled to message ownership, IMO it's the sender. To grant the sender the ability to take messages back is to allow them to encroach the "personal space" of the recipient - to make unilateral changes to the sphere of reality they considers their own.

Physical analogy: to "unsend" a letter, you'd have to break into my house and steal it.

Digital analogy: to "unsend" an e-mail, you'd have to break into my computer / mail server and delete it there.

"Unsending" e-mail exists in corporate (organizational in general) contexts, but this is tied to an artificial environment following a much different sense of rules - those e-mails aren't truly yours, they're the property of the company (org) as part of which you're communicating. In the same way, corporate might let you "unsend" a physical letter too, at least internally. But this is an exception, tied to acting as an agent of an organization; private communications have different defaults.

Also in general, as I mentioned in another branch of this subthread, I don't like solutions that let someone mess with someone else's perception of reality. "Unsending" is doing exactly that, so at the very least, it must not be silent - it must always leave a visible mark. "There was a message here. It was removed by the sender."

I agree with you. Analogously, I find the notion of forced read receipts to be weird. I can accept having a "delivered" status, to indicate that the message reached one of my devices, but a "read/seen" status is intrusive. The physical equivalent of this is sending an internet connected camera and let it send a message back if I opened your box.

This is very much a framing issue and trying to apply physical interpretations on non-physical things.

> Digital analogy: to "unsend" an e-mail, you'd have to break into my computer / mail server and delete it there.

They're not on your computer or mail server though. They're on discords servers, which grant you permission to view them upon you providing credentials to prove you're allowed to see them. Removing the message is removing your access to content I have authored and previously granted.

It wouldn't be weird for me to remove a blog or mastadon post of my own, yet those are very clearly one to many communications. If I hosted a page and gave you login details which I later rescinded, that wouldn't seem odd would it?

None of these are conceptually all that different though. I write a thing and let you read it. I later don't want you to allow you to read it any more. Having granted access once, must that always translate to permanent irrevocable permission? That seems like an extreme position - the most obvious place that comes up is with mistakes. I mistakenly "send" a message to you intended for my wife. Do you have a permanent and fundamental right to it? If you've not even seen a notification that it's arrived, is it encroaching on your personal space for you to not be able to read a message I don't want you to read?

> It wouldn't be weird for me to remove a blog or mastadon post of my own, yet those are very clearly one to many communications.

But that's more of a forum or a publication than an interpersonal communication. I think when you and I talk, we both own the content. The conversation is two-way, and thus it is ours. You have no right to take those conversations from my email server any more than removing them from my mind.

It's not about one-to-one or one-to-many, it's about is the conversation one-way or two-way. Are you talking to someone or with them?

I think the same applies to the Mastodon or blog example (or Twitter, or Facebook) - to me, these are closer to broadcast publishing than to producing creative works, so copyright issues notwithstanding, I feel GP doesn't have full ownership on what they published on the public web either.

In this context, I feel it's OK for GP to remove their blog or Mastodon posts - not weird at all. However, I believe I am well within my rights to scrap GP's blog, screenshot all their Mastodon posts, and keep them for reference; I'd expect the blog to be indexed by the Internet Archive, and would find attempts at preventing the IA from making a copy as something between peculiar and antisocial.

That is, there's a distinction between owning the message itself, vs. owning its physical form or means of publishing. The former, I believe, is always shared between sender and recipient or recipients (up to and including everyone, if we're talking about a regular website without any access control). The latter is handled through normal property law mechanisms, but owning the medium only means you can decide who can access the message on/through that medium, not that you own the message itself.

> In this context, I feel it's OK for GP to remove their blog or Mastodon posts - not weird at all.

Why not discord messages then?

I guess Discord is a bit weird here in that (assuming we're not talking about PMs), it's never clear just how open that Discord room is...

>I write a thing and let you read it.

By the why the physical universe you live in works the moment you let someone see an informational project (text for example) you no longer have a monopoly on that information. You can never remove access of that data from my mind, and with digital information under a end to end encrypted channel (and assuming you're not watching it with an OCR application from a monitor) you can't remove access to any other allowed person.

You have an extreme position, yes. It is extreme in the sense your idea only works in highly controlled situations or where everybody agrees to play nice. These rules do not work on the internet and there is no means or way of enforcing it.

Once you let photons go, you no longer have a permanent and fundamental right to recall it.

I think this has gotten wildly off track. It started with whether it's a feature that you can delete a discord message, there's a lot of steps from that point to wiping information from your mind.

> Neither. I find this a weird notion. The message belongs to both sender and recipients.

If only we could admit that about copyrighted work.

I think there's some overlap with recording phone calls here; some people do it, but do you need to get consent for doing it?

Laws tend to vary quite a bit, but around here (not US or a lawyer, get your legal advice from someone else), you're allowed to record phone calls without mentioning it beforehand as long as you're a participant in the call itself.

Basically the law surrounding phone call recordings suggests that for all intents and purposes, that right belongs to both entities independently. I'd apply the same to chat messages; the right to store them without prior consent belongs effectively to both parties.

In Washington, USA, both parties need to be aware of the recording. It's why many IVR systems announce "this call may be recorded".

> Basically the law surrounding phone call recordings suggests that for all intents and purposes, that right belongs to both entities independently. I'd apply the same to chat messages; the right to store them without prior consent belongs effectively to both parties.

Note however, that the law around mail and postal services suggests no such thing - on the contrary, once you send something, you lose your rights to it; you may have some residual rights for the duration of delivery, since the post is performing a service for you, but once the mail reaches its destination, its owned by the recipient.

Chat messages derive from physical mail, not phone calls, so I'd apply postal rather than telecom perspective here. Phone calls are in some sense unique here: in its first widespread form, making a phone call meant creating a literal, direct electrical connection between your microphone and a speaker on the other end - an unbroken conduit going for dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of kilometers - in order to "teleport" the sound waves by means of converting mechanical waves to electrical waves, and back again at the other end - allowing to have a conversation across distance by pretending it isn't there. Those first phone calls were direct evolution of spoken conversation - as opposed to written messages, whose analogues were sent over a telegraph.

Thus, in my mind, the right framework to think about IM chats and e-mails alike is through analogy to written letters and "snail mail" (if you really insist e-mails and IMs are not alike, then treat e-mails as similar to letters, and IM chats as similar to tiny notes passed around in the class by children, while the teacher is not looking). For phone calls, the right analogy is conversation. That extends to VOIP, Teams calls, Mumble/Teamspeak, etc. If you want digital voice communication that has semantics of mail, and not conversation, then we have that too: it's called voice messages, and is a feature in most IM platforms.

To spell out clearly what that last point means to me: mutual consent for call recording sounds reasonable. But if you send me a voice recording over Messenger or WhatsApp, to me it's just as if you sent a normal chat - and therefore something that I'm free to back up without your consent or even without informing you.

> Chat messages derive from physical mail, not phone calls

Chat messages are not physical things and trying to apply laws that are based on important distinctions with regards to physical things to features in an application is not useful. Even then, you can still send someone something but retain rights over it.

> Those first phone calls were direct evolution of spoken conversation

Frankly I find it a little weird that a fast back and forth chat on discord over the internet is being likened more to sending a physical bit of paper with delays of multiple days per message than a chat over the phone.

First letter: Hi. Do you have a minute

Reply: Yes. What is it?

Second letter: I've got a problem.

Reply: Is this on the new product?

And it's a week later.

The name of it is even a chat message. To say chat messages are not like a chat is weird to me just because they're not audio files.

I strongly think either comparison is irrelevant but I'm quite surprised at the distinction you're trying to draw.

Worth remembering what the start of this was though, which was that deleting messages on discords servers was described as a feature.

If the data ended up on someone else's system you need to assume they can store it. Pretty much every IRC client ever has the option to save logs, everything from channels to private messages. Assuming someone can't save conversations is not wise.

TOS doesn't matter. Select discord, windows+alt+R to start screen recording, middle click and drag to start scrolling slowly, walk away from computer.

> That's against TOS

Nobody even reads those things anyways. What they "allow" doesn't matter either. As users we should be able to do whatever we want. If we want to log messages, that's our prerogative.

But is TOS enforceable. That is the question. We have yet to properly test it in US court. I would like to finally get a binding court opinion whether a company can just put 'and we own your soul and youngest pet in perpetuity' and make cops come to your home to enforce that. I would like some clarity. Not this weird purgatory that benefits companies only.

Companies have successfully forced people to go through arbitration through terms of service, with courts agreeing. ToSes, as a whole, are enforceable, though several lines in them might not be, just like contract law.

Ahh, but by just moving it to arbitration it stops being contract law, does it not?

You like that it's easy for an abuser to hide proof of their abuse? I know what you're actually trying to say and I'm saying in reality you picked the wrong side bud, ignoring a very bad problem to protect against a comparatively trivial problem.

If I were in a relationship that went bad, and the other person was as vengeful and irrational as you can imagine, and had access to everything I ever said, and did their best to cherry pick and strip context, sure, that would be annoying for me.

And it would be no worse than annoying. I'll take that hit considering the kinds of things that other people do to other people.

I'm clairvoiant, so go ahead and say it's about protecting gays in gay-murderering states. Perhaps you assume the only reason I take this stance is that I have nothing that I think could be weaponized against me.

What kinds of things have you done in your relationships that you fear your past relations so much?

Any way you slice it, wrong victim.

the messages are rendered client-side and there's no way discord will bother messing with detection of client-side bot "tampering" that scrapes the output, and that's assuming it would be even necessary to do it this way. It's entirely pointless, if someone wants to do harm with the information its trivial to get it regardless of TOS, and those that don't get the short end of the stick.

At the end of the day the last thing discord cares about realistically is keeping their users "safe" anyway (and rightfully so in my opinion).

Forums have the same problem of locking up knowledge, and they also keep out anyone who doesn’t want to constantly visit a web site.

Mailing lists and newsgroups are the proper mechanisms for this. And you should be able to use them with a browser forum-style too.

That depends on the forum. Most forums could be searched and posts found via your search engine of choice. Well, the current crop of forums (discourse) prevents that with being JS based, but I would not count it as a good forum anyway.

I have no idea why so many choose to run a forum using discourse. It's the worst forum software I have seen.

While some forums do lock information behind registration-barriers, it's rare, whereas every discord is locked behind a email+cell phone barrier. It's far, far worse for anyone who doesn't want to be part of your community or install an app just to be able to read the docs or download a patch or ask a question.

I have joined 2 discords in the last week (as lots of 'community support' seems to be moving there these days). I set a username but I haven't had to supply any other info - I can't post anything and there's a banner saying I need to claim the account to avoid losing access but it's definitely not every discord which requires a verified account.

Doesn't help with the issues around searching for data from outside of discord.

Discord randomly (e.g. when a black box ML algorithm scores you naughty or if you just happen to log in from an ip that someone "bad" used) requires you to provide a valid mobile phone number before you can access anything.

>every discord is locked behind a email+cell phone barrier

Unless it's changed recently users can enter Discord communities without an email via an invite link*, just choosing a username. It's what made onboarding so easy and similar to just joining an IRC server with a nick.

What's been ironic is since Freenode had their spam issues years back there was a push among many channels on that network to allow only registered users (ie: email tied to nicks) to post, which has continued over in the migration to the Libera network and I find really unfortunate for such channels of those networks as low friction and less permanence in ties to identity have been a distinguishing feature of IRC. (Obviously this doesn't affect IRC broadly but those are among the largest networks for tech communities).

* Eg: https://discord.gg/blender

I just tried doing this and was immediately met by a "you must verify your account by phone" screen.

Ah, just re-checked that community and apparently they must have phone-gated it recently, as I haven't seen Blender use that before. Perhaps they got hit with spam, which I know is the reason some add the requirement, even temporarily (which I suppose circles back to the annoying side-effects of spam).

This isn't just a server-specific thing. Discord can and will randomly lock you out of your account completely until you verify with a (unique) phone number even if none of the servers you're in require it. If you have a discord account with no phone number, it will probably happen to you eventually.

> What began as effectively an IRC-like alternative + file hosting and voice support is now being used as a replacement for forums and I think that's where the issue is.

IRC was always an alternative/replacement for forums for many people (there was always the IRC vs forums debate for projects, gaming teams, etc.). Discord is just better IRC (Slack would have been this without the self sabotage via limited free accounts and sleeping on voice chat for years). Now it's more... Discord vs Reddit. But think of all the lost lore on those IRC servers or random private forums that are now gone.

Don’t forget the multiple severs multiple logins hassle, I wasn’t particularly bothered until I got to about the dozen mark at which point I started to resent any new slack I had to interact with, because even with a password manager it was a shitty interaction, because your likely matching on the slack TLD not the per slack unique FQDN, and given that owners can rename the slack and change that it’s not a bad thing to have the slack TLD be the login domain… anyway some people found this a problem immediately (likely not using password managers) and you can tell that it’s been an issue given that Slack really pushed the Magic Link logins pretty quickly, they obviously felt the pain.

> there was always the IRC vs forums debate for projects

Was there? IIRC for any non-tiny community the conclusion pretty much always was to use both, for different purposes.

> now being used as a replacement for forums

In Matrix there is an awful "threaded discussions" feature now, where collapsed forks branch off from the main chat flow. Which you have to separately manage. Keep a chat a chat, and a forum a forum.

Why is this bad, threaded discussions have existed for all internet time

I always wanted to get this feature in chat, as my conversation (with a single person) often consist of few separate, independant threads.

Why do you think the threaded discussion feature is awful? I find it useful to keep track of multiple running conversations with someone or have a topic discussion within say a #Help room.

> file hosting

That part is such a joke. I routinely run into the problem that I can't send someone a screencast because it's over EIGHT MEGABYTES. In 2023. And Discord insists on storing the bit-perfect copies of original images and videos too to add to the insult. I would be perfectly fine with them being compressed and/or stored temporarily but nah. I have to resort to cloud storage services like Yandex disk to go around that asinine limitation.

Your files are too powerful, my ass.

> I routinely run into the problem that can't I send someone a screencast because it's over EIGHT MEGABYTES.

Same. I can't just hit print screen and paste it into Discord, a single frame of my 3440x1440 resolution is too big for their free file size limit. I have to crop and/or scale it first. Just frustrating and an extra few steps.

That is actually one aspect where I agree with Discord : free hosting isn't free !

(And I would prefer that my files weren't arbitrarily modified by the host. BTW, there is software, like ShareX, which allows you to automatically do operations on files when you capture them.)

Sure, then allow me to send larger files and delete them after a while to reclaim disk space, and/or compress images and videos server-side so they take up less space. Heck, even the old-school ICQ-like direct file transfer, maybe through a proxy server of some sort, would be much, much better than this stupid limit.

You can send larger files if you pay for Nitro - basic is $30/yr and allows 50MB, normal is $100/yr and allows 500MB (they recently upped it from 100MB).

And to be fair to them, they offer a ton of features for free - 8MB seems reasonable IMO - though I do agree that some form of auto-compression if your file exceeds the limits would be nice... on the other hand, the infra to run ffmpeg on videos or imagemagick on photos is not free either...

They already process your images to generate thumbnails so that infrastructure is already in place. Then again, I don't need those files to stick around forever as part of the chat history, my primary use case is to show someone something. No one will come back to that file ever again.

Direct file transfers don't incur any storage costs whatsoever, it's only bandwidth. They also already have the relay servers to support WebRTC calls. They could've solved this problem for little to no additional cost if they wanted to. The problem is that they don't want to.

As for paying, Telegram has mostly the same business model (selling subscriptions but also ads in channels for free users) and allows uploading 1.5 GB files for free. With the premium subscription that is doubled to 3 GB.

Oh wow, I wonder how Telegram manages it... because it has an order of magnitude more users than Discord, so economies of scale ?? Or because it might be used a LOT less for non-text ??

> my primary use case is to show someone something. No one will come back to that file ever again.

Well, the whole point of this discussion is that (unless if you do it by PM) this counts as (folk)lore, so you shouldn't assume that.

> Oh wow, I wonder how Telegram manages it...

It's simply the experience and some of the tech stack from VK because most people who built Telegram worked at VK before that. VK, being a Facebook-like social media service, allowed people to upload all kinds of things — photos, videos, music, and even arbitrary files up to 200 MB. Telegram even praises itself on "unlimited cloud storage". I never asked anyone about it, but I'm sure that it works out to each user, on average, not consuming much storage, because most of the media content people send is compressed images.

> I don't need those files to stick around forever as part of the chat history, my primary use case is to show someone something. No one will come back to that file ever again.

I'd suggest uguu.se for this. Hosts up to 134MB per file for 48 hours. No BS web interface and can alternatively use local ShareX screenshotting tool to upload directly to it to grab a link automatically.

Discord will render still the thumbnail for the link and then after the file expires it will just stop rendering in the chat history.

There are a few free, donation-supported temporary file hosts of a similar nature. Discord ime provides just enough free hosting to be broadly convenient, while for larger uploads with 'Nitro boosts' to a Discord group everyone participating gains increased upload limits.

Cynically speaking, platforms like Discord are not interested in their content being widely searchable. If a,user can satisfy their need for information by reading an existing answer (even within Discord), that user needs Discord less. The user depends less on there being an active community in Discord members of which could provide answers.

This all likely means fewer paying subscribers.

So, Discord search should be fine for a few months depth, and need not be good further into the past. Exposing historical data to external search engines is even less desirable.

Same of course applies to Slack, HipChat and whatever other commercial chat-like software.

I don't buy it: making discovery faster and more accessible may result in fewer hours spent on discord, but Discord as a whole becomes more valuable. If slack created some awesome feature that mined your company's chat logs to train something like the Librarian in Snow Crash that would be a massive selling point even if it means fewer chats between human beings. It's s valuable because it produces an answer without taxing another human.

Look at stackoverflow. They made their information extremely accessible and now search engines are riddled with sites ripping the content directly from stackoverflow, rehosting it, and winning SEO on specific questions which bleeds advertising revenue.

Discord, and 99.99% of companies under capitalism, do not care if they produce more value unless they get to keep that value.

I think it works perfectly for stack overflow. Rarely is the full answer in the Google blurb. I almost always click through to the actual SO post.

Again, discord improving search would make users rely on their software more, since searching discord for answers becomes a part of user's workflows. Slack offering a premium enterprise "Librarian" feature would probably have significant demand. Usually, companies that offer more value can charge more for that value. I don't see the logic I how gimping search functionality somehow ends up improving these companies' bottom lines.

> I think it works perfectly for stack overflow. Rarely is the full answer in the Google blurb. I almost always click through to the actual SO post.

No. There are websites that copy the content from SO to their Site, and then they SEO themselves to the top on Google, so that the SO Page is lower than the Copy Page.

This is not about the Google blurb.

This may be the case but it's rare enough I've never encountered it.

I encounter it on a daily basis. Anecdata aside, it’s some amount of lost traffic and humans react to measurable loss much more heavily than they do to potential gain

Stackoverflow made their content available to other companies. This is different making using the discord client and service provide quick answers.

If a random unauthenticated user can find it, which is what I am assuming people mean by making it accessible instead of locked in a discord, then other companies can pull and use the data too. What benefit does discord have to gain by making their content more accessible, that outweighs the possible losses?

Discord having the ability to search through their history and provide knowledge is not the same thing as allowing unauthenticated/anonymous users to mirror all the data. The limiting factor is a human responding to the same question 1000 times or bad search through a channels history. Although one solution would be to give all their data to Google and hurt themselves, the alternative would be to make their own search better within their ecosystem.

>I don't buy it: making discovery faster and more accessible may result in fewer hours spent on discord, but Discord as a whole becomes more valuable.

This could be completely hidden to the Discord devs though. They could very well be slavishly improving various internal metrics. If one of those is time spent in the app, then I could easily see search ending up a lower priority. It doesn't even have to be intentional.

The opposite of stackoverflow problem.

And this is why interoperability is important, and this can likely only be forced via regulatory means.

And you can't even filter out spammy channels like bot command channels. On mobile it's particularly awful where if you look for a message's context, it's very likely you'll lose your "place" in the search panel and have to scroll from the top all over.

You can filter a discord search by what channel the message is in.

But not if you don't. Large servers tend to have information spread across many different channels and if you want to find out about something that may be in different channels, you have to search individually in each of them and that gets unwieldy fast.

IRC was the same way for 15 or so years, all mostly lost.

IRC used to be indexed by Google and such though. Also because irc clients didn't have rich media support a lot of knowledge would make it outside of IRC like code snippets or microblogs that would eventually get indexed.

Google didn't "Index IRC". Source: have been on IRC before Google was a thing.

What Google indexed was people's logger bots putting channel logs on the world wide web.

Many channels had official logs

Reddit is still bad, not only because it's a platform, but also because it tends to lock threads after merely a couple of months (which prevents necroposting, which sometimes IS the right thing to do, while creating a new post is the wrong one) - so even if someone comes in later with a solution, they can't even answer the previous posters !

(and some of the new forums, seems like Discourse has it on by default?)

Hackernews seems to solve this by simply not notifying us of responses, so an ancient post that somehow gets responded to is just never noticed.

Actually, HN has the same issue than Reddit here : it locks threads.

But now I wonder why duckduckgo never seems to show hn results (unless restricted to it of course) ? I have searched hn before as it contains a lot of "Lore" as GP calls it, some of it quite helpful !

I guess that hn is a bit to reddit what is IRC to Discord : because of its focus and lack of features, it's ironically better in this context because most people won't even try to use it for something more serious than "post-it's on the fridge door".

HN may be like the forums for Advanced Custom Fields, which weren't even indexed. I sent a mail to them and submitted added themselves to Bing, which in turn meant being added to DDG afaik.

You’re seeing the symptom of something deeper.

Conventional search was a ~20 year solution to navigating the “entirety” of online content when the available content was within the scope of that innovation. That era is coming to an end. There’s just too much content to index literally and too much noise too quantify quality and that problem is getting worse much faster than crawl+search technology can scale.

So new techniques to navigating content are emerging, some of them calling back to pre-search solutions.

LLM chat assistants drop the literal reference requirement by just mushing up all the sources they can and hallucinating something vaguely relevant to incoming questions. They lean into the noise and try to find patterns in it rather than sources.

Meanwhile, “walled garden” private communities like Discord, Slack, Whatsapp/iMessage, and the growing list of login-required social content sites commit to sharing literal source content but address the noise problem by regimenting and moderating how content is incorporated.

There will almost certainly be a next generation “meta-search” that can help you frame and make queries across these walled gardens, but it’s going to take a long while for the infrastructure and business models around that to establish themselves.

In the meantime, this is what we get and what we can expect for a while.

This is correct. Google became a monopoly and they stopped caring about surfacing any results that they couldn't immediately monetize. If your content is archived in a forum somewhere, Google won't find it anyway, it'll instead show you results from youtube, ads, and whatever is on top of their cache. Search is effectively dead, so we have to resort to asking other humans directly for answers. Which sucks, but that's the phase of the competition/monopoly cycle that we're in right now.

ignoring the problem of robots.txt inaccessibility, is it feasible to have Kagi-style "private google" with a more limited number of high-signal-to-noise sites, especially if you drop the concept of e-commerce and some other low-SNR feeds?

perhaps one interesting thing is that a decent number of the highest-SNR feeds don't actually need to be crawled at all - wikipedia, reddit, etc are available as dumps and you can ingest their content directly. And the sources in which I am most interested in for my hobbies (technical data around cameras, computer parts, aircraft, etc) tend to be mostly static web-1.0 sites that basically never change. There's some stuff that falls inbetween, like I'm not sure if random other wikis necessarily have takeout dumps, but again, fandom-wiki and a couple other mega-wikis probably contain a majority of the interesting content, or at least a large enough amount of content you could get meaningful results.

Another interesting one would be if you could get the Internet Archive to give you "slices" of sites in a google takeout-style format. Like they already have scraped a great deal of content, so, if I want site X and the most recent non-404 versions of all pages in a given domain, it would be fantastic if they could just build that as a zip and dump it over in bulk. In fact a lot of the best technical content is no longer available on the live web unfortunately...

(did fh-reddit ever update again? or is there a way to get pushift to give you a bulk dump of everything? they stopped back in like 2019 and I'm not sure if they ever got back into it, it wasn't on bigquery last time I checked. Kind of a bummer too.)

I say exclude e-commerce because there's not a lot of informational value in knowing the 27 sites selling a video card (especially as a few megaretailers crush all the competition anyway), but there is lots of informational value in say having a copy of the sites of asus, asrock, gigabyte, MSI, etc for searching (probably don't want full binaries cached though).

But basically I think there's probably like, sub-100 TB of content that would even be useful to me if stored in some kind of relatively dense representation (reddit post/comment dumps, not pages, same for other forum content, etc, stored on a gzip level5 filesystem or something). That's easily within reach of a small server, not sure if pagerank would work as well without all the "noise" linking into it and telling you where the signal is, but I think that's well within typical r/datahoarder level builds. And you could dynamically augment that from live internet and internet archive as needed - just treat it as an ever-growing cache and index your hoard.

With a source corpus that's high enough quality, you probably don't even need pagerank, just regular full-text search like Lucene would be enough.

Sounds crazy hard, a lot of moving parts, both human and technical. But if pulled off right I’d pay for that kind of thing, preferably hosted and cared for me in a datacenter

I'd like a browser plugin which allows me to vote up or down websites. This would go to a central community database. Highly upvoted sites would be crawled and archived, and available through a specialized search page.

The users of the plugin if it's at all successful will include SEO types. Without a way of sorting out quality input from generic promotional input, this plugin will not scale.

That used to sort of exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StumbleUpon

as chalst says, once your site becomes successful, spammers will make accounts and upvote their spam and downvote the good stuff.

your solution reduces to the reputation-network problem, it works if everyone is a good actor, or known-good actors (people you know personally) can "vouch" for others across the network (perhaps with reductions in vouch-iness across the network - friend of friends is good, friend of friend of friends ok, 4 degrees out maybe not so much).

But the trivial solution is easily attacked with the "sybil attack", which is one thing crypto was supposed to solve - people would have a good incentive to not forward shit if everyone had to put up a deposit and if they forwarded spam then they'd lose the deposit. But what is the definition of spam, and how can you assert that without attackers using that to kick legitimate users off the network? it's a tough problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

there's an old form-reply copypasta about spam filtering and how your clever solution will not work for the following reasons: and basically "it requires us to solve a user or server reputation ranking problem" is one of the main reasons spam filtering also will not work - remember Bitcoin originally evolved from HashCash which was meant to solve the spam problem! if I provably spent 10 seconds of CPU time solving this random math problem and the solution is provably never re-used, then it becomes infeasible for an attacker to send a bunch of junk messages because they'd need a whole lot of CPUs, right? Definitely not something they'd have access to via, say, botnets... ;)

the other core problem with a lot of these solutions is, attackers are a lot more willing to spend money to get spam in front of users (people make money running those websites after all) than actual users are to spend money to make a facebook post or whatever. 10 cents to make a bunch of impressions is cheap, but I'm not spending 10c to post my cat!

centralized authorities are a relatively cheap solution to these complex problems: if you post spam then facebook decides that it's spam themselves and bans you, done. If your IP or domain sends a lot of spam email then Spamhaus bans you, done. O(1) (or at least O(N)) solution. And that's kind of the neat thing about mastodon too - you don't have to moderate every message, you just have to ensure the groups you're federating with are doing a decent job of policing their own shit, and if they're a problem you un-federate.

It sounds like CommonCrawl: https://commoncrawl.org/the-data/get-started/

You can download it, put it into ClickHouse, and get your own professional search engine.

I've made up the term "professional search engine". It's something like Google, but: - accessible by a few people, not publicly available; - does not have a sophisticated ranking or quorum pruning and simply gives your all the matched results; - queries can be performed in SQL, and the results additionally aggregated and analyzed; - full brute-force search is feasible.

PS. Yes, the Reddit dataset stopped updating.

I don't know about youtube, but duckduckgo has showed me a forum among the top results just two days ago ?

Discord has its place, especially for game communities or other such personal things

I'm not sure Discord is necessarily good for "gaming communities". I mean, Discord is live chat. This is good for some aspects: match making, news, etc. - anything that has a short lifespan. However, a lot of things about games don't. Wikis are perfect for publishing this info. Think of a Street Fighter type game. Characters have their move set, that doesn't change. Imagine having to search through discord for how to do a fireball with Ryu. Then there's strategy - that changes, albeit periodically, after tournaments, etc. By all means, this stuff can be discussed in discord, but the consensus strategies have to be published because it's a terrible experience to search through chat logs and follow along with long finished conversations over who knows how many posts, figure out context, etc. compared to just reading it on a wiki.

Agreed.

I see Discord being used for things where forums (and non realtime conversations) used to rule supreme, like hobbies, tutorials, etc.

Why? A tutorial is not a real time chat. A showcase of hobby projects isn't a real time conversation either. And the searchability of these tools like Discord is terrible. I really don't understand why this terrible thing became popular.

I guess I should be clearer - I'm more referring to multiplayer communities rather than actual game-specific resources. Communities, rather than knowledge resources, are where it's appropriate, basically. Of course, these often end up bleeding into eachother over time.

You would be surprised by the FGC entities that seemingly gravitate towards this very thing.

Most FGC servers solve this by having character channels with the best guides pinned.

Those communities iirc nowadays operate a dual mediawiki + discord server. Dustloop (arcsys, Guilty Gear & BlazBlue mostly) for example didn't vanish entirely to Discord, the discord is instead just used to organize edits to the wiki if I recall.

Discord is absolutely terrible at storing semi-structured information like a wikipage and I don't see them fix that without completely overhauling their entire service (although I'm sure they'll try and muck up the death of publicly available knowledge even more).

GP mentions "lore", that has not been deliberately condensed to a wiki. A forum works much better for lore : to search and reply years later to some very specific question / answer.

(I guess wiki comments and especially talk pages can work too, but they are terrible and not the place for community discussion.)

Slack, IRC, Matrix are all like this too. All the services really need a "Make public searchable archive" option.

Yes, I know this is opt-in, but Matrix has a static & crawlable service for their chats: https://view.matrix.org/

And https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-public-archive

Oh heck yeah, this I did not know!!!

I'd say it's a symptom of how toxic the public internet (especially Twitter) has become. When there is an angry mob constantly scouring every community for transgressions (real or imagined), being unindexed and unsearchable is a feature not a bug.

> discord has a search feature, but it’s pretty awful

Their search makes me want to pull my hair out.

Why can't I just search the history with grep? That's a feature I would pay for (if anyone at Discord is reading this and wants my $10/month)

Because it would be obscenely expensive (in terms of computational resources) to search history via grep. Hence why we use an inverted index.

This is megabytes (at most) of text we're talking about, not gigabytes. And ripgrep is absurdly fast. Grepping a 5MB text file should be pretty much instantaneous.

Do you know of any service that is running at scale out there that stores their data as 5mb plain text files?

The “text files” don’t have to be the primary backing store - merely a derived cache file that can be periodically refreshed with new content. It doesn’t have to be text either - SQLite is pretty structured if you need more features in a minimal container too.

I'd be happy even if they just didn't hijack Command/Ctrl-F. You can't even search for text on the screen you're viewing without being dumped into their shitful pseudosearch.

Microsoft GitHub does this nonsense too stealing add-ons' and native `/` for quick search even when you disable the it in their settings

Massive pet peeve of mine too.

> discord has a search feature, but it’s pretty awful

I don't think it's bad at all, why do you say it's awful? I feel like you think it's bad because you have a negative bias towards discord

It only really works for exact matches. If I have a general idea of what I'm looking for, I can usually hunt it down with google. Discord will give me too many results or no results, which sucks.

I like discord - It makes up a very significant (honestly, majority) portion of my social life. But it's not good for any kind of real information storage (FAQ, guides, expert answers and so on) compared to a forum.

We've had the same thing happen with a local gaming club - we've pretty much wholesale moved from Facebook to Discord. Which is great for current members, but makes recruiting (which is sort of important in a college town) next to impossible.

I will say what I feel like I say whenever this comes up: Discord could contribute to a solution here, even partially, by making Discord Forums search indexable. It would (theoretically) help with the "has my question been answered before" and it would (theoretically) make (some) archival efforts simpler.

Most of German immigration information and advice is locked into private Facebook groups. This information is not good nor reliable, but it's the only way to tell how things actually play out at the immigration office, for example.

That information would serve a lot more people if it was available to them with a simple search.

indeed very disappointing that most games have wikis/subreddits where one can get the gist of it served in a consumer friendly format but public services do not

Well, it's people sharing their personal experiences. I'm sure the government has a public website where they try to be helpful, but personal experiences of immigration are very useful, and just not really something the government can collate (often because they work against each other - people trying to 'game' immigration).

It's absolutely horrendous, and supplementing this information is how I pay the rent.

I'd love to be tasked with improving the official resources, and I keep making new contacts in the city government. This could happen eventually, who knows.

> I'm sure the government has a public website where they try to be helpful

ime more often than not, the focus is not on being helpful to customers but to please organizational demands.

> people trying to 'game' immigration

exactly, why assume hostile intent? if somone wants to immigrate it should be welcomed since most industrial nations have a lack of births anyways.

What's far more unsettling is knowing that Discord's sysadmins, as well as their acquirer (which for a minute looked like it might have been MSFT) have the complete plaintext logs of every DM conversation. Every private link, every NDA'd product info, every insider crypto tip, all the passwords and credentials, all the sexting, all the nudes.... and all linked to your real world identity via the non-VoIP phone number you have to add to your account to join most channel groups ("servers").

The trove of blackmail and extortion data alone is worth a few dozen millions. The insider crypto trading that Discord makes possible is worth probably $20-50mm USD each month.

And the mundane reality is that they won't use it for blackmail or in any such personalized fashion (except for government requests). What they will use it for, is training language models. That's the new way of monetizing "user-generated content", especially one you've managed to lock up so it can't be casually scrapped by anyone else.

Don't forget that if you do decide to delete your account its simply renamed not purged.

One of Discord's shareholders is Tencent (not Microsoft!!), however, the co-founders are still on the board and are highly occupied with day to day stuff. Message deletion on Discord is traceless from the outset (once deleted, no one, not even database admins, can retrieve deleted messages; the same thing also applies to the metadata, but not messages, of deleted users), in fact, this is one of the features they are bragging with. Traceless deletion is verified by both engineering related blogposts and interactions with support.

Do people want to write comments and replies that are publicly searchable?

Discord is nice because it lets you have small talk and build strong communities with a more natural cadence. In the same way we don't record every spoken conversation, I think we don't need to stress about discord going missing. I imagine any historically relevant outcomes of conversations on discord will be recorded outside of discord.

All that said, it's still important to have knowledge bases to reference I agree, but I think that should be an effort separate to Discord. I wouldn't want to search an arbitrarily long chat log to find answers to questions, it's not well suited for the task.

I would say in something like speedrunning there is tons of information that only exists in discord pinned threads etc., and in the combined heads of community members.

To those who care about that hobby a lot of very useful information would vanish if discord went away. That's not a great state of affairs and discord is a very bad place to keep that information, even at the best of times it's not easy to find things in there. But I think it's probably the case for a decent number of communities.

You could definitely argue that it's not historically relevant, since, if speedrunning as a whole disappeared it wouldn't really matter.

> It’s a little unsettling to think about how much information and knowledge is being locked up in walled-garden servers

Not just on Discord, in general, everywhere: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and even here HackerNews.

It's not just about being searchable or long-lived, but that they can pull the rug anytime (or make stealth edits like the Reddit fiasco with their admin Spez)

How to solve this? Should the burden of searchability and archival be a requirement upon companies that provide social media services? Third-party bots already manually crawl all services and provide external search/archive interfaces (like the "Reddit Undelete" services) How to make that better?

I discovered one years ago that Facebook had a trove of useful technical groups that are completely invisible because they are not indexable. I wonder how much knowledge we have lost because of discord and FB are the new forum

Unfortunately, even the LLVM community has chosen a combination of Discord/Discourse, and deprecated their mailing list/IRC channel. This is a very unhealthy trend, and only the most ardent of communities such as Linux/Git/GCC stick to old-fashioned publicly-archived mailing lists.

[1]: https://public-inbox.org/README

Well, that's because mailing lists are terrible.

Not as terrible as Discord.

What if they tried using Substack?

That is if you get support at all. Many times I have not. At least on an issue tracker I can find other people who might have solved a similar problem on their own.

Walled gardens are unfortunately the future of the internet.

The public web is full of bots and adversarial content. Worse, anything you contribute in good faith can be used against you in the future by businesses and governments. Even in the rare case where those institutions are trustworthy, there is no guarantee of them being that way. So, the public web’s only power users are those who seek to influence others, who are therefore adversarial toward any higher minded purpose.

Balkanisation and fragmentation, unfortunately, seem to be at least our near future.

But how does this overlap with federated platforms? Then you can still balkanize into tiny groups but federate among compatible groups to rebuild larger networks bottom-up (I like to draw a comparison to how multicellular organisms are composed of many discrete cells). And if you don't federate with hosts that serve businesses, you can fly way under the radar (Pleroma even has built-in onion routing support IIRC).

Even more unsettling, when you realise there must be a lot of children talking to a lot of adults, about who knows what, on discords invisible to parents and police.

> more and more I am directed to their discord to ask questions - many of which were, in all likelihood, asked dozens of times before

It becomes painfully obvious and a little funny when the question triggers a bot to reply with a link to a pinned comment answering FAQ#36, and you see it happen a dozen times a day.

I wonder if setting up a discourse instance is too much of a friction that businesses are instead choosing a real-time chat inspite of it being awful for knowledge sharing as a whole.

May be there's a need-gap for a low friction forum.

I ran a Discord community that had the privilege of being "permanently banned" from Discord for "distributing cheats" for a game, which was reversed when we explained that no, we actually distribute anticheat software, and discussed cheats quite heavily in order to ensure that the anticheat software was effective. While the ban was reversed after much campaigning and cajoling, Discord Trust & Safety informed us that the data was lost forever.

Unfortunately, we just couldn't back down from the demands to have a discord server, and thus, one was eventually recreated. But the point stands: if you're in a Discord server of sufficient size for something you care about, take note that it can go up in-smoke. If it's a software project, you owe it to yourself to at least have GitHub Discussions so that people aren't railroaded into Discord for everything.

>Unfortunately, we just couldn't back down from the demands to have a discord server

Except you could've, and still can. People need to learn how to adapt. There's no reason a Discord server is necessary for distributing and discussing anticheat software. Thousands of much larger, more important projects are doing just fine without Discord™ servers, and part of it is the people with influence putting their feet down at the mention of Discord, a glorified spyware platform populated with the socially deprived. Discord is rarely ever a key piece of infrastructure necessary for advertising and documentation for the majority of projects that have one attached to themselves.

> Except you could've, and still can.

For many scenes, the community is an integral part of the ecosystem. Unless OP is the only person who can develop anti-cheat software, s/he's beholden to the community even if s/he's among the leader(s).

> People need to learn how to adapt.

They will adapt by starting their own Discord and cutting OP out.

This is exactly it. I’m in a few forums that insist on no discord and unless you go out of your way to provide a chat alternative there will just be unofficial discords.

Discord is a cancer.

Sadly.

The good news is that you'll have additional fragmentation with facebook groups and reddit, all overlapping your community so that no two groups are exactly the same!

If you want to post an update to the community for $thing, you must remember the Discord, Facebook group and reddit sub!

"Hey guys, we already have a reddit sub, do we really need a facebook group?"

"Well, if you don't mind I'll go create an unofficial $thing fb group!"

(Bonus points if you subscribe to all and get to see the same content being posted to every venue, with somewhat the same people reacting to it. It boggles the mind)

You are making it worse yourself by posting your updates on those walled gardens.

Yes. But I mean, these are not communities I created myself. Whatever the platform (phpbb, reddit, fb, etc) I always witness a sizeable portion of the community split away to something else (Discord, etc). It's maddening.

It always ends up being a doomed if you do, doomed if you don't.

If you don't post on those groups or create them, they get created anyway, and now they exist and you have no direct influence on them; and that can easily result in a community misunderstanding and split.

And if you do create them, you've encouraged walled gardening and there will STILL be stuff not duplicated.

Splits can always happen, and are probably a good thing once the community gets big enough, and it is also a good thing that these splits are even easier if you're not using platforms.

Doesn't mean you have to support the people that chose to go elsewhere and tolerate those that are advertising platforms.

> and are probably a good thing once the community gets big enough

Splits are happening in small-ish communities too. People don't know why, but they have to have Discord, facebook, reddit, etc. And if you join all of them -- which you often do in case they are similar but not exactly the same ("Why are you asking this? The answer was posted to the facebook group! Oh, but we are in Reddit, never mind, here's a link to fb") -- you'll see some of the same people in all of them. The one caveat is that the "owner" of the community (say, the game devs if this is about a game) are likely to be more active in only one of the platforms; Murphy's Law dictates it likely won't be in the one you prefer.

Which really raises the question, if (almost) the same bunch of people is posting in Discord/fb/reddit/whatever, do we really need all those platforms? What purpose do they serve?

But indeed it's doomed if you do and doomed if you don't. You have no control. You can be sure someone will create that goddamn Discord.

Yeah, the best you can do (as the "leader" or dev or whatever) is pick ONE and stick with it religiously. And "reddit" is probably the best of the worst available, at least it can be linked from elsewhere.

But for large groups of the world (who are not 'gamers' or 'computer literate' or whatever) Facebook wins because everyone has Facebook.

No, again, the best is no platforms at all, so probably phpbb forums (or maybe as other have suggested, newsgroups ?)

> probably phpbb forums

I loved phpbb forums! I felt in control. Sadly, every community I was part of has moved on from there. One private community (I'm talking fewer than 15 members) I belong to moved to Discord.

It went like this:

"Hey, let's have a Discord"

(me) "But I don't wanna."

"Yesss... it's optional, the forum won't cease to exist and you can opt-out of Discord".

Current situation: the phpbb forum is all but dead. All of the activity happens in Discord. For no good reason, except that people who are online and chatting 24/7 like it. I don't. The forum has died for me.

Rinse and repeat for many other communities I used to enjoy (sometimes it's not Discord but facebook groups, with their absolutely aweful usability which is miles worse than phpbb, but you get the idea).

But, yet again, did you stand your ground and did NOT keep using Discord / (ugh) Facebook ? The forum is only dead if there's nobody posting (or I guess, only 1 person, but it can still be used as a blog of sorts at that point).

I've noticed that one small sized community still has an active forum at the same time as a Discord, I suspect because one/two of the users have absolutely refused to use Discord (it might help here that they are 60+ years old ?).

It makes no sense to stand my ground since the whole purpose of the forum was to stay in touch with a small group of people. The majority moved on to Discord. They haven't officially abandoned the forum, they just don't post there. I tried posting, got zero replies (for a couple of years), then abandoned the forum myself.

I've seen this happen more than once. "Resisting" is not an option if you value the group of people more than the software platform. What would be the point of "making my stand" in phpbb? The forum software is not my friend.

> but it can still be used as a blog of sorts at that point

No. Why would I want a blog? I wanted to keep this community of people.

Depends how much you value these people I guess. (And this is also about not using platforms on principle.)

But I can see how this can be tempting for interacting with people that aren't friends yet (so won't spend extra effort to communicate with you via the medium of your choice), but aren't just random acquaintances any more.

(But personally, at this point I don't see why I would want to associate myself with the kind of people that insist on using platforms.)

> Depends how much you value these people I guess

The people come first, the software comes second. Always. I value people over software.

> (But personally, at this point I don't see why I would want to associate myself with the kind of people that insist on using platforms.)

I... don't know how to respond to this. Yours is such a bizarre take to me. People come first, my preferred software (platform or not) comes a very distant second.

As much as I dislike Stallman's non-tech opinions and actions, I think his proprietary social media handling policy is probably the best:

https://stallman.org/facebook-presence.html

Assuming you must use proprietary solutions to reach your people, RMS's solution is to use the other platforms to convert to your open platform. Maybe that won't work for everyone, but at least it allows usage of cockroach motel systems to your open one.

This is elaborated as POSSE in some places: https://indieweb.org/POSSE

Hmm, I don't know, social media is really good at addicting you, speaking from experience, even owning an account that you don't intend to use is "dangerous", and this seems much worse.

(At least Stallman's advice is targeted at organizations, where the official nature of communications might stop the person doing the job getting in the engagement trap...)

True, but if you're running a website like that where you pull people from, then you should also do some automation work via NodeRed to automate those social media flows.

Its hard to be suckered into a social media site if you never go there. Then again, HN is also a social media site too.

Oh yeah, and can be very addictive and a waste of time too, though thankfully it's very light on the "social" part...

> They will adapt by starting their own Discord and cutting OP out

Exactly. And it's depressing. People of every community think they "need" Discord (or a similar tool) and if you don't create it, they'll create it themselves.

"Hey, what about if AwesomeCommunity had a Discord?"

"I don't see the point, we already have a group here."

"Well, but some people like Discord!"

"Ok"

"Do you mind if we create a fan Discord community then?"

And presto! The community gets Discord and additional fragmentation, whether you like it or not.

Just bridge it to Matrix for archival and for a fallback chat.

Discord is huge with the kids today. I saw my nephew kept checking his phone and like a typical old fart I challenged him and asked what the hell he's checking. Turns out it's discord. He subscribes to channels on discord, some are read-only, just a way of distributing notifications.

The draw is the single sign on. You sign on to one simple service and you have all your friends, all the games you follow, all the groups.

Why does Discord even care if you're discussing/distributing cheats, so long as you obey the law? Who exactly is the Trust & Safety team supposed to serve?

DMCA takedown notices take up employee time, so maybe they formed this team to preemptively shut down anything that looks like it might cause DMCA notices to come in.

Discord has been banning groups for discussing breaking the rules in games completely unrelated to discord.

Many cheats violate copyright licenses and the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/bungie-wins-lawsuit-against-che...

This is the same Discord Trust and Safety team that was defending and participating in communities sharing cub content.

Wonderful.

What in the nine hells is "cub content"? Are we talking about drawn pictures of animals or actual bestiality? One of these is illegal, and the other is... what like Fievel Mousekewitz goes wild?

Fievel Mousekowitz Goes Wild is putting it.... mildly.

Drawn pictures, it's not illegal but it is a bit weird.

You lost me at GitHub : sure, the public part of it is being crawled, but it's still a platform (and a Microsoft-owned one to boot !), so if you care about the Web or libre software, you should stay the hell out of it, regardless of the sub-feature you use.

You mean there's no way to have a bot that logs conversations in discord?

There is. And they are actually quite easy to make. I would suggest this approach to anyone worried about losing information.

I'm so tired of programming communities using Discord in an official capacity. We are the folks that know better and what it means to lose this information and what it means to require sign-ups and giving private conversations to proprietary entities. If you're choosing it as the sole community of your project, you've alienated folks that value their digital privacy—and it was just as easy to set up an IRC room, Matrix channel, or XMPP MUC on a public server which offer broader platform support and a wider array of clients, and some are even decentralized. Do we not believe in FOSS software for our FOSS software?

For a better explanation from someone more eloquent than myself: https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/28/Dont-use-Discord-for-FOSS...

Totally this. When a project decides to go down this route I start questioning their whole decision making and feel alienated as you say.

I can't even tell how often I stopped looking into something because it was too discord based.

Maybe we do, but the mass of people who are just learning is enormous. The idea of keeping this information open and searchable is a cultural thing, and big companies actively undermined this culture with their walled gardens. They became the norm for a vast part of the population. The question is: Can this be reversed?

The mess with Twitter moved a lot of people to Mastodon, we need more events like that.

Note how it took a decade for most people to realize that Twitter is harmful after the 2013 APIpocalypse (when Mastodon got started).

And in the mean time we even had Trump showing every day just how bad it is !

I think it is purely a technology problem. Discord software is good and for text/voice chat nothing really compares to the ease of use, features and ecosystem around it.

Is it though? Is it exceptional? There are plenty of alternatives with feature parity, and the tech like Opus for low-latency audio and overlays for video games was freely available and good in Mumble ages ago (and still good though). Discord isn't particularly lightweight or cross platform compared open options which limits accessibility.

Discord is surprisingly lightweight and snappy considering it's Electron.

I don't know about the voice and video features, but it's the best chat program... that I know of - also note that libre software typically doesn't have half a billion dollars in investment money nor 600 full-time jobs !

But I now have to boycott it because of all the other issues (though I got advanced warning considering it's a platform, it's still a shame...)

> considering it's Electron

It runs in a browser just in general (considering browsers have better access to ad/tracking blocking and other features to its sandbox, it likely wiser to skip the Electron bit) which helps get access to a broader range of devices (like Linux and BSD) in some cases, but there a a wealth of underpowered devices that can't run something this heavy. It seems all attempts at alternative clients for TUIs or native ETD up with cease and desists. Compare to Matrix and XMPP who both offer browser-based clients (both heavy and lightweight) as well as native clients, TUIs and you have a recipe for greater accessibility. Throw in that you can get E2EE and it's decentralized (and by proxy self-hostable) that you'd have to have literally the best UX to compete with that… and to me it's just meh (granted I only used it briefly, containerized, and for a specific client that that Discord without bridging was a good idea).

Yes, my point is that it's much more snappy than any (somewhat complex) software that I've used that uses Electron (that I know of) : Element (though it's getting better) and Atom (vs Spyder running on Qt) specifically come to mind.

I disagree, the network effect is its only draw. For text with images in, Element is just as good, as are Discord's competitors. For voice calls, it's pretty good, but not the best. Can't comment on video calls as I've only used Zoom recently, which sucked.

edit: I've got to learn to reload the page before commenting :P

What do you mean by Zoom doesn't let you comment on video calls? There's an in-meeting chat.

I think he meant that he didn't have an opinion. But speaking of that feature, last time I used Zoom (at height of Covid lockdown), that chat was ridiculously lacking in features, IIRC there were various issues with text not showing up / disappearing on window resizing ? (Ideally one would use a different chat program anyway.)

Alienate privacy? How?

You are requiring users sign up for an account on a proprietary, closed-source, for-profit server. All metadata will flow through this entity and whoever they choose to share or sell this data to. Many rooms demand SMS verification which will often leak who you are and prevent anonymity. Chat platforms also include DMs and smaller group chats for private conversations around projects and there is no E2E so you’re making all of these message be read by Discord. Users must also agree to the ToS set by Discord—not your community—which can change and go against the community wishes. They also have the maximum authority to just axe your community by shutting down its chatroom (it’s not a “server”) if a bad apple breaks those ToS.

Tldr: unless you give them your phone number, then it is no different from the rest of the internet.

It is like acting that hair dresser violates your privacy because s/he wrote your last name and date of visit.

>so you’re making all of these message be read by Discord.

They may, but unless you have proof that they do (except law enforcement cases) then you cannot simply state that they violate your privacy.

Also what kind of privacy informations would you share in OSS community (which should be transparent after all, right?) chat that youre worried about?

Also how IRC server owner doesnt violate your privacy too?

> Also what kind of privacy informations would you share in OSS community

If you are building a community, then people chatter around the common area (this chatroom or server) about work and real life stuff just like they do at the water cooler and at conferences because we’re humans and not code monkeys who want to connect to one another. That’s normal, but letting corporations read that data should not be normalized considering we already have the technology, E2EE. With E2EE law enforcement and the government couldn’t read it either. The public side should be public and search indexable, but the private messages should be private. Without good support of third-party clients (which corps like Discord like to shut down), implementing something like OTR is much more difficult and I doubt many folks would bother going through the effort to exchange PGP keys and, I dunno like, using some browser add-on to seamlessly do the encryption/decryption in the browser for you.

With a technology like XMPP or Matrix, users could self-host a server behind a proxy or Tor and join the discussion anonymously without having to create an account or sacrifice that anonymity if they didn’t want to, and that should be allowed and acceptable.

With IRC, it’s flawed but most of the big servers are at least ran by foundations and non-profits which have different motives with how they would collect and treat that data.

Do you like eavesdroppers when you’re in chatting to a friend in a public space? Would you be happy to be constantly recorded while in such a space behind a closed door too? And then those recordings sold or given to the cops when they requested? Because that’s what you’re signing everyone up for when Discord is chosen, and you have the option of not doing that.

When you see the number of people that are still using Github after Microsoft bought them : I guess not ?

Yes, but also no. Each time Microsoft slips, you do see the waves of folks migrating and a lot of big projects—like KDE, GNOME, Freedesktop—have moved elsewhere since ’16. My concern is more on the education side where schools are starting kids on the proprietary service and YouTube ‘gurus’ saying you need it which might make its growth outpace folks leaving after all these the outages, or some new EEE initiative, etc. that have historically caused migrations. The other concern is communities that have used Microsoft GitHub IDs for identity in the community (i.e. Elm requires all public packages are published to Microsoft GitHub and your user ID is the an identifier, Nixpkgs requires the ID for its maintainers.nix, Unison Share accounts requires sign-ins via Microsoft GitHub, etc.).

While I totally disagree with the forced proprietary collaboration (need an account & can’t contribute without, nor can you self-host or fork to fix the platform) of Microsoft GitHub, at least unlike the Discord situation it is search indexable, reading doesn’t require an account or JavaScript, and is strictly public communication (no DMs floating around). Once you start buying into the larger platform though, the corner for yourself has been painted in—but that’s not to say you couldn’t have mirror that accepts merge requests without an account or still have a mailing list/inbox to mail patches to. (But, like, just set up your project elsewhere in the first place and stop playing into a social media platform masquerading as a code forge—as well as let folks sign up with email or WebFinger)

(agreed about the still better "readability")

Yeah, schools/universities using platforms is particularly bad. At least the EU is starting to wake up (for somewhat related reasons) :

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_I (2015)

> Under EU law, data-sharing with countries deemed to have lower privacy standards, including the US, are prohibited.

"German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools (techgenix.com)" (2022) :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33741537

"France directs schools to stop using Microsoft Office and Google Workspace" (2022) :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33725018

Yep—and Codeberg is right there if you need a EU non-profit for FOSS code hosting which is especially good for students without the money for servers. When given the choice, I’ve been suggesting EU tech of US tech recently knowing they’ll need to follow better data retention and user privacy by law. It’s good to see the indoctrination go down at least in some places.

"If you're choosing it as the sole community of your project, you've alienated folks that value their digital privacy"

so basically no one? cause almost nobody actually cares about digital privacy

I do. Hence why my discord persona is essentially made up and used as a marketing tool for my artsy hobbies, same way as my instagram profile is carefully curated to be something I'm not.

This is one of the reasons I created Linen.dev(A Google searchable Slack/Discord alternative) I had a decent size Slack and Discord community for my previous project and it became a blackhole of information.

You can check it out the repo here: https://github.com/linen-dev/linen.dev

Linen.dev/s/cypress slack-chats.kotlinlang.org

You can also google: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Alinen.dev to see the conversations that has been indexed

THIS. YES.

I wish the `@mention` `!mention` distinction become more widely used. I'm looking forward to checking out Linen once I find a group using it.

I often like to tag people so that it is unambiguous which "Alex" I am referring to and avoids me misspelling the names. But often I don't need to bother people. It would be nice if I could link to the user without notifying them.

How do I compare this to mattermost?

Quick note: On your website, there's this metric:

> Our largest community has seen over 180,0000 Google impressions

Is that 180,000 or 1,800,000?

Apart from that, it looks really good! As I understand it, you actually cache all those conversations, right? So basically, it's like mailing-list archives, but for discord and slack; even if the servers go down or get closed or threads are deleted or move somewhere else, the content on your site stays up?

180 lakh?

I was trying to join Discord, not having any memory of having used it before. Didn't realise I had an account already, so I made a new one. I was then flagged as "suspicious"(I was on my home network...) and told I had to provide a phone number, to verify my humanity. So I did.

It then tells me that phone number is already tied to an account, bans the new account, the old account, and blacklists my phone number. And there appears to be no recourse, no way to explain that I simply forgot I had an account already. So now I guess discord is just off limits to me.

I see people defending discord for lacking search because hurr durr so does IRC. Well, IRC at least doesn't ban you just for trying to use the service.

I don't use my real phone number for foreign data selling companies so I use SMS verification services.

Your situation explains why my accounts always get suddenly banned after a while without information. You can't get around the number thing usually, but having a number that works is not enough appearantly

Which services do you use?

What services are you using? Most I have looked into do not work for the vast majority of applications that are popular

Mostly SMSpva. Depending on the service some countries never work. If I got 2 fails I just ask the support and they usually name me a country that works.

Discord's policies are frankly absurd. I'm pretty sure that at one point, if not now, they suggest using a friend's phone to verify your account if you're prompted to provide a phone number. Discord is too big now to excuse such careless behavior.

I hate having to join discord servers just to see a certain bit of information. It's been especially bad with some open source projects.

I've seen a couple of discord servers using a service called disc.wiki[0]. even though all their actual info is stored and edited in discord, it's then pushed to that service and they can share it without having to invite people into their servers.

Came across it first with a world of warcraft guild who collated a bunch of raid resources there

[0]: https://disc.wiki

This comes pretty darn close to what the author is asking!

> Right now every channel is meant to be both transient and permanent. I know that’ll never change, so create a new “Lore” or “Archive” channel where the moderators tap on wisdom and preserve-forever statements or threads, and they get added over there. Think of it as “Pinning” but they’re pinned forever and there’s a bunch of them.

Disc.wiki seems to literally provide a similar feature, check!

> Make it possible to export this Lore/Archive channel to a reasonable file, like JSON or any other text format.

Disc.wiki provides a web interface for browsing "pinned" messages. HTML is a mostly parse-able text format, so check!

> At the very least, consider some sort of “FAQ” feature/contingency that does a similar function to the old-style FAQs, so people can contribute sets of knowledge in a structured manual instead of an endless search for terms from everyone who ever touched a server.

Ok, there's still some room for improvement. Disc.wiki's homepage claims their docs[0] are built on disc.wiki, so something similar could work.

There could be an open source version of both the cms and the bot but that's at least a step in the right direction.

[0]: https://disc.wiki/docs

It's better, but it still doesn't solve the preservation of "lore" issue : only preserving curated "knowledge".

For instance the failure mode of a detail that might not make it from discussed lore to actually preserved knowledge, but might be critical years later.

To be fair in practice I can't think of a good methodology to automate this selection.

This is probably something that would be determined much later, on a case-by-case basis... which is ideally solved by manually curating such knowledge. You lose some in the process but I'd argue something "critical" should bring attention to the necessity of its archiving.

My point is that you don't know at the moment everything that is going to be subjectively critical for the specific issue at hand years later.

But thankfully it's not so much of an issue, storage is cheap enough these days that ALL (human generated) text can be stored. Just don't use closed platforms like Discord, and 3rd party crawlers will do it for you.

(It's a bit more complicated for multimedia : we're probably at the point that ALL pictures, except the most high-resolution ones can be stored for cheap too, not sure for audio, probably animations too (just not as gifs, for the love of God!)... it's more complicated for video, especially HD and higher, since that is very storage-intensive...)

Ooh, I've never heard of this before, thanks a lot for the heads-up. It's still messy but it's a great base.

Wish it were open source though.

This is becoming a really annoying problem for niche hobbies/communities where resources are already scarce. I think the problem is that accessibility from a search engine was a side-effect more than an intended outcome when people asked questions online. It's too easy to just chat to a real person now on Discord, get an answer, and then have that answer be buried in a matter of hours.

This problem isn't unique to Discord either. In organisations with Slack it's impossible to find answers to previously asked questions, which has in turn caused us to appoint some champions to get people to put stuff in our organisation wiki.

> In organisations with Slack it's impossible to find answers to previously asked questions

It's doubly hard when you had a private chat with someone who got laid off. For some reason Slack makes such accounts/chat history really hard to browse once some time has passed. And sometimes you have valuable information in your chat history with that person!

Further down this rabbit hole: "The Web of Alexandria" by Bret Victor, http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria. ----

> Vannevar Bush's "library of a million volumes, compressed into one end of a desk" may sound quaint to us today. Bush naively assumed that immediate access to a million volumes would require the physical presence of those million volumes. His proposal -- a million volumes in every desk. > > The web, of course, took a different approach. A million volumes, yes, but our desks remain empty. Instead, when we summon a volume, we are granted a transient and ephemeral peek at its sole instance, out there somewhere in the world, typically secured within a large institution. > > Two thoughts: > > It's interesting that life itself chose Bush's approach. Every cell of every organism has a full copy of the genome. That works pretty well -- DNA gets damaged, cells die, organisms die, the genome lives on. It's been working pretty well for about 4 billion years. > > It's also interesting to consider how someone from Bush's time might view our situation. For someone who's thinking about a library in every desk, going on the web today might feel like visiting the Library of Alexandria. Things didn't work out so well with the Library of Alexandria. > >It's not working so well today either. > > We, as a species, are currently putting together a universal repository of knowledge and ideas, unprecedented in scope and scale. Which information-handling technology should we model it on? The one that's worked for 4 billion years and is responsible for our existence? Or the one that's led to the greatest intellectual tragedies in history?

Imagine how much further along libraries could be if they had big research and development budgets - you could use all the NLP, image processing and robotics in the world to catalogue, digitize, sort and backup every hardcopy in existence. And then there is digital media.

If we want to go into a TNG Star Trek future, taking the media and knowledge from those walled gardens and making them accessible and searchable should be a priority for what we would like to call civilization.

Instead, we have multiple digital circuses that happen to contain knowledge, just by grace of providing a way for people to host and discover media.

That NSA datacenter in Utah is probably at what, a few hundred exabytes of capacity now? They should make themselves useful for once and repopulate all the dead images they've certainly collected over the past few decades.

I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA datacenter has only a fraction of the claimed capacity and they used the secrecy to embezzle funds on top of the overpaid contracts to Quislings. Because that is what authoritarians do to buy loyalty.

After all their nominal function is to prevent terrorism by sorting through needle stacks many months after the fact. Failure just means more chances to attack encryption again!

Hah. I am torn between what I hope to be more true.

When it comes to discord the linkages to China side seem stronger via Tencent

This is the problem of the shitweb. Shitweb being a concern from law enforcement agencies regarding the difficulties to capture and analyze internet activities that are buried in pictures with text, video, hyperlocal cultural language (think l33tspeak) and temporal communications. The size of the datacentre likely won't help much.

(Tried to find a link to the definition of shitweb, wow not a great search)

I've seen this rhetoric since Geocities. Discord is the latest scapegoat in a long lineage of successful products that are paradoxically ruining the internet and holding us back from the digital utopia we all dream of.

Thinking like this leaves out the most decentralized part of the system: people. People are the real repositories of lore, and they're the ones who bring the useful things from place to place. It's a mistake to ever think of the internet as a library. Libraries take the kind of work and time you can never expect at a massively distributed group of volunteers to do. The internet has been and will always be ephemeral.

While you are on your soapbox, I'm down here googling for a way to unstick my van window and the diagram is no longer available but at least I can work out what they were probably doing from the text in the Internet Archive. Yeah try that with a defunct Discord.

It's funny to me; what halcyon days are people longing for? When was the Internet an organized, easy place to navigate?

There was a brief moment in 1999 when this tiny startup came on the scene and introduced a search engine that was so much better that all the rest of them functionally died off. Before SEO bots destroyed a lot of that particular search engine's results, it made the Internet feel much more organized, and just typing in what you wanted made it quite easy to navigate! It's now a quarter century later and Google Search has plenty of critics, but for one brief moment in history, the act of finding things on the Internet took a giant leap forwards.

I miss AltaVista, too.

Uh, Google Search was only as good as the as Internet was back then, and in 99 it was pretty bad…

2000-2010 or so.

Its good to remember that oral traditions have been (and still are) huge part of humanity; in many ways discord can be seen as internet iteration of that age old part of culture.

If we are going to supplant oral traditions with a massive disconnected worldwide web (sometimes of lies), and replace learned knowledge with 'googling' as a skill- whats the harm in trying to 1. make technologies that will protect the information, or 2. generate a culture of preservation to protect such information.

Because, as someone else on the Internet put it so eloquently, information wants to be wrong. Sure, you can build your technologies and make your culture and it'll even work for a while, but the average person doesn't really care about all that infrastructure and the rules for preserving content. It's (one of the reasons) why search engines are pushing LLMs so hard - few actually want to search for stuff, they just want to put words in a box and get an answer. They don't even necessarily care if the answer is (very) truthful, just if it's useful!

Geocities deserves the scorn and criticism. It died and took with it untold amounts of websites before archivists had a chance to save them.

I don't think anything has ever really been a suitable replacement for forums. Just bring back proboards and PHPBB, with an automatic CC-BY or similar license, and some archiving and exporting tools, and maybe a mobile app.

https://discourse.org/ is the closest thing I’ve seen to what you’re asking.

I'm actually looking for something like this. Discourse pricing seems to be around $100 per month minimum for a group of 500? It's a huge leap from the forums where minimum cost is about $8/month.

Discourse is free software [0], you can simply host it elsewhere, the pricing you're looking at is their managed option, which while convenient absolutely isn't necessary.

[0]: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

Self hosting seems like a bad idea if you're a random club for vintage cars or something and don't have IT staff. What happens when someone finds a 0day? Or some browser feature changes and nothing works until you update?

It's open-source and easy to self-host: https://blog.discourse.org/2014/04/install-discourse-in-unde...

Ah, I missed that. Thank you!

I swear every time I find answer on discourse it's near-always useless...

Discourse is the modern phpBB. It's really good, and both are about 10,000x better than private chat servers.

Discourse is not really good, it's got endless scrolling at takes forever to navigate what could be done in seconds with pagination.

Pages are a defining feature of old forums, without them it's just another Reddit-alike or something.

The endless scrolling is really annoying. Apparently they can't load more than 10 messages on a page for "performance reasons". But it breaks searching the page, slows down scrolling and a lot of other browser UX.

If you can't performantly display a few hundred short messages you need to rethink your frontend technology.

I don't like it. It works poorly without JavaScript, but this isn't quite the main problem. The main problem is that it seems to have the same sterile look everywhere just like every single "modern" corporate site, the same as new design reddit, facebook, or goolag, or anything else.

That’s because forums are themselves an abomination, just create a newsgroup in the `alt.*` hierarchy or set up a mailing list and be done. Just because you insist on using a web browser to access it doesn’t mean everyone should have to. You can use a web-based client and others can use native clients and nobody is locked out.

Newsgroups have obnoxious hierarchal branching replies, unlike any normal human conversation, unlike what forums do, and they lack lots of minor forum features.

Huh? Things like message threading are not only common on forums (like HN and Reddit and Slashdot and…) but with newsgroups and mailing list they’re entirely up to the client application you’re using to access them.

I use Mail for email and Thunderbird for news on macOS: Mail only presents one layer of hierarchy, while Thunderbird can show replies hierarchically _or you can turn that off_.

With a forum, you’re making that decision for me, instead of letting me make it for myself.

I can’t believe how ignorant people are about how things work.

Congratulations on using your stuff. But I really like my web browser. Thanks.

We need browsers to natively support newsgroups. But that would cause too much political backlash, so it wouldn't happen.

Unfortunately, browsers don't seem to be interested in native support for much of anything. It's all just javascript APIs where the websites are incontrol of the experience instead of your user agent. Video streaming is extremely limited without client-side javascript. They even removed the minimal RSS support that we had.

Reddit is not a forum, HN almost is but not really... The community is

Having hierarchy exist at all changes the way it's used, just like having pointer arithmetic exist in a language at all changes it. You can't just not use it, other people will, and you'll attract more users that like it and fewer that hate it, etc.

I would guess hierarchy appeals to the people with more active minds always running many loosely connected tracks at once, but doesn't do much for everyone else.

Linear threads are a social convention as much as a tech feature. They emulate real life conversations, they encourage separate threads for anything off topic, or catch all randomness threads. They create a linear history you can read through and know the order of events, like a collective story.

Note that chat platforms, which is where the article says all the lore is now, are much more linear, even moreso than forums.

We also have "Flat is better than nested" in the zen of python.

The only thing I can see being beneficial is the ability to mix in random off topic banter and memes and make everything a bit more personal and less like stack overflow... But somehow, platforms with linear threads seem to have a stronger sense of community anyway.

Also, linear threads create a sense of responsibility with every post and topic. Everyone sees them, and the format allows for the users avatar to be prominently visible. It's not just a message to one commenter and the few who dig that deeply. That seems to discourage random low effort fart joke reposts, aside from a small number that one feels are quality enough to merit a post.

Plus, pagination is basically impossible without linear threads, or mostly linear threads. You can paginate top level stuff. But ultimately it's unstructured. Stuff will be buried in the 300th reply to the 12th reply to the 80th reply and you can't navigate if you don't have a bookmark or a spare hour.

You can't jump back about a week or so ish if you're new to a long running thread nobody could read all of.

And maybe most importantly, the target audience of many forums either doesn't know how to, or isn't interested in using special news reader settings. Minimalism and flexibility are themselves, features not everyone needs.

Are you really, honestly suggesting that mail and news supporting the `In-Reply-To :` header and some people choosing to use clients that leverage it to order messages is an almost unbearable burden for community formation?

How is using `In-Reply-To:` to aggregate and order related messages any different than having individual threads in a forum? In a modeling sense they’re effectively identical, one represented by a linked list and the other by a vector.

If anything is adding hierarchy, it’s forums, because people tend to create boards and sub-boards and sub-sub-boards etc. and even there individual threads will develop their own cultures with a critical combination of user mass and time.

I just want the option to interact with fora in a way other than the web, I don’t want to take the ability to interact with them via the web away from you (regardless of my own opinion of it).

It's not an unbearable burden, it's a minor annoyance, of the kind hackers frequently accept, but people looking for polished optimal solutions don't.

Most forums I see have only 4 levels, section, subsection, thread, post, and many don't even have subsections, wheras mail and reddit and newsgroups can have infinite depth.

Also, the number of sections and subsections is generally small and controlled by moderators.

It's a fully dynamic DAG vs a premade mostly fixed DAG with only topic->post levels after that.

The individual threads having their own culture is kind of part of the point.

Newsgroups are much more powerful and general, but the ability of tech to enforce restrictions is just as valuable as it's ability to enable possibilities.

Linear threads is a much simpler mental model, and prioritizes knowledge in the world over knowledge in the head, it's a model that lends itself to directly displaying more of the state, one list you read through in pages, wheras dynamic infinite hierarchy is built for much more interactive navigation and involves much more context in your head especially as a new reader wondering what the heck went on in a thread.

There's 800 replies, 100 are in a sub thread for a meme, 50 are in an unrelated discussion of how lawn decor affects gun politics (With 3 relevant on topic posts mixed in), 400 are top level shitposts, all the real discussion starts at a third level comment...

There's no linear narrative. Especially if drama happens, there's no "Oh, ok, this got revealed then people got angry after that", that immediately jumps out.

It's not a super big deal, but I do think it probably takes away more than it adds for most average users. Considering everyone seemed pretty happy with forums.

But then again I know a lot of really smart people who always have 50 things happening and if you're thoughts aren't linear and there's 100 thoughts in your head connected to every one you actually say, then a less linear platform that relies more on context in your head, and doesn't attempt to just 1-1 mirror IRL discussions probably is a great fit.

Take a look at Groups.io: You can set up a group with both a mailing list and a forum for free, for up to a certain size, and then it’s some minimum price and $0.04/month per user for all the feature.

I've found many useful threads and answers for some super niche and obfuscated stuff on Gitter where you get some discord like benefits (better irc) and is indexed by engines. I liked their model where you can have rooms for topics, repos etc but shame it's hardly used.

Forums are not great for usability though.

You need a unique login for every forum, notifications are a mess and usually via email, the UIs are poor and difficult to use, every forum usually has a different theme with different locations for buttons and settings, there's no real time way to communicate so everything takes forever, and everyone has stupid profile footers in their posts that make you scroll twice as much as you should have to.

There are also bugs like quoting a post that has images reposts all of the images again and creates even more pointless scrolling. Or forums that lack even basic image resizing so someone uploads their 24MP photos and it goes way off the side of the screen and makes the post take ages to load.

I'm sure it could all be fixed somehow, but current stuff is just awful and I absolutely dislike interacting with forums.

What if recording everything that transpires on the internet is a mistake?

Yes, I'm aware I should treat everything online as permanent anyways, but surely there's value in making the intentional choice to archive lore vs just recording everything.

Chat has always been ephemera, whether it was on AIM, IRC, or ICQ. Is Discord different? (Again, yes, I'm aware large IRC servers likely archived some of their content.)

I mean you self answered here. Any person in that discord could be transcribing all the data to a public site, so nothing really changes.

It is different when some communities don't even bother with a website and keep asking you to come to Discord for help... which is then not on the Web to be crawled and found !

The problem that arises here is that a large subset of support and documentation is "locked" behind discord's walled garden. If and when those communities disintegrate there's no real way to get that information back or archive it in some way.

As and example, it's very possible that some Stack Overflow questions from a decade ago are still relevant. If StackOverflow were a discord server then anything from 10 years ago would be impossible to search or completely gone forever.

This isn't about transcribing everything on the internet necessarily, but it is about erring on the side of archival because you don't necessarily know up front what's going to last and what's going to be useful years and decades from now.

A middle ground would be to offer public searchable logs, but strip the usernames. I would be fine with that.

Whenever I see content organized as chat messages I know that it will fade away. It just moves too fast and in too small chunks to be searched, to be interpreted by humans years after it was created. Add a walled garden, it's dead content. It happened to IRC, it happens to Skype logs, WhatsApp, Telegram, whatever. It's convenient but I know that all my chat-like messages will be lost or at least not as easy to access as my email. Same thing for services like Discord vs web sites or forums. It will take ten years for people to realize it, enough time for them to move to something else, come back and failing to find what they were looking for. Then the next generation of content creators will be on another unarchiveable/unsearcheable medium.

Do you think this is true in the world of Chat GPT? Couldn't the IRC/Discord content be indexed and then queried from an AI service?

I've noticed lately that Facebook has been implementing every feature that discord has, though some arbitrarily gated to iOS only or phone app only.

It occurred to me that the only functional difference between the two is that Facebook retains its original content relevancy algorithms and this can be seen as a superset of features, with also an almost monopolistic superset of users.

That leaves Discord's only reason for existence largely cultural and generational. Like the submitter, my mind immediately went back to how great IRC was and how over the years it became increasingly difficult to evangelize for what was essentially an increasingly niche culture more than a platform.

My personal time with discord functionally ended accidentally a little over a year ago with a quiet quitting over about 6 months as hundreds of individual discords with their own set of notification levels culminated in an uncontrollable torrent of annoying noises and popups.

It now gives me anxiety thinking about launching the app.

The app launch anxiety rings true for me. Discord is sensory overload for me.

You can mute notifications for the entire server, change them to mentions only, or any picked channels quite easily by right clicking it

"the entire server" of which there are hundreds

I note that if you are using one of the alternative clients (like Pidgin with purple-discord), they can store local logs that you can then index and search. There is also Harmony for managing your account without touching the Discord website. Note that using unofficial Discord clients can get you banned.

https://pidgin.im/ https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-discord/ https://github.com/taylordotfish/harmony/

Worse are open source communities only using Slack.

As a normal user you cannot search beyond a very small amount of days without paying Slack money.

Slack, often found in American centred projects Vs European in my experience, possibly where the devs already use slack for their paid startup jobs, and where they don't really understand or like libre software as well as the average German developer.

I don't know if it's as true these days but in the early days you couldn't get Discord installed on office computers because of the association that it was a "gaming app".

The free version is unfortunately hobbled but slack is a lot better than discord at least at critical things like "getting caught up on messages that were sent since you last read." Some friends and I recently started a discord server for an async D&D game and it's a real pain to get caught up. They have the same red "you were here" line and the same "X new messages" banner as slack, but discord's default scrolling behavior works against you.

I was trying to find some info about an issue I was seeing on ESLINT the other day... and they told me to join their discord, I couldn't believe it. No, I'm not going to join the discord for a javascript linter.

The age old question between convenience and safety.

Why did people use imageshack? Because easy, because free. Just write a small plugin for the forum software du jour, or download one, and that's it, you're set.

Discord-Is-The-Docs is just the newest iteration of this struggle, and it's not the only one. How much documentation exists "de-facto" only, sitting in some issue tracking software that may or may not be accessible 4 years from now?

Maybe that is not the issue. Maybe it is merely a symptom of how ephemeral and temporary existing systems are and 'Discord4Documents' is just a lazy way to port all the unsexy documentation to one place so that the ones that need to gorge on it, can.

But the ones who need to "gorge on it" can't, because there is no good way to extract, catalogue, organize, archive, or search it.

Yes documentation isn't sexy. It's boring, it's tedious, and I can understand everyone who doesn't want to do it. And it's also key to a projects long term viability. If the only documentation for a project is "the discord", I won't use it, even if an alternative is a less optima technical fit.

Because if I have to come back to fix an issue 2 years later, and I need the documentation, I'd rather read a badly maintained, badly formatted 90s style HTML-ony page, than stare in frustration at an info telling me the discord channel no longer exists.

Unpopular opinion: I don't think it matters too much that we lose all this.

90% of everything is crap. In the case of chat, I think that's more like 99.9% of everything is crap.

The good/important stuff will be repeated and spread outside of its original container. All the good tweets are already on Reddit or Imgur. If Twitter died tomorrow (not as unlikely as it was 6 months ago) then we'd still have a decent archive of the good tweets. All we'd lose is all the dross. The same is true for other platforms; the good stuff gets cross-posted and preserved.

I think it's important that we do forget things. We all say things every now and again that we don't mean, because we're human. I would hate a world where there was a permanent record of everything I've said. I already regret most of my Facebook posts. Also, some answers that used to be correct are now incorrect. We get this problem with tech - I often filter my search for "last year only" when bug hunting because old solutions aren't relevant any more.

I understand that maintaining an archive is important for history, don't get me wrong. I just don't think we need all of it, and I think the important stuff will get preserved through duplication.

> 90% of everything is crap. In the case of chat, I think that's more like 99.9% of everything is crap.

Right but with 90% of everything crap you moved the 10% of good things into closed (for search results) system.

> If Twitter died tomorrow (not as unlikely as it was 6 months ago) then we'd still have a decent archive of the good tweets. All we'd lose is all the dross. The same is true for other platforms; the good stuff gets cross-posted and preserved.

Tweets are searchable and you can't archive.org discord chat easily. Terrible comparison and it is not same for other platforms.

My point is that the good stuff gets cross-posted. So a worthy Discord discussion will be screenshotted or otherwise recorded, and cross-posted to another platform.

Not necessarily

I was trying to get little big planet 2 working on an emulator recently (yesterday) and a lot of information about how to get secret dlc / costumes and use mod tools were hidden in a discord that I only found after a day of searching for the info. someone in the emulator discord recommended a different discord server, which I never would have known about and couldn't find that information anywhere else on the web (archive.org, YouTube videos, alternate search engines)

I agree. I think this is kind of a feature as you can be a bit more relaxed in chat, knowing that it will probably get buried over time.

Discord is a horrible echo chamber for gamers. It is responsible for many of the social contagion-based mental issues and political confusion of our youth and young adults.

Not only FOSS projects should stay away from it, but everyone else too. Don't let your children use it.

What toxic communities did you follow to wind up with that take?

Join anything related to crypto. Openly scamming kids is very very common, not even counting the abysmal spam/scam protection for PMs. 100% echo chambers, all negativity is an instant ban.

> Discord is a horrible echo chamber

Mastodon is the same yet most people want that, smaller communities where they tagalong with others.

Agreed. Frankly, the chamber is itself a problem. The community is just a nicer name for a tribe you currently subscribe to. It is downright folksy. I don't automatically mind, but there is no reason to pretend otherwise.

More like Death of Internet as we used to know it.

Imagine a tranquil and secluded nature reserve [internet] that attracts like-minded people [nerds/geeks/tech enthusiasts] seeking peace and tranquillity. But with the addition of an airport, a nearby suburban development and a sprawling ski resort, the once idyllic space has been transformed into a bustling commercial hub, unrecognisable from its former state. Although you still venture into the park, it feels like a different place altogether, leaving you with a sense of isolation and disconnection.

I'm afraid that the next thing we'll see is AI that creates content that is indistinguishable from human-generated content completely taking over online discourse and social media, together with entire fake personas. Why? Sales & Marketing.

This is happening elsewhere too - all kinds of traditional forums for hardware, be it cars laptops or watches have now almost entirely moved to Facebook groups, only the biggest communities still hang around and even then just barely, with a shadow of their former selves. And Facebook is even worse than discord, with absolutely abysmal search and very few tools to engage with your community effectively. But it's easy to join so a lot of people prefer it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230307024151/http://ascii.text...

I am on so Discords, but whenever I come across an Open Source project that uses it as sole form of support/discussion, I move on and look for an alternative.

It is just not useful at all for any kind of documentation/reference, but also for support: if it’s a reasonably popular project and you’re not on the same time zone, you will never be able to see any replies at all.

Sometimes I can't ask a question to a open source project because they decided to move everything to discord and lock it behind a account verification that needs a phone number I am not willing to put there (or rather don't have)

I literally use less promising products sometimes just because they not yet moved everything to discord

My company, a FAANG, went from having all our documentation in a wiki that is searchable by anyone, to heavily using Quip (some sort of Google Docs).

Engineers resisted for a while because it's obviously awful for documentation. You can't even search it AT ALL. But since all the non-technical staff had an easier life editing Quip than editing the Wiki it's now the defacto solution for all.

This is going to be doom of engineering at this company. Over the years I have found countless things on random wikis from random teams that helped me achieve my own solution. Quip destroyed that.

Discord is the same.

I blame slack for gaslighting everyone into believing chat makes a good knowledgebase.

I actually wrote about this phenomenon in my Tell HN post a few weeks ago:

Tell HN: Discord is obviating my need to use StackOverflow

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34746262

Reading your Tell made me realize something – I just don’t really google things anymore or look for answers online. Either read the official docs or ask the resident expert in my company for help.

SO feels increasingly less fitting as my problems become more niche and discord et al are flooded with newbies who can’t help me. Or it would take so long to even explain my problem that there’s no way a chat has the attention span required.

Depends on the Discord. Some have some pretty advanced members in there, usually the creators of whatever library or framework I need to use.

That might be it. I haven’t needed help with a specific library or framework in a long time. The problems I struggle with are more conceptual in nature. Like how to design a solution so the implementation itself is easy or obvious.

The tools are like a 3rd level concern. Just pick whatever gets closest.

Makes sense. For me, the tools are what trip me up more since they might not be fully documented (and why would they, they have a Discord to answer people's questions /s) so it's incredibly annoying to find a tool that you know should work but don't know exactly how to make it work the way you want.

For more conceptual stuff, I don't usually need to ask questions, I just work it out myself generally. However, there are some great general Discords for that too. Recently I was looking into CRDTs and I joined a Discord that had a lot of researchers for precisely that topic and I could ask them questions on theory and implementation.

It's basically true. I get the best support from some official Discords... A lot of it is from just searching and some is from just posting a question. It would be a pity if it were to just go away and never be recorded for all the smart answers would be lost.

Discord really doesn't have an export feature? Seems like something we should all immediately demand. Especially for paying customers.

Also see https://github.com/freenet/locutus

Unofficial / unauthorized with unique ToU: https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter

That certainly is a unique ToU. While I support the cause referenced in the ToU, I do not support the ToU itself. It violates the ideals of the Free Software movement and the GPL that the software is licensed under.

Oh wow, yeah, just yesterday I had the unpleasant discovery that what I was specifically searching for had been moved from forums to the Discord black hole... which took a while to notice, since it would by definition not show up in search !

This is just one bit of the death of text.

Circa 2010 most games had highly literate walkthroughs on sites like GameFAQs. By 2020 you could find only find walkthroughs in YouTube which occasionally answer a question hard to explain in words (like that level with a jump that doesn’t look like you can make it but you can) but means seeking through 20 hours of video to find the right 15 seconds.

I remember going to a copy shop in 1999 to print out a GameFAQs walkthrough for Fallout 2.

Jason Scott put out a plead to discord in 2021[0], with asks similar to the end of the article to add archiveability to their service, and I basically replied saying this is what we get for ditching irc, and he replied a tepid "I know what you're trying to say."

I love Jason and the work he does and I don't blame him. The thing is Discord was never going to play ball, why would they? Again, we're going to have this discussion in 2026 too and nothing will change. I appreciate now he does offer thoughtful rebuff wrt IRC, but it is a pain then that other platforms like matrix haven't had Discord's uptick.

People just gave up on better interfaces to IRC or other protocols. I get it many things are magic and we don't know how to get numbers, but it can't hurt to try.

[0] https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1345422597505351685

My experience, down to the moment, is that IRC may be "superior" to other services because it never tries to extend past its small set of core competencies. Which means it appeals exclusively to people who are fine with that small set, and every extension past that is lambasted and doomed to obscurity because there's no interest on the whole to push the entire realm as a whole into the late 20th century, much less the 21st.

My response was tepid because I don't like telling someone stuck in a little tiny fishbowl going "the fishbowl is perfectly adequate" and dissuading them that the fishbowl is not adequate. Not that Discord is "the ocean" but it's a cruise ship and it's expensive, and a very nice ride comparatively.

My weblog entry describes a situation beyond Discord, and that of knowledge, and is at best a framing of the problem in a static area, because I believe this is the year Twitter closes down, closes up, or dies.

Err, ArchiveTeam uses IRC as primary communication method.

The site will return to responsiveness when the Hackernews storm is passed. I assure everyone the writing will still be relevant in a day.

The problem with written-down lore is that for every one piece of information, there are six hundred pieces of copy-pasted information, false information, or malicious information; entire forums get SEO-cloned these days. Receiving it in real time from another human being is one of the very few ways you can guarantee it is real.

well.. if you can tell its a human being..

It's worth mentioning that Jason (the author) has dedicated his life to the preservation of information as the "containing" technologies are shifting like sand beneath our collective feet.

He's thought about this stuff for a very long time, in great depth, and is very much worth listening to.

Finger guns

I’ve been working on a fix for this at https://www.answeroverflow.com/ !

It’s an open source project https://github.com/AnswerOverflow/AnswerOverflow designed to index the content of your Discord community into Google

Some example pages you can check out:

An indexed question: https://www.answeroverflow.com/m/1055246179887230986

The C# community page: https://www.answeroverflow.com/c/143867839282020352

pretty neat solution!

How timely, given I was looking into how to archive the content of a server I "run".

Discord has no legal and accessible way of deleting all of your messages. You have to resort to abuse of their terms of service and risk getting banned to delete all of your messages. Do not use Discord seriously or in large quantities.

>Inb4 new service that automates getting you banned

> You have to resort to abuse of their terms of service

Or make a GDPR request and ask your local data protection authority to order Discord to delete them for you. https://noyb.eu/en/exercise-your-rights

Centralization does not scale. Discord's death is inevitable, and it will be far worse than ImageShack.

You're not wrong, but Imgur hasn't even hit that level yet.

I often think that I would be a best practice for slack/discord to auto delete messages after 2 weeks, that would enforce the idea that they are really ephemeral

Also related: companies that think because they have a slack thread discussing a design they have documentation. Hard to find that thing 3 or 4 months later.

Even harder when you've turned on Slack auto-delete for "security reasons."

Really Slack is more approaching IRC when configured like that, except I could still scroll back my IRC client. In Slack they're just _gone_.

Or your company hasn't paid for the 'good' version and the all the old conversations past a certain date are consumed by the Langoliers.

Well, and that's not to mention the massive amounts of personal data and metadata Discord is hoarding and doing whatever it wants with.

I fail to see why this article didn't mention that OpenFeint had a privacy lawsuit in its end as well.

One can only hope this privacy-hostile proprietary platform dies sooner rather than later.

If I think an open source library question might have value to someone else I'll always open an issue on GitHub, even if they try to push to discord.

Maybe if discord communities added AI chat agents trained on their docs and discord discussions you'd have less of an information black hole.

We will at one point know more about the Roman Empire than the World Wide Web 1994-1998, and it doesn't seem right. Huge chunks of cultural output that would be gold for future historians just... lost.

I have been trying to find and join some community of things that interest me. However I am not an expert on any of those things that interest me.

I have attempted several times to join into Discord, forums, subreddits, etc...

From all of those places and over the paper, Discord which is informal chatting should be the one I probably should feel more comfortable with. However, it is not the case. I always feel like an outsider.

This is completely irrelevant to the no back-up search problem here. But I struggle to understand in which case Discord would make for a good community place.

I just think it's the incredible to realize that with all this technology available to us, human brains are still where (most or at least much?) knowledge and lore are stored and retrieved from.

What a well written description of a looming large problem. A great read.

Does anyone remember xfire? I had such a popular username on there that I'd often get messages to sell the account for several $100 as a young kid, which I never did because I liked the name so much.

That was my favorite chat/IM app for gaming. That plus IRC + whatever in-game messaging/chat service, worked just fine. I dont know why they need "community" now ... or "archive" ability. Seems to overcomplicate things.

How feasible would it be for a team of hobby data archivists to scrape a whole server and put it on the public web? I'm guessing this is against Discord rules?

Someone should form a team of archivists. An Archive Force

https://www.answeroverflow.com/

Cool bot looking to help with this problem.

I was thinking of something like this. Maybe have a bot that automatically archives and uploads everything to some site? To archive.org maybe?

Is this guy writing articles about his own tweets?

Yeah! What the hell is wrong with him! Nobody wants to read that!

I moderate a server/community of high-end record makers discussing music production and a common question among us is how can we create a long-term database of all of the niche wisdom being divulged, for the benefit of the younger generations.

So far our best idea has been to publish an Obsidian Vault.

And then there are companies that hire security people fresh out of school and then Discord ends up being blocked.

for whoever unable to access the article directly:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230306164958/http://ascii.text...

Lore will be dead anyway in a few years. AI bots will be flooding the net with shilling indistinguishable from human beings.

The only way to get valid information will be from someone you can be pretty sure is human. The audio video features of things like Discord help, as do verified identities.

I really do hate Discord and other types of chat-oriented help and forums. Mailing lists are still the gold standard, IMHO. It's super easy to keep updated, works with any computer, etc. And most importantly you're not using somebody else's server.

Most things Discord can do (except audio / video), you could do in IRC 30 years ago; Discord just has a nice / usable webclient.

Maybe there's an opportunity for someone to create a nice webclient for IRC (which you could self-host with little effort and get to own your data).

This is not true at all. IRC has, maybe, 10% of the features and ability Discord has. I do agree a good, usable and more modern IRC client is a good opportunity.

A MUC on a modern XMPP client/server can do most of it. There are XEPs for reactions, stickers, threading, etc. and it still works well for small voice and video chats. The voice chat for gaming though is better handled by Mumble.

Can you please list some features Discord has that IRC lacks?

(Since IRC is a protocol, let's use the mIRC application for comparison with Discord.)

A big one is mobile (and laptop roaming) support. IRC alternative is to either run a bouncer (excludes casual users) or to pay for something like IRCCloud.

The bouncer SourceHut provides is the only thing that makes IRC usable for me.

Take a look at IRCv3 specs: https://ircv3.net/irc/

Unfortunately, many of them are still a work in progress. Still, a fully featured IRCv3 client connected to a modern server should be usable by normies.

With jabber I could

- play simple games on Jabber thru the client, like chess or checkers

- inline LaTeX with Kopete

- embedded YT videos with Kopete or some Pidgin plugins

- automatic message translating with Google Translate or similar. It just worked. Again, it was a Pidgin plugin

- OTR/Omemo encrypted chats

- video/audio chats

- multi user chats

- file transfers

- chat from either text mode or from a graphical client

- chat with Gtalk peers

- scribble in a whiteboard

Please, gen-Z ers, stop comparing Discord with IRC, you just show ignorance. If any, compare Discord with Jabber and what we had from 2007 to ~2013-14 and beyond.

IRC and IM are totally different platforms with polar opossite usages. IRC chats were made to be public in order to join a public conversation, IM was made to chat between people you already knew, and sometimes in a group with few peers.

I have noticed this too about gen-Z XMPP ignorance, IRC seems more widely known despite many of them growing up using XMPP. Perhaps gen-Z were too young to care back then, and nowadays open IRC communities appear more plentiful.

Sure. When we were teens/early adults using (a)MSN/AIM/Gtalk they were either toddlers or young children. Too young to be aware.

When they became teens classical IM platforms began to decay/rot because of social media and mobile messengers.

sounds like you have a business

at a company i worked at we had a bot system that would convert significant chat messages into full posts with indexing

create a discord plugin that makes preserving , highlighting , indexing and contextualizing important messages east

While I agree that the locked-off history is a downside to me I think this is actually a benifit to the target audience.

A lot of people want to start communities and this lock in if knowledge and constant asking of the same questions keeps a view of activity and boosts users numbers. It also gives a more personal feel that may encourage people to stay.

Especially for streamers who are trying to make a personal-feeling connection I suspect this is incredibly valuable. Especially if you offload a lot of the repetitive work to unpaid moderators.

Basically the goal of Discord isn't to hold and organize information. The information is just a lure. The search feature exists so that you can convince yourself that the history is useful and available. This leads to people needing to come in and engage in a personal-feeling way.

T'was always thus.

Every so often, another cave is uncovered, knowledge of how to hunt or recordings of various activities etched or painted on the walls. Thousands of other caves are missing or lost forever.

A nifty tool to archive chats: https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter

well, there are multiple solutions for that https://top.gg/tag/backup

Mostly when people think they want a Discord server (ie. not a server), what will actually solve their problem is a Discourse server (an actual server).

They should go back to calling them "guilds", as they still do internally. While also a pre-existing word, its real definition is sufficiently different for there to be no confusion that this is a new & special concept unique to Discord.

I love that Discord is ephemeral. The right to be forgotten doesn't exist on the searchable web no matter how much the EU wishes it were so.

No, it is persistent with denial by deletion.

The cancer called Discord has become so disgustinly common that they ought to be designated as a Common Carrier.

I hate discord. Bring back MSN and Yahoo Messengers

I m often baffled why discord became popular. I guess because genz hate the web and prefer apps. The www is such a boomer perhaps. Discord even brings the UI of apps to the web. But it's not open, how can they live with that

I'm glad we agree that IRC isn't any better but even worse.

As much as I dislike Discord (bad search, terrible notification system) there's also no open platform that can really compete with Discord, they all crumble when it comes to voice chats.

I'll admit that a thing I like about private communities is that they feel more comfortable - that not every single user of the internet will be able to see it.

The whole archival thing (like on IRC) can be done with bots. You could forward a message, add an emoji or ping the bot to archive a message.

Indeed, not every conversation has to be on the internet, accessible to everyone.

I thought hackers would care about privacy after all.

Discord is still an unparallelled product if you use it correctly.

If you want open and long conversations then use forum (real forum, not hn)

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