Hacker News Reader

Comment by rahimnathwani | Hacker News Reader

It might be worth testing different variants of the landing page copy. The version I see is this:

  Google-Searchable and community focused

Slack alternative Sync your Slack and Discord conversations to Linen and get SEO benefits while reducing customer support load

The latter sounds like I need to be a Slack or Discord user, and Linen makes the conversations searchable on the web. But the title (Slack alternative) makes it sound like I can use Linen instead of Slack.

Which is it?

View on HN

Yeah, the "Google searchable" copy specifically is a red flag for me. Does that mean I need to let Google index my corporate conversations?

They are positively fixated on being "google searchable" in a way that is really bizarre.

which is a big plus for open-core companies and open-source projects.

god it's HARD to search on discord.

It's because a lot of projects - not just open source (hell, my laptop manufacturer is now linking to their Discord for support) - have moved their support to Discord, and finding anything on Discord is a huge pain, even if their indexer decides to work that day.

There's a different problem I'm not sure if they've addressed, namely that Google chooses what it wants to index and finds relevant, meaning it's not certain your data will be indexed.

I think that's more down to "Google" being a stand-in for any search engine. Had they written "indexable" the intent would have been less clear.

It's hard to express how much I dislike Discord as a user

why anyone ever thought hyperactive gamer chat was the right way to offer community and support to their tech product is beyond me

I also don't want it in Slack - Slack is office chat for my job, I don't want to be adding random other stuff in there

Please just use a forum. Discourse seems to be the good/popular one.

> Please just use a forum. Discourse seems to be the good/popular one.

Honestly it's a shame that forums aren't a big thing anymore.

I especially loved the look and feel of systems like phpBB or SMF forum software. Just really nice readability and usability, good organization of everything and pretty limited hardware requirements. I'd argue that even better in some ways than Discourse, despite its more modern look.

The only problem was that due to how they were deployed (and how many of the PHP codebases were structured), it was challenging to deal with updates and/or plugins.

Forums are still used a lot, you would think this would result in forum software that's great, but no Discourse is a horrible experience by default.

Discourse is so horrible people would rather use Discord or Reddit - that's how horrible it is.

In what way?

I think I recognise the Discourse forum software across several sites I've used (correct me if I'm wrong about any of these these someone!):

- https://discuss.ocaml.org/

- https://forum.rescript-lang.org/

- https://discuss.huggingface.co/

- https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/

- https://discuss.pytorch.org/

- https://forum.strapi.io/ (maybe)

I don't know if it's a pain to run for maintainers or something, but as a user I have found the experience on these sites infinitely preferable to Discord

Marginally better than discord, substantially inferior to older forum software. Still a pain to get going.

Thank god someone else like Linen is trying their shot at it, before Discourse kills forums by being terrible.

Genuinely don’t know how you prefer it to anything, the only thing it has over Discord is being searchable, the rest is obnoxious. The giant avatar bubbles, the random large numbers thrown everywhere, hiding easy to navigate features from forums in favor of endless scrolling, list goes on.

I don't see why you'd think it's bizarre. Using Google for inbound links was practically Stack Overflow's raison d'etre. If someone searches their question, finds an answer almost immediately via a search engine (doesn't have to be Google), and never bothers your customer support agents, then both parties are better off.

That’s because they started as a static indexable host for Slack/Discord. The real-time chat features appear to be brand-new (to me atleast).

100%, I just closed the tab straight away. No thanks.

So don't use it for corporate conversations? There's already Slack for that. Corporation's private internal communication just isn't the target market.

The issue is the public side of projects that are using Slack or Discord to answer questions. Those questions have to be answered again and again by the poor employee instead of the answer being searchable (via Google, or other search engine).

Yeah, I had the same questions. Is it a chat app, or an indexing app?

After spending some more time it seems to be a chat app that allows importing.

And that's a pity because I got really excited by the prospect of the alternative. It made my gears start spinning for viable ways to accomplish that. Oh, the ideas I'd work on if I had unlimited time...

If you're interested in the alternative of an indexing app, you might like https://www.answeroverflow.com/! It's also open source if you want something to contribute to (for the record i'm the developer of it)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com