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Comment by Capricorn2481 | Hacker News Reader

I hate that it seems every community seems to start on Discord nowadays. That being said, is this not just a huge gift for Discord to eat Reddit up? A huge portion of Reddit users are millenial gamers and likely have Discord installed already.

Speaking for myself, I have found it increasingly difficult to get questions answered or find useful discussion on Reddit. For seeking information on a niche topic, you can get much more helpful information in a Discord community dedicated to that topic than posting on Reddit and hoping your post is seen. For anything related to gaming/TTRPG communities, Discord is way better.

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Discord could replace reddit for interactive feeds/discussion. But I don't think it could replace it as a repository of past discussions. It's quite common for me to add site:reddit.com on google searches.

Also reddits use of threads/upvotes can trend discussion towards a general consensus. If I want a recommendation for something that consensus is useful (eg r/televisions weekly recommendations). Discord is kind of a crapshoot of whoever is active at the time.

Am I missing something with discord? I'm a user but I generally don't engage in large communities. And there is so much "filler" discussion, that is hard to lurk.

Discord introduced forum channels some months ago: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...

Creating new topics looks similarly to creating a StackOverflow question, where it will recommend an existing topic if it exists, meaning that the search is separate from the dumpster fire that is server-wide search. It also supports pinning posts on top, so weekly discussions like the one you've mentioned are a possibility.

A couple of servers I'm a part of that have it enabled are much more usable than those that don't and use text channels, but that's not a particularly high bar. I wouldn't say it's necessarily better than reddit / GitHub discussions / Discourse. If they made them indexable by search engines and in some sort of read-only mode, it could make an impact.

Ok, but how does that help me if I'm trying to google something and don't even know this discord server exists?

One option would be to google "$tech discord", and another option would be to not put words in my mouth.

But they're still not indexed by Google, aren't they?

If there's no out-of-app discovery, it's still ephemeral content. It cannot be archived, cannot be searched, cannot be found without a discord account, etc.

Edit - Misread you, it sounds like we agree.

> Am I missing something with discord

Not necessarily. But whenever I post on Reddit for a language or programming sub, I eventually get directed to slack because the reddit answers "won't be that good." Discord can fill that niche as well

I'm developing a svelte site and it seems like the whole community is on there. I had a problem with a library so I hopped on the companies public discord and the main author helped me within hours. Reddit is mostly novice learn to coders and stack overflow is difficult to use these days. It's a bitter irony that open source web projects are using a closed platform. Google is already severely broken by SEO spam so it's a non-starter. Occasionally I'll use phind.com for dev searches.

Discord really should invest in making their "posts" feature web-searchable if the server opts in.

Why would Discord want to do that? I get why we, as people, want that; I do not get why Discord, as a company, would want their platform less sticky. "You have to have an account we can track before we let you get an answer" is all but a literal goal for them.

Because you don’t even know the discord server exists. So how is what they’re currently doing attracting the users searching for communities and answers?

Yes we do because 1) this forces the discord server owners to promote their servers on the web. 2) You're more likely to bypass Google all together and just search for open communities on discords catalog. Google is dead now thanks to SEO anyway.

Discord is king if you need information that is only available by word of mouth.

I've found that even trying to search for things I know exist on a Discord server can be very hard to find. One example of this is how statements are split up like text messages. If someone explained something in text over five separate side-by-side posts, then searching for something that appears in two posts but never appears in one will not return the result you want.

I don't use Discord but does it even offer similar features?

Last time I used it it just seemed like a nicer Skype, does it now offer posts in the same way reddit does or is it something tacked on?

It doesn't no. No easily searchable information, can't be indexed to the web, and nearly impossible to find the proper server to even ask in.

Yeah it has a forum system now, but it still kind of sucks since nothing gets indexed by a regular search engine and discord's search is kind of terrible.

It’s more akin to Slack, with text channels and voice rooms.

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