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Comment by grayfaced | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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