Genuine question: I love Discord, but how on earth is it possible that such functionality was not built-in to begin with?
I really don't understand how the need for indexing and search was overlooked.
I really don't understand how the need for indexing and search was overlooked.
Discord start as "your private place for your friends to talk" during a time where there were a lot of privacy issues with other communication methods.
Then as it grew beyond this scope of being a private place for friends, it would have been good for indexing to be added but indexing a normal text channel is really hard since you don't know where the conversation starts / stops to submit to a sitemap.
Now we've got large public communities and forum channels so it's possible they roll out their own version soon, but it does still slightly go against how their product was originally created so there may be some hesitation with adding it due to not knowing what the community reaction will be like.
Discord started as a way for gamers to chat with one another. Initially the developers even wanted to sell games directly from the platform [1].
I think it would be incorrect to position Discord as a privacy-oriented platform when the desktop client needs to be run in a sandbox because there's no real way to disable data collection.
1. https://www.pcgamer.com/the-discord-game-store-is-now-open/
Discord came about because all the instant messaging services (eg: AIM, MSN) had recently died, Skype was hot flaming gasoline garbage, Teamspeak and Ventrilo were tedious and expensive (for gamers), and otherwise there were no other means of reliable, easy, free, convenient means of voice communications.
Discord was really the best place to hang out with your friends outside of games. Social media was too distant and Steam friends didnt do enough. The old IRC chatroom / Discord format with voice comms and screen sharing is THE way to relate to friends online now.
Now it is one of the most privacy-hostile AND preservation-hostile platforms around.
Realistically, once everything was up and running, and they had moved their DB over to their current platform [1], someone should have taken the keys away from them and just said "Discord is done, it's complete". We likely wouldn't be having this much of a problem with useful information being hidden away behind Discord server invite URLs.
[1] https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-stores-trillions-of-mes...
Now they seem to be leaning into being Slack (notice that you can switch accounts, so your coworkers don't know you're xXxedgygamer69xXx or whatever.)
My takeaway is to always be a little scared about accepting investments. Your investors will make you hire people, who will want to work on something. The end result is a Frankenstein's Monster of a product.
Point being: different needs require different tools. Current trend is doing everything in closed, ephemeral groups.
Some channels contain a high level of knowledge in the same way as a forum, knowledge you won't find posted again, perhaps because the person who posted it no longer works at the company. Some channels are used for work purposes, similar to Slack and MS Teams, and contain async information across timezones about product development, or bug-investigations updates, or design discussions, which are more real-time but valuable to be able to find again. Some channels contain the information needed to enter and participate in multi-month long competitions. The information is not posted anywhere else, even though that would be useful and well suited to a blog or issue tracker.
Some places are using Discord not because it's their favourite thing, but because many other companies and projects in the same field are now using Discord, so it's become expected by users (like Twitter). After all nobody wants to install yet another application, but if everyone in a field already uses Discord for work, then that's what you have to use as well.
My first year of Discord was entirely because it was required by my job, as it was the way everyone communicated at that company.
The point is it was the only way everyone communicated at that company aside from a negligible number of emails (maybe 10 emails in a year), and some Telegram channels with outside parties. So nearly every formal announcement and work-related message, as well as real-time chat went through the company's internal Discord server. When I occasionally searched the company dev channels I found a treasure trove of relevant technical knowledge I couldn't find anywhere else. Knowledge I couldn't get in a reasonable time by asking current people. But being Discord search rather than a web page, it was really hard to keep track of things found, and that knowledge was effectively lost.
At my current job we use Teams the same way the last company used Discord. Teams is worse.
It wasn't overlooked. The point is to make it difficult for outside users to access information unless they sign up.
More and more open source projects are using it and I don't really like it, but what easy alternatives can you recommend to them?
Genuine question, as it is an open issue for me. I want to focus on my project, not setting up and maintain a forum, mailing lists, etc. on top of that.
Github discussions.
A project I follow moved all their Q&A from discord and it's a joy to both search and ask now.
Discord is actively hostile to anyone simply wanting to browse.
Whereas on discord, you might get a great answer which helps you and anyone who is immediately following that conversation but that's it.
Like getting on a call with a coworker or a collaborator on the project. You can technically record it or leave it open to the public, but most people do not because they just see it as not "informing the public" worthy.
I'd rather see something simple and plain (and functional) like phpbb.
A forum is totally different.
And even then, forums weren’t designed to be archived from the start. People just wrote web crawlers and search engines.
(I know Discord has some forum-like functionality now but the point stands.)
The lack of good search really prevents the hostility towards new users that you often see on Reddit/forums where every question is instantly answered by a one liner "use the search" reply.
Discord communities are some of the most friendly and welcoming communities I have ever encountered on the internet. I think a large part of it is the chat nature and inability to easily pull up old comments.
Perhaps you should consider getting your answers from ChatGPT in the cases where a community has decided to be for themselves instead of the greater internet.
That's the difference between the "cozy web" and the web 10-15 years ago. The communities used to grant everyone the right "to get the output of a community while sitting on the sideline" by default; in fact it was weird to gatekeep things that could be useful to others - the only thing that was gatekept was "write access", and it was done based on attitude, not on someone's ability to do networking and invest large amount of time on an ongoing basis.
Of all groups, it's both ironic and sad to see this happening to open source projects in particular. Those projects owe their very existence - and people participating in them owe their skills - to that open, indexed, no-strings-attached knowledge-sharing culture.
I don't think asking noob questions makes you part of the community in the way it matters here - actually contributing.