Q: "How do you do a search and replace for a string in VI"
Me: I cant recall right now, i'd just google it"
However, it did make me realize hidden therein is an actual interesting interview question, similar to the "describe what happens when you type an address into the browser's URL bar and hit enter": describe what happens after you type `:s/foo/bar` and hit enter. Followup version: what about `:%s/foo/bar`? The kind of thing that can be interesting to watch them reason through even if they don't know the answer, or even know what those syntaxes do.
To use Discord in good faith and with open eyes, you have to prioritize communication in the present, and give up hope of archiving anything that was said for people who might need the information in the future.
I just googled "how to use openllm" as an example to test your thesis, and the results look very relevant to me.
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=how+to+...
"Showing results for how to use openlm
Search instead for how to use openllm"
They stem words aggressively, so searching for "repeater", which is a less common, specific term, gives you results including "repeat", a commonly used word. And there's no way to do an exact word search.
That's only half true. Yes, Discord does allow a "rich" chat experience, with channels and servers, but there the similarities end.
IRC is based on an open protocol, with many open source clients available for it, and a decentralized server infrastructure.
Discord is closed and centralized, with only a single client available for it.
You can easily log IRC channels, but there is no easy way to do that on Discord, if it can be done at all.
I've logged every channel I've ever visited on IRC, and I can use powerful text tools to regex search through all of my conversations on IRC and have the results appear instantly. Nothing remotely like that is possible with Discord.
Paging through IRC logs is virtually instant on a modern terminal, while Discord makes you wait a long time between every other page load, so if you need to look through more than a handful of pages it's incredibly slow and painful.
Some IRC channels have their logs published on the web, making them fully searchable through web search engines, but to my knowledge no Discord channels do that.
What happens in Discord stays in Discord.
Its a shame its being used for general communities who don't use or need the voice chat feature. Especially when its an official community for a place, given their stance on third party clients and privacy issues.
If you don't need voice chat, Zulip, Mattermost, Revolt, Discourse, and many other would suffice (Linen recently got featered on HN). If you do, I think even Signal would be suffice these days.
For Discord search, recently Answer Overflow was recently featured on HN [1].
https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenLLM/
I much prefer the HN/Reddit discussion format to Discord and even Stack Overflow.
are discord conversations persisted and indexed on search engines ?
Very few people actually care about indexing the conversations.
There has long been a place in the ecosystem for ephemeral chat. Often alongside non-ephemeral things like written documentation.
/s
C'mon
IRC chats, especially in opensource projects channels, could and would be archived, published over the web and indexed by search engines.
Can you show me how to access the archives of the ask-for-help channel on the openllm Discord server? Right now they're discussing "loading models on CPU vs GPU". No matter how explicit I got, google did not find the discussion.
#haskell on Libra is publicly logged, but I couldn’t get Google to return a quoted phrase from a message a few weeks ago.
Many people on IRC don’t enjoy being in logged channels. I’ve also heard that there are GDPR implications to publicly logging people’s messages without their consent.
Discussion of the difficulty and downsides of IRC logging, from a coulple years ago:
=> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22892015
=> https://web.archive.org/web/20200417001532/https://echelog.c...
The HN blowback to developers choosing to use Discord is just wildly out of proportion.
On the other hand, if people have to actually converse to get an answer to their questions (like back in the real world), newcomers can more rapidly become part of the community, and help make it more diverse.
There's a balance between engaging with new members and not turning it into a time sink for older members. This is probably a good use case for LLMs.
This to me is the real way through this "Eternal September", where in every "cohort" of newcomers, one or more choose to stay close to the doorway to welcome and guide the next cohort.
I’m wondering how could learn from games, making the content also adaptive to user levels/experiences.
It’s prob also the key agenda in education.
In any case, I'm not arguing that it's impossible, but rather that the more comprehensive the archive, the less welcoming the community would tend to be, all other things being equal. To take it to the extreme, I'll posit the following law: "A well-curated archive is the grave of a community"
You can still have channels open to welcoming new people while at the same time having a large archive of answered questions so that over time a reservoir gets built.
Saying that the same questions getting asked over and over again by new people is somehow a more welcoming community, is like saying that there's any meaningful interaction happening when two people say "What's up?" followed by the response "not much". It's a handshake protocol equivalent without actual depth.
I see friends shaking hands
Saying, "How do you do?"
They're really saying
I love you.* FFS, read the fuckin' archive noob and stop wasting our time
* Hey there, thanks for asking! This is actually a pretty common question, and we have guides written up for just this case. Try entering some of your search terms here [link], and come back with a follow-up question if that doesn't help you!
But yes, in fairness, I'll certainly agree that a community which _chooses_ to respond as the former will stagnate and die.
a lot of people who are into tech stuff already have a discord account making joining the community a one click process, the instant nature of it seems to appeal to younger users more than async forums, it's a fairly mature platform so it has a bunch of moderation/customization/integration features you might want, etc.
> are discord conversations persisted and indexed on search engines ?
nope (and that is a drawback many point out)
Slack was the first to really get that right, and Discord effectively emulated them and made it available for free.
IRC users could get there with bouncers, but those were always a lot harder to get going with.
We might reminisce about irc but we all prefer discord.
Even the searchability of indexed irc has been surpassed by other knowledge sites. It would have to be something extremely niche these days where the only source of info is in an irc chat log
My main problem with Discord is that it's someone else's centralized, for-profit company and has no apparent barriers to enshittification[0]. As Reddit recently demonstrated, it's probably a mistake to build communities on top of something like that.
Matrix is a good candidate for a modern successor to IRC. It's not quite as slick a UX as Discord, but it addresses the main advantages Discord has over IRC.
[0] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
AFAIK most of the gamers choose it for voice chat (Anyone remember TeamSpeak?)
But it’s crazy, people are aggressive about Discord for some reason. I maintain an OpenAI SDK package for .Net, and I had some random person decide they wanted it to be a Discord community, so they created a Discord claiming it was the official community discord for my library, and submitted a PR updating my readme to say that it’s my project’s official Discord. They also replied to several issues and pull requests telling people to discuss it on that discord. If Discord isn’t paying this person in some guerrilla marketing tactic, they should be...
https://github.com/bentoml/OpenLLM/blob/main/src/openllm/uti...
You can actually try it out on the main branch :P