Ask HN: Why Discord instead of a public forum? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why Discord instead of a public forum?

188 pointslnalx137 comments

With the Reddit blackout, I see plenty of communities redirecting their members to their Discord.

But Discord is far from being a real knowledge base, it's overwhelming and information is not searchable through a search engine.

Why not use a forum-like solution like Discourse?

View on HN

A big drawback, and what killed many of the original forums, is spam management and maintenance. It's a very lucrative target to attack for two reasons. Popular public forums tend to be very central in pagerank, so if you manage to post comment spam, that's a big win. Forums also act as large databases of usernames and (maybe) hashed passwords, so if you manage to find a vulnerability in the software, you can sell those for decent cash.

This means that forums are always under attack on multiple fronts and require time consuming moderation and maintenance around the clock.

Centralized solutions like Discord and Reddit can use economies of scale to tackle the problem in a much more cost-effective way.

> A big drawback, and what killed many of the original forums, is spam management and maintenance.

It's also what's killed comment sections on a lot of blogs. Nobody wants to have to either periodically clean out spam or go through a queue and approve comments.

The second way is fine and not that distracting, just gets people reading the comments into the "they're filtered by the owner" mindset so there's that. Not that literally any social software can be

And the cost is lack of discoverability, basically forever. Maybe there's a way to layer on discoverability to discord, but I haven't seen one that compares to Google.

Anyway, I repeat myself, I've already written up my thoughts on forums vs slack/discord: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451

> And the cost is lack of discoverability, basically forever.

Sadly, this is actually a feature. Discoverability of content adds an incentive for SEO-style spam. It's very hard to implement technical solutions to this kind of incentive problem. I'm part of a few discords where there's a lot of valuable knowledge about purchasing certain consumer products. If this content were discoverable by millions of people it'd be someone's full time job to game the system.

That's a good reason in this specific case, but if applied on a wider scale, it signifies a rather worrying and sad shift in mentality.

The Internet of open forums and discussion boards was the one where people wanted to share, not hoard. It was a culture of "pay it forward", "growing the pie", "rising tides lifts all boats". A culture that gave us Wikipedia and StackOverflow and all the subreddits that make people append "site:reddit" to their Google queries. A culture that enabled free and open source software to exist, and transform the world. A culture of openness, a culture of hope.

What you described is a culture of fear. Fear of spammers and marketers and adtech companies and other evil scoundrels - entirely reasonable on its own, but also suffocating. A culture of hoarding, a culture of closedness. A culture of not giving a fuck about the wider world. This change, as mediated by technology, is only possible because of the openness that came before - it's literally built on Wikipedia, StackOverflow, and heaps of FLOSS. It walked up the ladder, and is now pulling the ladder up so others can't follow. This new culture will not give us a new Wikipedia or StackOverflow, but rather let both of them wither and die.

On another, somewhat unrelated note, prompted by an earlier discussion on a different thread:

> I'm part of a few discords where there's a lot of valuable knowledge about purchasing certain consumer products. If this content were discoverable by millions of people it'd be someone's full time job to game the system.

That's nice, and I'm both happy and envious. But it's ironic that doing things this way is considered clever and good, even though it's terribly exclusive - yet individuals exploiting their knowledge and skills to achieve the same by technology are considered a problem that needs to be stamped out for the sake of equality. As always, it's not thinking but socializing that wins.

> What you described is a culture of fear

No, most people are not aware enough of these dynamics to feel fear. People want to start and maintain communities. What they know is that certain systems make maintaining community easier or harder. Discord is winning over communities because a random person off the street can run a server without devoting their life to it.

> A culture of not giving a fuck about the wider world.

It's not about not giving a fuck, it's about priorities. People can't afford to spend their life fighting SEO spammers even if they wanted to. I would love for all the knowledge in these discords to be available on the web, so would everyone in the discord, nothing we're saying is secret! But approximately zero of us are willing to fight this fight (I would likely have to sacrifice my volunteer work on helping homeless people find employment and housing to make this happen for a community, is that a good tradeoff?).

Technically there always have been platforms that let you run a hosted forum maintained by others on someone else's host. These were typically paid.

But Discord has a different monetization nodel and that makes a world of difference. It's cheap.

It also has real time communication rather than delayed one, and has video and voice calls as well. On the other hand, it sucks even more than forums at maintaining a persistent knowledge base - but the actual solutions for that are wikis not forums.

The equivalent to Discord from old internet is IRC, not a forum.

>Discord is winning over communities because a random person off the street can run a server without devoting their life to it.

Is that a problem that any other of the dozens of web forums have? It's not exactly hard to make a new user account, create a new forum category, and then start posting topics. Or make an account, contribute to a community, and maybe one day become a moderator.

I don't know any forum that lets you do that so freely, but it's not exactly a technical hurdle (for the site nor the user). Simply one where you don't want a smaller website to spread too thin in the beginning.

At this point I think the only thing that will stop SEO-spam articles is an AI good enough to read with a human-like critical mind that can detect bullshit (or, at least skim the 100 similar articles to get the one useful fact they all repeat).

It makes me wonder about the future of the content producers though since that AI is not looking at ads.

You are 100% correct, but the sad reality is that doesn't make spam management or login security any easier for an admin.

Those concerns are so painful that people are willing to use a tool (Discord) completely unsuited for what they want simply to not deal with them.

A centralized system like Reddit or Discord can amortize both of those over gazillions of users.

I don't know about discord, but the "economies" of scale for reddit were mostly to let the users do it, no? They didn't really develop (powerful) moderation tools in-house, and don't really do much moderation themselves. So I don't see why that shouldn't replicate nicely to multiple public forums.

Sort of. For Reddit, economies of scale applied at the platform level. Sure, individual subreddits had to moderate submissions and comments on their own, however they didn't have to secure servers and networks against attack, manage user credentials, defend against DDoS attacks, etc. Even with spam / abusive content, the more egregious forms would be filtered out centrally, which is more automation subreddit operators had to neither manage nor pay for.

In part. But also consider that because they have site-wide data along with votes and moderation-actions to train on, they're in a position to build a very competent botspam filter.

Like even as a moderator of a popular subreddit, it's actulaly pretty very rare to see the sort of link spam that would plague old fashioned forums or comment sections.

> they're in a position to build a very competent botspam filter.

If that's the issue, then anyone with a little bit of donation money to run a simple LLM will now be able to disrupt discord? Awesome! :)

Moderator users do a lot of work. Even something simple, like a shared blocklist of trolling user accounts could save work. But, better federation moderation tools will also be able to bring some (most?) of the advantages of centralized public forums to decentralized forums.

They have to be doing something. I was missing a few small (50k-ish) subs until recently, and spam essentially was a non-issue. A few years ago my blog needed to have comments manually allowed.

Missing?

*modding

My understanding is that Reddit does lots of spam filtering. It does a good enough job that moderators don’t complain about that. It is good enough that can have mostly unmoderated subreddit if don’t care about off topic posts.

The moderators are responsible for off-topic filtering and catching anything, usually human made, that slips through.

I've moderated tiny subreddits and I can assure you that spam leaks through everyday.

I really don't want to join another Discord server.

Double for Slack and Microsoft Teams (even if they are arguably slightly better than Discord at managing multiple identities across instances.)

> I really don't want to join another Discord server.

Why? There are ways to keep the noise down, and there are plenty of good ones.

It's a proprietary platform that bans third-party clients and its official client is bloated Electron garbage.

Spam would be significantly lessened with a centralized IDP like Google or Facebook to gate the accounts. You can get that aspect of Reddit without needing the full squeeze of the actual content being centralized on their platform too.

The workflow here looks like "you log in with your cloud account and then you create a new username for the forum". Doesn't have to be posting with real names or anything.

This also gets you much closer to a "reddit-like" low-friction user onboarding experience. It's not quite one click but it's like, two clicks and typing in a username. No password management etc, which is of course much simpler from a security perspective too.

I have seen a few sites do it and my initial response was "what? no." but like, you're already accepting a "cloud IDP" in reddit anyway, and there's massive advantages from the dev side. No passwords being stored, much lower friction to signup, etc - you just need the users to buy into the idea.

But please don't make me create a Google, Facebook or Microsoft that all come with arbitrary ToS, auth schemes, tracking, blocking that would cause me to lose access to the forum and absence of support. Please accept custom OpenID providers.

If spammers can just create their own provider, that would kind of remove the point of having IDPs act as a spam gate.

That's not a firm "no" but like, you are transferring the user-reputation problem into an IDP-reputation one, so allowing arbitrary IDPs is not going to work. If you allow federated ones, you need some whitelist or reputation network of which federated IDPs are the good ones.

The people who use Reddit as a knowledge base are not the users that add to the community. When you’re a Reddit moderator, or any type of online-community leader, you care about the people who participate, not the people who lurk and do nothing.

Discord lets members of your community search for messages. It lets you pin important messages to be easily referenced later. It lets you create a link to the message, and send it to others later on, so they can re-read prior information.

Their concern is not “Someone off the Internet can’t find this off of Google, read it, and then close the tab, never to return again.” They simply do not care.

Your post is assuming that moderators are looking for an alternative to Reddit that benefits the lurkers, when, in reality, they are looking for an alternative to Reddit that benefits their community. Discord solves the latter.

Giving relatively trivial access to lurkers is the most reliable way to continue gaining community members - I have been a multi-month lurker on every community i finally became a regular participant in. Not to mention several more subreddits where I have contributed information/knowledge because I happened to visit them but had more information than the discussion already had, which is still valuable to the community even if I do not become a regular member.

Discord is a space for a completely different kind of community, and in no way replaces the longevity or value that comes from a subreddit, or to a lesser extent from a forum.

Communities rarely want to maximize growth: at most, they want a slow and steady growth, and at least they may wish to shrink. You'll find most long-lived communities that actually still have a sense of identity and norms have some form of barrier to entry: whether that be obscurity, extremely aggressive moderation, a strong set of norms which are actively policed by members, or a culture sufficiently toxic (at least superficially) to keep most people away. Often a combination of all of the above. I think for most moderately sized communities too much growth is more of a problem than too little.

> Discord is a space for a completely different kind of community, and in no way replaces the longevity or value that comes from a subreddit

I've been working on a platform that combines the feature set of Discord with the longer form content tilt of Reddit. It's sort of a Discord/Reddit/Patreon hybrid where the posts are search engine indexable. We've built a place to monetarily incentivize ownership over the communities created on the platform as it feels like the people curating the communities should be rewarded for the work that they do.

Here's an example community:

https://sociables.com/community/Sports/board/trending

Interesting. Planning to keep the code private or offering to others as well? I've been wanting to try something like this.

I couldn't identify the wiki aspect (implied by reddit), however looks awesome so far.

At the moment, I think they are just looking to hang on as much of the community as they can, as a bridge to the next thing/until Reddit comes to their senses.

"Longevity"

LOL

That's a pretty short-sighted and selfish approach, though. As others have pointed out, good contributors don't come out of nowhere - they start as lurkers. Many of them remain lurkers. Surely someone run a study on this, but at least in my personal experience on HN and some more discussion-oriented subreddits, the most interesting/valuable submissions are often one-offs done by users who otherwise don't submit or even comment much.

Also: moving the community from an open discussion board to a closed chat strongly favors the most active participants - i.e. those who are dedicated enough or otherwise have nothing better to do with their days than to actively participate. It's not a problem if the "community" is just a bunch of friends and regulars shitposting. It starts to be a problem when large open source projects move from open boards to closed chats, as they effectively shut off anyone who has a day job, kids, or... well anything else to do, tech or otherwise.

Also: lack of (or bad) indexing and search affects not just outsiders, but community members themselves: it's not just that some rando can't find the fruits of your discussion via Google search - it's also you who can't find it one month later.

> That's a pretty short-sighted and selfish approach, though. As others have pointed out, good contributors don't come out of nowhere - they start as lurkers.

I generally disagree with this. I tend to find communities and either (1) engage in them immediately (because they're interesting) (2) forget about them forever.

Most of my community recommendations come either as referrals from other sites or happy accidents. I rarely join a community simply to lurk on it.

I think there's a clear difference in how people relate to the on-line communities, but I struggle to find words to name or even describe it.

Maybe it's partly ADHD thing. I specifically don't engage with any chat-based communities, because from experience I know that

- I only have mental space for ~1-2 such communities at a time,

- If I engage with one immediately, it'll capture most of my attention, to the detriment of everything else I'm doing or caring about, and

- It stopped being sustainable around the time I started working full-time in the earnest.

I have enough trouble staying off HN, and that's a relatively slow-moving discussion board. A Discord equivalent? I just know I won't stick around, I couldn't possibly maintain active commitment to it for more than few days. As for more transactional cases - like, e.g. (real case) official Clojure community Slack, which I joined once to ask about some underdocumented aspect of a library I've been dealing with at work? It's something that I'll do only as a last resort - i.e. if Google, Kagi, Reddit search and Algolia fail me, re-reading the docs and the sources yield no insight, and the problem still remains something I need to solve - only then I'll bother with Slack/Discord, as the entire endeavor feels increasingly costly. It takes time to join and find one's bearing, and then asking the question several times until I do it in the right timezone so the right person sees it, ... I'm feeling exhausted just from thinking about it.

And, FWIW, I also don't lurk in communities, in the sense of regularly reading it while not participating. Rather, I pop in, look for specific thing I need, and close the tab after I found it. I love when this process is seamless and doesn't require any commitment, or bothering other people. Also, when in the process I read something interesting/useful, I love it when I can go back to that same place a week or month later, and still find that thing I read. Something that's nigh-impossible with no indexing or broken search.

You're assuming people who find reddit results in google only use it as a knowledge base and are only lurkers.

I'd say it's the opposite. Every new message is not new, valuable information. 99% of users are saying useless stuff and people interacting daily are only saying useless stuff that doesn't matter. People using reddit as a knowledge base do still contribute and someone engaged in that subject matter by googling it is more likely to be interested in that subject matter and participate in the community that they've found. Communities are killing their discoverability and turning into a closed-off echo chamber and keeping only their useless users.

Genuine question: how are new community members supposed to find the community? I'd imagine a significant number of productive community members initially found the community via search. Of course there's no easy way to make things discoverable only by those who will contribute positively, but choosing to severely limit discovery seems like it's probably not the right choice for most.

Word of mouth. I didn't hear about Reddit, or Twitter, or Google, or any number of modern internet household names through those companies advertising. I heard about it from someone else. It was the same with the forums and IRC channels that came before. Someone invited me because they thought it matched my interests.

There are degrees to word of mouth, though. Stumbling on, say, HN comment from a year ago, that said one can find high-quality Star Trek discussions on /r/DaystromInstitute, is a form of "word of mouth". Being invited to a community personally by existing community member, who themselves were invited by an existing member, ... is a different kind of "word of mouth".

Like everywhere else in the "cozy web" reality, it sucks to be an outsider looking to learn something or start to participate somewhere. With increasing number of hobby groups moving to Discord - or worse, Whatsapp groups - there's no way to observe from the distance or "dip your toes". Instead, you're asked to commit time, effort and/or reputation from the get-go, even before you know if the thing it's worth it.

This very mechanism keeps me away from any communities I'd happily participate in if they were open discussion boards.

Discoverability is worse now without a lot of public forums, blogs, and websites. That was the passer-by's way to find these things before The Great Consolidation. They'd search it up on Google when it still worked, find the website, see the IRC info or the forum signup, and hop on.

That said, Daystrom Institute formed a branch on the fediverse during the Reddit shutdown with some other Star Trek subs: https://startrek.website/c/daystrominstitute

Ironically enough, subreddit sidebars were almost always a great place to find highly relevant and useful discords, forums and blogs.

Exactly. The current trends make a lot of places suddenly out of reach for passer-bys.

Thanks for posting the link. I am aware of the current location of /r/DaystromInstitute, and registered on that Lemmy instance already - but to reinforce my point, I actually learned about it thanks to someone posting that link on HN a few days ago, randomly, in the middle of the Reddit blackout discussion thread. Much like you posting it here, which will hopefully help some other interested people find it.

The network effect is amplified significantly however by the popularity of those companies. You're much less likely to hear about an individual Reddit community by word of mouth. However, once you're aware of Reddit, it's much easier to discover subreddits that suit your interest. The same isn't true of Discord.

Finding Reddit and Twitter by word of mouth is very different from finding a specific subreddit or Twitter account by word of mouth. AFAIK, Discord as a platform doesn't support internal discoverability in the same way as Reddit and Twitter.

Absolutely the same experience for me with Google search, Reddit, HN, Twitter, Discord etc. Word of mouth or getting invites from friends.

Mostly by direct interest. For example, all Discord communities I participate are related to open source projects I follow.

Is there any tooling that can plug into Discord to make the corpus within Discord more publicly accessible, perhaps on a per server basis? Let folks come together where it is easier for maintainers and participates, and offload the heavy lifting of exposing the knowledge to middleware.

"Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36383773 ( 19 hours ago )

Should've asked for a million dollar...

Discord is a shockingly terrible place for information to exist and be helpful to others. The search for messages is very useless, the history management is slow, painful and prone to scrubbing.

Anyone who knows the values of past forums and thinks Discord is in any way an equivalent hasn't used both properly before.

Discord is easier to moderate the same way a chatroom is easier to moderate than a bulletin board at any scale.

>Their concern is not “Someone off the Internet can’t find this off of Google, read it, and then close the tab, never to return again.” They simply do not care.

Depends on the community. In a gaming community, for instance, having low barrier information means you're not stuck explaining things yourself to people who aren't in the same discords as you.

The same reason why Reddit took over Forums in the first place.

No one wants the hassle to admin or run a forum. The good old days of people setting up a forum with Perl or PHP to gather people of interest are gone. You do not have to pay for hosting, no more security nightmare. No software upgrading. No need to care about Web Traffic scaling.

Even just moderating a forum is tiring enough. Most of us have a Full Time Job and some may even have families. Discord or Reddit removes most of the hassle of setting things up.

Do I like Discord? No. But if I were to set up an interest sharing communities I would still have use Discord or other alternative.

Reddit is popular for many reasons but one reason for engagement among multiple communities (subs) stands out above the rest: the cost to join is a single button. You are already logged in and all you need to is discover communities that already exist on the platform, which Reddit facilitates by automatically linking certain strings like /r/subreddit which will naturally (or unnaturally) pop up in conversation. This is a contrast to the way that Web 1.0 and 2.0 BBSes and forums operated where each fiefdom operates independently, requires a user account, and admins or moderators typically had strict rules about linking to other communities out of fear of loosing their own members because the cost for their members to join other communities means an reduction of time spent on their own.

Discord is allows this in a sort of a roundabout (and a rather inelegant) way by letting people send invite links, but discord makes joining a new community a seamless experience, all without you from leaving the discord platform, allowing you to simply switch among your joined communities to engage with each one.

I suspect that this lack of friction to jump on to a familiar platform is a primary motivator exacerbated by the fact that people just want to move as quickly as possible. Discord is already known, familiar, trusted, free, and requires no setup or specialized knowledge on the part of the operator. Moving to a different forum would also require a user to potentially create an new account which in a notoriously friction filled process.

A permanent repository of knowledge made available by a forum’s history is ideal but the people who generate that discussion are not going to be the ones that need that now - they need the community wherever that may exist. I think it would be tragic to see in the long term all this information be kept behind a gate and intermingled with idle chit chat.

The meta-answer is that:

Mods of a community only want to direct users to something that a) they're personally familiar with and b) that they believe most of their users will be familiar with and c) that they believe enough people will join/use.

If I'm a mod of a community (and I do mod a few), the only option I'd consider would be Discord (sadly).

With a short term urgent need to switch to something else, I'm not going to take a bet on some platform that I'm not familiar with, or that most of my users won't be familiar with, or that might be confusing or hard to use.

I've used discourse, I personally feel the UX is worse than reddit, and still also worse than discord (reddit is best of the three because of voting), and I also feel that most of the users of my communities would know Discord and many of them would've used it before and already have accounts, whereas very few of them will have used Discourse and none of them will have accounts (and Discourse doesn't work like that).

This is part of the network effect of community platforms. People want to use things that they think other people want to use.

The two things needed to break that network effect are:

1) Another platform that's a better user experience than Discord/Reddit, or at least, equally good, assuming no users/no content

2) Everyone needs to be aware that everyone else is aware of this new better thing (either because it grows and gets popular, or people can see that lots of other people are using it, or through surveys that break the 'pluralistic ignorance' etc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance)

I get this and it's a fair point but Discord is also a completely different interaction model from Reddit, so it's hard to see how the groups will make the transition. Discord is chat-stream oriented; a subreddit is much more forum-like, with separated topics. Even if you're camped on the Reddit page watching for replies to your comment it still doesn't feel real-time. I think this is going to dramatically change the character of groups that try to migrate. I don't say it'll be objectively worse necessarily, but it will not be the same kind of participation.

Agreed, I think Discord is substantially worse. I do think it's the best of a bad set of alternatives, though.

Because people want a community and Discord delivers on that.

It also has Reddit's critical feature of "one account, infinite communities", something you don't have when you become an indie forum.

It's not very searchable, but people don't care much about that. Just think of how nonessential HN search is to your day-to-day of having a conversation on HN.

"I already have an account there," is a much more powerful force than some realize. Signup fatigue is real, and a lot of people will just hit the back button if it turns out they need to register a new account to participate.

This is something federation (e.g. Lemmy) solves, but it has its own signup fatigue that's higher than average.

OpenID with arbitrary providers aimed to solve this, but never took off. I think I only used it with Stackoverflow. Instead, we got OAuth with Facebook and Google being the only widely-accepted providers.

Layer a federated reputation system on top of OpenID and there could be a pretty robust anti-spam/asshole mechanism for independent forums and reduced signup fatigue.

IRC had "one account, infinite communities" too.

Sorta, kinda. The total set of communities you wanted to participate in were likely spread across 2 or 3 major IRC servers, and possibly several smaller ones. Though out of all UX problems IRC had, this was arguably a minor issue. At the very least, registering an account didn't come with so many strings attached as it does on the web.

That said, IRC was an information black hole in just the same way Discord is, for the same reasons. In my personal experience, running an official channel alongside the official community mailing list was a huge PITA, as the very existence of that IRC channel required constant oversight and regular reminders of its subservient/non-binding role, as otherwise it would quickly end up with the whole community being taken over by a small group of people who had too much free time, and therefore could coordinate everything amongst themselves on IRC, in near real-time.

You could call it "OODA loop mismatch" - IRC and Discord run through their OODA loops an order of magnitude faster than mailing lists and discussion boards, and as a result, unless actively prevented, they take over the community and cut out people who can't keep pace.

I think Discourse is terrible, too. The beauty of reddit/hn is that the more relevant discussions/comments get pushed to the top of a thread. The community constantly shapes the thread such that when you revisit it 5 years later you can quickly glean what is important. A forum is really terrible for that.

It doesn't work so well with controversial subjects, even here. Instead, only the more popular ideas, often the same, get pushed to the top. In retrospect, I view this more negatively than not.

> But Discord is far from being a real knowledge base, it's overwhelming and information is not searchable through a search engine.

I will be the first in line to complain about this, since it's a real loss for the web.

However.

Users fundamentally do not care and want something that works. Discord "works" how they want it to and has built the right patterns/etc to hook people.

Gotta out-compete it somehow if you want people to move.

> Users fundamentally do not care and want something that works.

Arguably, it works less than more traditional forums though (a la Reddit). The fact that web search isn't supported means that users will keep asking the same questions. Searching for topics is harder too (as it's a long line of intertwined topics).

I moderate a room and see this a lot, so...

I also moderate and run support in a Discord. We see that it's harder/less efficient/etc; you and I also both know full well that users don't think about this at all.

Like, tell me the last time a user who came in for support actually used the search bar. I'll wait, lol...

Oh 100% this. To play Devil's Advocate though, I run a Matrix room too and the search functionality on that is a lot worse than Discord (it takes around a minute to actually find something), so most users end up asking again because it's easier (...for them, of course).

I don't like discord but new users can be directed to the Forum Channels and search those. That new feature has helped me.

People have heard of Discord. They probably already have an account. Making a new community is free. Discord handles all the updates and maintenance.

Nobody has heard of Discourse. If they do use it, it's on a whitelabeled forum somewhere. Making a new community requires either paying Discourse $25/mo, or downloading the software and installing it on your own hosting, which is a completely alien concept to most people.

Reddit has pretty much completely killed "forum as a service". There is no alternative that anyone has heard of. Except for the Reddit-but-federated projects like Lemmy and Kbin - and these both had people who actively proselytized them in the discussions of "what should we do if we have to leave". And, again, the financial and technical cost of one of these is completely free to the moderators.

Why are you not going to your favorite Reddit communities and telling them about how wonderful Discourse is, and offering to help them set up and run one?

Personally, I’m not sure how to set up or maintain a forum. All the packages I’ve tried weren’t what I wanted: missing features, clunky ui, etc. Making custom forum software seemed like a pain for something I should be using a package for. And I’m not sure how to deal with spam or weird legal stuff around content people might post

There’s signup friction too: nobody wants to create yet another account. They may not trust sign in via google or Facebook. They already have Reddit/discord accounts though

^ likely the best answer. Forums are difficult to manage whereas on Reddit and discord any user can click one button and have their own community. No user management, etc etc

Most of the time, when people have a question, they don't know what the question is exactly. If they did, they probably could find the answer on the internet. They benefit immensely from having real time questioning and feedback with someone knowledgeable helping them to dissect their problem into a real question and answer.

Discords are not searchable but if someone is there to chat with, that is infinitely better for you, in that moment.

The user experience of stack overflow is garbage, for example.

LLMs also excel in this area.

Also: any discord mod worth their salt will have set up a #faqs channel with the most-frequent questions and their answers.

We went a step further on the iRacing community discord and wrote a bot that will search that channel and spit out answers.

…because users will nearly always just ask a FAQ instead of reading one.

> Most of the time, when people have a question, they don't know what the question is exactly. If they did, they probably could find the answer on the internet.

Counterpoint: selection bias. Most of the people who have a question are the ones who failed to find the answer on the Internet. Chat is good for them, but if chat is the only thing that's left, then much more people will have no choice but to either join the chat and ask questions that could've been trivially answered with a search, or just ignore whatever it is your community is doing/promoting/supporting.

> They benefit immensely from having real time questioning and feedback with someone knowledgeable helping them to dissect their problem into a real question and answer.

Counterpoint: that's only if you're lucky and happen to ask the question when right people are present, willing, and not busy with an ongoing conversation. Otherwise, you'll be spending unpredictable amount of time trying to ensure your question gets seen or answered. And that happens for any question, regardless of how many times it was asked and answered before. Tiring and inefficient.

> Discords are not searchable but if someone is there to chat with, that is infinitely better for you, in that moment.

Exactly. If. That's a big if for smaller communities - and for larger ones, the question becomes if anyone notices your question in the flood of ongoing conversations.

> The user experience of stack overflow is garbage, for example.

It's kind of the polar opposite of Discord, or even Reddit - the experience is bad for participants, but great for passer-bys looking for already-written answers to already-asked questions.

The democratization of the internet with smart phones have had the effect that there are a ton of people polluting the internet with questions that are easily answered by looking just a little bit for the answer before you ask. Like looking less than a minute before you ask. The mentality is "Why should I waste any of my time and effort to try to find out my answer, when I can just ask and see if any idiot replies?"

Yes, they benefit immensely by having people answer their questions at once. But why should these people be benefitted? 99% of them will not even say thank you when somebody made the time and effort to answer their question. They'll just close the tab and get on with their life.

Soon enough experts on discord will get tired of answering any and every question from strangers, without any reimbursement or gratitude. These chats are going to get flooded by it very soon.

cynical and incorrect take imo. also, people are very appreciative on discords generally

> The user experience of stack overflow is garbage, for example.

Which is everything Stack Overflow was trying to avoid with its Experts Exchange killer website consortium.

SO is pretty much dead to me except for search. A lot time ago I stopped trying to even use it or participate in it in the intended way after getting my answers or questions killed for what seemed like no reason.

People still tell you to use the search function on discords, and there aren’t even searchable topic names or the option to use google’s algorithm to power the searches.

Also, the great fun of llms is going on youtube and watching content creators accuse other content creators of cheating and using llms to write their scripts, even if they may just be using it as a research tool to round up preliminary information.

Others have made great points already, but one thing I see mentioned is "I don't want to manage separate logins for all these forums". We need to remember that most people don't use password managers and don't like "logging in" to things. They see it as a hassle.

1 login to thousands of communities ? Easy win for Discord. If everyone made their own forum, these people would get login fatigue and just won't bother.

Many Reddit moderators are interested in Pc Gaming, and Discord is ubiquitous in that space. It’s free, infinite scaling, and there is a big overlap in the user bases.

> But discord is far from a real knowledge base

I think you’d struggle to find many reddit moderators that see themselves as archivists of knowledge. Reddit being a go-to resource for google results is mostly seen as a fluke or unintended side effect.

PC gaming in general is an experience, not knowledge.

However, specific niches of PC gaming are a different thing. There's a myriad of subreddits focused on narrow things like assembling gaming PCs, evaluating GPUs, playing a particular game, modding a particular game, etc. Many of those have a knowledge-generating nature, and among them plenty are maintaining Wiki pages, so that valuable knowledge is not lost (and so that the same questions aren't being asked a hundred times a day).

In general, this is the case with many (most?) subreddits focused on topics that have a knowledge component - be it a hobby like woodworking, a specific diet, a support group for specific mental issue, etc. Where tools for it are present, people maintain knowledge bases, for their own reference as well as to let newbies get up to speed without flooding the group with questions.

>Reddit being a go-to resource for google results is mostly seen as a fluke or unintended side effect.

Maybe to subreddit moderators but to reddit admins and executives and stakeholders, they see it as a major plus that reddit is an ever growing and indexed knowledge base.

Reddit and Discord have two major advantages over traditional forums. It's less friction when you don't have to sign up. If you already have an account, you need only subscribe to the channel/subreddit of your interest. You more easily accumulate contributors, and then you have more content, and then that in turn makes your platform more relevant.

The second reason is that Reddit/Discord is its own source of advertising. You don't start off with a great forum. You have to get people to use it. Probably most forums never get past the ghost town stage before people see it as something worth signing up for.

I'm in a few Discord communities, but I don't enjoy using Discord. Even though I'm only on a few servers it feels like a firehose every time I open it. I get information fatigue. Reddit is similar but to a lesser extent. Plus I get so tired of the captcha-"You're not finished yet"-/verify flow. If you sign up to several servers at once it's not really a good user experience.

It's puzzling. Discord is for real-time chat, not static posting/branching. Completely different in my eyes.

Why? Because some of those children who supported the platform while playing games with friends are now adults and putting their projects behind it. I am so disappointed Discord took off. What an absolute privacy nightmare of a site. It boggles my mind people are working on projects with open source components/ideas and then forcing people to sell their soul just to read a CHANGELOG or find some simple instructions.

I agree with others, forum management was pretty difficult due to spam. But it feels like we could have come up with something else instead of just going all in on Discord.

Some communities do run Discourse. All I see are lots of questions and now answers or discussions. It doesn't really work.

Slack was popular before Discord.

I'd say it partially has to do with a learning curve.

More people are likely to have accounts for Slack / Discord / common tool than a custom forum. Internal (employees) and external (customers) are also likely more familiar with it.

Forums don't seem to work well for Q&A.

Technical systems that we need help with are always complete garbage, users are clueless/eternal September, spammers/trolls/vandals are relentless, and it seems futile to expect people to spend countless hours on moderation and providing high-quality answers for free.

Chat groupware (IRC, Slack, Discord, etc.) doesn't work well for Q&A because the same questions get asked over and over, previous answers are hard to find, the noise to signal ratio is high, and work scales linearly (or worse) with the number of users. And of course they are sequestered and invisible.

Q&A sites like StackOverflow etc. seem to have their own issues: hostility to new contributors, worthless non-answers/spam/AI generated garbage/'welcome to the site' posts/etc., moderator power trips and status games, bad profit-driven oversight, etc..

The main reason HN works, as far as I can tell, is good moderation - which I imagine is a lot of work. I don't have any other explanation of how HN has survived while comments on other sites (ars technica...) have gone to hell.

But few sites can compare to the utter uselessness and idiocy of the Microsoft Support Community, which is indistinguishable from a parody of itself.

I'm not arguing for Discord, but I can see why it "won".. It's centralized, which, philosophically, is terrible, but practically is awesome; Nobody wants to maintain more logins/identities than they want to, most want one, few wants a few, even less wants many. If I'm "on Discord" I can join so many different servers, without ever having to register another account, AND have this one single program keep track of all that goes on within those communities, that is a giant pull for me.

There's a lot of functionality discord got right, like the IRC like chat, except, with some history which is great so I don't need to worry about running a bouncer or other type of bot to "catch up" via a side-channel.

It's just too convenient.

Maybe, in time, Disocord could allow some sort of export or bridge to the web where content could be searchable.

Discord has a very good anti-abuse system in place that prevents most sockpuppet and spam attacks. The moderation burden on a Discourse is vastly higher than on a Discord as a result, and since most public forums have no paid moderators, the optimization of effort is strongly in favor of Discord over Discourse.

Everyone here ignores Discourse because it's not "cool". Some might complain about its UX issues. Yet those same people are tolerating the mountain of issues with Lemmy or Mastodon because they are approaching "cool" status.

I think people are more tolerant of issues with Lemmy and Mastodon because federation is a major benefit that inherently adds some UX complexity.

I think Discourse is fine for what it is, but it's less OK to be a siloed forum in 2023 than it was in 2013. Yes, I'm aware federated forums are just reinventing Usenet, but there was a good idea there we lost sight of in the web era.

The problem with fleeing one VC funded startup for another VC funded startup has nothing to do with the technology.

We're talking about a BBS. We solved the tech problem forty years ago.

Wikipedia figured out a way to pay the bills. How come no one else has tried follow suit?

If Reddit didn't need to make investor money back either by going public or selling (profitability doesn't pay your investors, it makes selling the company to the stock market or buyer easier) and instead was a nonprofit with a mandate to keep the lights on, none this would be happening.

If Discord works - it will adapt. It and its users will grow together.

This is a fundamental point that a lot of great companies miss.

They are built by their users and corporate partners - humans at the core are what drive value.

(Marginally related): the thing that holds me to move to discord it’s because their “conversational” nature instead to be an idea board.

At least for me, an idea board like HN or even Reddit demands a minimum level of insightfulness before post (ok, maybe for Reddit it’s a bit of a stretch) and a discord since the speed of communication it’s high most of the communication it’s just lazy responses, keyboard farting, people spitballing for engagement, and it’s quite easy for any serious conversation derail.

Lowest friction, but yeah I agree. Reddit was useful because it was searchable and self-discoverable, and Discord does not have any of that.

Because the people who "generate content" value participation. Creating a searchable knowledge base is always secondary.

Or even better, they could've used usenet. Usenet has all the benefits of automagically scaling (due to federation) and no worries about the issues of self-hosting (security, updates, etc) but also isn't run by any single company or person. The open protocols of the past are so much better than the proprietary corporate software services of today.

I have been wondering why Usenet and IRC haven't experienced a resurgence. Discord will be the next casualty of corporate greed. It's really a fallacy that these communities are moving to yet another corporate-controlled entity.

Discord and Slack are just IRC with a bunch more features. The IRC protocol just stagnated and never improved (because it's a function of it's time). I believe there was talk of a new version with more features, but that honestly defeats the purpose of IRC: its simplicity. All of these modern protocols have more complexity built into them because that's what the average user expects.

But yeah, the fall of Discord is coming. The enshitification process has begun. Their forcing users to use unique usernames still baffles me.

Unfortunately, I think it's just because there is no single organization pushing it. One that would be the recognizable brand, one that would engage in marketing, and spend time and effort streamlining onboarding.

There were in the past - Slack basically bootstrapped itself off the back of techies, with the IRC transport making Slack seem like a prettier IRC... only to shut down the IRC transport once they've entrenched themselves on the market.

IRC has been heavily wounded by the Freenode implosion, which was for a while the last big public IRC network. I think a lot of types of people who would once have promoted IRC over Discord are now on Matrix instead as a result.

Usenet requires special software and often subscriptions, whereas Reddit doesn't.

Doesn't the usenet have a spam problem?

It did back in the 2000s when it was popular. But even then it wasn't hard to use clientside filters/killfiles to get rid of spam. 15 years of being dead have resulted in usenet having a pretty good signal to noise ratio. If it becomes popular enough to have that problem again I'll be happy.

I've only seen usenet clients stuck in the past. A bit like RSS and IRC. Quite the reminder how lucky we are with the success of web browsers. Email made it something like 1/4 of the way which is still nice.

The functionality of the www also changed quite a bit over the years. If we could do the same with the other clients and protocols it would be quite the something.

edit: How is it that all desktop apps had to morph into web based apps while with phone apps it is the other way around? It cant both be right.

Scaling by making a huge numbers of copies. Basically a blockchain and similarly efficient.

If we're ranking needless waste, this is not worse than modern websites delivering JS over CDNs. In theory this should be a net win - everyone having all the scripts cached locally, or on a nearby static host. In practice, with CI/CD being the norm, you have to reload all the JS every other refresh, because someone changed something - and so do all the CDNs and all other users.

Ok, what website do I go to to get this Usenet thing?

Google used to have Google Groups which was the Usenet groups but web-based.

Usenet was created before the web was created so you can use a newsgroups app to access it if you don't want to use Google Groups.

If you don't have your own infrastructure or knowledge to deploy Discourse there are some costs related to it. As far as I know there is no free tier when it comes to Discourse. [1]

[1] https://discourse.org/pricing

I've been wondering about this myself, and I wonder if anyone here knows: Would Zulip with public conversations be a good alternative? (I've never used public conversations in it and I don't know how they work, but I love Zulip itself).

Presumably they can also be indexed, but I'm not sure at all.

Discord is more popular because it gives more instant feedback. This makes it far more addictive than forums

Reddit is nice because with 1,000s of eyes information moves quickly. Discord is nice because when you can't get the quantity of reddit, you can mimic the quantity via discord because the rate of chat goes up enormously due to the nature of being realtime

According to you it's overwhelming and "not a real KB", but many will consider it a more natural UI for conversing than a web forum.

That's what a lot of people are actually more interested in, just having a place to talk about stuff, not in using/creating a proper KB.

And then it goes into a black hole and no one else will ever benefit from that knowledge. It's a major reduction in the utility of the internet.

Because the web is a dark forest. https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest

Obscurity is a cheap form of security from the predators who lurk there.

I think the main reason: the forum is expensive. They cost a big chunk of money to set up for a large community.

And they missed so many features like a mobile app and notifications. And a lot of things that Discord offered.

I dont like having technical discussions over forums, its far to slow

Funny, I have the opposite - I hate technical discussions over chat, because they move way too damned fast, and I just can't keep track of them and remain focused on anything else - like, say, my job.

Perhaps the difference is that I don't typically start technical discussions - instead, I search for prior ones, which 99% of times solves my problem faster than any chat would.

Assuming the same number of users, I don't see why it would be any slower than Reddit. That's not a problem of forums but of the number of users.

My biggest complaint with forums is the lack of reply indentation.

I don't understand why we would want everything to be accessible from search engines. What's wrong with joining a Discord server and searching there?

A lot of people already have Discord for various reasons. It’s easier to convince somebody to use something that’s already on their phone.

Because you have to maintain it, you can't monetize it, and people are afraid of the legal trouble as well

Aren't discourse.org comments usually embedded into third party web sites? Also it appears they are paid.

Simple, because Discord is real-time chat.

Forums are way too slow and don't automatically load the new messages etc.

And beyond that Discord has group voice and screen sharing too. I use these features all time time in my communities to talk to and help other users.

I don't really understand how anyone thinks a forum is a viable alternative to Discord.

> I don't really understand how anyone thinks a forum is a viable alternative to Discord.

That wasn’t what OP asked though. They asked why Reddit communities are replacing a forum like website with a real time chat where there’s no easy way to search through history.

The question was about replacing a Reddit subforum with a chat, not a discord chat with a forum. Reddit is a slow async platform, forums are too, I don’t see what part of the things you mention makes Discord a no brainer.

Discourse's demographic is not small communities

If I had to guess, Reddit has a huge overlap with gaming where Discord is already immensely popular. It’s easy to set up from both a user and server owner’s perspective, and most Redditors probably already have it installed or have heard of it at some point.

I don’t think I can personally reconcile that reddit/forums are incredibly different products to Discord.

To me, a move from reddit/forums to Discord is akin to a move from MediaWiki to Skype, or vise-versa.

Because gen z uses both discord and reddit heavily

> Why not use a forum-like solution

Because it's serverless *badum tss*

The barrier to first participation is so much lower on Discord.

> i need help lol

That's a poor but passable first attempt at participating on Discord, at worst it will be ignored and you can try again. Such a comment will be deleted / downvoted on a forum and you might even be banned.

Eternal September was a problem in old chat rooms and IRC servers too. Discord isn't unique here.

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