Discord is not documentation | Hacker News Reader

Discord is not documentation

shkspr.mobi

577 pointsedent289 comments

There is a trend right now for startups to push everything to Discord, including all support. It is an awful experience for users/customers for the reasons this post cites.

It takes way too much time to both figure out the channel structure and where to post, as well as search to see if a solution has been posted. You also have no idea if someone will actually answer.

If you run a startup and are thinking of moving everything to Discord, please seriously reconsider. It will be a bad experience for at least some of your users.

I also don't understand it from the perspective of the business.

Instead of having information available publicly that can be found via Google or browsing a help portal/documentation website, they want everyone to drop into a chat room and ask a question that most likely already was answered before?

It just adds further work for yourself as well. Yes yes, I know that many won't even touch the help portal/documentation and ask questions regardless, but even if 10% could be helped by self-serve support, wouldn't it be worth it to keep something like that up to date instead?

One of the reasons everyone hates writing documentation is precisely because nobody reads them.

So this becomes a question of whether the time "wasted" writing documentation is cheaper than wasting time answering the same question again and again and again and again and again.

I guess that's true. I also guess one should consider the fact that you could (as long as things don't change) "waste" your time writing the documentation once, and saved time accumulates, while "saving" your time today not writing documentation will accumulate time spent on answering questions over and over.

Saved time today VS saved time tomorrow, the constant question for startups :)

even if people ask the same question rather than looking for docs, it's still a huge timesaver to direct them to the documentation rather than re-explaining from scratch everytime. Plus, after having been shown the docs they _might_ now be aware that they exist and self-serve the next time

Plus it's an opportunity to fix the documentation. You will figure out quickly if a section of it is too confusing. It would also help you to realize if it's not easily discoverable.

Most servers have a bot that people use to store and retrieve common answers so contributors don't have to type it out every time.

Now you could be like clearly that should just be in the web documentation but people still show up and ask even when it is and RTFM isn't exactly nice.

1. Of course people read it.

2. People read the docs when you send them a link to the relevant doc page. Having docs makes your chat support a matter of linking to the right page.

If nobody reads documentation, it means they don't trust it.

Trust is something that documentation for a project has to earn over time.

People will assume the documentation is incomplete and out-of-date, because that's the default for most things.

If it's comprehensive and stays up-to-date with new changes, the project community will eventually come to realize they and start trusting it. But it takes time to build up that track record!

I think we also tend to teach people to not read documentation (or spend time learning anything, really).

Maybe there is some kind of negative reinforcement, too. The way it feels to me is: "I won't write documentation, because users don't read it -> Oh great, I will use ChatGPT to support my users -> The users don't know how to read documentation (or anything other than a 500-letters answer to a chat question) because they do everything with ChatGPT-like prompts -> I won't write documentation, because users don't read it".

Same for many things: most people tend to complain about CMake, but almost every time, I quickly realize that they don't know how to use CMake. Either they complain about it and never used it, or they complain and use it wrong. Therefore many devs try to build alternatives that will solve that problem by "being better than CMake". Turns out I have seen Meson projects that were a big mess, it's not just a CMake thing. On the other hand, people who learn how to use Autotool/CMake/Meson usually manage to make it quite maintainable.

Here the negative reinforcement would be: "People don't learn how to use the tools properly -> They make a mess -> They complain about the tool -> Someone makes a "better tool" -> People don't learn the new tool and make a mess -> repeat.

I truly believe that we could solve many problems by teaching people how to learn, instead of building technology that helps them being productive without learning.

CMake has a bit of a documentation problem, though. Firstly because the tool really was pretty bad at the start and the correct way to use it is the new way, but all the examples people run into in the wild are generally using it wrong, and this becomes self-perpetuating. The second issue is that the main documentation is actually really light on examples, it's just a fairly dry (and not always helpful) description of each part of it. I know there's some pretty good books but that isn't the kind of resource a lot of people are going to use when learning a tool, especially a tool they regard as secondary to their actual goal.

I totally agree that copy-pasting examples from random websites is a bad idea, because there is a very high likelihood that those examples use it wrong.

Regarding the CMake documentation, though, I have been relying on it forever (that's pretty much how I learned CMake), and I personally find it pretty good. That is where I believe there may be some kind of cultural change: I am fine reading the manual (`$ man <command>`) and RFCs and documentation like the CMake one. It feels like "the modern way" is to find an example that does what you need and mimic it (hence the success of stuff like Copilot).

I just feel like my way is more powerful: I can both leverage official documentation (and RFCs, etc) and examples, and I can actually use them together (e.g. read the example, see new stuff there, and go read the official docs about those new things). IMHO, only being able to rely on examples that do almost exactly what one needs is a bit of a loss; people should learn to read actual manuals.

Case in point: Arch Wiki

I don't think that they don't trust documentation. I think that they don't want to invest half or a full day reading the docs and learning every facet of the tool. They are in hurry and if they can find the right answer, discord, ChatGPT, whatever, that would do.

I read all the Unix man page of every command line program I used but there were only a few of them. There are a zillion of tools now, I can't spend days reading their docs: I won't be able to deliver to my customers and get paid. Googling how to do X magically works well enough.

Discord is the very last resort, only if desperate. I tend to keep very far away from tools that have discord as their primary documentation. There are always alternatives.

If nobody reads the documentation, that's an indication of success, not failure.

It means you've done a good job with the product and people don't need help to use it.

I find this prevalent attitude actually harmful. It is kinda weird thing to think that the tools we use should not need any learning or training, that anyone should just be able to pick them up and be productive.

Of course I understand it is reflective of the current situation where naturally it is not worth seeking expertise when software gets at minumum a redesign every six months if not thrown out completely. But I'd really question is that actually good situation to be in?

Yes, but don't confuse cause and effect.

That is one of the explanations but you should not dismiss the others.

People read the documentation and fails to understand it. Writing good clear documentation that successfully guides your users or customers to gain the most value from your product is incredibly hard.

It's fine to have Discord, or something similar, for when you users come to you with a problem, but then you need to consider if you have to go back at update the documentation. Early in my career hanging out on mailinglists was much more popular, frequently you'd ask a question and the maintainers of whatever software you where using would take the answer and put them into the regular FAQ or documentation. Now we replaced Discord with mailinglists and that might be sensible, the feedback loop just should not be excluded. Discord is terrible place to store knowledge.

If it's hard to write documentation that people will comprehend, doesn't that make it equally hard to write near real-time chat messages that people will understand?

Yes and no, but at least they'll be able to provide real-time feedback and you can tailor your response to they specific situation.

That is survivorship bias. You hear only from the customers who don't read it.

(I like writing documentation.)

> I also don't understand it from the perspective of the business.

Is it a "Gen Z-thing"? Discord is already very popular in that segment, so if a company wants to engage with younger customers/users - or has a younger team-members calling the shots, then that would make-sense.

...just something I've noticed.

Honestly, I’d take it over other archaic forms of documentation that came before. These are, off the top of my head, the things Discord solves:

Documentation that requires you to sign up to yet another website.

Paying for documentation.

Documentation in a PDF that you can’t access until you have a sale calls.

Documentation on just a website.

No documentation.

Random forums I have to sign up for that are separate from the help desk sign up that are separate from the actual services signup.

Not be able to search across others issues and to solve problems without needing to ask.

Using HN to get assistance.

Using Twitter to get assistance.

Hoping my email doesn’t get lost or stuck in spam either way.

Having notifications so I can respond.

Not having to sit on some website in some chat window.

Not having to use some crappy web form that won’t take my screenshot because it’s 2MB instead of only being at most 1MB.

Not being able to add attachments at all.

Being able to have a real time conversation with someone.

Still having a search function.

Have something that works well on mobile and desktop. (Oh, but websites work well on both… OH no they don’t have to. People can easily screw that up and make websites that work horribly on difference devices).

All of these things can be solved, but they aren’t.

And keep in mind, the context of the discussion here isn’t documentation that ONLY exists on Discord. Rather, documentation that exists on web AND also stuff that exists on Discord. So, stuff that has yet to make it to the website.

> These are, off the top of my head, the things Discord solves: 1) Documentation that requires you to sign up to yet another website. 2) Paying for documentation. 3) Documentation in a PDF that you can’t access until you have a sale calls.

Huh?

Who has ever had to log into something to view documentation? Discord seems to be the only example!

Paying for documentation? Same thing, never had to it, pretty sure businesses don't think this is viable in any way.

As for the last one, well, getting you on to a Discord and into their marketing drip feed is a lot cheaper than having a sales call.

> Paying for documentation? Same thing, never had to it, pretty sure businesses don't think this is viable in any way.

Very normal when working with ICs.

> Paying for documentation? Same thing, never had to it

It was once very common. Microsoft had a "developers club" that basically sold access to their APIs docs.

MSDN sold a service where they mailed you physical CDs. Once they had the documentation on their website it was all free. (A subscription would get you licenses for QAing on different versions of Windows / additional other stuff, but the help files were free)

I used to spend a nickel or two on O'Reilly books, too. Those were effectively "the manual" for a lot of things, once upon a time.

What's wrong with documentation on a website?

The complaint was about having to sign up to (register for) yet-another website.

Which site requires you to sign up in order to read documentation?

It's certainly less common now, but prior to 2015 it was common for "legacy" vendors (y'know... the paranoid and posessive types, like ProgressDB...) - or just those embarassed about the state of their products compared to the rest of the industry: they'll hide their KB articles, bug-reports and workarounds, and more besides) behind a registration-wall, or even worse: only grant you access if you have a current support contract with them.

Oracle requires you to login to get access to most support documents now.

At least their SQL documentation is public - I remember (at least a decade ago) that only Postgres, MySQL, and MSSQL made their documentation public, while info on IBM DB2 and Oracle was scarce.

RedHat has traditionally.

Right. This is actually what I, and I think most people, actually want.

I don't think there's necessarily a problem with a company operating a Discord server for purposes of community engagement or marketing. But that's an entirely different thing than using Discord as a support platform.

People are just going to post their question on your forum anyway, even if it's been answered a hundred times.

And at least with discord it's easy to source answers from your community instead of paying developers to handle support.

You don't see the majority of people that do not do this, because they never interact with you in any way.

There's always going to be people who don't read your documentation and just post on your form but I think it's a pretty big fallacy to say for that reason it's useless for us to create and publish good documentation. You'd need data on customers that look through your documentation and never post to make that assertion.

The majority of the time they aren’t thinking about the customer, they’re (selfishly, or naively?) thinking about themselves and how they can crowd source their support versus providing real personal solutions.

Google is increasingly useless at surfacing relevant documentation (it prefers SEO blogspam).

The ability to talk directly to a real human is really powerful. I'd rather it wasn't Discord, but it is the lowest friction way of putting people in touch right now - at least, those within a certain demographic.

There are many alternatives to Discord, self-hosted or otherwise, but nothing else comes close in terms of the audience you can reach.

I don't think docs should live in Discord, but I can see why they end up like that.

It's still good for finding documentation if you know the domain it's hosted on, which for product documentation you should. Just add "site:documentation.com" to your search query.

Give me an example of a search for a given tools documentation that doesn’t have the result on the first page. Google seo is bad but I think this is hyperbole because I use it to find documentation easily most every day.

Search "python __init__" (sans quotes)

The the first page of results are from, in order:

    mygreatlearning.com
    udacity.com
    geeksforgeeks.org
    stackoverflow.com
    w3schools.com
    micropyramid.com
    edureka.co
    pythonmorsels.com
    tutorialspoint.com
    pythontutorial.net

Some of these resources are alright, but none of them are python.org or other primary source. As a python user and google expert, I know how to tweak my query to get better results, but if I was a novice I wouldn't.

On the other hand, if I went to the python community discord server, I'd probably get a sensible response from a real human in seconds. (the python discord is particularly excellent, by the way)

Surprising, the same search on duckduckgo gives me:

  www.w3schools.com  
  stackoverflow.com  
  docs.python.org

and a sidebar quoting the 2nd result which is the top voted answer to: "What is __init__.py for" on Stackoverflow.

Google is in a sad state it seems.

Google has a vested interest in you going to websites that serve their ads.

It doesn't seem like python.org answers the question very well? As in the implied question of "What is python __init__?"

The returned sites do?

If I google "php __construct" I get php documentation as the first result.

Google knows when someone doesn't find the answer they're looking for from a result, I suspect the results you're seeing are the ones the majority of searchers for that query wanted.

> The instantiation operation (“calling” a class object) creates an empty object. Many classes like to create objects with instances customized to a specific initial state. Therefore a class may define a special method named __init__(), like this:

  def __init__(self):
      self.data = []

> When a class defines an __init__() method, class instantiation automatically invokes __init__() for the newly created class instance. So in this example, a new, initialized instance can be obtained by:

  x = MyClass()

Seems like a good explanation to me? Maybe people are upset that it's buried a bit in the docs instead of having a tiny out of context statement about it?

[0]: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/classes.html

Yes, I suspect people saw a wall of text and went back to look for a shorter answer.

I would guess google A/B tested those results till python.org fell off the front page.

More to the point, I don't think either google or the people searching are wrong for that. The query isn't "teach me about python classes" it's "what is python __init__?".

Yea, I used to get annoyed when I saw results like this. But I appreciate them more and more. It's still easy to find what you're looking for with a quick Ctrl+F. But there inevitably comes a time when I want to understand a concept deeper, and I can come back to results like this for the longer explanation.

I know that it doesn't have to be either a long explanation or a quick and concise snippet of information, it can be both. But I find that a lot of docs will either have long explanations or short snippets (because time is finite and doing both is duplicating efforts), and in those cases, I prefer the long explanation.

Thats not what I mean by using a search engine to parse documentation. I would just type “python documentation” where the first link I get is the documentation. Then I would search within that documentation for “ __init__” which, when tested just now, took me about 30 seconds all in to get to the known good source of truth here. That’s pretty good I think.

But why would a novice care if it came from python.org, providing the information was accurate? I don't think you've found a good example of what the GP was asking for, at any rate. I've certainly had that experience recently, but it turns out it was something more obscure than I would have expected (relating to ensuring that gulp scripts don't return an error code when warnings occur - I'd searched for `gulp --warnoff` and none of the answers were anything to do with the gulp tool, but it turned out "--warnoff" wasn't a standard flag anyway, though there is a blog post about how to add support for such a flag).

geeksforgeeks.org is really dark pattern-y, and has been extremely high ranking for python related questions that seemed to come out of nowhere.

>The ability to talk directly to a real human is really powerful

In a fresh and new project. But how will it look in 5 years when the user numbers are smaller because of other new projects?

This isn't a new problem. I was doing some classic iPod research a while back, looking back on mid-00s hardware research. Some knowledge was present only in IRC chat logs, and some is surely lost to the sands of time. Similar story with PDA hacking.

The knowledge still needs to be transferred to wikis etc. so that it can be preserved long-term.

There were many times when I would have been lost without the Internet Archive. And more than once it was because of discontinued platforms on MS.

Knowledge in forums or now Discord has a shorter half-life until it's gone completely.

That's sad.

I suspect they've figured out that whole search engine business model thing has been deprecated for months in its current form. Their product has been shitty in specific areas for several years now.

Google being ran internally akin to the Soviet union has lead to a competitive advantage being not just lost, but far surpassed. As nature intended.

> The ability to talk directly to a real human is really powerful.

100%. But different strokes for different folks, as well as at different times in the evaluation/discovery journey. Many devs don't want to talk to someone.

From the perspective of the product company, things are a bit different. If you are pre-product market fit, you probably want every interaction with a possible customer/user you can, so you can move towards understanding the problem space. Set up discord for that.

Once you find PMF, it's all about setting yourself up for scaling. We made a choice to scale back chat and focus on online, public forums, and it worked out well for us. If you want to talk to a human, you can absolutely engage with our sales team, or in other public spaces like Twitter.

That said, some projects are big enough or inspire enough people that the community can scale on discord. Haven't seen that often, but it happens.

> Google is increasingly useless at surfacing relevant documentation (it prefers SEO blogspam).

Agree for generic programming queries, but for product specific queries, I haven't noticed that. And product specific queries are what documentation and forum are designed to help with.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/epstein-knew-dirty-secret... – 2019

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/04/google-co-founder-larry-page... – May 2023

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page

> On December 3, 2019, Larry Page announced that he would step down from the position of Alphabet CEO and be replaced by Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Nobody is writing SEO blogspam for your support problems.

The problem is that users type in "how to do X" into Google. End users often enough don't even know the website of your application, I know so many people who literally go to Netflix by typing in "Netflix" in the bar and click the first link.

But Google has dumbed down so hard that scammers using generic keywords outcompete everyone including yourself (or outright clone/farm SO/Wikipedia/whatever), which is why many people add "stackoverflow" or "reddit" to the search terms, and the latter broke a few weeks ago when many subs went private.

The most annoying thing is, Google could shut down a lot of these scammers if they would invest in a couple hundred people to look at the most frequent questions and rate the top 20 sites - everyone caught to be a blatant spammer gets the boot, and everyone selling fake dick enlargement pills or whatever gets the police with the full support of the billions of dollars of Google. But they seem to have completely stopped all effort into their core product...

We've had great luck at $CURJOB with forum software. Definitely have had folks do their own research and mention forum posts when they ask questions of our support staff. We even have an internal slack channel where we capture questions that have been asked on other media (including private slack channels and github issues) and generalize it to post on the forums. This helps future questioners.

Forums attract SEO traffic, but are more middle of the evaluation funnel, when people want an answer to a question about a specific piece of software.

I think chat is great for companies, just not communities.

> Yes yes, I know that many won't even touch the help portal/documentation and ask questions regardless

It's far easier to drop a link to answer a common q and let the person read it than to engage in the back and forth to answer fully answer a question. You can always have the back and forth if the doc doesn't meet their needs.

The whole point is that they don't have to answer. They hope someone else from the community will before they get to it.

It is the evolution of the mailing list then forum style "support". Make a forum, let people ask question and answer them themselves. Ideally don't participate in the communication at all yourself. Win!

Here we all are pretending like there aren’t groups that expect people to look for support on an IRC channel.

This isn’t some new degradation today’s youth have inflicted upon us. Discord is just the new IRC.

Even worse the “community” in the Discord gets angry and berates you for asking a question!

We were considering using https://www.linen.dev/ for our own slack group for this reason - it surfaces information from these chat groups and makes it available via search. Anyone here tried them out?

The platform slack with over 10,000 users uses linen. It’s good. Wonder how long it will last though.

> There is a trend right now for startups to push everything to Discord, including all support.

Which in many cases is, effectively:

"To read the FAQ just provide your phone number to verify your newly-created Discord account even though you just verified your email address."

Previously treated on Hacker News:

"Discord is a black hole for information"

https://knockout.chat/thread/33251/1

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30311982

in my experience, discord is more likely to demand a phone number after you 'claim' an account by adding an email address. and don't even think about not getting phonewalled if you use a commercial VPN.

Why Discord?

Their interface is confusing and awful for newbies (I was one). Telegram is much better. But either way, why are people putting all their content on some third party centralized service? I don’t get it.

Aren’t all Discord “servers” controlled by one company? And why did so many projects move from Telegram, Slack etc. over to it?

Telegram isn't great for having an overarching place for everyone to join with siloed discussions for sub-categories of discussion. The point isn't "we need IM communication", it's "we need IM communication in a logical structure that matches the way we want to communicate".

Slack costs a lot of money if you want searchable history.

Matrix (https://matrix.org/) is pretty bad when you get to using it. It works, but the QOL isn't up to Discord's level.

Discord is just as easy to replace as any other chat platform if they decide to sell out or destroy their product.

What is QOL? What is so bad about Matrix or Keybase or Gitter? Seems great

(Somewhat) confusing UI, delayed key exchange ("the sender hasn't sent the key to this device so the message can't be displayed yet" or something similar) and just in general a much less polished experience.

Gitter seems to have moved to being a Matrix instance (or maybe it always has? it didn't look like Matrix when I used it circa 2016), but matrix feels half-baked and is just a bunch of hacks put together. For example

- Can't "mark all as read" on a space. probably because rooms within a space are only tangentially related,

- No custom emojis or sticker packs (their proposal for this is to create rooms to house custom emojis/sticker packs[0])

Not a great bet to go to keybase with the Zoom acquisition https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28814210

0: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/195...

Didn't Matrix (or whoever owns Matrix) buy Gitter? That was my understanding...

Ah, the joys of open source: where "nobody has implemented 'mark all as read' on a space yet" is extrapolated to "half-baked and just a bunch of hacks".

Custom emojis & sticker packs exist as per MSC1951 (thanks for linking it), and implemented in various clients. The fact the data is stored in a room shouldn't exactly be a surprise, given 'rooms' (i.e. persistent decentralised pubsub topics) are the main primitive for storing data in Matrix, much as everything is a file in unix.

Sorry you feel Matrix feels half-baked; meanwhile we're busy doing a major iteration as per https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/matrix20 and https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-of-e.... Right now the target is more WhatsApp/Signal/iMessage style messaging than Discord/Slack/Teams, but we'll (re)address the latter eventually.

> implemented in various clients.

Are clients encourages to implement potential features before they're merged?

Guess it stands for Quality Of Life.

Zulip is the best for this IMO. You can even export conversations so they are indexable and viewable without login.

But Discord has the advantage that people already have an account and all the so called servers are within the same GUI. (This convenience also makes it a walled garden)

> Telegram isn't great for having an overarching place for everyone to join with siloed discussions for sub-categories of discussion.

Just want to point out that they fixed this, it's possible to create Topics once the channel's community reaches 200 users.

Though this probably isn't what most users want for a support channel. Having one place to go is simpler then a community with a dozen company meme channels that you have no interest in seeing.

> Matrix (https://matrix.org/) is pretty bad when you get to using it. It works, but the QOL isn't up to Discord's level.

It goes to hell if you make the mistake of enabling E2EE for channels since the key exchange bogs it down and only a few clients support encrypted message search. Otherwise, yeah the Element clients have pretty bad UX especially when comparing to Telegram. Some other clients like Nheko improve on it but don't cover the full set of features, so while I'm a user of Matrix I find it hard to continue to recommend Matrix over chat ecosystems with better usability.

Putting all your community resources on Discord is the surest way to repel me from joining your community.

The thing is, Discord might be 99% effortless.

For me at least, I have a very young audience, and everyone wants to be on Discord. If a nice community member proposes to moderate, it's basically almost no effort.

To put it short: I experienced Discord as all pull from the community, it wasn't even my idea to start it. Other platform you push and nobody wants it. Don't ask me why it works, it just does.

The question I'd be asking: works for whom?

Obviously, it works for you. And it works for people who are already dedicated Discord users. But unless that's 100% of your TAM, then not only are you going to be missing people, but you will have a hard time even noticing, because others will self-select out and you'll be left with a thriving community that feels good to you.

So at the very least I'd be doing user interviews across the TAM. It's legitimate to say, "Our initial target audience is only people who are already happy Discord users." But that should be on purpose, and you should have a plan to move toward the broader audience and that will include addressing concerns like in the article.

You can configure your server to not require discord accounts. Anyone can join Zia the web via clicking a link and simply typing a name.

You don't need user interviews, you just see where they are going.

Are they discussing this on twitter or reddit? Are they making YouTube videos? Did one of them start a Discord with lots of people there? Once you see what works, make an official one.

Funnily enough Discord was the only one I didn't start myself. I liked something async with proper Google searching better.

So even when I tried, I wasn't able to steer them.

Your entire TAM is composed of people you can observe on Twitter, Reddit, and Discord? That sounds like a pretty unusual business.

> To put it short: I experienced Discord as all pull from the community,

Survivorship bias? You're counting all the people who want to use discord as support for using discord, but since you[1] have no other avenues for the non-discord people you don't know how many users you've lost simply because you've silenced them.

IOW, you're[2] looking at the 5 people who express support for discord but ignoring the 500 who hate it enough to not use your support at all.

I think, if you're a business using discord for user support, you should should be wondering, if you've got 100k users, why are only 1k people in your discord?

[1] Not you personally; for all I know you have multiple channels, which include discord. The places who normally use discord only have one channel for users to use.

[2] Once again, not you personally.

Let me give you some more info. I started first with a forum on my own website (bbpress). I also had a twitter and facebook account where I posted updates. Still have YouTube.

I'm 44, so for me a forum is ideal, Discord is way too intensive.

Then one of my members started a discord years ago and a lot of members went there. I switched everyone to an official one, and one member volunteered to moderate.

I would say most questions come from Discord, then YouTube comments, then email. My own forum wasn't as popular so I closed it due to lots of spam that I had to manage.

I also pushed hard for Reddit but never took off (I liked reddit more)

One thing to mention that is probably important: this is in gaming sphere with lots of kids, teenagers and young adults. Also used in schools by teachers.

As much as I hate discord for anything other than strictly gaming and fun, if your user demographic is primarily kids, teenagers and young adults I think Discord is fine. They're already on it anyway and you have to meet users where they're at. If I were to ever choose discord it'd be in this kind of situation.

Yeah, community-driven support + documentation sucks. That's how Ory just lost me as a customer. Couldn't even get a reply from the DX dude, wanted to pay for onboarding.

A combination of both, good docs and community is where it's at tho. Big shout out to spicedb for that. The playground, documentation set me up, then I headed to the discord for more input. Got a reply and directly jumped on an intro call. That's how it should work.

Hey there, I'm the "DX dude" so you were probably messaging me in the Ory Community Slack. Very sorry about a missing response, that should not have happened! I usually take time to answer each and everyone in the community within 24 hours so apologies that I missed your message.

Ory does offer onboarding for commercial clients, for that you can set up a call in 1 click here: https://www.ory.sh/contact/ - we can kick off a guided onboarding session on the same day if you want to move fast.

The thing is, Discord is one of the few products that can “do it all” in terms of how people want to communicate.

It supports voice, video, and text.

It supports live human interaction, delayed human interaction, and automated interaction.

It supports web, desktop, and mobile.

I think it’s understandable that people want to standardize on one tool for communication, to simplify the support process and training, etc. If only we can make it accessible and easy to use, Discord would be a great step forward in many ways.

Minimizing the number of channels and giving them clear names is a good first step. A welcome message with some tips and encouragement might be helpful, but keep it relatively short. I’ve seen some servers overdo it with lengthy instructions and rules.

The problem is that it supports 'Locate relevant information' incredibly poorly. Discord is a great replacement for the chat app part of a support channel, it is not even a passable replacement for a website, or a wiki.

Search in it sucks to incredible degrees, you can't put enough good information into pins, anytime that you have more information that can fit in X channels * a few pins, it completely breaks down.

Maybe some users of Discord want the satisfaction of answering a question raised by another community member, but don't want the answer to be publicly indexable and searchable forever? In this case, Discord is working perfectly.

Good for them. While they are getting whatever social satisfaction they care about (which is fine, if you're an enthusiast, you can seek out whatever validation for your volunteer effort you want - I don't judge)...

I am just trying to solve my problem, and the design of Discord leaves me with a shitty experience nine times out of ten.

I won't judge the enthusiasts, but I will judge the hell out of whomever set the thing up.

Not great for employees either! Have worked for a startup such as this. Developers become part-time moderators/support for an audience which tends to be far less experienced than e.g. GitHub issues. Failing publicly becomes a daily occurrence, which is terrible for morale. Site outages and the like become unmanageable instances of highly unreasonable (often free-tier) outrage.

You are basically eschewing the "wisdom" that even the giants like Google have realized which is that direct, accessible customer support for tech products doesn't scale and saying "yeah! our dev team of size 3 should be able to handle it right?"

Just to be clear, I disagree with that notion. I just think you need to hire people to handle it and didn't have a say in such matters.

And usually there is no responsive mods.

Watch discord have it's reddit moment where they raise prices and people aren't willing to pay, but they are locked in due to hosting huge communities in it.

your complaints make it sound like a forum

It will be a bad experience for at least some of your users.

It will also stop many potential users from ever becoming actual users.

I do wonder if those doing this are self-selecting for the "right" type of user.

Worst of all, there’s no way to discover previously fixed solutions with a web search, all the help and effort are essentially obfuscated.

Discourse is what people want as a modern forum.

Two good examples are https://discourse.nixos.org/ and https://forum.level1techs.com/

Discourse is just as bad. A forum should not require the use of javascript. A forum shouldn't silently remove parts of the DOM that are off screen. A forum should allow me to load an entire thread (or however many posts it decides a page is) in my browser, and use the native browser search function to find things.

Another thing I dislike about Discord is how it deals with notifications. The default notification settings are absolutely bonkers. Everything is unread, all the time, everything is important, everything has red badges every-damn-where. Then whenever you join a new "server", first thing you have to do is right-click and select "suppress @everyone and @here" and "suppress role mentions". But even if you do that, the messages with @everyone @here @role STILL get the yellow highlight like they mention you personally. Broadcast mentions are the stupidest thing ever. They should've never been invented because people can't be trusted to not abuse them.

Then the message input field tries to be way too smart and is way too dumb at the same time. They've somehow broken macOS's native text replacements, iirc the thing eats some characters if your message starts with them, BUT — if you just type someone's @username and don't select the completion that pops up, the mention wouldn't work.

The UI to add reactions to messages is comically bad. It shows your recent emojis, then 5 kilometers of the custom emojis from all the servers you're on (that you can't use anyway because you don't have the subscription), and only then the rest of the unicode emojis.

Then there are all the incredibly obnoxious popups, banners and tooltips that promote the paid subscription. And the "what's new" popup. That's also obnoxious. Like, maybe, just maybe, if I'm not paying you, and have been using your service on the free tier for several years now, you should consider me a lost cause and stop raping my eyeballs with your stupid upsells in the hopes of converting me into a paying customer?

Also, my files are way too often "too powerful" with no option to have the server compress them to its liking — it's rare that I need to send a bit-perfect copy of an image or a video.

I'll be building a modern multi-protocol desktop IM client as my next project sometime in the future. Discord will definitely be at the top of the list of services to support.

Ok, let's backtrack a bit.

If you have startup and no docs + complicated product -> discord is super easy first step. It also has a nice loop: if you see a question over and over, move it to faq, if its still repeated perhaps add better labeling/hints to your forms, if it still persists, damn maybe rethink your offering/product(or accept CS as vital part).

In the end I don't want to deal with meta stuff. I want a nice seamless product period. Discord while awkward is a good first thing that you should absolutely have - you can bootstrap it in 10 mins. (Depending on your customers ofcourse, if you are selling insurance to old folks, for obvious reasons it's not good)

It's quite popular in the indie game community and seems to work well, but that's a different beast than software and software support.

Perhaps the intent is to create impediments specifically to reduce support requests....

I've heard of crazier happening in the industry...

Meta comment: HN's knee jerk reaction when it comes to certain topics is becoming quite exhausting. Obviously a lot of the current commenters didn't even read what the article was about and just wanted to vent about the good old days of mailing lists and half-assed docs that at best had a code sample, but on average were just a "table of contents" for the source code that you'd ultimately have to read. I for one wish these projects had BBS-es in addition to Discord, but man I love just chatting with people working on the thing I am also interested in and making friends along the way.

Actual comment: When it comes to Watchy, I found the docs to be a good starting point - https://watchy.sqfmi.com/docs/getting-started . They give you the architectural diagrams, have a few code examples for some of the more common use cases, and do a pretty good job at letting you know that this is very much going to be an "adventure" type project with a lot of surface to cover.

They could expand one day and add links to articles/projects other people have made, but I am not sure many of those exist. It is sort of a niche product.

Chatting with the creators and making friends is a great reason to create a Discord. But maybe don’t push everyone there for everything?

I agree in principle - Discord can only scale that much - imagine having a discord channel instead of docs for Pandas . Obviously it would be best if there were great docs for everything, a lot of easily searchable Q&As + sample projects, and a forum and some form of live chat for the community to discuss ideas.

But those take a ton of time to create, and a ton of skill to write well, and I feel like up and coming niche projects that need to build a community naturally would emphasize Discord over docs.

The greatest communities in technology all have good documentation. There’s no reason to play fast and loose when you can just do the job right and document your tools.

Maybe Discord can be a starting point, and documentation can be written later.

One way to think about documentation is that it is useful to help scale up support. But if there is no scale, it is less important.

That doesn’t seem very unix philosophy to me

The Unix philosophy has nothing to do with documentation lol. It is actually the exact opposite of your know it all hypothetical "no reason to play fast and loose when you can just do the job right" fantasy :

"Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don't hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them."

If anything, it is a lot closer to move fast and break things.

I use a Matrix channel (which is bridged to an IRC channel) for this purpose. I host computing book club meetups in the weekends. While the meetup main page and notes are hosted on a website, I have Matrix and IRC channels where the meetup participants can hang out together, follow schedule updates, make friends, etc. All our communication is in text format, so these open protocols and platforms serve our needs pretty well.

The group members have the freedom to use any free and open source client or one of the popular web interfaces to join the channel and talk to each other. Should something go wrong with the Matrix or IRC network (say, the network becomes user-hostile for some reason), it is a simple matter of moving the channel to another benign network. The group members only need to point their clients to the new address.

In fact, such a thing did happen once in 2021 when Freenode went through major staff changes due to disagreements with how the network was being run. All channel operators (myself included) moved their channels to Libera in a matter of days. It took me only about 5 minutes to complete the migration and hand out the new channel address to the channel members.

Discord sucks. It's propietary and using a CHANNEL (no, they aren't "servers", educate yourselves, FFS) as a documentation source/tool it's the worst thing ever the gen-z had made. Period.

Channels and servers are different things, and both terms are used for discord. A channel is just a single text or voice space where discussions can happen. Many projects will have multiple channels each specialized to a single topic. The whole collection of these is called a "server". The docs also use the term "guild" for the same concept, as the API docs explain [0].

[0] https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/guild

Doesn't change the point that a Discord “server” is not a server.

> a computer or computer program which manages access to a centralized resource or service in a network.

I think by definition you're wrong. By layman's terms you're wrong too. A server serves things, either content, chat text or your meal. Discord servers serve a collection of text channels located on a centralized resource.

Now, for the real lesson: take yourself and everyone else less seriously.

A Discord “server” is neither a computer nor a computer program. All “servers” are serviced by a single program distributed across many actual servers, presumably without any direct mapping.

From what Discord employees have previously said, a guild server is a single Erlang process that's usually fixed to a single host. Voice is handled separately, but again by a single process assigned to that guild server.

I'm not sure what distinction you're trying to draw here. Calling the process that handles communication between users a "server" was already common practice back when IRC was standardized in 1993 (where discord gets the term from). It even appears in the original jargon file, so that definition was common long before even that.

Yes, I don't disagree with this definition. But a Discord “server” is not analogous to an IRC server.

An IRC server has a collection of channels. A discord server has a collection of channels.

It is simple as that. IRC servers don't refer to a single physical server either since IRC servers supported federation allowing multiple servers to act as a single server. There is no need to be so strict on the definition of server considering how loose its usage was already with IRC.

No: an IRC network is a collection of channels. A network is then made up of numerous servers. In IRC parlance a server always in fact did explicitly mean a specific individual server and I would be shocked if you found anyone who hadn't used IRC for more than even a day or so that tried to call, say, EfNet a "server".

<moleman>I call EfNet a server.</moleman>

In fact I see this block in my .irssi/config:

    servers = (
      ...
      { address = "irc.efnet.net"; chatnet = "EFNet"; port = "6667"; },
      ...
    );

That is a specific hostname and is in essence a "server" (though the existence of irc.efnet.net is special in that it is a DNS load balancer address that selects a random server) and isn't EFNet; the concept of "EFNet", in contrast, is being called a "chatnet" in that configuration file, not a server. You might have multiple servers configured for the same network, and irssi will attempt to round-robin the connection between them if they fail. If you want a list of networks in irssi, you use /network list; if you want a list of servers you use /server list.

FWIW, IRC barely exists anymore. To the extent to which to does it has been massively simplified. It used to be that there were massive collections of servers for most networks run by tons of different people, and often if you ran an isolated server for a single-server network people would show up ply you to add their server to your network. I can see how someone who only casually uses IRC and only semi-recently (in the past decade or two) might be left with a really limited or even confused understanding of the lingo.

So like, sometimes networks did have these DNS round-robin load balancer addresses, and I could see someone getting confused by that for a bit. But, they weren't used all that often other than as a server discover mechanism, because--for a number of reasons I will list a few of--it mattered greatly what server you were actually on... enough so that, if you were to actually to use IRC much at all, it would become very very clear that a network and a server are not somehow interchangeable terms.

1) The Internet itself and the software we were using was flakey enough that you would routinely encounter a "netsplit", wherein people who were on one half of the network could still talk to each other but people on the other would see you all disconnect.

(This was also used by people to try to attack and take over channels by denial of service attacking specific servers in the network as the behavior of re-merging channels often gave you moments where you could take chanops.)

2) The latency across the Internet was sometimes higher--particularly if you had to do multiple hops to get to the right server the user was on--and so people who were on the same server as each other had a lot better experience talking to each other.

3) The channel namespace using # was global to the network but many networks supported server-local channels that were prefixed with ##. If you were on a different server you would thereby not be able to see the same server-local channels.

Nowadays, you wouldn't bother with most of this as, administratively, this is madness. The usual server-to-server protocol forms a DAG and so it doesn't actually provide any form of redundancy: your network feels about as stable as the least stable server (weighted by how close it is to the center of the graph). You also don't need lots of servers to try to distribute the connection load, and the core Internet latency isn't a big deal anymore.

Oh it was immediately clear that your original comment was right in the first half. The irssi example isn't intended to rebut that. I was rebutting the second half: that it was obvious. As someone who has thought about IRC for a couple of hours over the course of a decade, it's not obvious. The .irssi example is merely me trying to debug why I might have had that impression.

(It's also not clear to me why people in this thread are getting so pedantic about the distinction between server and service. I'm just here to exercise my pet peeve: nothing about computers is obvious.)

OK, so my argument here is that users aren't using IRC in a bubble: they are connecting to IRC to talk to a bunch of other people; and, because servers mattered SO MUCH, and the clients you were using--including irssi--are so consistent with the terminology split between "server" and "network", they wouldn't have continued to use the wrong term for very long because someone else would have corrected them or they quickly would have needed to do something more complicated with their client and discovered the difference in either the documentation or the output from basic commands like /connect.

Like, what server you were on was a near daily discussion among just about everyone on EFNet in particular, because EFNet was notorious for experiencing netsplits as it was simultaneously enormous and almost entirely unprotected: some networks (I think the big one being Undernet? it's been 25 years so I am likely remembering this poorly... I did a quick search for this and maybe I'm thinking of DALNet?) had come up with this idea of "services" like chanserv and nickserv that would help you register your stuff so it couldn't get stolen; but, on EFNet, every channel worth a damn had to be protected by redundant bots spread across the topology.

https://m.slashdot.org/story/13791

https://m.slashdot.org/story/19167

FWIW, the reason why the Discord usage of "server" kind of pisses me off is because it actively makes it more difficult for users to come to the correct understanding of terms in general parlance: it trains them to use a term "server" in a way that actively makes them understand the term less because exactly one popular service--Discord--has decided to misuse the term... and they do so with the excuse "we just wanted to be analogous to IRC"; but, somehow, they even got that wrong, and so the whole thing comes across as so incompetent as to be negligent and (thereby) passively malicious :/.

(I also probably am a bit more frustrated about Discord than a random commentator because, in addition to having been screwed during the username upgrade last month, a long time ago I was working on a similar service and even had a similar architecture--hell: I was even building it using Erlang; I don't think it was in Elixir, but I was an early user of that also and it might have been... I had two projects: one in Erlang and one in Elixir, and I don't even remember what the other one was--but then Slack came out and I thought I would never be able to compete against them as they had epic UI people... but then Slack chose a target market I found limited and after a couple years of feeling they would have to enter this space, Discord suddenly became popular and I was all like "damn it why the hell didn't I just assume Slack would be stupid?!".)

Ok that makes sense once you bring up netsplits. (Are they still as prevalent as they used to be? Or did the network grow more robust over time? Or is just the reduced usage of IRC that makes them matter less?)

They're called servers because we wanted to pick words that were familiar to what we were originally competing against, which was team-speak/ventrilo/mumble servers.

Picking words people are familiar with in order to convey a concept is a generally smart thing to do. A discord server was meant to be analogous to a ventrilo server. Calling them servers made that idea clear to our users, which helped users understand our product and what purpose a server served. I would say that the term has served its purpose well.

Internally we call them guilds, because having a "server server" is a bit ridiculous.

The future is now, old man.

That's not the future. That's old software using 20x more resources than usual.

We may not like the "future", but old software using 20x more resources than usual has been the future for a while, just look at electron apps the growing trend of home computers becoming thin clients over webapps and cloud computing. I despise this trend as much as the anyone else, but I can't see how it isn't the future we are heading towards.

It has always been this way. How many people who grew up on text terminals, and despised GUI-based utilities that are essentially just thin graphical wrappers on top of a CLI tool at 20x the size?

This argument gets repeated by every generation ad nauseam, even though they're oblivious to the fact that it keeps reoccurring. Everyone loves drawing an arbitrary line in the sand.

GUIs are a step over CLI's.

What does Discord improve over Kopete by using 20x more resources except for the video resolution?

Also, it should run far snappier if the improvement was just a video resolution improvement and a new codec often accelerated by the GPU such as h264. But it doesn't.

> it's the worst thing ever the gen-z had made.

Discord was likely built by millenials given that the oldest zoomers were not even 20 when Discord was released in 2015.

Still better by 2 orders of magnitude than Slack. Slack is shit and it's evil.

Slack is indeed terrible but it doesn’t resolve Discord of it’s shortcomings as a forum

In a few years' time, Discord will start adding in Jira integrations, just you watch.

I like that Millenials have finally gotten old enough to forget their own experience and repeat the age old tradition of blaming everything wrong in the world on the next generation.

Discord themselves call them "servers". If you want to change public opinion, you'll need to start at the source. I just double checked to be sure, and yup, that button at the left says "Add a Server".

Help me with my education. I'm just a lowly 4th year SWE major and we haven't covered definitions of servers yet.

Webster's says: > a computer in a network that is used to provide services (such as access to files or shared peripherals or the routing of email) to other computers in the network

And if a computer is: > a programmable usually electronic device that can store, retrieve, and process data

How is it not a server? It is a computer, it is used to provide services, it's programmable and electronic, routes content... Do you have to assume each discord instance is running in its own container for you to consider it a server? It serves things.

I use 'community' because, as someone else mentioned, 'channel' is already in use as a word and an invite-only collection of chat rooms where you can often create a custom profile I think can be called a community.

Server is indeed misleading and inaccurate, though I do fear we lost another war: hacker now means cracker, cloud now means foreign server, crypto now means cryptocurrency, ping used to mean Blackberry Messenger, you name it; these things come and either stay or go again... it might be more confusing to use another term for it (I try to introduce community where possible, but the opportunities are rare) because people have to (be able to) figure out from context what you're talking about.

Discord doesn’t have threading for messages. It deserves every ounce of hate it receives.

The Discord instances I've used do have threading. Maybe it's a configurable setting or maybe it's only available in paid versions of Discord. I have heard lots of complaints that the design makes it easy for people to miss that feature.

More broadly, it seems to be a common problem in chat UIs, regardless of what particular product you're on. I think there is a segment of internet users who have been online for a while now and are used to web 1.0 chat rooms where there was only one way to send messages. They do not have the muscle memory of using threads. That's why you see so many dangling responses that should not be standalone messages but rather should have been part of the thread.

You're correct, it's a configurable feature (not paid, it's been openly available for 1-2 years).

Discord also supports forums, but most server owners disable one or both as they can take more effort to moderate/maintain.

> disable one or both as they can take more effort to moderate/maintain.

This is why I don’t consider Discord’s version of threading as true threading. They are temporary channels with all the same admin/moderation requirements that regular channels necessitate.

I have yet to come across a Discord server that lets anyone create threads from posts in their general channels.

Yes it does?

They are temporary channels, not the simple and low friction version that Slack uses.

They are not temporary.

You can hover any message and press "Create Thread" which creates a separate threading for that specific message where people can participate.

>HN's knee jerk reaction when it comes to certain topics is becoming quite exhausting

Yep you can guess comments all the time just by the title alone. There are certain topics that triggeres a lot of people here and no matter what the actual submission is about (they won't read the article either way) they just post their preoccupied comment. I mean when someone makes a throwaway "discordsucks" to comment that says it all.

Honestly, my comment was pretty balanced imho. Discord does provide great UX for what it is good at. That is gaming communities and day to day chatter and such. I even think it has a huge lead in that regard other than maybe being a bit slow on weaker hardware - probably cause electron. It just has inacceptable entry barriers for documentation purposes by collecting your data and severe limits on how much content can be accessed and more importantly retained. I spare you to repeat myself on why I think so. Especially open source projects shouldnt make it a requierement to hand over your data to a entity which has recently been fined for GDPR violations in order to use them.

We've started mirroring our Discord to the web using https://www.answeroverflow.com/

You could roll your own equivalent but AnswerFlow has some nice features and handles issues around consent nicely.

If you're starting a Discord then I'd strongly recommend stating upfront that you might mirror content to another location even if you're not doing it now - it makes it a lot easier than doing so further down the line.

A better solution would be to not use Discord but friction, push-back from my colleagues on alternatives and a fear of fragmenting the community made this the best option for us.

The best solution might be not to use Discord in the first place but it does have familiarity in its favour (for some communities at least)

We also do maintain "proper" documentation but it's hard to capture everything and the Discord contains valuable content that's not recorded elsewhere.

Or at least mirror in the opposite direction. Keep your ‘primary’ communications on something open like XMPP MUCs, Matrix Spaces, IRC–or the likes of Zulip, Mattermost. If the chat flavor of the week changes, at least home base wasn’t ran by a megacorp that could rug pull & turn off the service like they do with sanctions, or just new paywalls.

I used Discord for support at my last company. It was amazing. It takes a while to bootstrap the community, but once you do, it becomes a huge asset. Here are the biggest benefits:

1. Real-time user feedback. Discord is conversational. If someone gives feedback on your product, you can quickly have a conversation about the exact issue they're facing and you can propose solutions to see how they feel.

2. User retention. When users have such immediate access to the product's developers, it makes their opinions feel helpful and useful and drives user retention.

3. User collaboration. Once your community gets big enough, users start to collaborate together. This might be directly in the product (if it's a collaborative product), but can also take the shape of brainstorming improvements and feedback.

4. Community help. Over time, members of your community becomes experts in your product and they help newer users onboard. This frees up a lot of dev time that would have been spent providing support.

Personally, I find the opinion that "it's not indexable" a little silly. How many times have you searched an arcane error and been brought to a mailing list? More often than not, the indexed email never received a reply. If it did, the answer is unlikely to solve your problem. Combing through conversations is not an efficient means of documentation. We use our community feedback to get a lot of signal about what's missing from our documentation and then update it accordingly. 10 users came in this week asking about feature X? That means we need to update our documentation, etc.

The "its not indexable" used to be a lot less silly but I'm afraid you're entirely right.

We have a web that has itself become almost unsearchable (due to SEO spam, google shitting the bed with their search quality in general, everything becoming a walled garden, everyone jacking up API prices/hoarding their data against LLMs)

I think that the death of the searchable web in general is to blame, and is driving this shift to Discord. Not so much the individual developers, for them its a net win as you say.

We need the "ozempic web": 2023 scale but lighter, indexable, un-walled, with less bullshit filler and attention grabbing monetization. Until that happens, we can hate the players all we want but it's the game itself that is crooked.

There are two key differences between what you're describing and what Terence Eden is describing:

1. You have succeeded at integrating Discord into documentation processes. You get feedback on X and then make sure to update the docs to discuss X. Eden is saying that a lot of projects just answer about X in Discord and then never get around to updating the docs to discuss X.

2. Your team responds to Discord messages promptly. A lot of teams drag their feet or don't respond whatsoever.

Sure, maybe for straight support items or collaboration but for actual _documentation_ if it only lives on your Discord that is a straight sin

For support? Absolutely. For documentation? Absolutely not.

> Personally, I find the opinion that "it's not indexable" a little silly.

How is that silly? I know there’s threading now, but it has to be used by everyone. If you find someone that asked the same question you have, but without a reply, is it unanswered or answered out of the thread 1000 messages down the page? Without threading it’s a disaster.

> How many times have you searched an arcane error and been brought to a mailing list?

Tons, but forums were even better. I never get answers, or at least good answers, via Discord or Slack. It barely takes anything for my question to get pushed up the page and then no one sees it. If someone does answer, it’s often a naive, enthusiastic person that doesn’t even understand the problem I’m having.

I used to post a lot on forums. I’d post well tested, reproducible examples that exactly demonstrated my problem. I’d also take an “ask a question, answer a question” approach where I’d skim the first page or two of unanswered questions and leave a reply if I knew something off the top of my head.

Almost every Discord or Slack “support” channel I’ve tried is terrible. They’re a way for companies to reduce support by shifting the expectations towards ignoring users. Drone (CI) did this recently. Their Slack channel is nothing but users asking questions (at least for the several days I saw before unsubscribing from emails).

I think the real reason Discord, etc. are popular is because it’s low effort. No one expects you to come in with a fully baked example. It’s a conversation. So instead of the old expectation that you’d come prepared with a concrete example of your problem, you just blurt out some half-assed question and wait for someone to prompt you and hold your hand through the whole issue.

The price for that is the loss of people that want to participate in a high effort community rather than an emoji filled meme-fest with content splattered at mile-5 on the 1k mile continuous scroll. At least that’s my opinion.

> Tons, but forums were even better. I never get answers, or at least good answers, via Discord or Slack. It barely takes anything for my question to get pushed up the page and then no one sees it. If someone does answer, it’s often a naive, enthusiastic person that doesn’t even understand the problem I’m having.

People on forums were free to ignore your posts as well, but they didn't, because they cared about their users. Discord isn't the cause of indifferent dev teams.

We had a brilliant, visionary solution to this whole problem. It was called Stack Overflow. Real questions with actual answers, no faffing about. Tragically it has been dying a slow death for seven or eight years and as of now looks like it will just be milled into LLM food.

SO is definitely the best there’s ever been IMO. I’ll repeat myself a bit and say that I think the reason platforms like that are dying is because many people don’t want to make any effort and the expectation you try to be a good contributor is a negative for them.

I bet 50% of the problems I’ve ever had were self solved by trying to build an example that showed exactly what issue I was having.

Discord servers can have forums in them if you didn't know

Presumably they mean forums that can be found with a web search.

Searching for FreeBSD stuff I usually get the answer from forums.freebsd.org, which is usually the first search result.

With Discord, when I search for something related to a videogame[1], I usually end up in a wiki. I never get search results for anything that happens inside the wiki's official Discord "server"[sic], even though I'm fairly confident the Discord should have 10x the amount of search results.

[1]: Or any topic, really. I'm using videogames as example to give as much advantage as I can to Discord.

They're not indexable

>How many times have you searched an arcane error and been brought to a mailing list? More often than not, the indexed email never received a reply. If it did, the answer is unlikely to solve your problem. Combing through conversations is not an efficient means of documentation.

Usually it's a stackoverflow post or an issue on a bug-tracker. Discord redirects information away from those open venues. Sometimes the answers are how I discover the project.

On the other hand I care about FLOSS and not startups with proprietary code, so it may just be a different thing (mainly customer focus).

This seems like a matter of perspective. As the product owner, having an active Discord would be amazing--easy dopamine hits everywhere.

It's selection bias. Of course the conversations the owner participates in turn out well. What about the other conversations? What about that question that just nobody responded to and 3 hours later people start talking about something else and buried the question? Well, the company never saw that question. The company does not see what it does not see--selection bias.

Why would we miss a message?

Everytime I am in a remotely active discord this always happens. 502 new messages since 9am. Then if you scroll while reading the app it scroll jacks as it fetches new messages.

Is this activity across all the servers you're a member of or is it a social Discord? Just my personal experience, but there isn't too much chatter on product-focused Discord servers so it's easier to get to every message. I also have a totally separate Discord account that I use and make sure every message to the server ends up as a push notification to my phone.

If its that slow then you might as well just run a mailing list instead. More of your current and potential users know and understand email than discord.

I can confidently say our users would be 100x less likely to sign up for a mailing list.

From a user perspective, Discord is much better than email. When you give out your email, it's basically giving an entity carte blanche to spam you. With Discord, the user is more in control of when and how they interact with your community.

Nobody under 35 wants to use email for anything.

I'm older than that and I certainly don't want the hassle of setting up a mailing list. You can make a Discord server with a few clicks.

Why would you miss a message? Because people miss things and there is no signal that indicates something has been missed.

Missing things is the default state for humans. However, sometimes we setup a system, and the system wont let us miss things. As much as I hate how metrics and tickets have taken over everything, it's hard to miss an open Jira ticket. It's hard to miss a GitHub issue that was opened 2 years ago and still has no replies. These are signals from the system that something has been missed, the system itself provides tools to help us not miss things, because otherwise we would.

What signals does Discord provide that something has been missed? If you accidentally scrolled to far and missed a one-line message in the chat 6 months ago, what signal do you have that you missed it?

> Because people miss things and there is no signal that indicates something has been missed. ... What signals does Discord provide that something has been missed?

You can configure Discord notifications so that every message generates a push notification to your phone. I only ever dismiss the notification if the message requires no action or if an appropriate response has already been given to the message. Most of the time, I respond right away.

There’s no way that scales. I have email addresses where I delete everything at 10k unread messages. I can’t imagine notifications for something like chat that produces even more messages.

Do you mean when people mention you specifically?

To be fair, I see some good things about that.

But to answer my own question, the system you have in place to ensure you don't miss things is "just don't make mistakes, just don't miss things". In the event that you do make a mistake (like accidentally moving your finger in a slightly wrong pattern on the screen) there will be no feedback or signal to indicate you have missed something.

There are hundreds of channels and thousands of messages. Nobody checks notifications in chat servers of reasonable size.

> How many times have you searched an arcane error and been brought to a mailing list?

When I search an error message, I'm usually brought to a mailing list, forum, Reddit, or Stackoverflow - often all of those. More often than not, one of them has either a solution or a clue that gets me closer to a solution. My problem gets solved and I don't have to waste someone else's time.

Chat is not documentation.

So I hit a blocker, how can I solve this problem? I do a cursory look over the implementation to see if I can figure it out, but it's an unfamiliar codebase. So I check the docs and there's nothing except a "join the Discord community" link. So I open Discord, install updates, do the custom email-based 2FA dance, agree to the changed T&Cs, dismiss a Nitro banner, agree to the server rules, and join #general. I write up my question with all the context I can and post it. No reply. So I crack out the debugger and step through the library/framework/etc one line at a time figuring out what's going on. I set up my own editable copy so I can add logging and try some fixes, eventually after a few hours I find that X just doesn't support Y, or that I have to pass in the value encoded in Base 47 or Latin 1. Three days later at 1am I get a dismissive response on Discord telling me to refer to a conversation that happened 2 weeks previous to me signing up.

Chat massively shifts the burden on to users both in terms of figuring stuff out themselves, and in terms of providing support to each other. It's no substitute for documentation, particularly in the world of asynchronous working. We think it's good for async working because you can reply asynchronously, but it's not because you can't unblock asynchronously.

In ~8 years of working with Django (split over the last 12 years), I think the only time I used a debugger on Django code was when I found a security vulnerability and needed to be certain of some very low level details. In ~5 days (over a month) of a hobby project with a project that encourages Discord for documentation I've had to use the debugger 3 times to figure out what's going on.

There's a cultural/process hack that can really help here: be meticulous about turning questions in Discord into updates to your documentation.

If you do that, Discord can be a powerful accelerant to the quality of your project documentation. But you have to be disciplined about it!

This is the key. If I have to do my job and monitor slack discord mattermost all day, I’m not doing my job. Unless my job is support. It’s just one more instance of software development taking over yet another business area (support) because developers are by and large naive, opinionated, and eager to please. It happened with agile (we got project management) and devops (we got sysadmin). Ymmv.

Surely an LLM could parse the chat and keep a public FAQ up to date? Somebody must already have implemented this, but last time I looked I still came empty handed...

From some experiments with a discord bot, the non-deterministic responses you get from an LLM are the big killer for that use case. Ask the model to summarize 100 lines of chat 10 times and you will get 10 different outputs, all worded subtly differently, with different headlines missing each time. (Even on state-of-the-art GPT-4)

https://recurai.com/discord

Yeah, if you want to have an inconsistent documentation with lots of subtle and non-subtle errors, using a non-deterministic black box to generate it is a great way to achieve that.

As a user of a product, I do not want to be a community of random people and flooded with unproductive discussions.

I do not want to be refreshing mostly-synchronous chats and if missing a day, missing important information.

I want companies to respect my time and attention.

Then don't use the chat support. You don't need to use the chat support to be a user of a product.

Discord's search is astonishingly horrible. Users have been complaining for years about it, and it's not improving. This alone disqualifies it from being useful as documentation.

I came here to say this. There's so many things wrong with it:

1. If a user left the server, you can no longer specifically search for stuff they posted.

2. Even if a user is still in the server, it can still be hard to search for stuff they posted because Discord search seems to only sometimes know about all the current users.

3. It breaks if you search for something with a lot of hits, and try to go back to the first page (i.e. the earliest hits). For example it's not possible for me to jump to my first message in some servers.

4. Can't search within specific threads

5. Something about how the text search works itself has bothered me in the past, but I can't find a good example of what's wrong with it at the moment.

Discord's text search isn't exact, which can be a big problem sometimes. For instance, I was in a discord for a game mod recently which had questions asked about the terms 'element' and 'elemental', which were two very different topics. You simply can't narrow your search down to just one of those. Even searching for "elemental" brought up every usage of "element".

Yes, that's exactly it. The search is greedy and even partial hits (or hits with the word order not matching your search, etc.) will show up.

Because they expect you to lurk all day and chat, not search and get back to work. Engagement (wasting time) tends to be a desirable quality at these kinds of companies.

Why would Discord, a product created for gamers to chat/talk to each other while playing games, prioritize anyone's need to search and get back to work?

Exactly. People need to stop using this thing outside of gaming; it was never made for work.

Also, Slack is not documentation, for all of the same reasons. I'm working with my company now to improve documentation across the organization. We're an old startup (takes a very long time to get to market) and in the past quarter I've led two projects where I've spent weeks trying to answer questions about old code, sometimes finding that the original author is no longer at the company and no documentation exists or the original is still at the company but literally doesn't remember writing the code and no documentation exists. And each time people tell me there are Slack conversations explaining everything ... somewhere. No. Every project, every application needs a design doc before and a user's manual after and they actually need to get maintained.

I'm perplexed about the wider community's strange enthusiasm for Discord. As another user noted, fundamentally it's IRC with multimedia. Why are people promoting it so enthusiastically? Even if we accept the very controversial idea of 'Get Support On Discord!', the actual product itself is nothing special. It's only a marginal improvement over other similar products we already had. All of this is leaving aside very real concerns about how user data may be used in the future.

It's IRC with multimedia that someone else manages but you control who can use it.

And a lot of people who use it have never used IRC.

And it has an app that has the same name as the service. That makes it a whole thing, like Instagram or TikTok. It's really eye opening to see the number of people who never considered that reddit the app is a separate thing to reddit the service/site.

The wider IT community is still very much a small niche. We often forget that.

> the actual product itself is nothing special.

I wouldn't agree. Aside from Slack, Discord built the next highest quality browser-based chat and voice app, targeting consumers vs enterprise. It's well engineered, reliable, and has a simple user interface (mostly).

Chat is about the only thing Slack does ok.

Video & voice on slack is pretty bad.

Yeah, that was the essence of how it became popular to begin with. It was the first time I'd ever seen an irc experience for the masses, thanks to browser tech improving.

I've always thought their video conferencing was better than Google, but eventually zoom just took over. Never tried voice and felt like that was just tacked on because it became trendy due to Clubhouse etc.

Because they were seemingly the first ones to a) get that combining these features together in a way which is easy to use and administrate was valuable and b) implement them somewhat competently. Most of IRC and the various other alternatives commonly mentioned are stuck on A even just for plain text chat before you get to multimedia, and most would-be competition that gets A either fails at B or got there too late. Privacy concerns are so low down the priority of users that there's pretty slim chance it will be enough to sink discord's first-mover advantage.

IRC with multimedia that works so well people use it all the time, and persistent message history and being able to see messages from before you joined a channel are very useful!

That would be enough by itself.

But it's so much better than IRC in so many ways. Sure, you can run your own IRC bouncer for Libera on that "shell account" or AWS micro-instance you're always running anyway, but who except the nerdiest wants to do that? Even then, you don't get to see past messages when you join another channel, unless there's some history bot or archive page, both of which are clunky. Also don't forget to do the NickServ rituals with each network. And you still don't get good multimedia, which most users expect now as normal communication culture.

Throw in a good UI (compared with alternatives except maybe Zulip, and not including search!), link previews where the sender knows exactly what the receiver will see, markdown-style message formatting, enough metadata to link replies, and succinct emoji reactions that don't spam the channel, and if you feel like using them audio and video conferencing that just works with no additional setup.

I say all that as someone who used to use IRC daily, including running an archiving bouncer and admining a community channel, but I no longer bother. Admittedly because I was busy and ill for a while I lost my registered NickServ username (it expired), which also ended up breaking channel admin, so that was a bit demotivating. When everyone left Freenode for Libera, I just stopped using IRC.

I also say it as someone who strongly agrees with the Discord complaints about projects using it in such a way that most of their useful documentation is being continuously created then effectively lost now.

To Discord's credit, they made a great quality, polished product with an understandable network effect. But it's a shame it's not easy for projects to make their channels publically archived and searchable, and of course it's a shame it's neither an open network nor an open source product. And that the search and search UI are awful.

I'd say given the types of projects I see using Discord (mostly open source, even the commercial ones), Matrix still has a chance of taking over eventually, if Discord doesn't open their network somehow. But there's a high friction against it, both for existing projects because their chat history and users can't be transferred, and for new projects because of their need to meet users "where they already area", i.e. on networks (Discord, Slack, Telegram etc) where the users you want tend to already have accounts and apps already running.

I see a lot of talk about Discord being the latest evil, but really nobody is actually tackling the underlying problems that causes people to use Discord for reasons it's not well suited for.

Open source projects will rely on Discord for more than ephemeral discussions because they're too swamped to dedicate resources to proper documentation or a readme. It takes too long to keep information up to date, nobody wants to write it, and those that do want to write it tend to not be great at really understanding the project. "Edit on Github" links work for larger projects almost exclusively it seems as nobody uses it to help out smaller projects struggling with docs. Documentation is a hard problem! It requires all hands on deck, yet people treat it like one person can go off in isolation and come back with great docs like a novelist. So they pin a comment on Discord for FAQs, they section a channel off for admin-only docs in progress for stuff they eventually move to a Github wiki of sorts.

Also interestingly enough, the project he links does have a lot of documentation, even has wikis full of links. They're adequate enough as docs. So I don't know what he would even have to go into Discord for. He can submit Github issues as well to the multiple repos they have linked.

I don't believe businesses are exclusively moving support to Discord, but again the ones that do rely on Discord are already using it for ephemeral discussions so they just add in casual support to the mix because they are not going to opt into extremely costly support systems. It's easier, counterintuitively, to provide support through Discord than it is to run the likes of Intercom especially at a smaller scale. How else are they supposed to prove direct support for people who don't want to search through the Github?

Now that two core problems are out of the way, we can talk about why Discord thrives. People are ok with Discord being ok at everything but not really excelling at those tasks because they want a hub. They want a place with one account they can get support for an open source project, and then talk to their game friends, and then look up job applications in another server. This is why they don't care about the official site or sending an email, Discord is good enough.

All this to go against the grain and say: Discord is fine as documentation. Not enjoyable to use for that purpose, but fine. Do yourself a favor, and contribute to some docs.

I've joined the project discord he's ranting about, seems like all the questions he asked could be answered by following through the docs or actually reading the code (or by using the search function on github). Discord is just a place for asking questions and having someone else to do the research because most people are lazy.

There’s four tiers of support channels imho and I think the issue is that people try and push discord as a solution for all four.

- documentation is meant to be official and the best effort representation of what a user should know from the perspective of the dev. This should be easily searchable from a search engine.

- forums where support questions come up that may or may not be answered by the documentation. This is still externally searchable which makes it a great secondary form of documentation.

- community chat which acts like a forum but allows for faster and more ephemeral solving of issues. This is great because it’s more interactive but hard to search for newcomers experiencing issues that have been brought up before.

- 1:1 support which is more focused but still not searchable, but allows for more sensitive discussion.

The biggest issue for me is that the forum and the 1:1 support tends to have fallen by the wayside with chat replacing them. But the lack of search engine integration and low history limits means that it’s really inscrutable to people who are trying to solve an already solved issue, but now must join the community and waste everyone’s time with repeating the same thing again.

there’s a place for each of them, and I think too many projects try and treat one as a silver bullet

Discord IS harder to sign up to than other stuff. They sometimes force you to sign up with a mobile number and thats just a huge NO NO.

The alternative is being overrun by spam, which is already really bad on discord.

What's your solution?

HTML files. Or a PDF.

That's shortsighted. GP doesn't want to share their phone number, because then that phone number is likely to be sold together with their other data which can lead to more nasty problems.

Documentation

Documentation is really cool, but it doesn't support voice chat yet :)

Right, but that's "support", not "documentation". Completely different thing, and the latter is not really a substitute for the former, whether it's on Discord, IRC, XMPP, or at the bar after a conference.

Im aware of that and dont have a solution for that. Its not my job to provide one. The thing is there doesnt need to be one if you just document your stuff in a normal way. Also other platforms like reddit face the same problem and seem to be able to solve it in another way, so its not mandatory to survive in the net. Spam has always been an issue as long as the public internet existed. There are other ways to deal with it than introducing global identifiers which can be correlated between platforms and the "real world".

Reddit solves it by having millions of unpaid human moderators manually removing spam. And also by throttling/shadowbanning accounts that use anonymous IPs, non-FAANG email accounts, or non-google/apple SSO.

That's not the only alternative. You see these kinds of intrusive checks on platforms that have drastically under-funded moderation/safety teams. I don't know Discord's numbers, but Twitter's total revenue pre-Musk was about $1/user/month or about $0.01/tweet. Plus there's a hunger for investor-beloved growth metrics that leaves things biased toward greasing the signup funnels. So you end up with privacy-destroying compromises like this.

The solution would be easy: at least offer an alternative. I would gladly give you a few cents or a dollar so you leave me alone with the dishonest bullshit. Probably one of the easiest and most effective ways you could use to fight spammers, but it is obvious why nobody does it or offers the option, because they want numbers. Would be nice to at least stop the charade.

In short, no, the alternative is not "being overrun by spam".

IIRC you do not have to sign up to use discord. When clicking an invite link without being logged in, a temporary account is created without having to register with an email address/phone number/password.

Mobile number is required if the admin of a server sets its verification level to "highest". This is often needed because spam bots are rampant and will do anything, including solving a regular captcha (which discord also employs via hCaptcha), to send spam in direct messages and channels.

This is one but not the only case discord uses mobile numbers. If for any reason discord figures you are a probable source of spam - they dont tell you the criteria for that for obvious reasons - discord will present you with a prompt to verify with a unique mobile number. They only tell you so after the normal email signup and the profile will be instant locked. So you are locked out on profile not on "server" level. For people not on discord: A "server" is something like a subreddit or a part of discord which is subadmined by a certain group/admin. The thing is whatever they exactly do it can flag you for any reason, not only if you really spammed the platform and they seem to use rather creepy technology to make the flagging sticky. At least flushing your browser profile and changing IPs is NOT enough to remove it, so they might be using TLS supercookies, screen resolution or whatever. Would be intresting if some privacy researcher reverses their tracking tech. I had that happen to me in the past and cant tell you what exactly caused it. It may (and equally likely may not) have been caused by an account of mine being thrown out of a "server" after pointing out some lets say inaccuracies that our student government spread. (I didnt spam the server. But it contraticted some talking points they rather not want contraticted.) This wasnt a platform ban either just a local admin action, but it teached me you really want seperate identifiers for different tasks, especially if you somehow engage with politics, cause otherwise crazy people will start following you around and discord makes it easy to track you across servers. You would probably run into the same issue if you engage with health related, nsfw or really any non mainstream content. Other reasons discord might figure you are a likely spam source might be use of a vpn or a network range they already have seen spamming. I cant tell you if they also just want to collect numbers, a blog post of then claimed they only do so to combat spam and not for advertising. At least in germany mobile numbers are tied to your real identity: To get one you have to provide ID to the mobile provider so the goverment has an easier time to spy on you if it wants to. Also you can be followed between platforms with the number. For example you would be able to find me on signal if you had my number. There are ways to firewall against this by using virtual mobile numbers (google voice or something) but they can be detected, it is work and Im not sure if they are allowed or blocked. Lastly, at a certain point you can only join so many "servers" with a free account, which will be quickly reached if every damn software project out there uses one. Though I think this is fair from discords POV. I mean in the end they need to make money somehow.

> At least flushing your browser profile and changing IPs is NOT enough to remove it, so they might be using TLS supercookies, screen resolution or whatever.

Fairly obvious that they flag your account in their database. They can't use TLS supercookies for the primary reason that all of their traffic is proxied through Cloudflare - every API call, CDN image, and websocket event.

Cant be just that. You can change your IP, create a whole new browser profile and of course not log into your old account and it will still flag you. It might just be that Im unlucky and for some reason outside of my control whole regions of my ISPs adress space are flagged.

Yes because the flag is on your account.

The flag is not on my (usually used) account. I can perfectly use that one (though it seems to be the case that old accounts can and sometimes are flagged, not for me though). It is set on new accounts in an otherwise empty browser profile over a clearnet connection in the adress space of a rather large ISP. So there should be no context to work with at all unless creepy things are done. Having some amount of google cookies didnt help either.

The phone number is only a requirement in higher-security servers.

You could join mine with almost nothing verified.

Nope.

Discord sometimes flags your whole account to require a phone number.

It's not a "server"[sic]-specific requirement that can be disabled somewhere; it's an account-wide requirement that cannot be disabled unless you open a support ticket and pray that the person in charge of your ticket is not having a bad day.

I might have gotten unlucky with my ISP, but Discord blocking me from doing anything at all unless I give them my phone number, is what made me leave it once and for all.

Oh but without deleting my account, because I can't delete the account unless I give them my phone number.

> In truth, Discord is no harder to sign up to than Slack, Matrix, Gitter, IRC, or whatever

Not true, they demand phone numbers, make you fill out captchas and generally try to grab as much identifying data as they can get their hands on. It’s a pretty scummy app all round.

> they demand phone numbers

It annoys the absolute shit out of me that this has largely become "acceptable" for SaaS products. I don't want to be identified by a phone number, and I don't want to perform a login by proving I can receive a text message.

I want a login form that can be completed by a password manager.

what about the verification proccess then?? some servers are bullshit wanting to be verified by phone number

Interesting, I've experienced the opposite. People would join the discord server and ask questions that are already answered in the documentations, so you're ending up just sending them the link.

This is close to an ideal outcome, IMO. For us technical writers it's a sign that we're doing our job correctly when support/software engineers answer customer questions by linking to our docs. It's viewed as a good thing because presumably it wasn't too much work for the engineers to find and send that link. Much less work than recreating ad hoc explanations for the same question every time that it comes up, at least.

If something feels off about the situation, you might argue that it could be a symptom of suboptimal design. I.e. "this is covered in the docs, why aren't customers finding it?" But in my experience there will always be a subset of new, inexperienced who default to asking for help in the forums. Once they see that the engineers keep linking to the docs to answer their questions, they usually get the hint that they should just check the docs first.

The Internet is flooded noobs. You don't experience the people who don't join your Discord because they've already read the docs.

Yep. Reading the docs first used to be expected and they were worse and harder to find in the past. There’s a lot less willingness to make a solid effort before asking for help these days (IMO).

I can’t even count the times I’ve solved my own problem by spending an afternoon trying to build a reproducible example.

gone are the days where RTFM applied

Part of building a community is dealing with people who know absolutely nothing. At some point, each of us knew nothing about our strongest subject, including how to effectively get help.

Yes, that includes people who don't read the docs, or are confused by the docs, or are totally new to the problem domain as a whole.

Part of what differentiates successful communities is how they remain welcoming to those complete beginners, even when the question was asked for the 5th time today.

Sure, but there's difference between beginners and people who don't know anything and expect you to do everything for them. Tending to the latter is a recipe for burnout.

This is why you have a bot you can use to easily answer FAQs.

Somewhat related tangent -- while I have issues with Discord as a platform, I do find it to be a very friction-less way to get a community together easily. But since it has consumed so much of the conversation on the internet, it is quite concerning that centralizing all of this knowledge and culture in one, closed, proprietary space will inevitable lead to that Reddit moment when unpopular moves are made from the underlying business and everyone suddenly realizes they fucked up. It was especially strange seeing Reddit subs during/after the blackout funneling users into Discord communities.

This post says everything I’ve been feeling. Ive been doing a lot of work with the Dronecan/UAVCAN protocol and nearly all their documentation is relegated to a Discord channel with no discussions about problems I’ve been trying to solve. A LOT of people have asked the same questions I’ve been asking and not one person has responded. Probably because their questions are ignore for a short time by busy people and then the questions are buried in a deluge of other questions from users. No doubt people have solved the same problems I’ve been coping with but have neglected to post what they’ve learned because discord does not allow you to make focused threads on a very specific topic without the content being buried. I’m getting more frustrated that projects are ditching the tried and true old school forums of yore where conversation can be focused and easily found.

The irony of this behavior is that, Discord’s own support channel for non-paying users are only e-mails and there are no actual discord channel to report discord issues.

Disclaimer: To best of my knowledge. I tried reporting bugs but it was always e-mail with scripted responses(reboot device, reset router, reinstall client, factory reset device).

They have a Discord server for creating integrations with their API, which is probably the most similar usage.

A ~50 german colleague of mine asked me recently what the hell Discord was and I couldn't come up with a good explanation for him that wasn't

>"uhh It's IRC but with pictures and far worse."

Next time I am simply going to answer that it's an NSA longrun project. Because that even if it isn't, it probably will be.

> But if you can't even be bothered to do that, perhaps you shouldn't be releasing a product in the first place?

That is simply unreasonable gatekeeping; Discord might not be documentation, but having documentation is in no way mandatory for releasing your thing into the wild.

There was a thoughtful comment [1] along your lines in the discussion about Diataxis a couple weeks back. The author basically argued that in early stages of a project, certain types of docs aren't necessary or even that helpful and are therefore not a great use of project collaborator time & energy.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36611205

Im sure airbags are similar for prototype cars re: costs. We sill do it though because its common sense.

>but having documentation is in no way mandatory for releasing your thing into the wild.

No. It's not mandatory to have documentation (or even, gasp, good documentation), but easy access to quality information about functionality and usage significantly enhances the UX.

If you're actually charging money for your product, especially if it's a product that isn't strictly for tech folks (e.g., IOT devices, end-user applications, LOB application frameworks, etc.) you better have some decent documentation or you're asking for a world of hurt.

With Discord (bots notwithstanding), you need actual, meat-based agents to handle the support channel(s). Providing quality documentation reduces the support load, and over the long term, likely reduces support costs significantly.

What's more, making folks jump through hoops to get answers to questions, most of which are about ordinary usage/configuration/dependency/etc. options is not a good look.

I'm not rejecting Discord and similar environments as support channels, but we should use the right tool for the right job.

As an old guy, I remember the DEC days, and as Ken Olsen put it[0]:

   One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How enthusiastic
   is our support for UNIX?
   
   Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago.
   Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines. Ten percent of our
   VAXs are going for UNIX use.  UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand,
   easy to get started with. It's great for students, great for somewhat casual
   users, and it's great for interchanging programs between different machines.

   And so, because of its popularity in these markets, we support it.  We have
   good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s.

   It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run
   out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and will end
   up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming.

   With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly
   check that small manual and find out that it's not there.  With VMS, no 
   matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation 
   -- if you look long enough it's there.  That's the difference -- the beauty 
   of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there.
   
   -- Ken Olsen, president of DEC, DECWORLD Vol. 8 No. 5, 1984
   [It's been argued that the beauty of UNIX is the same as the beauty of Ken
   Olsen's brain.  Ed.]

Now, Olsen was wrong about Unix/unix-like platforms. But he was right about documentation, especially in a business context.

These days, of course, you don't need physical, paper documentation and that's a good thing.

Would you rather have to connect to a Discord channel (assuming you know the right one to use), have searches for similar issues return copious useless results, watch your question/issue slide off the page (potentially) with multiple other conversations going on, and wait for someone (who may or may not have a clue) to attempt to answer your question or,

open a browser tab, search the indexed documentation and quickly see all the relevant options, capabilities and/or specifications?

Now get off my lawn! :) :)

[0] https://motd.ambians.com/quotes.php/name/freebsd_fortunes_2/...

Exactly! I don’t use discord for privacy reasons and I don’t want to just to learn something that should be included in the README file or in documentation!

Discord should be a last resort when documentation fails. People should be able to RTFM, and if they’ve come to Discord that means that either 1) they didn’t RTFM or 2) the answer isn’t in TFM or 3) the answer isn’t clear from TFM in which case your writing needs to be clearer.

So when people are asking questions in your Discord, you should loop that answer back into your documentation.

In terms of the 4-document model, I find a lot of software systems (libraries and frameworks), while they are good at providing tutorials and an API reference, they are a lot poorer at providing an Explanation.

What I want to know when learning a new software system are what are the main classes/concepts in it and how they relate to each other.

Discord attracts a weirdo community of young people into anime and furry stuff .. Slack, whilst not my favorite, is way more professional and enterprise. Don't understand the developer evangelist stuff moving to Discord. Maybe if you were a gaming company or made some gaming mod, but for a web product/tool, big fail.

Discord is far, far superior to slack (except in actual product parity between mobile and desktop.)

It may be a superior program/app, but its use case was not built with business/enterprise in mind.

Pretty much if you pay for it you get just about everything Slack could offer.

Slack requires you pay per account and the free tier is even worse than Discord since every message is deleted after 90 days...

You can join Slack channels as a free user ... Devrel teams usually have a budget to manage their communities.

For paid products/support sure.. obviously not for open source and/or free projects.

Discord is the most prevalent and lowest friction communication app for the highest portion of the relevant audience, and will only become more so with every new (younger) developer cohort.

The average 16-34ish year-old probably-male developer that owns a PC with a discrete GPU almost certainly already has Discord installed, and does not perceive any undue burden from being "forced" to use an app they already use regularly, for better or worse: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1327674/discord-user-age...

In my opinion, the best solution is Discord getting ahead of this and letting admins make in-server threads visible to the clearnet.

I've needed discord documentation for unreal engine, several niche plugins, and a few video game mod communities. The experience is way better in my opinion. The hard part of finding information in a new field is formulating the question, not finding the answer. Talking to people who can help you formulate the question is great. Most documentation for things is pretty bad for hard problems. You want some barebones stuff, sure, but most projects have this.

The watchy example looks fine to me: https://watchy.sqfmi.com/docs/getting-started

I'd rather post a question and wait for a reply than waste time trying to find answers on dead forums and bad docs.

Gen-Z grew up in a world where the old, searchable internet was already dysfunctional and overrun with siloed apps. I think most of them don't know what they're missing. It's no big deal to do documentation in Discord for them, and I can even see a few pros (comments, chat, pins, multimedia, likes/emojis). At the very least, the format aligns with things that are already ingrained in their minds.

Personally, all of that can go to hell, just give me documentation generated from source on a static site and get out of my way.

Discord overall is antithetical to the web's foundational values and yet another thing where a "moderator" culture has emerged that cannibalizes user interaction

I feel like it harkens back to the days of lurking around IRC, chatting with randos about all sorts of stuff. I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment from it. The main difference is that conversations are persistent and you can (sort of) search them.

That said, pretty much every popular modern website is antithetical to the web’s foundational values, with persistent user tracking, monetizing everything, walled gardens, etc. It’s not a Discord exclusive problem.

Funny story: I recently received an email from discord threatening my account with suspension because I had simply lurked a server they found to be rule-breaking. I had forgotten about even joining it until I saw the email.

(Plug) This is one of the core issues we look to solve at Inkeep (inkeep.com). Especially for technical products, knowledge is not just in Discord or docs, it's also GitHub issues, StackOverflow, forums and more. At Inkeep, we ingest all of that content from all these different sources and use LLMs to power both search and chat. The goal is that you as a user can quickly find answers to your questions regardless of where that answer may happen to live. By focusing on one product at a time, we can create higher quality search and chat than a generic search engine like Google or ChatGPT with Bing.

We're now powering AI search and chat for over 100+ companies. If you're a product owner and want to see it live for your content, give us a ping at hi@inkeep.com. If you're a developer and would like this for a product you use often, let us know here: https://inkeep.typeform.com/pleaseIndex. We'll create a chatbot you can use for free.

Counterpoint: Discord has awesome search features, and joining is painless. Everyone already knows that Discord is the new way to communicate with a business, so everyone knows that the best way to get answers is to (1) Join the official discord (2) Use the search to see if someone has asked a similar thing before (3) If not, ask and people will answer helpfully.

The other part is that many companies consider Discord as being a malware source and thus block it.

Great, I have an issue which may be a bug, but you're only supposed to post confirmed bugs.

Guess I'll disable VPN. Need to do that anyway to read documentation on SourceForge.

0 accountability in security.

Everytime I read something like this it's almost always because the author does not actually know how to use Discord.

There's some nice search features: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000468588-U...

And on top of this I'd push the Discord to use forum channels if they do not already https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...

I know how to use Discord. I admin a couple of servers. I know how to use its search and agree it's a pretty good search. I know how forum channels work.

I still think it's a bad substitute for both documentation or a web-searchable forum. I can't use a web search to find results on Discord. I have to log in to a Discord server and use Discord's search so it's a separate set of steps from the web search I initially did when I started trying to solve my problem.

Once I grudgingly jump through those hoops, if the server admins and users are actually using forum channels, I might find reasonably structured results, but they often aren't. When I have a technical issue with a software project, I would like proper docs, then a proper forum (Lemmy might be a good option as of summer 2023), in that order. Real-time chat, whether it's Discord, IRC, or Matrix is a distant third.

There should be a good opportunity for whoever can implement an LLM that listens in on chat platforms like slack and discord and constructs a wiki from it.

Bonus points if it also chats back with answers to questions, linking to the docs as needed.

Discord and its consequences have been a disaster to the human race.

Or the internet at least.

In my opinion LLM based document search tools such as OSS Quivr may be better suited for documentation search for startups.

A highly customed Quivr with one of the 'Open Source LLMs' may provides great 'semantic search' for product documentation.

https://github.com/StanGirard/quivr Dump all your files and chat with it using your Generative AI Second Brain using LLMs ( GPT 3.5/4, Private, Anthropic, VertexAI ) & Embeddings

I remember when I was given CorelDraw in the mid/late 1990s and it came with 3 volumes of manuals, several hundred pages of documentation, in rather nice paperback with glossy color pages.

Discord is good for real-time chatting -- both text and voice. It's pretty horrible for finding old conversations, unless you know exactly what you're looking for (and even then there's a lot of manual sifting).

I mostly love Discord. It's better than Teams, better than Slack... but it's not a replacement for a well-curated Wiki, or even a Reddit thread that I can find via Google search.

Discord, or any IRC analogue for that matter used as documentation is same as saying, "hey look we have a cantine in our head quarters, if you have any questions pop and ask on a table thats designated for that purpose. And this way you will reach all our users that have similar issues!" A modern day direct democracy assembly.

I signed up for Midjourney recently. Not for work, just to test it out. It is indeed amazing and clearly the best image transformer right now. But I find it terribly annoying that it’s only accessible on Discord.

So much unnecessary scrolling and interface visual overload.

I feel this. Lately I'm using Remix as my web framework, but most of the discussions and issues are had on discord. This means they're not searchable via Google, and even in discord, the search completely sucks.

There's so much good info which is really hard to access.

Isn't discord attachment security really lax? In a "anyone with an image or file link can download it regardless of connection to the server or role" level of lax?

You'd need to be really bold or poorly advised to consider that role

Search function? I always use search... Much faster than trying to put stuff in docs.

I'm just into this epaper watch this blogger writes about. Anyone have any experience with them?

I am confused. Why would anybody use Discord for anything other than...well, I don't know. I guess the same thing the old Yahoo! chat rooms were for 20 years ago.

>Why would anybody use Discord for anything

It's a replacement for Ventrilo/Mumble/Teamspeak. At the time (and still) there were no voice chat + text chat service integrated into one that can be used for free both on web, desktop, and mobile.

I don't use it, but have done in the past, and can see why it became popular.

Textual communication is nothing new.

But a relatively platform agnostic system which enabled anybody to quickly set up a room, or form and administer a private or public group, while also covering multimedia like voice comms and file sharing, in a modern and arguably elegant package, well developed even 5+ years ago, it's clear why it gathered a following in it's own right. Successful business strategies played a large part in the extent, of course.

The fact does remain however that textual communication is nothing new, and content in Discord is subject to the same old principles of merit and efficiency with respect to data format, usage, and availability.

With chatgpt you can have the documentation write itself. Far superior to nothing for sure.

This is why I’m working on an AI discord docs/support bot: https://recurai.com/discord

Reach out if you’d like to get it set up with your server -> contact@recurai.com

There is also embedchain which you can use in conjunction with a discord bot (create QnA pairs, feed them into embedchain along with your documentations).

I don't know how recurai works under the hood since the discord invite link is broken and there seems to be no documentation on it, so not sure if its worth paying for it.

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