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Comment by kemayo | Hacker News Reader

> Discord has been decent for a while. I suspect enshittification will commence soon, so we should be on the lookout for an alternative over the next five years.

Discord's fine for what it is, but it's also a fundamentally different thing than social media or forums or a support-site. Projects that try to funnel everything onto Discord are (a) losing anyone who thinks joining an 800 person chatroom doesn't sound fun, and (b) always seem to wind up being very irritable at people who join and immediately ask all 800 people their common question, despite Discord being extremely poorly searchable.

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Discord is not a social platform. It's a chatroom for gamers, to share memes and voice chat while they play <game-of-the-month>. It's not a base for documentation. It's not a platform for your next product (other than a bot..) launch. It's poorly designed for searching, for knowledge, for connecting. It's 2020s version of ICQ.

I find it utterly insufferable. I, a very technically capable person, really struggle with using Discord. I can’t help but feel that people that misuse Discord in this way are doing it from a place from extreme ignorance and hubris. It is so blatantly not intended or appropriate for what a bunch of people use it for. The only thing it has going for it is that the person setting up the community knows how to use it. It is utterly inscrutable from the perspective of an outsider, trying to look past all the stuff that is at the very least using gamer jargon, if not functionally built explicitly for gamers in a way that is not useful for others.

REALLY cynically, I think that Discord has a feature set that the admin / moderator / power user functionality of Discord gets a particular sort of controlling “community manager” very excited. They can have their bots and username colours and whatever else set up just the way they like them, usually in a way that people don’t really care about. A means of a power-seeker to tinker around with community dynamics in a way that is far from having an in-person analogue.

To be fair to the people running Discord, they've been trying to simplify and change it. But the existing user-base that knows the platform always pushes back against changes - such as loading screen tips being un-gamerified and the general design of promotional material going from being a gaming chat platform[0] to a general purpose chat thing[1]

0: https://rr.judge.sh/Chickadee/43748a/chrome_DXEAHYhlJF.png

1: https://discord.com/

> To be fair to the people running Discord, they've been trying to simplify and change it.

Instead of focusing on worthless stickers and Nitro upgrades, how about they allow users to rebind keys for most, if not all, shortcuts on the desktop client.

Back in the wii home brew days, I used to hang around in their irc channels. Those channels were a main way for people to get help with what we would now call "jailbreaking" their wii. Sure some sites and forums existed with instructions, but if you ran into a weird edge case or just misunderstood what some kid wrote on a forum you'd be stuck till you found how to get on irc and asked in those channels. During the peak of that scene's activity, once you get in there you would have top notch support from several volunteers handholding you though every step of the way. The actual people who wrote the tools you were having problems with would help you out. Sometimes they'd give you a debug version comoiled just for you. Often, your bug would get fixed and a new point release made while you wait. The people writing guides would camp out in there and take note of the most common questions their guides cause and go fix them to head off problems early.

To me, forums felt like a place information went to die. Your answer would be on page 5 of a 30 page rambling thread but you wouldn't ever know because you wouldn't read that far. Read page one and maybe two, then jump to the end to see if it's solved and instead they are on another topic entirely.

IRC meanwhile was always 100% relevant and timely.

You really hit the nail on the head. I'm technically capable but discord really gives me the vibes of corp slack channels where I don't care to participate in, because they're not paying me to.

I still can't seem to get how this is a real social media outlet.

You can’t seem to get it because of that bias. GenY and GenZ haven’t had that experience (yet) so to them, it’s the bees knees, or lit, or slay, or whatever they are using to express their approval.

As a very technically able person, can you get into more detail on what is "utterly insufferable"? I hopped the boat in 2016 so I am probably blinded by using it from pretty much the start.

So long as you have the nitro.

I’m with you and I think it’s entirely ignorance and hubris. To be fair to discord, I think they know this. They know their product market fit, they know their audience. Their customers are those community managers that like shiny things and surveillance powers. The fault is entirely on those community managers thinking their customers would like it too.

> So long as you have the nitro.

What do you mean? Nitro doesn't offer much besides using cross-server emojis and custom profiles.

Do you run a community on Discord? Nitro levels enable more community features.

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028038352-S...

I miss IRC, man... a Discord guild is a poor man's IRC server... a Matrix homeserver is a rich man's IRC server...

a Discord guild is a poor man's IRC server..

that natively supports emojis, stickers, embeds, non-ip-leaking voice chat, screenshare with audio, rich permissions, avatars, attachments

oh, and chat history. Because everyone loves needing an irc bouncer to be able to assimilate the context of the active conversation when they log in.

Exactly. Back in 2012 or so I wrote a web chat system that had all that (minus the screenshare & voice chat) and it was quite a challenge supporting all the permutations of links, images, emoji's, bbcode, etc. It's a pos in today's standards but back before slack it was "on the right track". Slack pretty much came out of nowhere and killed the effort though. To your point about a bouncer, I think a lot of folks are nostalgic and forget what a shitty system IRC was. Net-splits, bouncers, no filters or mod tools other than kick. No embedded media unless your client did magic. It was some folks' first foray into online community so naturally they want that feeling back.

I'm glad to see this pushback against centralized monopolies. The open-web needs more openness.

It’s it interesting how many meaningful conversations we’ve all had on IRC, lacking all those essential features you mention?

IRC is dead in any meaningful way, though. It's a decent technology that's lost to services with all those essential features. We also used to have great conversations while riding bikes with our friends when we were kids. Does that mean employers would be served to hold all of their meetings on bikes?

irc has 2 killer features: 1) it takes some effort to get and stay on. web chatters leave pretty fast. 2) people leave for digital prisons.

the freenode exodus was great, there was no discussion, nothing to explain.

> IRC is dead in any meaningful way

False. IRC is still alive and kicking.

> IRC is dead in any meaningful way

It's interesting how many meaningful conversations I've had over email too, the medium doesn't matter, but it doesn't mean the features aren't useful.

I don't miss IRC. I use it :)

Read your comment but believe me when I say I don't get a single reason why you do not like Discord.

Part of the reason Discord falls short as a social platform is that each community is siloed off from the rest. There is no continuity bridging the overarching platform and userbase. I feel like for a social platform to work, the platform itself should be a community and the users should be able to carve out their own slice within that.

I've been working on a platform that blends social features from Discord with the discoverability of Reddit. What we're building is intentionally not just another Reddit or Discord clone. We're trying to create an all-in-one place for people to create communities first and foremost and not just posts/chat messages.

https://sociables.com/

What if I specifically like the fact that the communities are siloed on Discord?

I don't want people from other circles accidentally ending up on my community just because they were bored and were browsing. I don't want my Discord server ending up on the results of some global search either.

I never understood how so many people - seemingly everyone - all came to the conclusion that Discord is all these things that it clearly isn’t.

Simple--because user authentication and management sucks ass.

So, everyone is willing to put up with a wildly incorrect feature set simply to have someone else deal with lost passwords, spam, fraud, etc.

Okta, Keycloak, Auth0, Kinde, FusionAuth, Firebase, Cognito, Clerk - User auth does suck ass and it’s been solved time and time and time again. Don’t be lazy.

In what way do those solve "have someone else deal with lost passwords, spam, fraud, etc."?

The technical authentication is the easy part. It's dealing with the humans that is the hard part.

Okta is a SaaS offering that does that. Maybe not fraud. What is fraud in this context? Spam? Check. Lost passwords? Check. Let someone else deal with auth? Check.

All of those are either services or software you can host yourself that provide auth and user management, OTPs, 2FA, email recovery, forgotten passwords, single-sign on, and more.

> Spam? Check

In what way? verification emails don't count. And for many servers where spam and troll accounts is a problem, custom bots and new member screening features deal with this - since they don't want to spend every waking moment staring at the server and banning people who join and immediately cause issues.

Okta recently partnered with a few folks to tackle this. They published a thing [1] in April. Fraudulent registrations and bots are being screened using Shape which was acquired by F5 [2]. I'm not saying this problem has been solved, but it's an area of active concentration. For most folks, the offerings are more than adequate. For the top saas or platforms, you'll probably always have this issue as you're a lucrative target.

[1] https://sec.okta.com/shareddetections

[2] https://www.f5.com/cloud/products/bot-defense

Exactly my use case. I admin a community of around 20 people that chat together about games and to pass the day at work sometimes. We post stupid stuff or interesting things to read. Some days pass by with zero messages, some are frenzied. We get in voice channels and chat and game together.

I am a guest in other similarly sized circles' discord servers and this way I keep in touch with different groups.

For this use case, Discord is gold. And I happily pay for Nitro. For anything else like searching a wiki, it sucks, but it is not its use case.

> I admin a community of around 20 people that chat together about games and to pass the day at work sometimes.

This sounds cozy. Can I join?

Common internet fact: people can and will use the most popular platform for features it was actively not designed for. Hence, dozens long twitter rants that should have been a blog, imageboards being used for news, and closed off chatrooms being used to more or less house arcane knowledge, some documented and some not.

Not much you can do there.

And yet, the new generation is (mis)using it for collaboration purposes, without realizing everything they're losing in the process.

When you want your friends to try your app but you end up with a whole support system inside discord, that’s how it happens. You’re hanging with your friends playing games, you show them that side project you’ve been working on, they all love it and it grows into a shit show of channels, rules, bots, response emoji’s to indicate intent, merging with other servers, with a whole new set of rules, channels, bots, mods.

It’s unprofessional. AI tools that rely on Discord as their delivery, unprofessional. Possibly even down right illegal. Not the act of using a bot, but what service they offer through that bot.

IRC…? ICQ was mostly 1:1 conversations.

ICQ had rooms as well

One way that Discord is similar to Reddit (and, imo, a reason for it's relative success) is that it operates on the same authorization model. A single pseudonymous account gets you access to many disparate communities. In either case, once you have an account the activation energy needed to join that subreddit/server is very low.

The entire 3D printing community has switched to discord there is no more forum, blogs or something else; even reddit was not able to compete with discord, and that was before the blackout in June. Since then, a lot of 3D printing subreddits are closed or only accessible in archive mode. So what does it means in practice?

I have 30 different discord servers on the 3D printing topic (across the others i use for gaming or friends), each with 50+ different channels, not counting subchannels. For the Voron 3D Printing, i have the official Discord + 4 other fans discords including 3 in my local language. You cannot read everything, as chats are mixing high quality information but also random chats not usefull.

Some discords are only available if you pay a montly fee on Patreon Some discords are completely empty but make a "news announcement" some times to times that is not published elsewhere that is why i keep them in my list You have to manually pickup the notification otherwise some servers are constantly spamming.

Of course you cannot search across all discords at the same time and discord is picky with typos so if you search "pizze" across the pizza-discordverse you will get nothing specifically for each precise component reference, you have to search the servers 1 by 1, this is really painfull Discord is trying to create their version of reddit threads but that is shitty and not usefull in practice

It was a fantastic platform back to the covid period but now it's becoming very complex and not usable; the main pain point is that (as instagram) is it not indexed on any search engine.

I manage a Discord server for a few friends, topics are gaming related (DCS World primarily, but also Star Citizen and iRacing) - could easily be other hobbies.

I have structured the channels to support the learning journey that DCS is.

I absolutely love it, so incredibly useful. It's very easy to share resources, pictures - anything. The voice chat is also superb, just hop into a fixed hangout channel that anyone can join. I'll often just go into one early in the night, so that my friends (all over the world) can see me and hop on if they want.

I have joined server vendor specific discord servers, as well as racing league ones. The fact that they are invitation based is perfect.

Furthermore the scan on screen QR code with phone to sign in on desktop merits special mention, another massive usability win.

I specifically love how siloed it is or can be. Sure there is a lot of fluff they're putting in (game stuff in the message editor etc) which I just ignore; I can only hope they never change this core design and turn it into way more than it is now.

(Have been using it heavily since 2020, but started before then - fwiw. It absolutely helped me get through some of the strictest lock downs in the western world. Oh and I'm in my fifties, been on computers since the Vic20. I pay for Premium, and also for my early teenage son who uses it with his friends).

The problem as I see it, as a heavy Discord user as well as a mod and admin for some moderately large communities, isn't that Discord isn't searchable - it's just the people are generally too lazy to do so. Often (and by often, I mean _daily_) I see people join a server, skip past the FAQ channel, and ask the same question the person above them asked. Said user would have had their answer had they:

- read the FAQ

- used the search

- scrolled up just a little bit

I don't disagree that the walled garden of Discord could use search improvements, but the users themselves bear much of the responsibility for the perceived distaste of the tool and I have yet to see a solution that isn't perceived as "mean" when people are directed, even gently, to try the aforementioned methods for seeking an answer.

Glad I wasn't the only one uncomfortable with Discord, especially in the vicinity of that point (a). To me, Discord feels tainted with weird masculism or toxic kind of gamerism that isn't my kind.

How does a chat platform have any sort of nonsense like that? You're projecting or joining shit servers. It's a technology. It's neutral.

We use Discord at my company. It was a compromise between us graybeards wanting email + issue tracker only and the new people wanting... Discord.

> the new people wanting... Discord.

Had they never heard of Slack?

Doesn't slack have most of the same problems?

back to the irc

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