Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
kraktoos.com
kraktoos.com
IMO for projects that need a place for support questions but don't want to use issues, they could use the Github "discussions" board feature.
Did you try searching for the error message on Discord? If so, what was the experience?
(And I think the engagement cynicism might be at least a bit correct/warranted for Reddit.)
Have you ever seen the GitHub issues of a halfway popular repo?
Once a project is big enough to attract all the low quality users, the same question/problem will be asked/reported over and over again.
The maintainers will have to deal with a mess either way. They might as well choose the platform they themselves prefer.
With GitHub you reduce the noise because people who know how to use Google will find the relevant issue and either contribute to it or find an answer to their question. OTOH everyone else submits issues with no regard to what's already in the issues list.
With Discord you do it by putting an auth wall in the way, which reduces the overall number of people reporting issues and asking for help but, OTOH, everybody who signs up has to ask for help.
Even with that, I'd still prefer GitHub issues, but I can see why some owners would get annoyed with it.
Personally I find it a barrier to entry since I have no desire to sit around in a chat room where support is typically blended with shitposting, infighting and drama.
At least perhaps consider a middle ground like Discourse or phpBB.
Years ago I looked after a product that the company I'd worked for had acquired which had hundreds of thousands of users. Originally the only avenue for support for that product had been email and that was a problem because we were overrun with emails asking very similar questions, and nobody was responding to them (or had time to). So I started creating blog posts to answer these questions, every time I encountered a new question, and sending them in very short responses to emails. I.e., effectively I created a knowledgebase, but I used a blog because it was the most convenient, and least bureaucratic way of achieving the solution: I won't say it wasn't politically charged, because it definitely pissed a couple of people off, but it got the job done and avoided a zero outcome scenario because I didn't get blocked by these people (one in particular). Sending out these knowledgebase posts started to reduce the support burden because now, of course, we had a search-engine indexed body of content that people could find online.
The point being if you're a small team and you want to minimise the amount of work you need to do to support your project, unless you have a very small and niche community, you're much better off creating resources that are openly available, than in some sort of walled garden, especially if the walled garden means you have to repeat yourself a lot.
Then set up a mailing list (Google Group?) which will be searchable, and send out a regular FAQ message to it (like in the Usenet days).
Making things easier to find via search is one way to deal with what you describe, and Discord/Slack/IRC does not allow for that.
Sorry for a stupid question; but does not Discord have full-text search?
So if I grep something in /var/log/foo.log, find an error, I can copy-paste it into a search bar to start seeing what others have said about.
How does that work with Discord? I now have to sign up for the channel(s) of that software… and do that for every piece of software that decides to go with Discord.
Whereas if folks go with publicly accessible web forums, Github tickets, mailing lists (either old school Mailman or Google Groups), all those discussions and threads are universally available to web search.
That's true for Discord too though.
Nobody said Discord solved that problem, only that GitHub hasn't either.
I don't know, this sounds like draining all the water in all the oceans on Earth just because somebody pee'd in your local pool.
But their choice will make some people decide not to use their software. If I have an issue that I'm looking for support for, and discover that it doesn't exist outside of something like Discord, I would stop using that software.
It may be that there aren't many like me, or that the devs don't want users like me, but nonetheless, choosing a poor support forum will lose some users.
I guess so, but to me discord seemed a rather awful choice.
See also this article that was posted here a few weeks ago: https://drewdevault.com/2021/10/26/stalebot.html
> On GitHub, I had to log in and search their thousands of issues to find an error message, only to find it's like three closed issues without any replies and there's one troubleshooting step in chinese.
I don't see how this would be an issue exclusive with Discord rather than the project itself.
If I had to waste time digging through their discord to understand that when the issues page can give a quick overview, I wouldn't bother with the project unless it was something extremely unique and important enough to me to deal with such a mess.
- Chats in modern IM applications like Telegram or WhatsApp are sorted by the time of the most recent message in chats. Yeah, there are various workarounds like folders and pinning, but the default approach is "sort by time"
- The default for modern monitoring, Prometheus, does not bother with storing aggregated information for the long time. And mostly people are OK with this. Compare with old school RRD which retained aggregated data for a year by default.
- The common UI for photo gallery on mobile devices is the timeline. Other options like grouping by GPS location or folders are not easily accessible and feel like an extra not very polished feature.
And in a way this is a reasonable strategy to cope with too much data, too many things demanding our attention.
Now let's get back to issues vs discord. In the point of view that I have just described there is no need for search and discovery. If the issue happens frequently it is frequently mentioned and grabs attention and therefore get fixed eventually. Something that happens infrequently does not matter anyway. Eternal storage feels like a burden. Every issue that have been posted just keeps begging for attention and does not sink in the depth of time!
But even if I can understand this point of view I am an old-school guy and can not accept it.
On one hand, I don't see Discords as any different to web forums, except with no personal control and the knowledge barriers removed. In that way, they're not really different from the defunct AOL communities or Yahoo Groups of yesteryear, outside of their inability to be conveniently scraped or archived. Can you port your Discord channel to a different platform or self host?
On the other, it seems like the people who like it /really/ like it. But then again, people have always liked being gatekeepers, even if they don't really hold the keys and it's not their castle. But that surely isn't all of the appeal?
- More people get notified immediately on Discord, and then everyone chimes in. When I star a repo I don't get notified when anyone opens a new issue. It becomes even more of a community effort to find solutions.
- It's much easier to use a single account for multiple purposes. If everything is on Discord, then a single account is all you need (vs a separate account for GitHub, GitLab, random bulletin boards, etc.)
You can customize your repository notifications in a granular way, including subscribing to issues (Watch > Custom > Issues), discussions, releases, etc.
This is the primary method I use to track OSS releases. More in the GitHub docs:
https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/managing-subs...
A rather huge difference is that you have to sign up in order to use Discord. You usually don't in order to search web forums. Signing up for something is a pretty huge ask.
A place to report issues and a place to discuss have their use, but any project needs comprehensive documentation and a FAQ page. Yes, many won't read them. But also, many will.
(Full disclosure, I've been that guy)
At times, they might be wrong, but they’re going to realize they’re a problem if they’re always wrong. I do think sometimes incentives seem misaligned, like, I was in an enterprise linux related community, where their income is related to providing support to enterprise customers. In that scenario, it seemed like someone answering questions for free could be problematic to their business.
I don’t know, I don’t think it’s an issue, but I’ve noticed it does seem strange being that person.
To be fair, when he answers a question he's right 99.9% of the time.
These people, while knowledgeable, drag down the community with their toxic personalities and discourage others from participating. Who wants to ask a question if there is a high probability of being called stupid.
Warning and then ultimately kicking these individuals improved things as a whole. Others stepped up to answer questions and mods handled fewer complaints about the asshole's style of communication.
What ultimately convinced us banning was appropriate was people reminding us that it was within our rights and duties as community maintainers to create a welcoming environment for everyone, and seeing regular members stop participating because of them.
You are the host, you define the rule.
These sorts of bans aren’t just good for the community. They’re also good for the recipient. (I’d only say that in the short term, depending on the person, there could be a danger of self harm and people should always be kind and careful.)
It doesn’t feel good. But that pain you feel is you caring about that person. Understanding that makes it easier.
I've never seen anyone learning anything from being permabanned from anywhere. This is just post-facto justification to make yourself feel better for removing those people - but don't believe it even for a second that you've helped them in any way. Helping the community? Could be. Helping the banned person? Hell no.
Your argument also requires the hidden assumption that the person making the claim you disagree with (specifically me), was the person performing the action rather than the recipient of the action. While it is true I have ended relationships (including permabans), it was by being the recipient of such endings that I came by my knowledge so this assumption in a practical sense is false.
You can always push them to a misc channel and if the community really likes them they'll chat over there?
Banning used to come with a lot of consideration and sympathy. Often multiple attempts to outreach were made.
In the social media era, not only do we ban without prejudice, we shadow ban (leaving them to think they're talking to people), ban on presumption (banning Redditors based on other subreddits they use), and take joy in shutting down those we disagree with (freedom of speech for me, not for thee).
The new tactic on Reddit is to block someone when you disagree with them - this prevents them from ever interacting with any thread you post in, even the sibling posts.
We love to silence people these days. I just wish it didn't come with a wide blast radius beyond peoples' own personal consumption.
There are a lot of decent people there and participating can feel really worthwhile to me but there are a lot of very angry people and even 1% of crazy angry toots can wreck my mood and I feel I wouldn’t want to participate otherwise.
One kind of behavior I can’t stand is people who call other people “fascists” indiscriminately because they are comfortable in their own skin or think we should have a police department or because they are a landlord evicting a tenant who didn’t pay the rent, or whatever. Much of the time I agree or largely agree with them on a lot of issues but it’s the hate I can’t stand.
So I am really quick to block on expressed hate, particularly when associated with certain issues that quickly get flagged on Hacker News as it seems many participants immediately resort to name calling against anyone who disagrees with them in the slightest or even expresses uncertainty on the issue.
You could make the case that these people really deserve a correction and that, who knows, the way they are they are driving people away from their side and helping “the fascists” get elected (for any political activity I think you have to ask the question of “who does this really help?”). This behavior is self-reinforcing and unfortunately these people surround themselves with other people who do the same things and many of them respond quite hatefully when you call out their behavior so I’d be doing nothing but arguing with these people and getting exhausted… without the block button.
You can measure what inflames people or you can predict what inflames people, measuring is always going to be more acccurate.
… and you can do that measuring by counting boosts or (on HN) taking the ratio of comments/votes. 0.5 is about the median, articles that go above 2 are well in the danger zone.
In my mind the chronological feed with boosting is pretty toxic on its own, an “explore” feed based on what is getting boosted is even worse.
YOShInOn’s main feed I look at every day is based on (1) clustering and (2) prediction of my upvotes and downvotes, I don’t particularly upvote toxic articles, in fact, I make a point to down vote them so my feed is calming and low in sensationalism. (Though there was a time I was into articles from The Guardian about how the UK is going to hell…). So that kind of algorithmic feed is not inflammatory.
If you use “boost count” or judged sentiment or the like you could make a model that amplifies or diminishes angry content. The thing is voting and boosting is not all bad, I post a lot of flower pics to Mastodon because they get boosted, up to a point discussions on HN are a good thing, If you used a sentiment model to suppress angry content in a voting/boosting process that might be very good.
Sometimes I think about making an “angry toot” model but I can’t stand the thought of looking at 5000 angry toots (well, i have thought about testing a weight loss plan based on inducing a psychogenic fever and maybe that would work…)
As someone who moderated a political board in the aughts: the hell there was. We banned people all the time who were being shitheads. We did it with glee. The discussions we had were often quite interesting but if the wrong sort of person got in there it would turn into a flamewar and we didn't want never ending flamewars.
Believe it or not you can actually foster interesting conversations about politics including across the various aisles. But a big, big part of that is having a very strict set of engagement rules and if you broke em, you were out.
Granted, a lot of people returned under a new username because we didn't have any IP banning tools. But at the same time, they usually returned and at least attempted to respect the rules, getting a little better with each ban.
> In the social media era, not only do we ban without prejudice, we shadow ban (leaving them to think they're talking to people), ban on presumption (banning Redditors based on other subreddits they use), and take joy in shutting down those we disagree with (freedom of speech for me, not for thee).
Your freedom of speech goes as far as you're asking me as a forum operator/reddit moderator/facebook group owner to allow it. You're not entitled to participate in any community for any reason.
And especially now where people too invested in online communities are taking guns to their campuses and all kinds of wacky shit, if I was still doing this, I'd be stricter than ever. At least back when I was in it the worst thing someone would do is post goatse or one jar if they were pissed.
> The new tactic on Reddit is to block someone when you disagree with them - this prevents them from ever interacting with any thread you post in, even the sibling posts.
Yeah, and? This is weird. You're effectively saying someone telling you to go away has to allow you to make a counterpoint. No they don't. If you're irritating them they're absolutely going to use tools at hand to make you go away. If that's a problem for you maybe you should work on being less irritating?
> We love to silence people these days. I just wish it didn't come with a wide blast radius beyond peoples' own personal consumption.
Nothing new in the slightest. We've never had access to such a variety of incredibly powerful megaphones. It only makes sense that, by extension, other people will want an equally powerful set of earmuffs.
Frankly, I think this whole notion of "communities now are overmoderated" is rooted in the fact that for a long, long, long time on the internet, it was literally the wild west in most places. This meant it was a natural place for people with low social calibration/skills to congregate, because they could function better in a social space with less "rules" would be the best word. The idea that you have to not piss off everyone around you when you speak your mind is basically status quo for the vast majority of human history, only disrupted on the internet from the period of the late 90's to maybe 2012, somewhere around there. Now it seems the Internet is catching up.
Like, I dunno, if you can't make a point without pissing everyone off, then either A) it's not a point worth making or B) you're not the person to make that point?
The issue with blocks as implemented on reddit is that they effectively work as moderation tools that instead of following some community norms are in the powers of individuals who are happy to abuse them. In at least one Reddit community it was enough of a problem that they made ot a rule that blocking someone was a bannable offence. Blocks should just be mutes for those blocking them. not an effective unilateral ban for whoever gets there first.
1) Your post will get very little traction or engagement, which means it'll be buried in New quite quickly
2) You won't really be a bother to the community at all, because of 1. Like, if someone posted something that was incredibly offensive to all in a given community but then hid it from everyone... like, is it even really posted? Isn't that just basically shadowbanning yourself?
I'm legit trying but I'm having a hard time picturing what purpose this would be used for, on the part of the poster. Seems like a huge waste of time to be honest.
This is not your problem.
A support forum is not a "social outlet".
A lot of rules seem to be trying to create that standard on paper, when that standard does not exist in the heart. If I were to go on a limb, "inclusivity" is the fear of being exclusive, which forms only in a vacuum of authority: the unquestioned power to decide who is in, and who is out.
A good video related to this: "Assholes Are Ruining Your Project. Donnie Berkholz (RedMonk)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZSli7QW4rg
A rule was made for that situation: "If the effort and/or stress associated with moderating you regarding rules or general behavior becomes too much of an issue, we will remove you from the server.".
That rule has been used a few times since its implementation.
Some users waste hours and hours of moderator time per week and it would be nice to have a written rule to point to for a timeout
On some level they are very hard working and if I banned them it would take longer to get my tasks completed. If they did 5% of the work that they do the low quality wouldn’t bother me because (1) a little of that diluted in the whole is OK and (2) the individuals would not come to my attention.
With some feedback some of those people might get better (I was always open to paying more for quality) but I also didn’t want to get into arguments with those folks.
If they're hovering right over it, they're out, based on the administrative burden principle.
The other rule is that all arguments with moderators are short, and lost.
For example there's a bot Discord servers can utilize that awards users with points and levels for nothing more than volume. So you see the colored name and the wall of ranks and the beginner thinks "so they're recognized as an authority around here therefore they're correct".
Also IMO, on forums that show a user's response count, anyone with several thousand responses should be ignored unless their account is over a decade old. They tend to spend more time on the forums than actually using the thing the forum is based on.
Forums could have thousands of personalities and never really feel dominated by any of them, but IRC channels became dominated by a relatively small percentage of regular users.
I think the major difference between forums and Discord/IRC is that the conversations are more likely to be seen on the forums because they’re more persistent and can be more easily referenced to see the entire picture.
That’s certainly not impossible in IRC but it’s more work and less accessible to the less technically inclined.
And I do understand, I know from experience how much basic third-party tooling/OS support questioning you can get from people not even getting as far as actually running your thing successfully.
I'm not defending Discord as a solution though.
Same thing happened to the Ripcord Discord (it's basically a stream of memes now).
So yeah, moderation is great.
[1] "Not that I would ever use this tool in production, I use BRAND X"
However, I've noticed a disturbing trend amongst web shops. It used to be common for a shop to have it's return policy and form linked on the main page/menu. Right along side its terms&conditions, privacy policy etc. Now I noticed a couple of popular shops I interact with replaced it with "chat with us" things(IKEA in Poland, a bunch of very large clothing brands etc).
I hate it when I have to talk to crappy LLM for 5 minutes to convince it I need a human, then wait 15min because "we're having higher than usual support volume" (at which point it becomes the norm?) to then have a human ask one question and give me a RMA number and order their courier to pick it up.
So much time wasted could be recovered by a simple RMA form. I hope this trend doesn't spread everywhere.
I've never had to jump through any hoop or deal with any clueless AI to return a product.
The "chat" button disappeared from the help & contact us, and to talk to real person you need to go through bunch of jumps.
In contrast, the limiting factor to getting on the phone with an Amazon support person was the distance between my desk and my phone. Two minutes later, the fully-paid return label was sitting in my inbox.
That's why people praise it.
They didn't feel new. You know that new sock feel you only get fresh from the package, before they've been washed? They didn't have that.
I don't know if these were factory reject socks that failed QC after the fabric softener ran out or some sort of counterfeit sock or just some sort of error that could happen anywhere, but I will never forget my Amazon marketplace betrayal.
Putting on a brand new pair of socks, fresh from the package.
They took that away.
It's like taking a bite of delicious cake only to find out it's shit. You can send it back to the kitchen, but it doesn't take away the whipsaw disappointment.
Never had the slightest issue with creating a fully-paid return label on my own. And if the products aren't very expensive, they don't usually wait to actually receive it before issuing the refund.
Other sellers are usually hit or miss, requiring jumping through hoops, like calling them up or filling half-broken internet forms and waiting around for them to "approve" the return.
They've never refused a return I asked for which has frequently happened with other shops.
I really want to support local shops, but for any product where I'm not sure if I will have to return it, I usually use Amazon because of their return policy.
Maybe that's the goal? To discourage the return of merchandise? They think customers rather write off the loss, than waste half an hour.
I agree though, it's like finding the support email address. It's hidden on purpose. Use our Contact page. Please search our FAQ before talking to our Bot!
> I hate it when I have to talk to crappy LLM for 5 minutes to convince it I need a human
The lovely self-indulged and intimidating in voice so-called artificial intelligence Max assistant ham-fisted on Orange help line, right next to the "would you like to authorize yourself with your voice in future- it's totally SAFE" message. How I despise that thing. They even trained it to avoid "connect me with human" line as much is possible.
Whenever I need help from that ISP and I'm facing a perspective dealing with this thing, it feels like I should just shut the hell up, leave the money, sign newest service contract without any word because the rest doesn't matter for them at all.
I do understand this assistant (and similar ones) probably does the perfect job dealing with this kind of customer who calls them with trivial issues. But that puts those people whose issues are more complex and who do really need to talk with human consultant ASAP on a hell-hole loop fencing with an algorithm.
So my rule of thumb, if that service or software that I’m trying to use list a discord as the mean of communication, I simply don’t use it, what’s next, holding meetings over Twitch and discussions over tiktok?
In general it has a much lower barrier of entry. With all the good and bad that brings.
For the record I think it’s a miss in general. But YMMV.
Overwhelmingly the word I'd use to describe Discord's interface is "one". There is one interface. It's an interface that most people seem to like, but we've lost an important freedom there. It's against the EULA to modify your client or use an alternative one.
If with IRC one can have any interface, I would not call Discord's better.
Whether we should be using text chat clients as FTP clients is another issue, XMPP is better for multimedia messaging.
Plus the concept of +v doesn't really exist on discords. Sometimes you'd be stuck lurking while only a select few could speak.
And frankly being able to embed images/videos degrades the seriousness in various ways as it can become a bit of a meme/comedy competition (and they scroll disproportionately more text off.
And avatars mean less space is actually text..
<[@+]?shortnick>: <text>
is pretty much the optimal format for information density, which is ironic that twitch chat uses it (to mostly spam emotes)
At least part of that is that the search in Discord is horrifyingly bad, and isn't available via search engines.
I don't mine Discord as a place to ask questions / discuss; but it's far less dysfunctional when combined with a wiki.
What forum owners want is to not have to deal with idiotic user logins and spam.
Both sides think Discord is good enough even though it isn't.
The problem is that everything else is so much worse.
Unfortunately, "user login" is an expensive cesspit of failure.
Discourse would probably be doing better if they actually ran a login provider rather than outsourcing it all.
Honestly I’m rather enjoying everybody telling me they know my users better than I do. I polled pretty extensively and got a good amount of non power user and power user responses.
As always: nothing.
When Discord enshittifies, all your data will go down the drain. Or, if you disappear, all the user data goes down the drain even though Discord will continue to exist.
But, hey, logins are easy and nobody needs to learn anything new.
And so it goes ...
Do not assume the worst of posters, some of us are just as smart as you I promise, it isn’t fair to assume I had no plans :).
I will apologize directly to you for my assumptions being incorrect. It is unfair for me to paint everyone with the same brush.
However, sadly, you are the first person I have had to apologize to for this.
Nobody else I have ever interacted with has anything remotely resembling a plan for leaving Discord.
I'm happy with searchable public chat support. Unfortunately, discord seems to be the best way to do this.
I think I do want a forum, but I probably wouldn't use it because signing in is too much effort. Maybe if forums had shared profiles and better mobile support, they'd be used more.
To me this is the biggest drawback for discord over forums.
I rather like the approach of editing the original question/solution or posting the latest solution there as otherwise this just creates fragmention.
I believe we need the history, especially when dealing with legacy versions. The first thing I usually check is the date or contexts to infer it.
But I do have a problem with having to ask a question that has already been answered a hundred times, instead of being able to search for the answer.
That's what made Reddit so popular.
What if the forum offered the following three options for sign in:
- Sign in with GitHub
- Sign in with Apple
- Sign in with Google
Part of the problem is that communities can get really nasty, worst case going as far as writing bad reviews at the place you work at. So it's useful to containerize your identity.
Reddit actually does this very well.
Say for example that your “real” iCloud account is muzani at iCloud dot com.
You browse to my hypothetical forum and choose Sign in with Apple. Then Apple lets you choose if you want to use your “real” mail address or if you want to make a new alias specific to this service. You make an alias an it will look something like emperor_virginia.9p at iCloud dot com.
It’s super convenient and easy to use, while at the same time doing a great job of keeping your identities separate between separate services.
I have no idea how long these random companies will keep providing auth services, I don't want to be part of the mess when they inevitably stop the service or start charging. It barely solves the account fragmentation problem because every website supports a different random combination of providers. It centralizes everything more than it already is, further increasing your dependence on these companies. Not to mention the tracking.
But the biggest thing is that with a native account I know that I'll be getting all the features of the app and everything will work normally. There have been too many times where I've experienced "your account does not support this feature" because of a botched external auth integration. Remember when Spotify users with Facebook sign-in couldn't change their name from the default string of random characters?
No thanks, the "effort" is more than worth it for me.
When I started out, it was pretty clear to me that to solve problems, first read the error message clearly and try understand it, then search the relevant forum or google for someone in the past who experienced the same error. Finally, if unable to solve, post a message describing the problem clearly and what you have tried to do and still failed.
Well, good luck finding any thread from discord on Google. The chat interface also wants you to post one liner chats without taking the time to properly describe the scenario.
Chat platforms can exist but should not be the official support channels.
That's actually mind-blowingly horrifying.
some communities do, for example the webots discord i'm in. They have a mirror of all chat logs indexed and searchable on their docs website. I don't know how they do it, I can ask if you like.
I just can't understand why anyone would think using a chat app for support is a good idea.
Derail, but this right here is the key to debugging superpowers. I can't even count the number of times I have amazed juniors with my genius when all I did is read them the error message and ask them under what circumstances could that be true.
A corollary that's just as important is "believe the error messages - they are telling you the literal truth." Hard to believe how often we implicitly disbelieve what the compiler or runtime is telling us.
My personal fear with Discord is the audience. Discord has a lot of kids and the likelihood of having kids come into your server and troll you or ask low-effort questions is much higher than Slack. But if your users want Discord, then you should use Discord. There's nothing gained by telling your users what to like.
I don't think you can assume everyone wants to be on discord. I certainly loathe adding yet another discord or slack community that frankly I don't check. Nobody has time to keep up with dozens or hundreds of discord communities (it's very easy to join one).
I prefer any online community that is searchable (via Google, site search, etc) so that I can find answers and past discussion without having to ask the same question for the 100th time in the channel.
How is Discord more social than the other systems you mentioned? I consider something to be social (social media, social network, etc.) when the primary utility manifests as a function of establishing friends, followers, or whatever similar jargon.
That is: if the content presented to me is primarily generated by users who I've selected, while content generated by users I haven't selected is unavailable or relegated to lower tiers of functionality, then it's a social network/medium. In other words, it's the product of subscribing primarily to people (regardless of what they might discuss) rather than to topics (regardless of who participates).
I don't see Discord in this way. Isn't it more about subscribing to topics than to people?
I realize you're not speaking for yourself, but for the HN hivemind; my question remains.
Discord is bad because if I don't like the default client, I can't use or build another one. I can do this with IRC/XMPP/Matrix.
2-3 people can seem like a huge crowd and a complete consensus in the right context. It is still a handful of people. And the fact is that Discord (and Slack) is long-term-toxic to building up knowledge in a community. There isn't an available body of records to figure out what the history of the community is and what topics have been considered in the past. It is completely unsuitable for recording Q&A. It isn't terrible as a support forum, but even then anything that can be crawled by a search engine has some serious advantages if the community cares about people who are in the silent majority.
> I tried launching a forum, I spent a _lot_ of time setting up Discourse and proper CDN/uploads etc. I didn't go all out, only a few categories based on what was commonly needed (like 5?). I did this _before_ I resorted to Discord as the only point of help. People begrudgingly used it... It got to the point where I was asked "why aren't you using Discord like everyone else in this space?" enough that I asked my power users on the forum, and the broader internet via other channels, and most people overwhelmingly wanted Discord. In particular, of note, my power users on the forums wanted it. After switching, the number of people asking for help significantly increased, and we gained a fair number of new power users willing to help those people out too.
The people who have choosen to use Discord rarely care that others abhor it. And it really sets the mood: this is not a community I am welcome in.
So then you use the Discord forum feature to solve that problem. But then you may as well have used Discourse.
if all you have is discord that's what you'll see
if you have a forum/gh-issues there are a lot of visitors who won't bother you but will get their answer
Discord is a great piece of software for organizing ephemeral communications. Voice chat works well. That's 99% of the value of Discord. It also absolute dogshit as a persistent store of information.
Stack Overflow-style Q&A is the definitive good choice for Q&A documentation.
There is not a single other popular communication software out there that a) has a pretty shitty client that wastes resources and leaks ram but b) bans account when they use better alternative clients
That's the most toxic environment I could imagine to communicate with
More details here: https://discord.com/blog/investigating-discords-react-memory...
I wish more projects would take inspiration from them, the software is open source [2]
[1] - https://forum.dlang.org/
How does the integration work? Can you post to the forum, and it's then mailed out.. ?
Anyone can post on the forum, you just have to provide an email address (you don't have to register, but they can enforce it)
[1] - https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/blob/master/src/dfeed/w...
[2] - https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/blob/master/src/dfeed/s...
You should use whatever works for you and your clients/customers. All the channels come with plus and minus issues. It's the support version of CAP theorem: You can be reachable, focussed and structured but probably not all three at once.
I also miss email. Mainly because the expectation of "instant" was muted through delivery delays.
When I need instant, I should possibly expect to have to pay for it.
I wonder how long it’ll be before people are saying “I really wish we could just go back to Discord.”
Threaded replies, in whatever form, have been the killer feature for me to grok more data that may or may not be relevant.
We've had one "Enterprise" supplier move from Slack to Discord. Their community manager in this case did not understand my argument of why this is a bad thing and kept pushing it. For example when I said there is no SSO, they said there is (of course not realising WE have to pick up the bill to set that up - also puts the work on CISOs to investigate the tool for larger use).
Now they are on Discord and I will not share any NDA-related material there - nor would our Security and Data Privacy team like us to.
At least they agreed to keep the Slack Connect in this case.
TBH a Reddit isn't much of a "threat" unless its a really popular subject and the original forum is really bad.
The same could happen with amy Discord. No users means no users, no matter if it's Discord or Reddit
But I can find and read a subreddit via search engine without joining anything.
But if users want to start and join one to shoot the breeze, I think they are mostly going to pick Dsicord.
I have both an official Discord and Reddit. Discord was the only platform I didn't start myself, but eventually took over. My Reddit is as good as dead, Discord incredibly active.
The theory all sounds good, but the fact is that the community will pick the place they hang out, not you.
The same will happen with Discord's successor, but the Discord data will most likely be lost at that time.
That said, I have had success so far using https://www.answeroverflow.com/ to search discord for questions. It sucks we have to use such tools, but given the current situation, it's also better to adapt.
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29154216
I'm a big fan of https://nodebb.org/ Full featured OSS forum you can self-host or let them host for you (for $).
Big fan of letting people use the search interface they want, which is almost always Google.
TIL to what shit Netgate moved pfSense forums to. I'm glad you are fine with it, but not only my FullHD monitor is not a smartphone, so I don't need 400% fonts on everything (and post dates on the faaaaar right clearly shows nobody ever even used the forum) and most importantly - search doesn't work. It's not like the previous forum had a good search, but at least it worked.
Bonus point: try to Ctrl+mousewheel on any NodeBB (including the official one).
I've never seen this forum before but this I never expected it to be This bad. Is this some kind of mobile only design paradigm?
All the alternatives have proven that they barely work too.
1. Dedicated forums - have you seen cesspools that are community.microsoft.com or apple support forums? Or few surviving audio forums, with those long taglines? Also searchability of those forums leaves to be desired too, as they rarely get to first page of google.
2. Stackoverflow quality has degraded severely in recent years. Both from perspectives of someone who wants to ask a question and someone who wants to answer it. Niche stackoverflows are still fine, but general programming ones are just shit, full of obsolete/old accepted answers that nobody cares to update to current year status
3. Get it done. It is obviously to be better healthy and rich than sick and poor
I grown into contrary view. Discords are fine. Based on my personal experience, at least the ones where I tried to find some help (QMK, Bambulab, bunch of gaming ones). The fact that same question is being asked again and again is fine. Somebody will answer it. Or not, and then the search for an answer will continue.
They significantly reduce friction to answer for somebody who is open to help. See example about stackoverflow above. I just left it, as I don't want to deal with mods there.
You could hook it up to a mail provider and can host it yourself for less if you wanted.
Discord is free and is omega easy to setup. Low friction, low cost, that's the real competition
Nobody in their right mind would want to use that for a project they care about, over using a piece of free software they have full control of.
At least in my POV
Guys, it was very common for (side-)projects to self host a forum in the 2000s, what changed since then so that many people find this unreasonable? Or are you a vocal minority?
It's not like you have to host a service that needs 5 figures SLA.
I understand that people may not like having to host stuff, but seriously, there's no need to dismiss the option that harshly, calling forums "random shit" and so on.
Now people want it easy and free for everything: git hosting, website, communication tools… you can't have your cake and eat it too forever. It's very unfortunate those investors-infested companies running at loss made us used to this.
It's requiring that everything is free and easy that's an unreasonable stance, not suggesting to self-host or to pay. At some point things need to be sustainable. Even for side projects with limited time available. A community can't be managed if nobody has time for this anyway.
Setting up a forum is not the hard part in handling a community. Moderation is a lot harder.
I greatly prefer forums to ephemeral IRC or walled-garden Discord/Slack/etc. However I don't like the moderation time commitment, especially with in a climate of aggressive spambots and twitter-style idiocy at scale.
I also like blog comments, but those seem to have largely split into spam-filled cesspools on one hand and "comments are now closed" (after 10ms) on the other. HN is something of an exception, but I'm sure it requires aggressive and time-consuming moderation.
Constant security threats also make self-hosting an ongoing maintenance headache even if it's in the cloud.
If you don't care about the project, why even open up a Discord server you will never look at? The point with open forums is to get feedback and provide customer support
who cares about reddit.
microsoft has all the motivation to lock down developers. they already got most by the balls with vscode and copilot.
Discord had certain features that struck a chord with a generation of gaming communities, thats more or less all there is to it. Now people will pick it just to be trendy and in tune with the times.
Personally I find its manipulative, over-emojed UI distasteful and it is hopeless for knowledge management.
Now a days, I see events being a post across a few chat groups, with no source of truth for time and place (and those often left out!)
I have an impression that there is a whole new generation of people who _don't_ want to post on or interact with a forum/bulletin board style of interface, but want to be part of a "living" and instant group.
I'm not part of any chat group where this is really working, but every meetup I go to, people are asking "which chat group should I join?" or "why don't I create a whatsapp/discord for this meetup?"
Well nobody sane at least. Seriously, IRC was always an informal sideshow to the asynchronous mechanisms.
Attention spans have shrunk all across society. But it seems worse with the younger folks because they don't remember that it wasn't always like this. I don't think they are affected to a greater degree. It just doesn't seem to occur to them that resisting it might be a worthwhile effort.
If it was, you’d want the events to be tracked by an app for all invitees.
In my mind we’ve regressed and returned to asking the invited to keep track of where and when, when there was a brief decade where an app did it for you.
What a product management...
It has not been long that we started working on this. More than half of the time we spend goes with potential customer interactions. Here are our insights so far: - Companies are well aware of the information clutterness that Discord bears - Companies value the activity level of the server more relative to the usefulness of the community - Developer communities are an outlier here - People who join a community platform when outside Discord are more valued vs the ones that are on Discord
I am looking to talk to more people around this so we can build a first version as informed as possible as to what the best version would look like. Feel free to sign up in our waitlist and I will make sure to reach out.
I know a guy who uses a private, single-user install of phpbb as his project management software. He's got all the bells and whistles enabled like file uploads, media embeds, and markdown rather than bbcode. One subforum/top-level category per project, and different threads tracking bugs, documentation, etc. Of course since it's phpbb it's available everywhere you have internet, and it's responsive/mobile friendly, etc.
Definitely unorthodox considering github projects and redmine exist, but still really neat stuff. If only phpbb had a kanban board.
I even used it for password management, because I was the only user, and I was not exposing it directly to the open internet. Instead, I had it listening only on the Wireguard interface of my computer. That way I could connect to it from all my devices anywhere in the world, while no one else could even attempt to reach it.
However, because I was keeping those passwords on it I did not want to copy the data to any rented computers. And so I was running it from a computer at home without any redundancy.
After a while, the SSD started to malfunction. No fault of phpBB of course. It was an old SSD I had bought several years ago. But because of that I gave up on running phpBB for myself for now.
Maybe when I can afford some new, more reliable hardware and a spot in a data center for hardware that I own, I can one day return to running my own private phpBB instance accessible only to me over Wireguard
It gets the job done, and just about every host supports PHP.
For a site that just needs to load some HTML and run scripts, that is overkill. Shared hosting works fine, and requires almost zero actual system administration skills to maintain.
For a few dollars a year you get a shared host.
--
hosted zulipchat.com is free for open source, and Zulip is free to self-host.
self-hosting is not as easy as discord though, for sure
I can't quite put my finger on why this is the dominant way people think about solutions in tech nowadays, but the impulse to reach for this kind of solution is infiltrating all levels of tech (see: every single "wrapper around LLM to force it to do things we want" startup). It's like that deep learning meme from a few years ago saying "just add layers" except it's webdevs saying "just add endpoints".
It could be useful to have a periodic "open office hours" VoIP meeting perhaps, but that's more an argument for Zulip adding VoIP than for contorting Discord into something it's not suited for.
Sometimes there is choice though, and it takes choices from many folks to switch a community
Some pros, I'll pick three. (1) I think the appeal for something like Discord becomes more obvious when documentation feels like a moving target. For example, as a long time back-end developer, I have never disliked StackOveflow more than when I decided to learn front-end JavaScript. Every answer seemed attached to an expiration date. Anything older than 2 years and I'd wonder is this still in effect? I actually wished that JS would have its own special SO where answers can be sorted by "number of votes this year" or a "deprecated" flag. (2) The immediacy of chat, you ask and don't have to wait half a day for someone to notice. (3) No search. It could just be an impression, but my search experience seems to just increasingly suck. Engines seem to struggle to find relevant bits, particularly if the tech is fairly recent and results are flooded with meaningless articles, that just echo the same "Hello, world" from the official documentation. With Discord, I don't have to sort through the junk.
Now the cons.
The chat format for support certainly has its highlights, but you don't have to wear blinders about its downsides. If you allow for time to improve information, information accrues interest. Chat doesn't allow for time. And Discord doesn't particularly care about the quality of information. Discord cares about (authenticated) users showing up on the platform now, now, now. The problems highlighted with the chat format (as it's implemented on Discord), are very focused (though they have ramifications): archiving and searching capabilities are subpar. You show up on some chat channel and ask a question. You get the benefit of immediate advice, by the most authoritative voice that happens to be present. It may be good advice or it may be moot. You just have to take it at face value. On StackOverflow that advice would go unchallenged for a few months, but allow for time and you allow for scrutiny. Eventually, if there's contention, there will be a discussion. Answers are commented upon, improved, deprecated. You can simply show up years later and benefit from the maturation of the different perspectives that contributed to crystallize our current best understanding of the issue.
Obviously, YMMV. Still, don't apply on the wrong problem.
SO's search engine always sucked. Whenever I cannot find the answer that I was looking for immediately, I use google with the site:staoverflow.com parameter. This always gave me much better results than the SO search itself.
I can't help but feel it's related to hustle culture and attempting to foster a community that they can then monetize.
The younger generations live a hellish existence where they are locked in time unable to grow as humans, perpetually judged by the mistakes of their younger selves.
Doesn't change the fact that discord support sucks though for all the reasons mentioned this these threads.
I can tolerate Discord when it's real-time help, but this new forum-like feature is the worst of both worlds: You don't get real-time, and you don't get searchability/Googleability/the ability for people to get help without a login.
Just terrible. I really hope this doesn't catch on.
"Normally, rooms are silent, and no one is chatting"
Yeah, cause you went to unactive servers. It would be like coming to Hackernews, opening first link in newly submitted, and complaining that no one is here.
Just go to active servers. Servers I frequent are very active.
"The UI as a whole is a jumbled mess that feels bloated"
Another hard disagree. UI is one of my favourite things about Discord. It feels very well designed and it even works very well on mobile. I'm quite impressed by this aspect
> Linen is a search-engine friendly community platform. We offer two way integrations with existing Slack/Discord communities and make those conversations Google-searchable.
The problem though is that my community chose Discord, not me.
I tried to move them away, didn't work.
1. This is what the "Ban" feature is for.
2. Anecdotal. Not really an issue in my experience.
3. This is what the Discord API is for. There's a really simple API to dump the chat history. Just make a cron job to dump every 10 min or so, and host that on a static site. Problem solved.
4. See 3.
I don’t see why anyone complains about Discord user experience when you can just manually implement basic functionality that the Discord devs didn’t see fit to put in.
Why would anybody post on a forum when you could just write a custom client for Discord from scratch?
I’m not sure why you’d feel the need to come back and do a victory lap. You’ve thoroughly debunked the idea that the Discord search UX is less than stellar by pointing out that you personally built and maintain your own search UX based off of API that is both universally understood and governed by a TOS that none could possibly misinterpret.
3. I think he writes as a user. Do you expect the user to export every discord chat history.
4. See 3.
It's more useful to have permanent, searchable forums so that answers can benefit more people. (1:N instead of 1:1.) Discourse is one possible solution.
Going to a project’s discord that has active messages feels like the thing is alive, and getting engagement from the maintainers or project owners feels more connected than replies in issues.
GitHub issues is mechanically better but is (properly) spare in comparison.
Creating an issue, (which occupies a number that can not be taken back), is heavy compared to a chat message.
Discussions are GH’s answer to this but I think those muddy the waters. Having Discussions enabled on only some repos makes them unreliable. And each repo has different criteria for what should go in a discussion.
As much as I avoid Discord, I don’t think the chat based medium is going away. If anything, I could see GH finding a way to enter that fray.
And then they'll DM you if you look helpful.
I do appreciate the ability to on interact in real time, compared to mailing lists, but yeah, it tends to attract a certain segment of "whatever it takes to ship" instant gratification devs.
Disclaimer: I‘m the founder of awesomeqa.xyz
Forum Channels FAQ: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...
Forum Channels are a type of channel that's structured as a more traditional forum. It's similar to channels that tried to enforce that everything is a thread, but much better.
* The top level shows posts only - no standalone messages
* Selecting a post opens the thread to the right - it's very easy to browse posts and threads
* Posts are sorted by date or most recent activity
* There's a tag system and you can quickly filter by tags
* There's a combined new/search field so you're forced to see search results
* Your active post threads show up in the left nav section like other active threads, making it pretty easy to see new replies.
I don't know if it's the best forum system ever, but it's pretty good and it's right in Discord. And like another poster said, our users want Discord.
That's not possible with Discord.
> Chaos Discord can be a whirlwind of madness. Important stuff you post can vanish into the ether within seconds, drowned by a never-ending stream of messages.
Already it looks like ChatGPT made a formatting mistake, what is "Chaos Discord"? Pretty sure it should says "Chaos - Discord..."
It also concedes that they made threads a thing, so the point is moot. This is followed up with
> TERRIBLE Search and Discovery Trying to find past discussions or solutions in Discord is like trying to locate a needle in a haystack blindfolded and drunk.
Again there is no separation between the title and the content. And actually Discord search in my experience is really good. They can filter by media, link, text, user, and more. And this INCLUDES in threads. In comparison, have you tried searching through FAQs using Algolia or BBPost forum search in general? Those are truly awful.
> The Discord Odyssey Picture this: You encounter a problem with a project that exclusively relies on Discord for support and questions.
Notice the continued formatting failure, a failure of copy-pasting from ChatGPT and not separating the title from the content!
This point is about all the restrictions and actions needed, but fails to address that users are already logged in and often have Discord open, and instead comes with some ? nonsensical example of installing a js library?
And finally
> Waaaay too ephemeral Here’s a curveball for you: what if Discord decides to pull the plug?
This is interesting but, how you can really tell it's ChatGPT is that the examples it provides as solutions below ALSO suffer this problem. Here are the options provided in the article.
> Dedicated Community Forums - Check out platforms like Discourse.
Again I'm pretty sure the search is worse, and it literally doesn't solve any of the other problems.
> Lean on the Pros - Websites like Stack Overflow or communities on Reddit
Yeah I'm not sure how you're going to use Stack Overflow as a Q&A for your own product. And again, WHAT IF THEY DECIDE TO PULL THE PLUG?
> Git It Done - If you’re dealing with code issues, rely on GitHub, Gitlab, Gitea, or any other Git-based issue tracking system
Actually not a bad idea if your audience is technical, but again WHAT IF THEY DECIDE TO PULL THE PLUG?
Finally, nothing is more obvious than when ChatGPT says its signature "REMEMBER, BLAHBLAHBLAH", and lo and behold:
> Remember, Discord is great & all but as a Q&A forum ...
Personally, I'm 90% sure this is a ChatGPT generated low quality article. Even though it sparked some discussion here, I'm flagging this article, and I did not enjoy the article for the content.
How so? Just add a tag for your software and tell your users to write questions to Stackoverflow tagged accordingly. Then just put a watch on that tag. Almost zero setup effort. At least that is what I am planning to do. Am I missing something?
- matrix spaces not hidden behind auth
- indexed by search engines
- chat channels
- subreddit like posts with nested replies, voting etc
- private invite-only spaces
Hoping to get voice/audio working soon, along with encrypted DMs. Experimenting with activitypub integration too.