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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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