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Comment by eddythompson80 | Hacker News Reader

I found that part of it is the informality of it all. There is no expectation that someone will search the chat history for an answer. When you don’t get an answer, but someone after you does, you can ping on it maybe once more. Those who don’t know the answer might chime in with “hey, I don’t know but look there”

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.

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Some degree of informational amensia is a good thing. We've all hit the "I need to do X, but every page on google tells me how to X in Version N-1, and it doesn't work like that any more".

I don't understand your example. How does "informational amnesia" help against "I need to do X, but every page on google tells me how to X in Version N-1, and it doesn't work like that any more"? If you can't find a solution, you should ask on the Q&A channel, regardless of informational amnesia or not.

> There is no expectation that someone will search the chat history

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.

So like IRC? It's not like this was a new problem, we've had this problem in the past. Not everybody liked mailing lists/forums 20 years ago either.

Sure, like IRC but with a better interface,

And no netsplits/nickserv insanity.

Or people purchasing a holding company and proceeding to take over the entire volunteer ran network a few years later. :)

Luckily since there is no expectation of an archive, migration is fairly straightforward if there is an alternative. If there are no alternatives, I guess they can try IRC ;)

Better? Sure, for you maybe.

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.

Maybe it changed, but how do you share a screenshot on IRC?

Use Pidgin or The Lounge and do it like normal.

Whether we should be using text chat clients as FTP clients is another issue, XMPP is better for multimedia messaging.

Some modern clients (or clients-as-services) build in image/file sharing.

IRC had a higher barrier to entry and a lot more common expectation of kickbans for various reasons (justified or not).

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)

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