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Comment by 0xpgm | Hacker News Reader

Of course, yet another way for the new generation of programmers to relearn the hard way the lessons of the older generation, like happens a lot in software.

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.

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Woah this is an incredibly good point I hadn't even considered before now. After years of finding solutions to problems in obscure threads on forums I'd never have visited otherwise, I had never even considered the fact that the only way to do similar with discord is to not only have an account, but be a member of the specific discord guild, and then search that specific guild for specific keywords.

That's actually mind-blowingly horrifying.

This is one of the most common reasons I've seen people use to push back on Discord for support, and the article somewhat brings it up in points 3 and 4. It's not publicly scrapable or anonymously accessible, nor can you archive it and host the information elsewhere if it goes down. Even the forum channels they introduced aren't useful in those regards.

You're allowed bots, so why can't we archive it and make it more easily searchable? Those programming channels with QA style threaded answers would be great to log and make searchable. Is it against Discord's ToS or something?

Bots can only be added by the "server" admins. So archiving is only possible (within the bounds of the ToS) if they care enough to do it.

Its not, but its an extra step that most people won't do.

> nor can you archive it and host the information elsewhere if it goes down

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.

Say what you will of StackOverflow, but they completely solved this problem nearly a couple of decades ago. Answers may be getting outdated depending on what you're looking for, but new answers are always welcome and the site tends to always have the "current" best answer - and very search engine friendly.

And if you somehow are able to find an archive of the chat somewhere, you have to try to piece together the conversation because there are six other conversations going on at the same time. Not to mention, all of the valuable information/insights that was never shared in that particular discussion because no one with that knowledge was online at the time.

I just can't understand why anyone would think using a chat app for support is a good idea.

> first read the error message clearly and try understand it,

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.

I know this and do this, but I would add, make sure you _actually_ read the error message and don't _think_ you read it. This bit me just yesterday as I was encountering an issue and spent a good 30 minutes trying to solve a problem I thought I'd been having. When I re-read the error message it was clear that I'd been too careless and not fully understood the issue. It happens from time to time and then I'm more cautious for a while until I get _just_ complacent enough to have it happen again.

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