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Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

I recently found a repo for an Xbox wireless controller kernel driver where the GitHub issues page was turned off and instead they used discord. I asked why they don’t have GitHub issues turned on and they said they “didn’t want it to become a support forum”. I couldn’t believe it. If there is a common issue, one person will ask about it on the issues page and then everyone else can benefit from that discussion. On discord, I had to log in and join their group to ask about an error message, only to find it’s a common issue and there’s a few troubleshooting steps. I could have figured that out instantly that others have encountered this problem and discussed the solution. Instead, this repo owner moved everything to discord where it was hard to discover and usually required direct human support for every new person.

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That'd almost definitely turn me off from using that project. Whenever I'm assessing if a project is good enough to use, the first thing I check is the issues to see what bugs/missing features there are and what things users commonly need help with.

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.

Yep, it had this effect on me! Ultimately I did not get that device working on my debian desktop, though it worked without issue on the raspberry pi I also wanted to use it for and that was good enough. Would love to have this device (wireless xbox controller dongle) for my desktop too, but I am not going to hang out on discord to debug a computer problem unless I desperately have to. I can just plug in my xbox controller and use it wired.

> If there is a common issue, one person will ask about it on the issues page and then everyone else can benefit from that discussion.

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.

But surely answering questions in a public discoverable website reaches more customers than a discord server. The utility provided is not the same.

I can see a trade off here: effectively we're talking about different strategies for reducing the amount of noise.

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.

On GitHub the issue count goes up, on discord nobody sees how many questions weren't answered.

I think sometimes people want communities rather than projects so they go the whole hog with realtime chat: IRC, slack, gitter, discord, etc.

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.

That makes sense, and I think I probably come down in a similar position to you. I'd say it can be great for a project to have a community, but I don't think I'd conflate managing and supporting that project, with interacting with the community in quite that way.

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.

Is it possible to get the creation of new github issues behind some sort of signup? In the same way that randos can't merge PRs.

> 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.

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.

> Discord/Slack/IRC does not allow for that

Sorry for a stupid question; but does not Discord have full-text search?

> 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.

Discord search kinda sucks

Discord has the most infuriating search I've ever seen. It's fuzzy by default and you can't turn the fuzziness off - there's no way to search for a literal phrase, or even a literal word.

Then make a (readable) FAQ with the commonly asked questions. Any project that has a large number of commonly asked questions either has major UX problems or poor documentation, or both.

> 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.

That's true for Discord too though.

> > They might as well choose the platform they themselves prefer.

Nobody said Discord solved that problem, only that GitHub hasn't either.

Discord is worse then GitHub issues by far

But Github has the closest thing to a solution - a public repository of all the previous questions which people can search to discover if someone has already had the same issue.

In my experience, people rarely search previous issues.

This is obviously false since there are several people in this discussion who have mentioned they search previous issues

Maybe the people of HN are just a small minority of users that contribute GitHub Issues on popular public repositories and not very well representative of the whole? Have you maintained a popular repository on GitHub? I can vouch for tons of spam/duplicate Issues.

There might be a ton of duplicate issues. There might also be a ton of duplicate issues not brought up by a FAQ. How would you measure those?

Probably would be a problem that using LLMs to suggest related issues would help with.

If only GitHub (Microsoft) had a LLM product they could use when someone is writing an issue or pull request...

On Discord, if it's an active community, 99% of the time the person to respond first will be another community member and not an active maintainer. Because people are already on Discord, they'll see a channel light up and decide to drop in. Compare that to GitHub issues where pretty much just the maintainer will get an email and the advantage is clear.

You can have newly created github issues automatically post into a discord channel.

Maybe identifying duplicate issues could be a good use case for AI. Stackoverflow does this when you try to ask a question.

> 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.

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.

> They might as well choose the platform they themselves prefer.

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.

> They might as well choose the platform they themselves prefer.

I guess so, but to me discord seemed a rather awful choice.

I wonder why GitHub never implemented "does this other existing ticket already cover your issue?" suggestions like StackOverflow. That would probably help in a lot of these situations.

...instead, they activate the stalebot that deletes "stale" tickets (that may however contain valuable workarounds for a problem) by default.

See also this article that was posted here a few weeks ago: https://drewdevault.com/2021/10/26/stalebot.html

I suppose this can be at least partially explained by typical modern attitude "What is the most recent is most important. What have been long ago can be ignored". Let me give you examples:

- 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.

100% this.

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.

> On discord, I had to log in and join their group to ask about an error message, only to find it’s a common issue and there’s a few troubleshooting steps.

> 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.

Maybe GitHub issues are bad as a support forum, but the point that OP was trying to make (that Discord is even worse as a support forum) is still valid. On GitHub issues, you at least have a chance to find the solution for an issue yourself, on Discord you basically have to ask and hope that someone is nice (and competent) enough to answer your question.

You don't have to log in or even have a GitHub account to search through issues. Hell, in many cases you don't even need to be searching on GitHub to find the relevant issue since they're indexed by search engines. Neither of these are an option with Discord.

Totally off topic, but I just got two Xbox Series Controllers working over Bluetooth flawlessly, connected to a Raspberry Pi, using xpadneo driver. Can highly recommend that driver.

Thanks for the suggestion. I am still using my crusty old launch day Xbox One and the original launch day controllers for it. All of the hardware is working great, and somehow I have a lot of those controllers. But that generation of hardware uses their proprietary wireless interface rather than bluetooth. There is a cute little $20 generic dongle you can buy for this, and it works great on for example the raspberry pi I use with steam link. For some reason though the kernel driver did not properly load on my debian system. This is where I encountered the discord based support chat. I did post some info there and got some suggestions, but I really dislike discord for working on software issues. Github Issues works extremely well for me for this.

I guess what I'm wondering is, what are people trying to prevent or protect by moving to Discord?

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?

The things that I can think of:

- 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.)

> When I star a repo I don't get notified when anyone opens a new issue.

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...

But people don't do that. Pretty much only the maintainer(s) of a project opt in to be notified of issues on GH. On Discord, by default the channel lights up if a channel has new messages.

> I don't see Discords as any different to web forums

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.

IMHO, Github issues vs Discord is a false dilemma. Searching in Discord or searching through hundred of issues with months of comments are equally bad.

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.

> On discord, I had to log in and join their group to ask about an error message, only to find it’s a common issue and there’s a few troubleshooting steps.

Did you try searching for the error message on Discord? If so, what was the experience?

Not GP, but it's miserable. Discord, and to only a slightly lesser extent Reddit, is not built for that use, it doesn't drive engagement.

"It doesn't drive engagement" is overly cynical. Discord was designed for chat, not as a support forum, and the search is surprisingly functional for a chat client.

Yeah fair enough, I did say it wasn't designed for that though, I think I meant more like '[and] it doesn't drive engagement [in what the core product/use-case is] [so that's not a cause for a push to make it work well, history well discoverable etc., either]'. But basically I agree, my intended main point was it's not for that, you're not supposed to be spending much time reading old discussions.

(And I think the engagement cynicism might be at least a bit correct/warranted for Reddit.)

It has been some time so I have no clear recollection. Usually I hate waiting for replies though so I imagine I would have searched if I saw how. I cannot recall how that went.

Discord: the uninternet. Thanks.

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