Why are we putting everything in a data silo controlled by a company with pretty draconian policies? There's so many open discussion platforms available - why use the worst one?
If and when those open discussion platforms manage to match the UX of Discord, I'm sure people will be happy to switch. But I'm not sure it'll ever happen.
Because functionality wise, it's the best one. And the most popular one. Even among programmers people who will sacrifice that for idealogical purity are a minority.
The machine I use is fairly recent btw. I get distracted and frustrated by slow programs. If you run enough of them, you get compounding issues. It’s not fun!
Aside from that, I do agree with GP 50%. However I absolutely use and promote proprietary software when it’s good quality.
Yea man, that's a you problem. Discords popularity speaks to how little of a problem any of that is for other people.
Anecdotal I've never thought of Discord as slow or "complicated".
I also enjoy using discord for programming, it has awesome support for code blocks and all kinds of stuff.
At work we use slack, I'd take discord over slack any time.
That's not to say I think it makes sense for a programming language or library to use discord servers instead of documentation. Documentation is a minimum requirement in my book. But if they also have a discord server, I might consider visiting it.
And you sow the seeds of it happening again when you think of opposition to Discord as an ideological stance, rather than one that promotes a practical structure which guards against a company deciding to screw you over.
People saying Unity was not a good choice because it's closed source and controlled by one private company were laughed off as ideologues. Then what they warned about happened.
Now the same kind of people are getting the same kind of response. Maybe that "ideology" is based on practical considerations after all?
I kinda feel like including what Unity pulled recently in your "private company threat model" is a bit overkill - I'm generally comfortable assuming that private companies aren't going to do something quite that self destructive and braindead.
Based on prior behaviour I wouldn't trust anything google develops to not get canned within a year or two, I'm very weary of anyone trying to monetize open source projects, and building a business on top of someone else's saas product seems pretty risky.
But commercially licensed development tooling that I'm using to produce my own binaries is pretty low on my list of concerns - most companies aren't as bugfuck insane as Unity's current management seems to be.
And just using some closed source product for which the switching cost is effectively zero (for me - see other comment in this thread about chat being ephemeral) seems like a no brainer.
I guess most people don´t care that much about participating in forums that are, for all practical purposes, essentially ephemeral. Not only is the search abysmally bad, we all know the data will vanish eventually.
I genuinely think this is how people roll. The willingness to do something that can remain useful 20 years from now is relatively rare. Sometimes speaking about this topic to others, it's like they don't even acknowledge there's a problem to begin with.
For me at least, chat in general is ephemeral - I don't care about history past the last couple hours - the same way as I don't record regular conversations with people and listen to them later.
For this reason I'm much less concerned about vendor lockin with a chat solution than I would be with email or more forum type stuff - if Discord starts sucking I don't lose anything by moving to something new (assuming it sucks enough for the communities I'm in to move too).
Extremely poorly.
I am on 2 or 3 instances, and I cordially loathe it.
Compared to mailing lists, it's a grotesquely over-complicated mess.
To make a comparison with text editors:
Discourse for a mailing list user is like telling a skilled expert in Vim or Emacs...
"Now, to join our community, all you have to do is install a Windows 11 VM and use MS Word 365 for all your editing! Some new users prefer the toolbar. It does all the stuff you're used to and like, but it has a cool new UI! It's great! We all love it and we are sure you will too! We looked at your old system and we have made sure we've included all the old functionality! You can move the cursor left, right, up and down, but now, you can also use an animated GIF or PNG as your cursor and have a choice of colours!"
> Try it and you'll get a bunch of people complaining that inline images are bloat and who needed an auth system anyway and why can't I use my IRC client from 1996 and your client wasn't supposed to use my RAM, I'm saving that for guests.