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Comment by whinvik | Hacker News Reader

Would be nice if forums come back simply because of the searchability.

The problem is when they become inundated with users and have too much noise. Maybe it will be just another cycle which will lead back to Slack/Discord after some years and then back to forum after some more.

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Discord search is horrendous. The chat and threads are nice, but finding previous messages can be difficult. I feel like there's a opportunity here for someone to make a similar platform with far better search.

I rather like Discord search and found it to be fast and reliable to use.

It is called Discourse and it is far better.

What do you mean? Its search is zippy af and the filters you can apply help narrow messages down very well

It's the lack of verbatim search. I can't plonk an error message in quotes and have Discord return only comments with that. Instead I'm inundated with irrelevant comments.

This wouldn't be a problem if so many things didn't use Discord for support. It's being overloaded as a knowledge base, support forum, and community when it doesn't handle any of these functions well.

Discord search is pretty standard, you can do much worse. Especially at their scale.

Standard in what way? It can't even do partial matches or words with close spelling. It's pretty much exact whole words only or nothing.

Which, is pretty standard..

On what platform? Every single social media app I use has some form of partial matching in the search boxes.

But there already is one. It's called a forum :)

I agree, I think forums and things like Slack/Discord/IRC is used for different kinds of communication. Forums are rather asynchronous, while the others are rather synchronous.

When a forum is used to help someone fix a problem, there is a communication thread that (as you say) can be searched and followed by other people. In things like Slack/Discord/IRC, this kinda of thing "disappears". Even if you have seachable logs, I think these are a lot harder to search than a forum that is more "structured".

I do believe there is value in having both forums and Slack/Discord/IRC.

> In things like Slack/Discord/IRC, this kinda of thing "disappears"

This drives me nuts. I went from one company that used Workplace to a different one that uses Slack, and I can never find anything anymore. “Who was in that conversation back in November? What timeline for this project did we agree upon?” I spend half an hour adjusting search filters in Slack to try and find information like this.

Strongly recommend you use a knowledge engine like glean (or one of it's many competitors) at work - pulls together slack, google docs/sheets, confluence, github - single place to filter by date, document type, who it's from, etc....

That’s just bandaid. Using chat to manage projects is just a bad idea a lot of people now got used to….

I’m afraid SPAM will ruin that effort. Running a pretty decent forum on Google Groups, we’ve been hit by spam recently and you have to restrict posts seriously to combat the attack.

Google Groups isn't a forum by any modern standard. All the advances forums have seen in the last 22 years have passed it by because Google doesn't care about it.

I recently had problems finding an old message, I learned that having “streamer mode” enabled prevents a lot of search features and filters

I had no idea why streamer mode was active so worth checking it this also apply to you

Discord will automatically switch to streamer mode if you paunch a recording/streaming app like OBS, so that could be it.

to be honest I think the opposite issue happens, where various places have their own tiny forums and there's little in activity.

I think IRC's strategy of having networks and channels on those networks is nice because then most programming languages will be like "well let's just be on this one network". Reddit is this times 1000 given that it's all subreddits on the same platform.

Not perfect for many reasons, but having to sign up to random forums to try and interact with support for, like, Circle CI has always felt a bit silly for me.

Forums can definitely see some improvement. I want to subscribe to certain subforums and threads, and get all the updates in a single app (like with a RSS reader) without having to visit each forum. IRC got this right. Reddit was okay, but all your content is still beholden to a single platform.

Widespread use of "Log in with Apple/Google/FB/whatver" can somewhat alleviate the signup burden, but also introduces other issues like privacy. I for one don't care about signing up to random websites. Modern password managers make it almost a non-issue if I forget my credentials or one of them gets hacked.

Tapatalk was/is great to heighten the experience in that regard. But I’m not sure whether it is still supported with recent versions of forum software. Also many admins didn’t like it as people using Tapatalk didn’t produce ad impressions.

Nowadays, forums should support ActivityPub so I can subscribe to threads from e.g. my Lemmy instance.

We could try using vector search to surface better matches, or LLMs to summarize large forum threads, etc.

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