Stop Using Discord
malenfant.net
malenfant.net
The quite liberal free file attachment limits (25MB each), ease of communication and ironically the fact Discord is closed off in nature means it's quite attractive for people to more easily share things that would require a separate file host normally (it's an almost universal experience that forums usually have meager attachment caps).
I'd be quite interested in an article that understands Discord's benefits and use cases and then approaches a critique and alternative solutions to address it in a more open web friendly way.
If anything, I would argue discord tends to improve website-based documentation because people ask the same question over and over again, leading to a need for a quick way to link the answer.
Who do you think is replacing FAQ's with Discord?
I don't know how much of an outlier this is, as said, I didn't ever use it again and that was at least two years ago. But at least here on hn I've read similar stories.
I have seen exactly 1 project ever have a solution to this, and ironically it was actually on Discord. Of all the many many chat applications out there, Discord seems to have the most flexible admin control of retroactive chat organisation, and 1 huge development community I'm in has actually proactively created threads when a reoccurring topic comes up again and then moved them to a common FAQ channel.
When enough people make the same thread to ask the same question, that is a frequently-asked question.
Discord has a clear segmentation where a "server" (community) has multiple "channels" (and "forums").
I can easily context-switch between servers. With Matrix there is no clear way (at least to me) to get all channels from a specific context - that is provided by someone else. I can of course manually organise channels somehow, but that's not what I want to do.
Example: When I join the Retro Handhelds community[0] on Discord I get access to a huge amount of channels, created by the server admins. I then have a fancy UI (Channels & Roles) where I can pick which specific retro handhelds I am interested in (RG35XX and Anbernic) and it hides the other channels from my view.
There are no other tools that can do this currently. Matrix has the technical capability, but their insistence on making the client NOT-Discord is getting a bit tedious.
I WANT to like Matrix, but they're making it so damn hard.
Nobody thinks that. Creating and maintaining a traditional website with a well-organized FAQ section requires non-zero effort. The discord backlog is already there on accident. This thread comes up every other month and is always full of people who seem to imagine a project lead sitting down to weigh pros and cons of possible options for their FAQ, and settling on, "I think we'll use Discord!"
Documentation lives on Discord for the same reason that so many companies have critical infrastructure running in Excel. Nobody sits down, evaluates tech stacks, and decides, "I think this part should run on Excel." It runs on Excel because the guy who initially wrote it was already interacting with a CSV file in Excel and didn't know how to do much else, or didn't want to spend the effort for something he thought might be a one-off job.
And the fundamental problem is that social chats are noisy, and you should never be using them for knowledge retention. And web forums aren't a replacement for social chat. And 99% of the questions and answers in there are from newbies and are covered in FAQs and are just noise anyway. You can't index your way out of a horrible noise problem.
They also do serve a purpose because as one of the subject-matter experts (who is a single-point-of-failure/final-escalation level), I don't have to get involved in most of the discussion. There's usually dozens of people on the server who can answer the easy questions, and I can monitor for people hitting real bugs that actually need fixing.
Here's the key: if I use something for free, I don't expect anything from it.
If folks want to convince less ideologically motivated people to switch and support The Cause it still needs so much TLC. It's barely competing on table stakes features for a chat platform.
It’s not a “kids these days” grumble, just an honest observation that some computing skills are slowly being lost generationally, and it’s hard to say that anyone’s really to blame.
You have to effectively create your own closed off platform to avoid those shortcomings like discord so might as well just use it (or Matrix etc).
You might even be able to argue there's greater skills than ever before as compute is so cheap and FOSS is so readily available.
I was 1 of maybe 3 nerds in a school of 2500 people, 20 years ago. Being smart wasn't deemed to be cool, computers weren't cool—doing well in class made you a "swot".
The people who do productive things with tech for their own enjoyment and curiosity has always been small relative to people who just "consume" as an end user.
What is being lost is electronics design skills, despite KiCAD et al being available. Also not much interest in FPGAs and DSP from younger demographics, but at least MiSTer got some younger folks into FPGAs, but unfortunately, prices went through the roof to even get a foot on the ladder.
This phrase was in context of sharing moderate amounts of data, but I think the un-indexable nature of Discord is a feature in more ways than that. The public internet has become decidedly less tolerant over the past decade and I can see why people would want to retreat from it and form more isolated communities.
I thought Parler back in 2021 was an interesting case study. From a simple game theory perspective, any group with minority opinions should probably not be organising in public. Majorities are pretty brutal to people who do not conform. We seem to be entering a tense era, so something like the Holocaust or the Chinese Land Reform Movement is not out of the question in the next 50 years. Pseudonymity is a good start, but even better is not having publicly available records of what was said so the bureaucrats don't know what to deanonymise.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites
The other part is that Discord feels much more like a club than a library. It may be nicer, but no one is interested in popularizing information. Instead you have to hope to be heard by the experts. And that’s after the requirement of being a member. A forum is open to anyone on the internet, who can consult the interactions anytime they want. And information categorization is already done.
The real danger of Discord is that people want to use it for everything and forget to offer other means of communication like a Wiki or a bug tracker. Imagine if Arch Linux was only present on Discord.
The alternative are still the same as it was ages ago. Host a forum software yourself or pay someone to do it. And build a Wiki to answer the most requested information. Relying on free products from companies is not the correct decision if you care about permanence.
"Join my Discord" is a 100% hard pass for me.
Every time I've made an exception, the entire experience is a net-negative.
Half the time, I can't even get authenticated and then once I'm in, everything is awful. The notifications, the constant chatter, the dozens of topics, the useless search, it shocks me that anyone over the age of 14 uses it at all.
Add to all the broken basics, the fact that your data is now locked away in a vault that will absolutely disappear at some point in the not-too-distant future, and it just makes no sense at all.
Maybe it's the Gen Z take on IRC, but it seems a bit much. The client is very smooth in performance, though, which is nice.
Really? I'm in my mid 30s and am in a couple servers with a bunch of 30-50 year olds. I don't know of any better platform to organize and play DnD with voice chat and screen sharing. It's also great for when I play larger online games with a group (e.g. World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy) as we have a guild server to organize absences, socialize while not raiding, etc.
If you have a suggestion for a better way to voice chat, screen share, drop in and out of conversations, etc. I'm all ears.
For what its worth, all of your complaints (except for search, which really does suck) are easily addressed.
> The notifications,
You can turn them off
> the constant chatter, the dozens of topics
Topics are there to limit the messages to just what you're interested in, cutting down the chatter.
If you expect it to be anything different than discord, you'll be disappointed, but there are communities where discord/slack/mattermost model works fine.
Who cares? Why do you want to record every single thing forever? Do you write down every single thing when you converse with someone in real life?
And you really can't figure out how to use Discord, when a 14-year old apparently can? Maybe it's time to retire.
Our group of 40+ old farts uses Discord exclusively, because we can do it all under the same roof.
Want to chat about stuff, we've got a few channels just to keep them contained (one for each RPG campaign we're playing and separate ones for the few PC games we have time for).
Need to chat during an online game? Discord has video and voice chat as well as screen sharing.
Want to keep a log of a RPG campaign? You can do a "forum" post about it after every session, it's all there in a nice format under the same platform.
When we play online games, like Helldivers 2, everyone can use Discord for voice even when I play with PS5 and the others are PC players. Discord works cross-platform.
> Stop using Discord for anything else than just chatting. Stop dumping knowledge into a black hole. Use forums. Use the open web. Future nerds will thank you.
I get the need for non-open communication channels if you want to stay away from Nintendo's lawyers or something but otherwise come on, just have the discussions in a more open place FFS.
I also hate Reddit but at least it can be reached via search engines.
The issue is how some communities use it as a wiki, documentation and forum replacement for information that should be available on the public internet. This is a huge problem for speedrunning and modding communities, which seem to love using Discord and Google Sheets and other awkward 'must know the link to access' tools for information that should probably be in a wiki somewhere.
Don’t be reachable on non-e2ee DM systems. Delete your account.
I have been wondering: is it even possible for a platform to fulfill both needs?
For searchable, "forum style" discussions, we already have a large accessible platform: Reddit! I genuinely ask myself: why is "Join our Discord" much more popular than "Join our Reddit"?
I personally prefer "forum style" discussion over "IRC style" discussions, but the polularity of Discord even in technical circles proves to me that a lot of people like the IRC style of communication.
Let's say the maintainers of Foo and the Debian Foo package disagree on which plugins should be in the default install.
If they have that discussion on a public forum, maybe unhappy people get directed to the conversation, or someone decides to parade a comment around twitter and link it from HN so everyone can see what an asshole you are. Quite possibly with your real name attached.
But if you have the same discussion on Discord? Much harder for people to link to, once it's scrolled off the screen it's practically forgotten, and almost nobody uses their real name. And you don't see people screenshotting Discord posts anywhere near as often as they screenshot Twitter posts (although it is possible, of course).
I can see how an open source maintainer using their free time to provide unpaid support might find the latter more pleasant.
I'm _still_ looking for a Reddit replacement that has sufficient community to make it at all useful, since Reddit died.
But the issue is no replacement is proposed by the author.
Discord has the advantage of:
- being free
- being maintained by someone else
- being used by a lot of people, so no need to create a new account for many users
- being very useful as a chat and growing organically as support from there
I don't see many competitors available. For example discourse is paid 50€ per month for 100 users maximum, which small project can pay that ?
Edit: I rarely see FB mentioned on these debates but it's probably by far the biggest place used for forum. I'm a member of several 10k+ groups. Even discords don't come close of it. The official bambulab group is 60k people, the hiking group of my area (1 million inhabitants max) is 30k people. The numbers are insane, as is the information invisible and lost
- edit/delete messages
- code highlight
- notifications
- fast search that works for everyone:
https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-stores-billions-of-mess...
I've never understood people who log out of IRC.
You can't even view them partially anymore since you illegally have to give up your rights to do so.
People use Discord because it's useful and they like the experience. Discourse is nice for purely written communication but if you want to setup a call, direct message and, more importantly, write bots (presentation, topic organization, news, modding, now even AI Q&A); people will fall back to Discord.
Pointing at Discourse when it doesn't have the same value proposition and blaming users is just not useful at all.
Let's fix that.
Discord-using people use Discord because it's useful to them and they like the experience.
Having said which, finding out is obstructed by the fact that very few organisers offer users both.
The UX on Discord is excellent. That's why so many people, including nerds that used to happily use IRC and Mumble, use it. It's easy to create your own server, administer it with granular permissions, and to invite your friends to it. You can instantly start voice and video calls with screen sharing, for free. It's also a live chat with excellent formatting capabilities and has multiline support, unlike IRC (unless this has changed recently?), which makes it much better suited for technical questions involving code. Oh, it also has actual code formatting built in so it's actually legible (though this remains a feature underutilized).
The problem with discord is it's just not visible outside of discord, it can't be indexed, archived and searched through other means, and is vulnerable to the whims of the server owner. It's also not very good at being a forum replacement because its threading capabilities and UI wasn't designed for that purpose, so it feels bolted on (because it is).
People on this site really confuse this issue: your dislike of Discord is an ethical one, because it goes against what you believe a chat should be (free/open/whatever). Most people unfortunately just don’t give a shit.
Of course, this isn’t always the case, your messages can still go unanswered for days. But in my experience, when I see that a project has a Discord, I now think "Great I might get an answer". And this doesn't dismiss all the cons that others have already mention
Look at the VIM help as an example of great manual. Or the GNU software documentation. Now, you see “Join our Discord” instead.
[0] hacks aside
As far as I know there is no other voice communication program that handles voice channels TeamSpeak style with a chat box next to it. If there is one I'd jump ship.
That said, most people use Discord because other people use it and there is much less friction to add a new "server" (i hate how they use that term instead of something like "community" or whatever) alongside those you are already part of than making a new account to yet another site.
I know i'm using Discord mainly because the people actually go there. I used IRC since the 90s but for more than a decade it has been channels with 15-20 people all of whom are AFK and idling via some proxy bot or whatever with the occasional chat now and then by a couple of people (Discord also has a lot of idlers but it has 10x more people too so that couple of people becomes 20 people). IRC not having server-side storage of discussions does not help because i can't login to a channel, ask/answer a question and leave later. I know some people like that lack of permanence but personally i find Discord much easier on actually making or even starting discussions (e.g. i might respond to a message someone left 8 hours ago which is seen by someone else right after i post it and starts a discussion - this only happens because i was able to see that 8h old message). I know IRC supposedly added optional support for this recently but i don't know anything that uses it (and even then it wont solve the "people go to Discord" problem since other services like Matrix already supported that for years and people do not go to Matrix).
Maybe that’s changed. But a lot of folks don’t think so. Twitter is useful precisely due to its network effect. That’s why I’ll never move to mastodon. Doesn’t make sense for the reason that I use the tool.
This convenience-driven mindset extends to technical communities on Discord. Creating a server there is as simple as clicking a couple of buttons, whereas setting up a new forum requires significant technical effort and ongoing maintenance, besides $$$. These practical aspects are often overlooked in discussions, hence the failure of all these campaigns lead by a bit too technical people i.e. those who are willing to spend time researching alternatives and enduring their particular pains, and don't care about networking effects.
To challenge Discord effectively, create something equally convenient yet superior (like being indexable by Google). Wait for Discord's deep enshittification and seize the opportunity then. If it's not as convenient, don't expect users to switch. The average user won't invest time in learning new platforms when they can get everything faster and for free elsewhere.
Nothing is more off-putting about an open source project than seeing that discord is the main support forum.
I am in the fortunate position of being able to just solve my own problems by myself most of the time, but sometimes it genuinely is helpful to talk to someone about it.
If you're an open source project, please use IRC, or matrix if you absolutely must.
If you need a forum, well, discourse is not the worst option, but honestly no idea why forums need a tonne of javascript, a re-implementation of basic browser functionality like scrolling, and to override your keybindings. A mailing list is the ideal option. If you really must have something web based, I don't have any recommendations other than "please don't use discord, at least not unless you feel actually satisfied with its search functionality". You can self host a forum on a cheap VM and require some kind of user signup to try to mitigate the inevitable spam.
By the way, maybe this is naive, but what's wrong with Github Discussions?
But seriously, Discourse is good forum software. You can self-host it or pay for a hosted instance. An example instance is IRLO, https://internals.rust-lang.org
I'm starting to think that this is part of the appeal. Having an emotional outburst and power tripping is fun for some people, and Discord provides ample opportunity to do it (+ in real-time)
However, I will admit that I much prefer seeing that a community has a Discord channel over being exclusively located on Github/Gitlab issues.
It's not your server, it's not even a server at all.
Matrix comes the closest to fitting all the same requirements, but I've only ever managed to get one friend to regularly use it, and even then we only use it between ourselves and not to participate in federated matrix servers.
I use a bouncer etc but that's more than the average person should have to worry about. There is https://www.irccloud.com/ but I fear it's too little too late
Having to create an account on every IRC server is also not great.
I use and love IRC, but I get why centralised services take off. It's just a shame it's a sucky one like discord where everything just goes into a black hole.
Chats are for kids, students and unemployed.
We could probably use mumble and sometime else. The screen sharing part could probably be jitsi. It's just been easier to get everybody playing our game on discord as they already have it.
This is it. The brain is wired to expend the least amount of energy possible. Online communities of the past were held up by the few. Those willing to do the work.
I've gone looking and there is simply no alternative with core feature parity.
In the end there is nothing special about Discord, but it does most things people want well enough.
I am an IRC lover, it's a classic platform.
But my classic IRC platform needs someone to host the server.
And it needs NickServ to add on the missing persistent usernames.
And it needs ChanServ to ensure opers don't lose control of the channel.
And it needs a bot so you can leave messages for offline users.
And it needs some sort of third-party image hosting and file hosting.
And you need something like irssi+screen if you want to see messages that arrived while you were away.
And you need to rename yourself to michaelt_afk when you're away.
And you need some way to block spammers and other unwanted bots.
And if your channel wants a browser-based option, someone's going to have to figure that out.
And you've got to take care not to reveal your IP address for DDOS by griefers.
And of course the normal ports might be blocked at work/school/college, maybe you'll need a workaround for that.
IRC has solutions for all these problems, but not particularly easy solutions. Discord/Slack/Microsoft Teams have succeeded by fixing all the weaknesses of IRC that we IRC lovers have been working around for decades.
I tried to google for things I had earlier seen on Mastodon, but was never able to find the relevant post again. Even modern-day Twitter, which is impossible to just browse these days, is more googlable.
By default. You can turn on indexing for your account if you want to.
I'm not familiar with indexability outside Mastodon instances, though can't really recall coming across them naturally in search.
[1] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/elasticsearch/
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/yv1cl4/global_sea...
Edit: updated with links from my prior research.
The HN algorithm is intentional about a primary goal of driving well behaved discussions, even knowing that means important controversial topics getting downranked.
Seriously. What's the probability that invisible masters gave the censor order?
I want to be able to browse the existing information without needing to announce that I'm looking (people joining a server may be announced in a specific channel and you are added to the user list) and without implicitly signing up for notifications (you get the chat notifications unless you make sure to mute the server and suppress @mentions). I want to be able to search for information without trudging through loads of BS chatter and interleaved conversations.
Traditional forum software is great for this. Please use it!
Jokes aside the discord ux is good enough for the average user, it already has chokehold on its users and there is no equivalent.
I would also prefer things to be easily searchable, archivable etc but consumers consume.
Guilded has entered the chat
In this instance: Amiga 600 Discord where we post pics of our cool Amigas good, Amiga maintenance and schematics hidden in God knows which channel on God knows which Amiga Discord server bad.
Best of both worlds: if someone asks question on a Discord and you know the answer, write a blog post (or whatever, as long as it is on the open Web) and link it back! You are guaranteed to have at least 1 readerr which is wildly above the average blog post lol
There are plenty of equivalents - Slack, Microsoft Teams etc offer the same IRC + persistent messages + searchable + persistent user accounts & admin + multi-device + image sharing + file sharing + spam protection product.
They're just even worse, by most of the metrics that make people hate discord.
The big difference is in vibes. Slack is unashamedly corporate and would love to sell you premium SSO integration. They could cut out (or offend) the free community tier, no sweat. On the other hand Discord is more gaming aligned, and would love to sell you some premium custom emojis. Offending the free tier users or getting rid of the free tier is a lot less compatible with their business model.
And with an active server, there's typically always someone around to help you chat through a problem almost immediately.
I understand the sentiment, but it does seem misinformed.
Slack, on the other hand. Absolutely! Stay away for anything related to knowledge-base.
Out of curiosity, is any of that useful information on the Elixir Discord available to be searched for with Google or any other search engine?
It is not, and that is the one major knock against Discord. But see my response above about that.
I understand your position and I’ve had pleasant experiences on discord in the past with people being very willing to help. However, the help I received for my problem is basically impossible to discovered for anybody else (in fact, I have a hard time finding this thread myself).
Discord is really great for realtime interactions, wether that be chatting or talking. But it absolutely sucks at retrieving information generated in the past. It’s not search engine indexable and the discord search itself usually isn’t of any help either.
On conventional forums on the other hand, I have learned so much from reading threads from the past. Recently I’ve been diving a bit deeper into construction and I’ve found a forum in my native language. There are so many treasures there: experts from the field sharing experiences and advising on issues, people linking relevant threads, people asking questions and whole threads evolving from that. Sure, there is quite a bit of „toxic“ forum interaction as well, but there are so many gems that would absolutely be undiscoverable if the same interactions would happen on discord
I agree, this is a great value. I don't argue against forums, they need to exist.
I was just pointing out that Discord, in my experience, has not been a place of disdain like the original post claims.
Discord has done a lot of work to help foster a good community for all types, especially for the software development communities. If you haven't yet experienced Discord's forum feature, it's worth at least exploring. Here's an example from the Elixir community: https://share.barkerja.dev/4o8Ozk.png
If Discord ever did decide to make this content SEO, what then becomes the major point _against_ something like Discord and your traditional forum?
Still have to register though and the content is not indexed by a search engine.
Chat fine, do deep discussions that could benefit people months, years and decades from now somewhere else.
I feel like there are two discussions to be had:
(1) Discord as a commercial platform vs. open web; (2) Discord as an IRC-style platform vs. forums.
For me, only (2) is about the point of OP of "dumping knowledge into a black hole". It's a black hole because it's IRC, not because it's commercial.
Sure. Using Discord as a help community for technical issues seems like a bad idea on the surface.
But that’s not why I use Discord for technical issues.
I’m prolly a year and a half behind on what’s what (my last big project ). For me StackExchange was the place to find answers to specific questions.
Discord (and Reddit because discussion is permitted) was the place to go to find guidance when you don’t know where to start.
Sooo, Id rather say use Discord, use what works—but write and share back your knowledge to the searchable communities mentioned by the author.
The easy way to do that is write the question that you should have asked to those technical communities and answer your own question.
I have seen one site that seems to enable it by adding their bot to your "server", but it's only on a handful of programming-focused ones.
Friends don’t talk to friends on surveillance platforms.
Lots of people mistakenly assume their DMs on Discord (and their iMessages) will be private.
I wonder how they deal with spam if anyone can post without being logged in.
Specially since I plan to create a forum for a small web framework I might share in the future.
They have a paid hosting offer, but you can also self-host it for free. And it’s open source.
Yeowch. $50/mo is a huge cost for anything that's not making money.
Also anything that’s $50 a month doesn’t compete at the low end (which is where most OSS discussion hosting would exist) with Discord, which is free.
MacBook M3 Pro with Firefox.
And to test many replies you actually have to see them since they're not loaded on page load, only when you get to the bottom of that page, so just opening the top doesn't test anything re. lots of replies
You can host it yourself for much less than $50/mo, some people run small instances on a raspberry pi (I work for Discourse)
Pagination works fine tho, for their demo page at least. An example long thread, [1] has a clickable link to [1]?page=2 at the bottom of the page.
But you can't post. If you log in (using javascript) it refuses to show you anything without javascript later, and you can't post a new message.
It's clearly not their priority, and I am not sure why.
[1] https://try.discourse.org/t/is-the-second-amendment-still-re...
[0]: https://flarum.org/
The Discord works perfectly and always has. It's completely free and easy to use.
The forum is expensive, complicated, and usually broken. or hacked. or full of spam. It's going to cost even more money to fix. Nobody wants to work on forums, much less me.
Good riddance.
The chat logs, etc clearly would be a problem but these isolated areas could be prime candidates for a bridge of this gap.
I think the old phpBB was way better. But if there was some type of way to output the static html, it would benefit everyone in the long term.
Stop Using Discord
Jumping between screen sections is annoying because lists and headings are too nineties and the hell with them.
Captchas? Should I mention that for some reason they disliked one of my logins and put an inaccessible captcha? Maybe your unhappy blind users are still locked out and can't tell you for their issues. Good that I was registered with a gmail account and circumvented them by adding a dot in the email field.
Those are personal experiences and I don't know your previous solution, but for me Discord manages to be annoying in a very specific and unnecessary way.
I agree on captchas. Rocket.Chat was the previous platform.
I will file a bug against discord on the timestamp issue.
When I worked for Washington State University, one of our tests pre website update, was the developers had to use a desktop with a screen reader and the display turned off. I think we made great websites for blind users. That was in 2003, so things may have changed.
PS: Regarding the timestamp issue, maybe I've formulated it incorrectly. Just, when you arrow on a message, it reads sender and timestamp. Some people write bursts of messages so you have a name and timestamp for every few words of the conversation and for many stupid emois.
But I guess I'll just put a blanket over the monitor. New OSes and GUI frameworks behave strangely with no target resolution.
Oh wait, I can't? So it's not really "my" "server"?
I would have a very different take on Discord if I could host a server myself and ensure that what I and my community have built won't be deleted at the whim of the corporation or threat from a lawyer. There's no offline backup where you can just spin everything back up on a different host.
And to those that think an obscure "invite" link will protect you from Nintendo's lawyers, you're living in a different reality than I am. Discord, a registered company with a lot to lose, will throw you under the bus in a heartbeat to lawyers or law enforcement.
The current generation is way too comfortable with technical stuff being abstracted away behind pretty cloud based interfaces and Electron apps.
Discord is a big offender, but it is not alone.
Consider: Google Plus, Usenet, Facebook.
I don't know of any pre-2010 forums that are still functional and searchable.
https://www.vogons.org/ ->Since 2002
https://bbs.archlinux.org -> Since 2003
And so on, just to name two important ones.
Then the thread went on for a couple more years helping people with similar issues for whom the orginal fix didn't work, until eventually another fix was posted. That other fix was copied over from another forum.
[1]: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/23158-help-s...
Of course people can privately discuss things, but if you were asking for help with your car, would you prefer that someone tell you which manual and page to look at to solve your problem, or to invite you to their car club that meets on weekends because Timberly probably knows how to solve that problem, and will probably be there next weekend, unless he's not?
Some of the channels seemed a bit weird, especially one full of memes, somewhat 4chan-like. It took me a few minutes of reading (and a few gross right-wing memes) before I realized that the Discord I joined had absolutely nothing to do with NixOS.
The complete opaqueness of the process makes it impossible to know anything at all about the community you are about to join.
Like yeah, forums are great if you want to search something and find. But... Have you actually make an account and ask about your problem?
Because I have, in reddit, specialised forums, and other forums, make an account and try to post.
You have stupid limitations with your new account, most of them, do not impede you asking your question, but it does at linking image, video, or link that would help explaining your problem.
You have to create an account for that specific forum. If you are on Reddit you need to deal with automod, who deletes your post the second you press send. Often without a warning, a real reason, other because you asked for help, please check the wiki. (Yes, my problem is not there)
Then there is the second part, the community. Most of the time, if you overcome that situations, your post get no answers. Sitting there until it reaches the end of page 1 on the forum, and then it is forgotten forever.
Discord is easy, you go, connect with your account, have some rules displayed, accept it, send a chat message, you might get an answer or not, most of the times you do, although is not helpful.
So yes, Discord is a sinkhole of information. But the experience is way better, even if it is a shitty mess.
Then I read a Geocities suggestion - something from my elementary days
Discord is actually pretty cool - a walled garden but no different than the rest of the internet.
Google won't send anyone to forums or blogs/personal sites anyways, so this isn't really advice at all
Oh? It does here.
> Google won't send anyone to forums or blogs/personal sites anyways, so this isn't really advice at all
They had that capability in the past, and may again in the future, to say nothing of possible competitors focusing on forum or blog search specifically.
Discord is a black box and that data will be lost forever. That's different from publishing on the public web.