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Comment by Springtime | Hacker News Reader

Ultimately someone has to pay for things. Many communities have apparently decided they don't want to use even modern forum software and become a webmaster, along with avoiding the costs and time associated, or use someone else's existing forum (which may or may not suit their needs).

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.

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I tried discord only once, but to me it was a disorganized chaotic experience. People seem to really think that well organized faq sections on traditional websites and properly searchable and indexable forum threads should be replaced by "just search through two years of chat backlog on discord". Or something like that.

I run a large discord. I am in several large discords. I do not know anyone proposing replacing a traditional FAQ with discord.

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 want to throw dirt at the project in question, but I signed up specifically to ask a question regarding a configuration problem, and the reply was "search for <specific term> in the channel." like they apparently already had enough people ask the question that they immediately knew how to find the relevant discussion containing a solution. Versus in the old days, asking on irc and getting a link to a forum thread, or even better, finding the thread on Google.

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.

That is the exact reason Discord isn't sufficient. I've had to support enough projects as a maintainer to know that you will always get hammered with the stupidest questions and the same questions all the time. The less you have to repeat yourself the better, and Discord, or any chat application, ensures you have to repeat yourself as much as possible. There's virtually no way to retroactively follow the stream-of-consciousness that is a chat-style discussion with no single topic instead of the post-style single-topic threaded discussion.

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.

I've seen it on numerous game, book, and software related discords. Your experience is alien to mine.

The forum threads ARE the FAQs.

When enough people make the same thread to ask the same question, that is a frequently-asked question.

I'm guessing you don't interact with the development community very much then? Almost every open source project I encounter at least has a Discord server, it's the new easier and more accessible version of "find me on IRC", but most that are less than 10 years old that I've encountered also don't have a forum and direct you to the Discord for even the most basic info. In fact I've had multiple popular GitHub repos that directed me in an Issue I was offering to file a PR for to go check Discord for an explanation of how the project was even used.

I have the same feeling about Matrix - and I've used IRC since the 90s so I'm used to jank.

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.

[0] https://discord.gg/retrohandhelds

I'm an admitted matrix fanboy, but i hear ya about organizing in the matrix world! There certainly are opportunities for improvement. That being said, i feel like the challenges are 80% ~ 90% UI/UX challenges that need to be evolved, and maybe 10% ~ 20% protocol/architectural challenges. I have a feeling that there will be improvements from the client/app side that will create a positive jump in experience in the matrix world...of course i am biased. :-)

Matrix has so-called spaces, which group rooms together. Chaos Computer Club used this for 37C3, it was quite neat.

> People seem to really think that well organized faq sections on traditional websites and properly searchable and indexable forum threads should be replaced by "just search through two years of chat backlog on discord"

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.

I'm actually a moderator on a discord. We have a lot of FAQ pages (generally wiki pages on various GitHub repos) that a discord bot will send you to in response to various different commands. Occasionally I use search to find a chat that I personally had with someone X months ago, and it usually works if I can find the right search terms. I don't think it is any worse than IRC with chatlogs (arguably might be better depending on how well indexed the chatlogs are).

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.

Discord is meant for gamers playing games. Who tf cares what happened 2 years ago in that context.

Here's the key: if I use something for free, I don't expect anything from it.

It’s free and easy to setup. That was the same as Facebook, Twitter,… and that’s because corporations have money to throw at the problem. The issue is that their intention is not the same as the users and after a while, the illusionary cooperation stops. And then, the communities collapse and a whole part of the internet goes dark.

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.

My sad realization is that in today’s nerd world, there just aren’t that many teenage webmasters. Unix and DNS and Apache just aren’t very sexy or fun to learn when the other cool kids are playing with LLMs and Flutter and WebGL. Obviously _we’d_ prefer if they learned to setup vBulletin and do it our way, but when Discord is free and all their friends are on it, it’s a tough sell to the other nerds.

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.

There’s also a mismatch in incentive. Before you would become a webmaster and foster a community with your friends, now even if you try, your community will just be botted, content scraped, and rehosted on bigger platforms that have giant conglomerates behind them. An example of this is that Fandom site which is abhorrent but has ruined many fan sites due to alternatives being squeezed out.

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).

I don't know if skills are actually being lost. Skilled kids were always an anomaly when it came to tech on a meaningful level.

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.

Those kids are building Discord bots now.

matrix.org allows 100 mb attachment. It is federated, which means you can move your data to your server if you like later. There are many clients and server implementations now and it is e2ee.

More importantly, it is indexable by search engines (if you use view.matrix.org). But it's not as simple to use as discord quite yet. I say this as a self-hosted matrix user, but it's not quite as simple to call someone else (until element call becomes a thing) or use custom emojis, to show a few problems.

I dip my toes in regularly for the last two years. Every time I do, Matrix has been an extremely janky experience with negligible command of good UX principles. It's awful, and I'm only trying to use two devices.

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.

This is my exact experience. The tech underlying Matrix is very interesting, but they really need to hire a proper UX person.

> the fact Discord is closed off in nature means it's quite attractive

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

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