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Comment by Legion | Hacker News Reader

Pushing what used to occur on web forums into Discord chats has been a net loss for the Internet.

"Push" is the right word, because moderating web forums was always a labor of love, and automated trolling/spamming has only gotten easier and more prevalent, not to mention anti-mod culture.

It's just too hard to moderate a space with so little friction, and any friction you add chases away all but the most dedicated users -- and the most dedicated users are often the ones more likely to get entangled in some insane drama and try to burn the whole place to the ground.

It's a difficult problem. I've always wondered what it would actually cost to actually, properly moderate a reasonably sized forum if you paid a professional mod team real wages and gave them proper tools. Probably way more than we would guess.

No. A readme on GitHub that only says "documentation on discord" is an active push by the developers to contain everything within discord.

Way to miss the point entirely. GP was talking about why that happens. And yes, it's almost entirely due to going places that actually provide effective tools to deal with bad-faith participants.

Agree 100%. Not the most important example, but I used to be heavily into World of Warcraft. The go-to place for discussion of high end play was a forum run by the guild "Elitist Jerks". Everything was there out in the open, to be read and indexed and discussed and preserved indefinitely. The forum eventually went away, but the info was still available thanks to the Wayback Machine.

Fast forward to 2020 when Blizzard put out WoW Classic (basically the original 2004 state of the game again, as a nostalgia trip). I was bummed to find that all discussion of the game had moved into discord servers. And not just one. There was a separate discord for every single class (mage, warrior, priest, etc). Sometimes more than one if the community couldn't agree on which was best. Every guild had their own discord. Special purpose servers existed for niche topics. If you wanted to find a piece of information, you had to hope that a helpful moderator had pinned it somewhere, or else rely on a crappy search feature. If a server is shut down or you get banned, all of that info is lost forever. It's a nightmare.

Discord is a perfectly good tool for real time chat. It is a TERRIBLE tool for summarizing and preserving knowledge. But unfortunately it's increasingly being used for that purpose and I do not for the life of me understand why.

Yeah a lot of things are going this route unfortunately. RIP to the open internet. Ill still be there when everyone decides they have had enough.

Absolutely. Information can no longer be retrieved via internet search. Discord and Slack are effectively silos.

A lot of sites now block non-Google search engines from accessing their data.

Honestly, I find it easier to check a Discord server than to get useful results from DuckDuckGo these days.

Google has done whatever it takes to incentivize people not to use competitors. It sucks.

Sure but you can search for communities then use the platform-native search. Not as convenient as a search engine natively supporting, though.

until the discord server goes down

If the thing goes down there's no guarantee any indexer/scraper is going to index/scrape it

you have to have an account, with mobile number

Are you sure? I seem to remember Discord requiring an email but not mobile number

I know Telegram absolutely requires a mobile number, though

It will sometimes let you register without a phone number, but other times it will demand one. I imagine it has to do with IP reputation and how many accounts have been created from your network recently.

Same thing can be said about Twitter and most of Facebook

For now at least. Some day everyone's relatives will be digging through databases of their ancestor's grand wisdom filleted wide open. Maybe it'll even use all that info to recreate an Ai version of them. Sorry just thinking out loud.

That sounds awful. But there's no reason why Discord can't go the same route.

Some chat apps like Zulip have the option to open a channel to the web. It can even be indexed by search engine bots

The real loss for the internet is the puritan approach to federation and decentralization. It's either that or app-centric solutions like matrix. Even forums weren't discoverable easily. I'll say this, matrix really has the right idea, it just does too much too fast. An SRV DNS record indicating your matrix server should be enough, then browsers should auto-discover the 'matrix' for the website, and via matrix you can comment on a site, leave reviews, chat with visitors, post forum-style,etc..

But as I mentioned in another comment, what's more important is how easy it is to administer and setup. The experience for site/community owners is the critical factor for adaption.

Forum posts were indexed by search engines - doesn’t that alone provide a minimum level of discoverability?

Based on how search engines behave to day, not really. These days, you'll have to fight spammy forums who game SEO, reddit, stackoverflow, ML digested output,etc.. it is discoverable as in technically it is somewhere in the results, but people never see it. If google paid discord like they pay reddit and searched discord servers that allow for that, that might be a nice compromise.

Add forum or “forum” to your search term and you’ll get results from tons of forums. Yes, you have to know to do that, but once you do, your results will actually be good.

thanks, i didn't know that keyword was special.

Also, ancient forums without https seem to be excluded by Google more often than not. I know they have their rules to push TLS but I still want results regardless.

Don't forget IRC. My previous employer [very reasonably] blocked Discord with their MITM. This meant that the numerous developer/package discords were inaccessible to me.

Gitter exists, and they use Element. As well as many other open source alternatives (including IRC, but I can understand the apprehension with nicserv and all that ceremony).

I started a Discord 'server' for my JS Canvas library thing a couple of years ago because - apparently - it was a "good way to build a community". Not only have I failed to build a community, I've grown to hate its UI and confusion of channels.

I think Discord is overkill for my requirements. But I still want a (free) venue (which is not GitHub) where people can ask questions and - maybe, just maybe - form a community around the library. I keep staring at PhpBB ... but it feels too oldskool, so: nope.

I am beginning to like the idea of a self-hosted Discourse[1] thing; there seems to be a fair number of active tech-related communities... maybe if I have some time over Easter I'll investigate further.

[1] https://discover.discourse.org/

IMO, you should have different channels of communication: A wiki which has commonly requested information; A manual for references; A bug tracker for issues. I strongly believe that IM should be reserved for active contributors. Forums should mainly be user to user help and support.

This is why when we wanted to build a community around our product we went for Discourse instead of Discord (even though many people asked us for Discord instead). It certainly feels a lot less "lively" than a Discord server, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Ironically internally we still use Discord for comms.

All about the right tool for the right job.

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