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People don't often talk about https://spectrum.chat/ https://spectrum.chat/ when it comes to this topic and I don't understand why. Personally I've always thoug

People don't often talk about https://spectrum.chat/ https://spectrum.chat/ when it comes to this topic and I don't understand why. Personally I've always thought the Q&A style chat seemed a better fit for open source communities. Too often when I'm looking to pose a question in Discord, there's five other questions before me with no answer. Context easily gets lost in a flood of messages.

petersjt014 7y ago
My guess--based on my singular experience--would be obscurity. I've never heard of it. Looks really nice though, A StackOverflow/Discord hybrid is a fascinating idea--could easily be groundbreaking.
jack_arleth 7y ago
Some things that come to mind on a quick reading of the website you linked: - you can only sign up by using github. This is equally nonsensical as requiring a facebook account to sign up. I have neither. But I have e-mail, so why can't I play along? - I legitimately cannot tell what platform this is on. Is it a webapp or is it a OSX/mac only local application? - Does it exist on mobile? I mean this as constructive criticism and I hope that somebody related to the project/company reads this and improves the information. But from what I can see this application is locked down for those on github and who operate macs. That makes it useless to a whole lot of people. *edited for formatting
- chrysoprace 7y ago
  That does make a lot of sense. I suppose the barrier to entry is a lot lower with Discord. To answer your question it's just a web app so it works on any platform. [1] The author talked a while ago how he regretted not building it with react-native-web. [2] (I'm not affiliated with Spectrum) [1] https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum [2] https://mxstbr.com/thoughts/tech-choice-regrets-at-spectrum https://mxstbr.com/thoughts/tech-choice-regrets-at-spectrum
acemarke 7y ago
I'm an admin in Reactiflux, which is one of the largest programming communities in the world, and hosted on Discord (https://www.reactiflux.com https://www.reactiflux.com). I agree that message flooding is an issue with a real-time chat channel environment. If multiple conversations are going on at once in a channel, it can be hard to follow, and questions can quickly scroll out of site and not get answered. Getting answers is also highly dependent on when they're asked and who's around. At the same time, real-time chat offers an immediacy: you can get interactive help, _right now_. One of the big sales pitches behind Spectrum is that "all questions and answers are indexed by Google". That's not wrong, but I think it also kind of misses the point. As we've seen both through Stack Overflow's years of existence, as well as the thousands of devs that have been helped in Reactiflux, new developers aren't going to go searching for answers. And, even if they did, they don't generally have the expertise needed to properly assess the quality and relevance of the answers they find. Most of the time they need some hand-holding to walk them through their current problem, right now. Yes, this _does_ lead to the same questions getting asked, over and over, but I truly don't think anything is going to prevent that from happening.
- chrysoprace 7y ago
  Spectrum is real-time too, but conversations are threaded rather than separated by global topics. I suppose Discord and Slack offer a kind of urgency to messages that are hard to replicate in threads.
  - acemarke 7y ago
    Yeah, Spectrum feels to me like it's "just" a standard web forum, albeit one with live reply updates and a chat-bubble style for its UI. I've certainly seen plenty of other forum software that has live updates as well, so it's not unique in that regard. (Note that I'm not bashing Spectrum here, just saying that I don't feel it's as revolutionary as I've seen it pitched to be.)

petersjt014 7y ago

My guess--based on my singular experience--would be obscurity. I've never heard of it. Looks really nice though, A StackOverflow/Discord hybrid is a fascinating idea--could easily be groundbreaking.

jack_arleth 7y ago

Some things that come to mind on a quick reading of the website you linked: - you can only sign up by using github. This is equally nonsensical as requiring a facebook account to sign up. I have neither. But I have e-mail, so why can't I play along? - I legitimately cannot tell what platform this is on. Is it a webapp or is it a OSX/mac only local application? - Does it exist on mobile? I mean this as constructive criticism and I hope that somebody related to the project/company reads this and improves the information. But from what I can see this application is locked down for those on github and who operate macs. That makes it useless to a whole lot of people. *edited for formatting

chrysoprace 7y ago
That does make a lot of sense. I suppose the barrier to entry is a lot lower with Discord. To answer your question it's just a web app so it works on any platform. [1] The author talked a while ago how he regretted not building it with react-native-web. [2] (I'm not affiliated with Spectrum) [1] https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum [2] https://mxstbr.com/thoughts/tech-choice-regrets-at-spectrum https://mxstbr.com/thoughts/tech-choice-regrets-at-spectrum

acemarke 7y ago

I'm an admin in Reactiflux, which is one of the largest programming communities in the world, and hosted on Discord (https://www.reactiflux.com https://www.reactiflux.com). I agree that message flooding is an issue with a real-time chat channel environment. If multiple conversations are going on at once in a channel, it can be hard to follow, and questions can quickly scroll out of site and not get answered. Getting answers is also highly dependent on when they're asked and who's around. At the same time, real-time chat offers an immediacy: you can get interactive help, _right now_. One of the big sales pitches behind Spectrum is that "all questions and answers are indexed by Google". That's not wrong, but I think it also kind of misses the point. As we've seen both through Stack Overflow's years of existence, as well as the thousands of devs that have been helped in Reactiflux, new developers aren't going to go searching for answers. And, even if they did, they don't generally have the expertise needed to properly assess the quality and relevance of the answers they find. Most of the time they need some hand-holding to walk them through their current problem, right now. Yes, this _does_ lead to the same questions getting asked, over and over, but I truly don't think anything is going to prevent that from happening.

chrysoprace 7y ago
Spectrum is real-time too, but conversations are threaded rather than separated by global topics. I suppose Discord and Slack offer a kind of urgency to messages that are hard to replicate in threads.
- acemarke 7y ago
  Yeah, Spectrum feels to me like it's "just" a standard web forum, albeit one with live reply updates and a chat-bubble style for its UI. I've certainly seen plenty of other forum software that has live updates as well, so it's not unique in that regard. (Note that I'm not bashing Spectrum here, just saying that I don't feel it's as revolutionary as I've seen it pitched to be.)