38 ms·

Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord

996 points by ClawsOnPaws 5y ago

codingdave 5y ago
Forums started dying off when social media started rising. I liked them better than what we have now, too, but... it is a little odd to attack Discord for the downfall of forums.
- wanderingstan 5y ago
  Interesting; I’d consider forums to be one of the earliest forms of social media. What is the distinction for you?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - barrenko 5y ago
    Not only that, they were the PERFECT form of social media. Then the name got co-opted so marketing peple could push crap around more easily.
  - Macha 5y ago
    Lack of singular identity or algorithmic feeds would be the big two for me. Forums are decentralised so you are someone else on the forum for game A than on the forum for hobby B, unless you work to link your identities. Whereas the big social media platforms aspire to be a one stop shop. Additionally forums generally sort by "newest thread first" or "most recently replied thread first" rather than trying to push the "hottest" threads or "trending threads" or similar at you.
    - rumblerock 5y ago
      To add onto this, the identities on good forums, with reputation scores, post counts, tenure, etc. served as a useful proxy for some degree of expertise or experience with the general topic at hand. On Facebook everyone has a transparent identity, yet somehow seems more like an anon if outside of your real life circle. On Twitter post and follower counts don't correlate with having thoughtful or informed opinions. On Reddit shitposting dilutes everything, with a dash of Instagram-like flex culture for karma points, and the effect / bias towards a hive mind is too powerful.
  - codingdave 5y ago
    Forums were content-centric, while social media is person-centric. Every user got the same content, with the same experience. I consider HN a forum for these reasons - even though the content is ordered algorithmically and are voted on, Rando A gets the same view as Rando B (for the most part)
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      Yeah, when I think about social media I think something like MySpace or our local IRC-Galleria. That is where user presence is main thing and not discussion like usenet or BBS or simple forums. Not even sure if I would consider Discord a social media...
murkle 5y ago
Reddit works fine as a forum. Just make a subreddit and start posting :)
- Macha 5y ago
  "move it all to reddit" has some of the same issues as moving it to discord. It puts control in the hands of a single company who might say, decide your subreddit is only available to mobile users if they install the app and sign in
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    Notably, however, this was not the issue focused on by the article (somewhat to my surprise). The article is about real-time versus asynchronous communication, and reddit would solve for that.
    - sk2020 5y ago
      I would like to think putting everyone’s eggs in one basket to be used for unstated purposes would bother most people, but it really doesn’t. I think they’re right though. I’m inclined to think that chat in general facilitates a staccato of quick-takes that paralyzes reader and writer from forming complete thoughts. Adding some activation energy to communicate seems to encourage more thoughtful statements. Twitter is an obvious argument by contradiction of this.
    - JohnWhigham 5y ago
      No, reddit is absolute garbage for long-running threads. Their algorithm is predicated on people constantly posting new threads. This leads to people constantly posting the most common discussion topics over and over and over.
- Crusoe123 5y ago
  I disagree completely. Reddit is a terrible alternative to forums. It's hard to actually have quality conversations there as communication is by default time based e.g the later you are in thread the less chance someone will read what you have written, and it's popularity based e.g. lowest common denominator memes and predictable comments will hog 90% of communication unless the sub is heavily moderated. Communication on forums is much longer living and discussions have opportunities to evolve into something else, which creates an environment for more meaningful communication. And if you like your memes, well there's probably a thread for that.
rg111 5y ago
I have seen a lot of companies, sites, non-profits move to Discourse[0]. It is customisable, low-cost, and has a lot of features which makes hosting a forum really easy and effective. This is a nice alyernative to hosting forums yourselves and Discord. [0]: https://discourse.org/ https://discourse.org/
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  I want to like Discourse, but as a user there’s something that bothers me about the design, compared to Xenforo or even phpBB or SMF. I’m legitimately not sure what it is, I just find Discourse forums harder to read.
  - joeberon 5y ago
    I have to agree. No idea what it is, but I just really don't enjoy using it at all. I find it quite disorientating. Would be interesting to see someone do a blog post on why that happens. It's honestly bad enough that I simply find myself just not using Discourse forums at all, even if it is on a topic that is actually important to me.
    - zbrozek 5y ago
      Discourse overrode ctrl-f, which made me instantly hate the experience. But the rest of the UI is generally overwrought and frustrating. Old fashioned phpbb or vbulletin is so much better.
    - true_religion 5y ago
      I wish someone would staple down what about discourse is so off putting. I have the same feeling using it… it’s just feels like a chore. Yet from 1000 feet, the UI does seem like an upgrade in phpBB, and the actual functionality lists so many checkboxes that it’s a wonder it has any competition.
      - dqv 5y ago
        It’s because it lacks dimension. We use the scroll bar to get a sense for how long a thread will be. We use pagination to get a sense for how many posts are in the thread. Infinite scrolling doesn’t make sense for something where a sense of the whole is important. I get that sites like HN or (old) Reddit do the same thing, but the pages are cut up into much fewer chunks AND they’re not linear discussion forums! They tried to solve this with a weird pseudo scroll bar in threads, but it still lacks dimension. There is no way to tell if the next 10 posts will be long or short. The pseudo scroll bar is just weird in general. I don’t really have anything succinct I can say about the way the pseudo bar represents dates but I can say it’s disorienting. I really should write about this
throwaway59553 5y ago
I don't know how people can read anything in Discord. It's a chat app, not a good medium to expose any information for people to be able to check when needed. And moving everything to reddit is not a solution either, it's a hellhole.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  Works for development when there are < 5 active people and some viewers.
- rchaud 5y ago
  As a crusty old barnacle in my 30s, I'm inclined to think (with no empirical evidence mind you) that younger users prefer chat because they are used to looking at screens with a constantly updating ticker of new info. Twitch, IG Live, FB Live, TT all have these auto-refreshing streams of comments in the UI.
  - mcbuilder 5y ago
    Long before that there was IRC. I dunno exactly how old you are, but I'm 36 and IRC was definitely a thing during the 90s.
    - rchaud 5y ago
      I'm the same age but didn't have Internet before the late '90s. MSN Messenger and ICQ were the big chat platforms of my time. I rarely chatted with strangers, although there were several city-based or activity-based rooms on mIRC where that could be done.
  - antifa 5y ago
    > younger users prefer chat because they are used to looking at screens with a constantly updating ticker of new info. Maybe, but I assume it's not age but because they have more freetime to sit in chatrooms.
unixhero 5y ago
Discourse or NodeBB is the real future
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
marapuru 5y ago
It's a real shame. The most thoughtful discussions usually take place on forums. Chat has this feel to it where it's better to reply fast and short instead of taking a bit longer but providing an elaborate reply. I understand the maintenance issues though. Forum software like vBulleting or phpBB have had it's fair share of security issues. Let alone the costs for a small community forum. However I do think that the moderation of forums is easier as opposed to moderating a chat. Where context can get lost in the different topics that are discussed in the same channel.
- inetknght 5y ago
  > Chat has this feel to it where it's better to reply fast and short It's not just a feel. Discord's maximum message length limit is minuscule compared to many forums.
  - marapuru 5y ago
    I didn't even realize there was a character limit. A quick search shows me that it is 2000 characters. Which is not _that_ bad, since most forum posts will likely be something shorter. But the entire UX surrounding it is all about quick responses (hit enter to send etc).
impostervt 5y ago
My friends and I started a website devoted to a multiplayer game back in college at the turn of the century. It had a forum that was heavily used. Somehow, 20+ years later, it's still going. 14 million posts and 196 people online now. And the game series has been dead for over a decade. I moved on a long, long time ago, but many people remain. There's a community there that just keeps going, despite the original purpose being long gone. I don't think that would happen with Discord.
- thomashop 5y ago
  I don't know if one can easily say what would or wouldn't have happened if you had chosen a different platform. There are a lot of communities based on irc that have existed forever.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    They d have been acquired by google and shut down 3 years later. The ones that have escaped that fate are self-hosted forums and , oddly, blogspot
  - aweiland 5y ago
    This site also had a companion IRC server.
- aweiland 5y ago
  I know this forum! It was one of the largest installations of vBulletin for a time.
  - impostervt 5y ago
    ...and 20 years later I run into one of the guys who helped run it. ha!
xlii 5y ago
I'm longing for the return of the mailing lists. Sure, the format is slow and somewhat complex, but then it seems like all the places are devoid of non-immediate conversations. Companies are moving to the Slack, informal groups to the Discord. I've been using IRC for years and I still love it but with recent adoption of Slack it seems everyone wants to push all the communication there and I don't think it works. It's hard to search for stuff (usually it takes me 3-4 queries to find thing _I know_ is there) and then it's in lengthy conversational format that takes a bit of time to replay. You might lose window of opportunity to provide important info just because you aren't present at the moment and since Slack is perceived as a low impact tool, those conversations can happen in late evening hours. And yet all the places that (in my opinion) were better to have more fruitful, thoughtful and searchable conversations are slowly winding down. Newsgroup are long dead, mailing lists are perceived as archaic, forums are closing down one by one. It might be me, but I start to get feeling that even on StackOverflow conversations aren't what they used to be. Only e-mail is left - in some places at least, because some organization start to have "why send an e-mail while you could send Slack message". Thankfully those organization usually bless users with capability of installing Slack on their private phones /s Too bad Google Wave didn't pick up.
- twic 5y ago
  Mailing lists? Bring back usenet! In all seriousness, by far the best professional discussion i have ever had was at a company in 2000 which ran an internal NNTP server. For me, that combined the relevant strengths of email with a format more suited to active multi-party discussion.
  - superkuh 5y ago
    Just be the change you want to see. I've been posting on alt.startrek and alt.cyberpunk sporadically again for a couple years now. https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/ is a great group that provides free text group access and posting.
    - walterbell 5y ago
DizzyDoo 5y ago
I agree, higher quality conversations happen more often on forums and they're much easier to search and access if you're not a member. But forums are also much easier to moderate than Discord - a message or image you might not want posted in your Discord scrolls up quickly (as people react to a troll or something inappropriate), and you tend to need moderators on-hand a lot of the time to react quickly, which can also mean moderators from a bunch of different timezones are required. On forums, yes, a rule breaking message can be posted whenever, but the pace of chat is much slower and the immediacy of effect on everything that follows is lessened.
simonbarker87 5y ago
I asked a very similar question on HN about this a few months back related to software support forums going to discord and slack. Total pain for finding answers to issues and problems
ziml77 5y ago
I hate that everyone is using Discord not just because of searchability but also because it's difficult to have multiple identities with Discord. It's frustrating to be looking for help with using some library and seeing in the readme a link to join their Discord server. I don't want to join those with the same identity I use in gaming Discord servers so I usually just give up at that point.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  and then you have the godawful bots. Try to join a server, get spammed by 5 different bots that want to verify your identity. And so many different rules when you just want to ask a question. Kafka would be proud
  - blstz 5y ago
    >And so many different rules when you just want to ask a question. Kafka would be proud Yes. Kafka is when rules, and the more rules the more Kafkaesque.
  - Meekro 5y ago
    As someone who runs one of those Discord servers, let me say that the rules have a purpose. Lots of people will jump in and post their question in the first channel they happen to see without looking into which channel would be appropriate (or worse, post it in every channel). Or they'll @-message or PM every mod. Or their attitude will be nasty, treating volunteer helpers like a personal servant. There will be posted rules saying not to do these things, but they'll do them anyway. When a mod confronts them over a violation, they'll say something like "Oh. Sorry. But now that I have your attention, can you help me with this quick thing?" Mods who deal with this stuff over and over will start getting tyrannical with their rule-enforcement, and I don't blame them.
    - ajuc 5y ago
      > Lots of people will jump in and post their question in the first channel they happen to see without looking into which channel would be appropriate (or worse, post it in every channel) That's a big reason why forums are better for Q&A.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bluetidepro 5y ago
Maybe it's just me (30-something year old male, big into gaming), but I love when I see forums on Discord. I think it's way better to use a system I am already signed up for. I don't want to sign up again for a million different forums like the old days. I also love the new threads feature by Discord to keep convos more concise and isolated. That has helped forums on Discord a ton. It's also nice that I can join a server, get my answer, then leave that server with no lingering email sign up for some one-off forum that I'll never visit again, and then I get bombed with emails after I'm done. And when I leave, it's worth noting my comments/questions are still on the server for those to find via search if they join after I'm gone [1]. I know a lot of people in the comments seem to hate Discord for this, but I personally love it. I guess I'm just saying this as a reminder that there are always others that do enjoy the other side. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ [1] It's worth noting that I guess this is a Discord server specific setting, so that could vary I suppose.
- bigwavedave 5y ago
  I say this as someone who uses discord heavily for a couple of hobbies: I truly detest discord search. I'd be more accepting of this trend if search wasn't hobbled; please, for the love of zeus, honor the difference between "normal" and "normals" in channels about 3d modeling.
- rijoja 5y ago
  no
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  I'm in the same demographic as you. The reason why I hate Discord as a replacement for forums is because I find it very hard to find whether my specific issue has already been discussed, and if I find something, it's quite hard to follow the intertwined discussions. You're talking about a threaded-feature, I'm not familiar with that, maybe it helps. My latest experience with discord was around spring of this year, with some tokio(-rs) related projects. But I find that something like stackoverflow or "Discussions" (not sure what the name of the app is, but many projects have them) are much more practical to use when you need to look up things. It seems to me that with Discord, the way it works is you show up and ask your question, as opposed to searching the archives to see whether someone already asked it before.
croon 5y ago
While I agree with the article that they are not the same, people using one thing may not be interested in the other, or at least not be aware of it. I've used IRC for the last 25 years or so, and BBS:es before that, and forums alongside it. Forums are great for nesting information and discussion for future reference, but less equipped for fast discussion on issues more ephemeral (or fun). A lot of people used only forums, even for things where I would go to IRC. These people could be well served by Discord (ignoring any discussion on proprietary software/data integrity/ownership etc). As a product, I really love Discord. I don't want everything to end up there, for various reasons, but the most important of which is discoverability and persistence. Please stop closing forums that are an information resource for both members and non-members. But some forums are just slow chat, in which case those users abandoning the forum are likely better served elsewhere.
ch33zer 5y ago
Is discord indexed by Google? I don't think it is. If this is the direction we're going anyways then at least having the ability to find discord messages from a search would be beneficial. I know that in recent years my primary interaction with forums has been as a result of searching for things either videogame or Linux related. Losing that info into an unindexed service is indeed a loss
- rchaud 5y ago
  No, search engines can't crawl pages behind a login wall.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
We have both, it works fine, and both platforms have their own goal. I think the most important factor is archival work. Discord is transient, anything older than a day is lost, and as far as I know there's no public search history anywhere (gitter does have that iirc?). There's a LOT of information and history in old forums and even old mailing list threads. I mean sure, 99% of it is probably useless, but it's that 1% that makes it worth keeping around IMO.
rickstanley 5y ago
I almost never use discord, not that I want to avoid it, but because my daily use of software doesn't require it. Gaming, I usually use Steam's built-in voice chat and/or rooms, and search for community forums within the game's page without hassle. For meetings I use either MSTeams (unfortunately if I don't have the option) or telegram, the latter is even better now with the group calls and screen share. When search for answers for a Github project, I go to discussions or create an issue.
hyperpl 5y ago
Long time IRC user here. I didn't mind using discord for some communities but it seems as though they now require phone verification which I certainly will not provided them. I feel as though one should be able to use it similarly to IRC and not be tied to one account for one phone number. I haven't been able to find a temp phone number to use for this purpose as the best I could muster was a vpn number that supports SMS but alas, that didn't work.
- cfgghsj 5y ago
  It's not strictly required, but you need a high reputation email address verification. For example, a custom domain email will not work, but gmail or outlook.com will allow you to make an account without a phone.
agjmills 5y ago
I have the same problem with Gitter.im or slack for FOSS projects - quite a few communities have switched from being fórum based (and therefore the conversations are logged and indexable by search engines), to being ephemeral conversations in Slack channels. You could argue that IRC fits in the category of ephemeral platforms, but most large communities provide some form of indexable log of the conversations
chobytes 5y ago
Yeah I dislike that everything is moving on to there. I dont like having to share one account with all the random servers I join. I dont like all the bots and the gauntlets to enter servers. I dont like the format for most of what it seems to be used for. I dont like the centralization and the general corporate overlord vibe they have.
eigengrau5150 5y ago
Discord: because normies can't handle IRC.
danaris 5y ago
I run a small, free browser-based persistent strategy RPG. We've had a forum for about a decade, and for a time, it was extremely popular. A few years ago, the usage of the forum began declining significantly. In mid-2019, we created a Discord server for the game, and people started joining immediately. It's been nearly a year now since there was more than a single forum post per month. If you want to engage your community, you need to go where they are—or where they want to be. I'm not at all thrilled with the fact that the major out-of-game community hub for my game is now hosted on a proprietary platform still looking for proper monetization, but I am thrilled with how much people love interacting with each other on it. And more importantly, I don't have a realistic alternative to offer them.
schwapnut 5y ago
Made an account just to post this. Internet forums are the senate chamber Discord and the like are the private chamber of whispers. Caesar was murdered in the chamber, but you can guess where Brutus and Co conspired, and it wasn't the chamber.
lvl100 5y ago
I hate discord. Every time I jump on to get help or engage in a semi-intellectual conversation, you end up talking to the same “regulars” on the server and often times you end up with a lot of misinformation. I end up leaving because there’s also a lot of gate keeping going on.
schnebbau 5y ago
Is there an open source old.reddit-alike forum available anywhere? I find Reddit much easier to read and digest than Discourse.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- zksmk 5y ago
  https://tildes.net https://tildes.net (source: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes, github mirror: https://github.com/spectria/tildes https://github.com/spectria/tildes, Python back-end, made by dude who worked on old reddit) https://lobste.rs https://lobste.rs (source: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters, Ruby back-end) https://lemmy.ml https://lemmy.ml (source: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy , Rust back-end, federated, in-development but usable) https://postmill.xyz https://postmill.xyz (source: https://gitlab.com/postmill/Postmill https://gitlab.com/postmill/Postmill, PHP back-end) There's also https://github.com/notabugio/notabug https://github.com/notabugio/notabug a P2P fork of old reddit UI (that used to be open source itself, old version: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit), and there's https://notabug.org/zPlus/freepost https://notabug.org/zPlus/freepost, I just found it searching for this stuff, those are the ones I know of.
slothtrop 5y ago
Tangentially, what would it take for forums to get a resurgence? Pseudo-centralization / connection through forum-software? Clearly a lot of users prefer the long-form format. My own observations from the past decade+ is that the influx of new users to forums very quickly dissipated, and what remained is a senior membership clique with dwindling interest in discussion with each other, which led to exodus. This could all be owing to there being a hip-new-thing monopolizing people's attention rather than a failure on the part of forums... and there were a ton of forums. Until it implodes it seems people are satisfied expending their attention on reddit or discord. The other difficulty competing with reddit is, in part as an aggregator, it's a dopamine-pumping machine, updating with new headlines and content every instant.
carlgreene 5y ago
My biggest problem with the transition to Discord and FB groups is the lack of search engine indexing. There is SO much valuable information locked in the communities that is near impossible to search for even WITHIN their platform.
swayvil 5y ago
I have tried Discord a dozen times and could never stand it for more than 10 minutes. It's an utterly obnoxious format. How about a nice conversation tree? Usenet!
offsky 5y ago
I wish someone would make an app like Discord but with functionality like forums. Hosted forums in an app with topics that persist and can be searched. On discord it’s all one long conversation and anything older than a week is hard enough to find that it’s pretty much gone.
- rchaud 5y ago
  A "topic" on a message board would be a "channel" on Discord. There would still a massive pool of messages to wade through.
  - offsky 5y ago
    If Discord had one more level of hierarchy, that would make it work like a pretty good forums. Server > Channel > Topic > Messages. Where mods make the server/channel and users can make topic/messages
- stiltzkin 5y ago
  Guilded has forum type channels.
everyone 5y ago
I really like when some random program or service I am trying to use has a Discord, cus I can just go on, ask my dumb questions and immediately get help in realtime from a human who knows about this stuff. As opposed to a forum, where u have to make an account, wait X amount of time (days maybe) for your account to be allowed to make a post, make your post, then wait more days for a single response, and so on.
- rchaud 5y ago
  I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to make a brand new post on a forum. The guiding principle of 2000s forum etiquette was "do a search first", because you weren't the first to come up with that dumb question. That is the value that will be lost.
ngrilly 5y ago
I so much agree with this. That's why our team is starting to use Discourse for Teams instead of email and Microsoft Teams. Structuring discussions per topic is key. Each discussion should have a title. That's how mailing lists, newsgroups, forums, but also Zulip work. That's what I miss the most in Slack, Discord, Teams, etc. Mailing lists work, but I miss the ability to edit a message to fix a typo or clarify something. Discourse provides a lot of quality of life improvements like to this compared to mailing lists. A forum like Discourse can also seem more lively, with typing notifications and live updates, without becoming annoying like a chat system.
raspyberr 5y ago
Scariest thing is Discord isn't accessible without an account. And it WILL close down within a decade. And with that all that information will be gone.
- SamuelAdams 5y ago
  Forums and plenty of other websites close down. They are not always archived or backed up. What is wrong with data being deleted after a service closes?
  - z0r 5y ago
    They _can_ be backed up by the internet archive and other interested parties, because they are accessed through web standard technology. Discord is closed. It's worse for your information.
- slightwinder 5y ago
  If you don't have an account, discord asks for a nickname, and you still can enter the server without register that account. I think they will create some kind of guest-account. And that access will disappear at some point, so you need a new invite for this server. Did that changed in the meanwhile?
  - vorpalhex 5y ago
    It's server adjustable.
  - sneak 5y ago
    Yes. And the account also requires a phone number as often as not, and of course the agreement to their abusive TOS that is so restrictive that it even bans political cartoons.
drumhead 5y ago
Did people not learn a lesson about closed communities from Facebook? At somepoint Discord will want to agressively monetise the numbers of people using its platform, and a lot of the convenience it currently provides will find its way behind a direct or indirect payment mechanism.
samsolomon 5y ago
If you're a manager of a forum and are considering doing this, I would encourage you to look at discourse.org. It's mobile friendly, looks great and easy to install. They have a one-click DO setup, which requires only a little technical knowhow and is extremely affordable. I've managed a community—Product Notes—for several years on the platform and it has been fantastic.
FractalHQ 5y ago
I’m going to be downvoted for this, but I love discord for communities. GitHub issues for tracking long-standing bugs or feature requests, and discord for more granular, spontaneous support queries is great. The new Threads feature is nice, the amount of control and automation with channels and bots opens up endless possibilities. Not to mention the search is powerful and blazing fast. Forums feel sluggish and dated in comparison. I spend an hour or more providing support in the Svelte discord, and I love it.
slightwinder 5y ago
As useful as discord is for its primary purpose, it's probably also one of the worst development for communities in the last decades. Discord is a chat, not a forum, nor a wiki. It's just not meant to make knowledge accessible. And even proper discussion are barely possible after a certain group size. But on the other side, it's a very well protected walled garden, and communities can distance themselves from the rest of the world there quite well. Not really sure whether it's good to have so many communities growing in the shadows, outside the public attention.
- stiltzkin 5y ago
  Guilded is a Discord alternative with extra channel types as forums.
- steffen84 5y ago
  I am a member in a tabletop gaming club, and no one wants to be responsible if some new European internet law is broken. So our forum was closed an we have our private community on discord.
  - dijit 5y ago
    Your tabletop gaming club is not the target of GDPR unless you’re _very_ sloppy with user data or you’re selling user data. All forums, even 20 year old ones, allow you to easily comply with GDPR data requests and deletions without additional tooling from the admin panels: because good moderation tools used to be a thing that didn’t need legal enforcement.
dangus 5y ago
Some of these forum owners want chat instead of forums. Forums just used to be one of the only ways to facilitate chat in a practical way. I think that the author of this article didn't really consider what the communities' and companies' needs are, and is more interested in criticizing them for "making the Internet worse." For the author, it was all about him and his preferences, not about what the owners of the forums or their users want: > Due to this, our forum community has declined over the years to the point where there are only a handful of people left actively using the forum. It says it right there. Eurogamer had a dead forum. There are going to be communities and companies that want forums for the exact reason the author likes them. They're great for technical support and searchable archiving of useful bits of knowledge. They're great for certain types of discussions. At the same time, not every community is out there looking to do that kind of thing. A lot of them just want to socialize live, and that's where services like Discord shine.
riantogo 5y ago
I'm swimming the other way and trying to create hosted software for plain old forums (https://discoflip.com https://discoflip.com). I started it to scratch my own itch and then opened it up. Honestly, not getting much traction.
- abestic9 5y ago
  Cool concept with channels, but it took me over 7.5 seconds to load the front page with half of it before any visible content, and almost 2.5 seconds to load About. Also, hot-linking images is bad practice, it may be worth just getting rid of the images while you build out functionality. Are you planning on releasing the source for it?
  - riantogo 5y ago
    The performance sucks. 30 out of 100 on chrome web vitals. We are overhauling it this week (including eliminating the post load). Great point about hotlinking images which I have taken a note of (also creates mixed content http issues). I didn't think there would be value in releasing the source. So hadn't thought about it. But now that you mentioned it, maybe I should.
Topgamer7 5y ago
"Forums create a record, an archive we can search through" This article touches on the biggest frustration point of communities using discord for me. It completely removes from the public internet crowd sourced solutions to problems.
GoodJokes 5y ago
this seems like a old tech people yelling at clouds deal. Get over it
s0rce 5y ago
I haven't found discord replacing forums but Facebook groups certainly have and it really hampers searching and finding information and stuff just seems to vanish.
dethos 5y ago
I agree. Very unlikely that I will find a meaningful discussion on discord, about a subject or problem when I'm searching for it on Google/DDG/etc. If i cannot find it, I won't be able to participate. A web forum is very different from a chat program, they sit at different levels and have different purposes. Even Discord's support uses a forum like system and not a chat room [1]. [1]https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/topics https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/topics
silicon2401 5y ago
I second this article's sentiment. Back in the 2000s I spent a lot of time on forums and Wikia. I can still find lots of posts and conversations I had way back over a decade ago (on the forums that haven't shut down) and looking things up is easy. Even for forums you're not a part of, it's easy to benefit from their knowledge with an online search. In contrast, anything within discord is stuck within discord, and not only do you need an account to participate but it introduces a single point of failure: discord. If the company gets shut down or gets bought out and changed, everything's gone. If a server runs into issues with discord management/leadership, it's gone. Not to mention the slower pace of forums and chat nature of discord lead to completely different kinds of conversations and discussion. Ideally discord would be for unimportant or personal chat and forums would hold real discussion. We'll see if that approach survives.
uses 5y ago
Discord is amazing for getting fast answers to questions, but terrible at accumulating knowledge. For example, several times I've joined a server to ask a question about an obscure game mechanic, and gotten helpful answers in a few minutes. The flip side is none of that information is crawlable on the web, so it is lost like sand through an hourglass. Whereas with forums (or their replacement, reddit) somebody in the future could benefit from my Q/A session by finding it on a search engine. The second major problem I have is identity. When I post in a channel about school, I want to use my real face and name. When I post in a random server, I want anonymity.
jrm4 5y ago
Honestly, it feels like the best use of time would be to aggressively port as much Discord functionality as possible to, e.g. Matrix. You can count me in as an old head who loves (because it works SO WELL) and hates (because it's so locked down) Discord.
winddude 5y ago
or facebook groups. :(
- winddude 5y ago
  I see this a lot with automotive forums, or someone steals the name of a popular forum for their group.
gamerDude 5y ago
As someone who runs a discord server. The issue I had with a forum is that I hate all the off the shelf forums around. There doesn't seem to be any modern forums that I can just host. If there was, that would actually be really preferred to me. A web app that melded the discord experience of live chat, but also had topics that could be discussed and kept around for both search engines and archives to look back. But every forum I could find is still a very old and outdated experience. A big one being that you need to refresh the page to see a new response which really changes the dynamic of a conversation. The designs of those forums also really feel like the early 2000s. Did I miss something or did modern versions of forums just never really get developed?
- mcbuilder 5y ago
  Discourse is an option for a modern forum like experience.
  - lucasverra 5y ago
    Growing bubble.io platform (tens of thousands forum members) community [0] use this since multiple years. And bubble community is one of the key aspects. [0]: https://forum.bubble.io https://forum.bubble.io
    - archon810 5y ago
      Wow it's like a straight up shameless Discourse clone.
      - tadfisher 5y ago
        The mobile experience is much better though.
      - truetraveller 5y ago
        It is Discourse, hosted by a company called "Bubble". Just do a "view source".
- 5y ago
dcdc123 5y ago
Also please get government organizations off of Facebook and Twitter. I don't use either and being disconnected from information about my government because of that is really shitty.
- throw_m239339 5y ago
  > Also please get government organizations off of Facebook and Twitter. I'm fine with that, since they are popular platforms, the problem is when Twitter or Facebook are used EXCLUSIVELY for communication, this is insane. Governments should have RSS channels or forums maintained by governments themselves as a redundancy. Another thing is all these businesses that have delegated their entire customer service to... Twitter and Facebook. My ISP did this recently, you can't even call them anymore or email them, they don't have a public phone number or phone line, you must go through Twitter for support, this is INSANE. I immediately cancelled my plan with them as soon as I found out.
  - stiltzkin 5y ago
    I am really not fine if you need to have a Facebook or Twitter account to follow. Add Facebook blocks any RSS attempt to grab post from their pages. Facebook is GeoCities with restrictions.
ggregoire 5y ago
> Sadly, times change and the way people communicate also has changed. Traditional forums are no longer a popular place for people to come together to talk, and have been replaced in popularity with more modern community platforms like Discord, Twitter, and Twitch. Isn’t Reddit that killed forums like 10 years ago? People who used to read Eurogamer’s forums probably read /r/games nowadays, and some more specialized subreddits (by platforms, by genres, by games, etc), and some other ones unrelated to video games.
- coolso 5y ago
  > Isn’t Reddit that killed forums like 10 years ago? Unfortunately, yes. I love reddit, but it suffers from a major issue that most forums didn't suffer from: homogeneity of thought, with little options for those who go against the grain, either in general or on one particular issue. If you have an unpopular opinion amongst a subreddit's members, your comment is ignored at best or goes to the bottom of the pile, never to be seen by anyone. How is this healthy for discussion? Even if you were to go on a forum made of members with a completely different set of ideals and opinions, unless you were a jerk about it, your voice would be just as "audible" as everyone else's. Everyone could have their say and not be silenced just because they were outnumbered. And you weren't writing just to get the most upvotes, or having to tread super lightly in the hopes that you wouldn't offend anyone or have them downvote you instead of actually, you know, responding to you telling you why you're wrong. Sometimes we all need to be exposed to things we don't like. Yes, the upvote/downvote tree system may have largely solved the "asshole forum member" problem, and that's great. And for some things, the upvote/downvote system is awesome. Finding a solution to a problem? On a forum you have to go through most of the posts - on reddit, the best answer is probably going to be at the top. But at what cost? Reddit just feels like a form of censorship to me - even when politics aren't what's being discussed. Just because the government or a corporation isn't the one directly doing it, doesn't make it a good thing suddenly.
  - Klonoar 5y ago
    I wouldn’t lump upvotes and downvotes in as censorship, personally, but I hold the opinion that they’re a cancer slowly destroying society nonetheless. Not even from a pure user posting perspective, it’s just too easy to manipulate them for things like subtle advertising. I worry though that we’ve entered a world where people don’t know how to look for content without it.
kthejoker2 5y ago
Just summarizing based on this thread, why wouldn't Reddit be a much better option? Forums + chat + voting + flairs. Automoderation for low quality stuff. Builtin anti-spam, reporting, etc. Pinning hot topics ... Search is ok not great but you could build better search on top if it's critical. Alt accounts are encouraged and relatively lightweight. ... and you can still have a Discord? I get it, it's just another big platform but feature wise it's way better for forum migration...
- throw_m239339 5y ago
  > Just summarizing based on this thread, why wouldn't Reddit be a much better option? Cause reddit will kick you out if other subs pressure reddit admins to do so.
jedberg 5y ago
I bought a product that had moved their support to Discord. Their Discord requires that you verify your phone number. I tried to do so but Discord told me my number, which I've had for 22 years, is not valid. I contacted support and their solution was: "Just find a friend who hasn't used discord and use their number". Why do people trust this company with anything important?
- fouric 5y ago
  I would be very interested to know what company this is so that I can never buy anything from them.
- antifa 5y ago
  And what happens when your friend needs to use discord? I have to have separate discord accounts for work, gaming, and the third reason, and I can only use my phone number on one of them, but I'd prefer to use it on none of them.
burnished 5y ago
It's weird reading an article about damage to the internet in-between two aggressive advertisements that I can't seem to get off my screen.
wiether 5y ago
A good example is CyclingTips[1]. They are using Slack for years but lots of people never went because it's messy. A few weeks ago they decided to launch their own forums[2] and there is already a thousand members and three times that of posts. I'm so glad they decided to go this way : build a community with a "fast and easy tool", and then improve this by setting up your own platform to welcome everyone. I use Discord everyday but I agree, it's not THE tool that fits every need. Especially if we're talking long term engagement and knowledge repository. [1] : https://cyclingtips.com/ https://cyclingtips.com/ [2] : https://forum.cyclingtips.com/about https://forum.cyclingtips.com/about
lazyjones 5y ago
I would love to have pre-spam Usenet back, or threaded forums like they used to make them before everyone used the BB-style flat forums. But I can understand companies not wanting to bother with this kind of software, moderation, data retention and privacy laws etc. ...
amattn 5y ago
Show HN: https://kbclip.com https://kbclip.com I don't think you can prevent people from migrating to discord or slack, but I built a Slack app that tries to bring the best and most frequent conversations to the web. The issues brought up here are exactly what I am trying to solve.
sneak 5y ago
Discord is not end to end encrypted, so Discord can see, mine, and sell off your private DM chat contents. Don't type anything into discord you wouldn't print out and mail to Microsoft Legal. (And don't install the client, it is spyware.)
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
Why not a Discourse forum, which has a mailing list mode and a forum view? Plus, Discourse is open source.
alkonaut 5y ago
Who does this? I haven’t seen that happen even once. They are completely orthogonal? Both have their uses. What should happen is closing of ancient phpbb boards and moving to discourse and that I see happen in tons of places. But closing a forum and moving to discord? A chat/voice-chat?
- TillE 5y ago
  I've seen a lot of communities moving from IRC to Discord, which is a fantastic improvement in accessibility, search, etc. For the types of communities I'm thinking of (eg, certain retro gaming niches), forums had essentially been dead for years before Discord rolled around and helped revive a lot of conversations. Maybe it's an awkward fit for technical stuff where you really just want Q&A, but I love it.
femto113 5y ago
As a middle ground I'd at least love to see some way to expose Discord's pinned messages to the web for anonymous viewing. It seems like they're acting as the de facto "forum post" of yore.
lvspiff 5y ago
My company has started moving people to Teams and Yammer and its the most annoying thing ever. Nothing is available anymore as all the links are dead because everything is moved. Finding information now is a chore because a search for the right question returns multiple results rather than a page that once contained all the FAQs individually. Getting feedback means wading through the noise of multiple posts of "thanks" for some reason. Its all very annoying and I yearn for the days of forum posts and wikis.
fossuser 5y ago
Forums are awful UX - really bad, it's why all this other stuff exists. I don't like discord either and don't like the model of megacorps sucking up all our communication and locking it away while creating a massive privacy risk and centralized control. I think HN and subreddit UX is far superior to forum threads. I'm also bullish on urbit as a solution to this core issue of solving this in a way that doesn't centralize ownership while also enabling a UI that doesn't suck. Asking people to use forums will not succeed. As far as their complaint about real time vs. static, I agree - but I think subreddits are just a better model for this anyway.
- noasaservice 5y ago
  Urbit a solution?!? Hardly! Urbit is a digital fiefdom made by a neo-fascist whom coded that arbitrary limits at the base of the protocol. I cant get far enough away from that garbage.
  - fossuser 5y ago
    Its design is interesting and the non-zero cost of IDs make sense as a way to build reputation and eliminate spam: https://media.urbit.org/whitepaper.pdf https://media.urbit.org/whitepaper.pdf I'm no fan of CY's neo-reactionary politics, but he's also no longer involved in the project and they're not relevant to the problems the design solves. Similarly I think the 2008 monetary policy around QE was an incredible success, but I still think Bitcoin is worthwhile and interesting despite the fact Nakamoto thought the bailouts were a bad idea. It's possible to look at these things separately imo. (John Nash, Bobby Fischer, etc. - long list of people that do worthwhile things but may believe things I don't agree with). Simpler less technical intro: https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit
- tester756 5y ago
  I hardly disagree "HN" comment chains may be better (but that's debatable) than forum's linear discussions, but HN "news" model (front page oriented) is terrible and everything that falls from front page is automatically dead, end of topic. Forum discussions can last weeks, months or even years meanwhile everything that's 2 days old is dead on HN, here's no discussion once something disappears from front page.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
Not gonna happen unless someone makes forum software with better UX than Discord's, that is also as easy or easier to maintain / administer So, not gonna happen. Discord has won forums for the foreseeable and is well on its way to FAANG tier dominance, impregnability, & scale
- antifa 5y ago
  If we're calling discord a forum, it's probably the worst forum (UX, mod tools, etc) I can think of.
nikisweeting 5y ago
If only Zulip were search-engine-indexable it would be the perfect middleground. Unfortunately it's still a ways away from being implemented I think.
- tabbott 5y ago
  Search engine indexing is available in Zulip today via Zulip's public archive tool (https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive). Many larger OSS projects using Zulip, like Rust, Julia, and Lean Prover, use it. We expect to have a native feature allowing a configurable set of streams to be browsed using a real Zulip web app UI without creating an account, available in beta in the next few weeks; we're actively integrating the implementation via https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/18532 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/18532. We plan to look at optional search indexing in that native implementation once the logged-out access feature is complete.
  - nikisweeting 5y ago
    I stand corrected, this is awesome! I didn't realize it was already a reality.
z3t4 5y ago
Discord is where communities go to die.
nilleo 5y ago
I feel the same way about Facebook groups. I'd much rather create a throwaway account registered with my domain (whateverforum@mydomain.com) for every forum than create and use a Facebook or Discord account to engage with multiple communities. I don't want or need a centralized "social" account.
leke 5y ago
Discord has its uses, but forums should be moving to Reddit.
- stiltzkin 5y ago
  I would not move away to a centralized solution which mods can kick you out. An open source and hostable alternative is better than Discord or Reddit.
ConanRus 5y ago
Forums/Newsgroups is the way
e2le 5y ago
I wonder if we're headed for a future in which knowledge is far less accessible than it was in previous years. With communities moving to these closed/proprietary platforms (Discord, Slack) which aren't fit for purpose (making knowledge accessible and easily searchable), I suspect it'll have a negative affect on the ability of individuals to learn, collaborate, and share knowledge.
MaxLeiter 5y ago
One downside not mentioned is the accessibility aspect. Screenreaders are great at reading basic HTML like forums. Discord? Significantly more work and trouble. Last I checked, VoiceOver completely skips emojis in Discord messages.
Lev1a 5y ago
It's not just forums, recently I looked around for information on an incremental game only to be told that there is no wiki or anything like that but to "join the discord". WHY?! would I ever use a chat software to look up static information on a game? I know that information may or may change between releases but the release isn't daily or even close to that, so using a platform where I might have to read through or at least skim over hundreds of messages in conversation/support channels to find the right crumb of information is just insane to me. Also having to get an account and/or installing additional software for serving information which could just as well have been done with a fandom/wikia page and no unnecessary barriers is just utterly stupid.
darkerside 5y ago
This is destroying the internet in the same way we raze neighborhoods to build skyscrapers. Yes, we destroying something real and valuable, and it sucks, but it's the inevitable march forward of human progress. Why shouldn't digital redevelopment work the same way as physical?
IMAYousaf 5y ago
Does anyone have any insights into the upper scalability of either of these solutions?
Nezteb 5y ago
insert old man yells at cloud meme (just having a laugh) My least favorite part about forums is having to create a new account for every single forum I want to access. Sure, password managers make it easy to have hundreds of different accounts on different sites, but I just don’t want to do that because it makes everything feel clunky and disconnected. Sure, most have Google/Twitter/GitHub logins available, but some don’t which only makes me think “wait did I use Google or Twitter to sign into this forum last time?”. Discord has three things I like: a single account, infinite chat history, and the ability to star/favorite messages that are relevant to me for future reference. Those are all I really need to consider it a useful platform for forum-like discourse. Speaking of that, some forum software like Discourse (and it’s mobile app, Discourse Hub) and Forem make it easier to consolidate tons of disparate forums, but any time I’m on an old phpBB or vBulletin site I usually don’t even bother making an account.
jbrains 5y ago
I routinely run a combination of Slack and Discourse for my online communities. I can move interesting Slack threads into Discourse for longer-term and more-thoughtful discussion. The immediacy of chat has its place, but so does the semi-permanence of something like Discourse or Groups.io or a good, old-fashioned mailing list.

996 points by ClawsOnPaws 5y ago

Forums started dying off when social media started rising. I liked them better than what we have now, too, but... it is a little odd to attack Discord for the downfall of forums.

wanderingstan 5y ago
Interesting; I’d consider forums to be one of the earliest forms of social media. What is the distinction for you?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- barrenko 5y ago
  Not only that, they were the PERFECT form of social media. Then the name got co-opted so marketing peple could push crap around more easily.
- Macha 5y ago
  Lack of singular identity or algorithmic feeds would be the big two for me. Forums are decentralised so you are someone else on the forum for game A than on the forum for hobby B, unless you work to link your identities. Whereas the big social media platforms aspire to be a one stop shop. Additionally forums generally sort by "newest thread first" or "most recently replied thread first" rather than trying to push the "hottest" threads or "trending threads" or similar at you.
  - rumblerock 5y ago
    To add onto this, the identities on good forums, with reputation scores, post counts, tenure, etc. served as a useful proxy for some degree of expertise or experience with the general topic at hand. On Facebook everyone has a transparent identity, yet somehow seems more like an anon if outside of your real life circle. On Twitter post and follower counts don't correlate with having thoughtful or informed opinions. On Reddit shitposting dilutes everything, with a dash of Instagram-like flex culture for karma points, and the effect / bias towards a hive mind is too powerful.
- codingdave 5y ago
  Forums were content-centric, while social media is person-centric. Every user got the same content, with the same experience. I consider HN a forum for these reasons - even though the content is ordered algorithmically and are voted on, Rando A gets the same view as Rando B (for the most part)
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Yeah, when I think about social media I think something like MySpace or our local IRC-Galleria. That is where user presence is main thing and not discussion like usenet or BBS or simple forums. Not even sure if I would consider Discord a social media...

murkle 5y ago

Reddit works fine as a forum. Just make a subreddit and start posting :)

Macha 5y ago
"move it all to reddit" has some of the same issues as moving it to discord. It puts control in the hands of a single company who might say, decide your subreddit is only available to mobile users if they install the app and sign in
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  Notably, however, this was not the issue focused on by the article (somewhat to my surprise). The article is about real-time versus asynchronous communication, and reddit would solve for that.
  - sk2020 5y ago
    I would like to think putting everyone’s eggs in one basket to be used for unstated purposes would bother most people, but it really doesn’t. I think they’re right though. I’m inclined to think that chat in general facilitates a staccato of quick-takes that paralyzes reader and writer from forming complete thoughts. Adding some activation energy to communicate seems to encourage more thoughtful statements. Twitter is an obvious argument by contradiction of this.
  - JohnWhigham 5y ago
    No, reddit is absolute garbage for long-running threads. Their algorithm is predicated on people constantly posting new threads. This leads to people constantly posting the most common discussion topics over and over and over.
Crusoe123 5y ago
I disagree completely. Reddit is a terrible alternative to forums. It's hard to actually have quality conversations there as communication is by default time based e.g the later you are in thread the less chance someone will read what you have written, and it's popularity based e.g. lowest common denominator memes and predictable comments will hog 90% of communication unless the sub is heavily moderated. Communication on forums is much longer living and discussions have opportunities to evolve into something else, which creates an environment for more meaningful communication. And if you like your memes, well there's probably a thread for that.

rg111 5y ago

I have seen a lot of companies, sites, non-profits move to Discourse[0]. It is customisable, low-cost, and has a lot of features which makes hosting a forum really easy and effective. This is a nice alyernative to hosting forums yourselves and Discord. [0]: https://discourse.org/ https://discourse.org/

Wowfunhappy 5y ago
I want to like Discourse, but as a user there’s something that bothers me about the design, compared to Xenforo or even phpBB or SMF. I’m legitimately not sure what it is, I just find Discourse forums harder to read.
- joeberon 5y ago
  I have to agree. No idea what it is, but I just really don't enjoy using it at all. I find it quite disorientating. Would be interesting to see someone do a blog post on why that happens. It's honestly bad enough that I simply find myself just not using Discourse forums at all, even if it is on a topic that is actually important to me.
  - zbrozek 5y ago
    Discourse overrode ctrl-f, which made me instantly hate the experience. But the rest of the UI is generally overwrought and frustrating. Old fashioned phpbb or vbulletin is so much better.
  - true_religion 5y ago
    I wish someone would staple down what about discourse is so off putting. I have the same feeling using it… it’s just feels like a chore. Yet from 1000 feet, the UI does seem like an upgrade in phpBB, and the actual functionality lists so many checkboxes that it’s a wonder it has any competition.
    - dqv 5y ago
      It’s because it lacks dimension. We use the scroll bar to get a sense for how long a thread will be. We use pagination to get a sense for how many posts are in the thread. Infinite scrolling doesn’t make sense for something where a sense of the whole is important. I get that sites like HN or (old) Reddit do the same thing, but the pages are cut up into much fewer chunks AND they’re not linear discussion forums! They tried to solve this with a weird pseudo scroll bar in threads, but it still lacks dimension. There is no way to tell if the next 10 posts will be long or short. The pseudo scroll bar is just weird in general. I don’t really have anything succinct I can say about the way the pseudo bar represents dates but I can say it’s disorienting. I really should write about this

throwaway59553 5y ago

I don't know how people can read anything in Discord. It's a chat app, not a good medium to expose any information for people to be able to check when needed. And moving everything to reddit is not a solution either, it's a hellhole.

raxxorrax 5y ago
Works for development when there are < 5 active people and some viewers.
rchaud 5y ago
As a crusty old barnacle in my 30s, I'm inclined to think (with no empirical evidence mind you) that younger users prefer chat because they are used to looking at screens with a constantly updating ticker of new info. Twitch, IG Live, FB Live, TT all have these auto-refreshing streams of comments in the UI.
- mcbuilder 5y ago
  Long before that there was IRC. I dunno exactly how old you are, but I'm 36 and IRC was definitely a thing during the 90s.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    I'm the same age but didn't have Internet before the late '90s. MSN Messenger and ICQ were the big chat platforms of my time. I rarely chatted with strangers, although there were several city-based or activity-based rooms on mIRC where that could be done.
- antifa 5y ago
  > younger users prefer chat because they are used to looking at screens with a constantly updating ticker of new info. Maybe, but I assume it's not age but because they have more freetime to sit in chatrooms.

unixhero 5y ago

Discourse or NodeBB is the real future

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

marapuru 5y ago

It's a real shame. The most thoughtful discussions usually take place on forums. Chat has this feel to it where it's better to reply fast and short instead of taking a bit longer but providing an elaborate reply. I understand the maintenance issues though. Forum software like vBulleting or phpBB have had it's fair share of security issues. Let alone the costs for a small community forum. However I do think that the moderation of forums is easier as opposed to moderating a chat. Where context can get lost in the different topics that are discussed in the same channel.

inetknght 5y ago
> Chat has this feel to it where it's better to reply fast and short It's not just a feel. Discord's maximum message length limit is minuscule compared to many forums.
- marapuru 5y ago
  I didn't even realize there was a character limit. A quick search shows me that it is 2000 characters. Which is not _that_ bad, since most forum posts will likely be something shorter. But the entire UX surrounding it is all about quick responses (hit enter to send etc).

impostervt 5y ago

My friends and I started a website devoted to a multiplayer game back in college at the turn of the century. It had a forum that was heavily used. Somehow, 20+ years later, it's still going. 14 million posts and 196 people online now. And the game series has been dead for over a decade. I moved on a long, long time ago, but many people remain. There's a community there that just keeps going, despite the original purpose being long gone. I don't think that would happen with Discord.

thomashop 5y ago
I don't know if one can easily say what would or wouldn't have happened if you had chosen a different platform. There are a lot of communities based on irc that have existed forever.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  They d have been acquired by google and shut down 3 years later. The ones that have escaped that fate are self-hosted forums and , oddly, blogspot
- aweiland 5y ago
  This site also had a companion IRC server.
aweiland 5y ago
I know this forum! It was one of the largest installations of vBulletin for a time.
- impostervt 5y ago
  ...and 20 years later I run into one of the guys who helped run it. ha!

xlii 5y ago

I'm longing for the return of the mailing lists. Sure, the format is slow and somewhat complex, but then it seems like all the places are devoid of non-immediate conversations. Companies are moving to the Slack, informal groups to the Discord. I've been using IRC for years and I still love it but with recent adoption of Slack it seems everyone wants to push all the communication there and I don't think it works. It's hard to search for stuff (usually it takes me 3-4 queries to find thing _I know_ is there) and then it's in lengthy conversational format that takes a bit of time to replay. You might lose window of opportunity to provide important info just because you aren't present at the moment and since Slack is perceived as a low impact tool, those conversations can happen in late evening hours. And yet all the places that (in my opinion) were better to have more fruitful, thoughtful and searchable conversations are slowly winding down. Newsgroup are long dead, mailing lists are perceived as archaic, forums are closing down one by one. It might be me, but I start to get feeling that even on StackOverflow conversations aren't what they used to be. Only e-mail is left - in some places at least, because some organization start to have "why send an e-mail while you could send Slack message". Thankfully those organization usually bless users with capability of installing Slack on their private phones /s Too bad Google Wave didn't pick up.

twic 5y ago
Mailing lists? Bring back usenet! In all seriousness, by far the best professional discussion i have ever had was at a company in 2000 which ran an internal NNTP server. For me, that combined the relevant strengths of email with a format more suited to active multi-party discussion.
- superkuh 5y ago
  Just be the change you want to see. I've been posting on alt.startrek and alt.cyberpunk sporadically again for a couple years now. https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/ is a great group that provides free text group access and posting.
  - walterbell 5y ago

DizzyDoo 5y ago

I agree, higher quality conversations happen more often on forums and they're much easier to search and access if you're not a member. But forums are also much easier to moderate than Discord - a message or image you might not want posted in your Discord scrolls up quickly (as people react to a troll or something inappropriate), and you tend to need moderators on-hand a lot of the time to react quickly, which can also mean moderators from a bunch of different timezones are required. On forums, yes, a rule breaking message can be posted whenever, but the pace of chat is much slower and the immediacy of effect on everything that follows is lessened.

simonbarker87 5y ago

I asked a very similar question on HN about this a few months back related to software support forums going to discord and slack. Total pain for finding answers to issues and problems

ziml77 5y ago

I hate that everyone is using Discord not just because of searchability but also because it's difficult to have multiple identities with Discord. It's frustrating to be looking for help with using some library and seeing in the readme a link to join their Discord server. I don't want to join those with the same identity I use in gaming Discord servers so I usually just give up at that point.

cblconfederate 5y ago
and then you have the godawful bots. Try to join a server, get spammed by 5 different bots that want to verify your identity. And so many different rules when you just want to ask a question. Kafka would be proud
- blstz 5y ago
  >And so many different rules when you just want to ask a question. Kafka would be proud Yes. Kafka is when rules, and the more rules the more Kafkaesque.
- Meekro 5y ago
  As someone who runs one of those Discord servers, let me say that the rules have a purpose. Lots of people will jump in and post their question in the first channel they happen to see without looking into which channel would be appropriate (or worse, post it in every channel). Or they'll @-message or PM every mod. Or their attitude will be nasty, treating volunteer helpers like a personal servant. There will be posted rules saying not to do these things, but they'll do them anyway. When a mod confronts them over a violation, they'll say something like "Oh. Sorry. But now that I have your attention, can you help me with this quick thing?" Mods who deal with this stuff over and over will start getting tyrannical with their rule-enforcement, and I don't blame them.
  - ajuc 5y ago
    > Lots of people will jump in and post their question in the first channel they happen to see without looking into which channel would be appropriate (or worse, post it in every channel) That's a big reason why forums are better for Q&A.

deleted 5y ago

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bluetidepro 5y ago

Maybe it's just me (30-something year old male, big into gaming), but I love when I see forums on Discord. I think it's way better to use a system I am already signed up for. I don't want to sign up again for a million different forums like the old days. I also love the new threads feature by Discord to keep convos more concise and isolated. That has helped forums on Discord a ton. It's also nice that I can join a server, get my answer, then leave that server with no lingering email sign up for some one-off forum that I'll never visit again, and then I get bombed with emails after I'm done. And when I leave, it's worth noting my comments/questions are still on the server for those to find via search if they join after I'm gone [1]. I know a lot of people in the comments seem to hate Discord for this, but I personally love it. I guess I'm just saying this as a reminder that there are always others that do enjoy the other side. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ [1] It's worth noting that I guess this is a Discord server specific setting, so that could vary I suppose.

bigwavedave 5y ago
I say this as someone who uses discord heavily for a couple of hobbies: I truly detest discord search. I'd be more accepting of this trend if search wasn't hobbled; please, for the love of zeus, honor the difference between "normal" and "normals" in channels about 3d modeling.
rijoja 5y ago
no
vladvasiliu 5y ago
I'm in the same demographic as you. The reason why I hate Discord as a replacement for forums is because I find it very hard to find whether my specific issue has already been discussed, and if I find something, it's quite hard to follow the intertwined discussions. You're talking about a threaded-feature, I'm not familiar with that, maybe it helps. My latest experience with discord was around spring of this year, with some tokio(-rs) related projects. But I find that something like stackoverflow or "Discussions" (not sure what the name of the app is, but many projects have them) are much more practical to use when you need to look up things. It seems to me that with Discord, the way it works is you show up and ask your question, as opposed to searching the archives to see whether someone already asked it before.

croon 5y ago

While I agree with the article that they are not the same, people using one thing may not be interested in the other, or at least not be aware of it. I've used IRC for the last 25 years or so, and BBS:es before that, and forums alongside it. Forums are great for nesting information and discussion for future reference, but less equipped for fast discussion on issues more ephemeral (or fun). A lot of people used only forums, even for things where I would go to IRC. These people could be well served by Discord (ignoring any discussion on proprietary software/data integrity/ownership etc). As a product, I really love Discord. I don't want everything to end up there, for various reasons, but the most important of which is discoverability and persistence. Please stop closing forums that are an information resource for both members and non-members. But some forums are just slow chat, in which case those users abandoning the forum are likely better served elsewhere.

ch33zer 5y ago

Is discord indexed by Google? I don't think it is. If this is the direction we're going anyways then at least having the ability to find discord messages from a search would be beneficial. I know that in recent years my primary interaction with forums has been as a result of searching for things either videogame or Linux related. Losing that info into an unindexed service is indeed a loss

rchaud 5y ago
No, search engines can't crawl pages behind a login wall.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

We have both, it works fine, and both platforms have their own goal. I think the most important factor is archival work. Discord is transient, anything older than a day is lost, and as far as I know there's no public search history anywhere (gitter does have that iirc?). There's a LOT of information and history in old forums and even old mailing list threads. I mean sure, 99% of it is probably useless, but it's that 1% that makes it worth keeping around IMO.

rickstanley 5y ago

I almost never use discord, not that I want to avoid it, but because my daily use of software doesn't require it. Gaming, I usually use Steam's built-in voice chat and/or rooms, and search for community forums within the game's page without hassle. For meetings I use either MSTeams (unfortunately if I don't have the option) or telegram, the latter is even better now with the group calls and screen share. When search for answers for a Github project, I go to discussions or create an issue.

hyperpl 5y ago

Long time IRC user here. I didn't mind using discord for some communities but it seems as though they now require phone verification which I certainly will not provided them. I feel as though one should be able to use it similarly to IRC and not be tied to one account for one phone number. I haven't been able to find a temp phone number to use for this purpose as the best I could muster was a vpn number that supports SMS but alas, that didn't work.

cfgghsj 5y ago
It's not strictly required, but you need a high reputation email address verification. For example, a custom domain email will not work, but gmail or outlook.com will allow you to make an account without a phone.

agjmills 5y ago

I have the same problem with Gitter.im or slack for FOSS projects - quite a few communities have switched from being fórum based (and therefore the conversations are logged and indexable by search engines), to being ephemeral conversations in Slack channels. You could argue that IRC fits in the category of ephemeral platforms, but most large communities provide some form of indexable log of the conversations

chobytes 5y ago

Yeah I dislike that everything is moving on to there. I dont like having to share one account with all the random servers I join. I dont like all the bots and the gauntlets to enter servers. I dont like the format for most of what it seems to be used for. I dont like the centralization and the general corporate overlord vibe they have.

eigengrau5150 5y ago

Discord: because normies can't handle IRC.

danaris 5y ago

I run a small, free browser-based persistent strategy RPG. We've had a forum for about a decade, and for a time, it was extremely popular. A few years ago, the usage of the forum began declining significantly. In mid-2019, we created a Discord server for the game, and people started joining immediately. It's been nearly a year now since there was more than a single forum post per month. If you want to engage your community, you need to go where they are—or where they want to be. I'm not at all thrilled with the fact that the major out-of-game community hub for my game is now hosted on a proprietary platform still looking for proper monetization, but I am thrilled with how much people love interacting with each other on it. And more importantly, I don't have a realistic alternative to offer them.

schwapnut 5y ago

Made an account just to post this. Internet forums are the senate chamber Discord and the like are the private chamber of whispers. Caesar was murdered in the chamber, but you can guess where Brutus and Co conspired, and it wasn't the chamber.

lvl100 5y ago

I hate discord. Every time I jump on to get help or engage in a semi-intellectual conversation, you end up talking to the same “regulars” on the server and often times you end up with a lot of misinformation. I end up leaving because there’s also a lot of gate keeping going on.

schnebbau 5y ago

Is there an open source old.reddit-alike forum available anywhere? I find Reddit much easier to read and digest than Discourse.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
zksmk 5y ago
https://tildes.net https://tildes.net (source: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes, github mirror: https://github.com/spectria/tildes https://github.com/spectria/tildes, Python back-end, made by dude who worked on old reddit) https://lobste.rs https://lobste.rs (source: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters, Ruby back-end) https://lemmy.ml https://lemmy.ml (source: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy , Rust back-end, federated, in-development but usable) https://postmill.xyz https://postmill.xyz (source: https://gitlab.com/postmill/Postmill https://gitlab.com/postmill/Postmill, PHP back-end) There's also https://github.com/notabugio/notabug https://github.com/notabugio/notabug a P2P fork of old reddit UI (that used to be open source itself, old version: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit), and there's https://notabug.org/zPlus/freepost https://notabug.org/zPlus/freepost, I just found it searching for this stuff, those are the ones I know of.

slothtrop 5y ago

Tangentially, what would it take for forums to get a resurgence? Pseudo-centralization / connection through forum-software? Clearly a lot of users prefer the long-form format. My own observations from the past decade+ is that the influx of new users to forums very quickly dissipated, and what remained is a senior membership clique with dwindling interest in discussion with each other, which led to exodus. This could all be owing to there being a hip-new-thing monopolizing people's attention rather than a failure on the part of forums... and there were a ton of forums. Until it implodes it seems people are satisfied expending their attention on reddit or discord. The other difficulty competing with reddit is, in part as an aggregator, it's a dopamine-pumping machine, updating with new headlines and content every instant.

carlgreene 5y ago

My biggest problem with the transition to Discord and FB groups is the lack of search engine indexing. There is SO much valuable information locked in the communities that is near impossible to search for even WITHIN their platform.

swayvil 5y ago

I have tried Discord a dozen times and could never stand it for more than 10 minutes. It's an utterly obnoxious format. How about a nice conversation tree? Usenet!

offsky 5y ago

I wish someone would make an app like Discord but with functionality like forums. Hosted forums in an app with topics that persist and can be searched. On discord it’s all one long conversation and anything older than a week is hard enough to find that it’s pretty much gone.

rchaud 5y ago
A "topic" on a message board would be a "channel" on Discord. There would still a massive pool of messages to wade through.
- offsky 5y ago
  If Discord had one more level of hierarchy, that would make it work like a pretty good forums. Server > Channel > Topic > Messages. Where mods make the server/channel and users can make topic/messages
stiltzkin 5y ago
Guilded has forum type channels.

everyone 5y ago

I really like when some random program or service I am trying to use has a Discord, cus I can just go on, ask my dumb questions and immediately get help in realtime from a human who knows about this stuff. As opposed to a forum, where u have to make an account, wait X amount of time (days maybe) for your account to be allowed to make a post, make your post, then wait more days for a single response, and so on.

rchaud 5y ago
I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to make a brand new post on a forum. The guiding principle of 2000s forum etiquette was "do a search first", because you weren't the first to come up with that dumb question. That is the value that will be lost.

ngrilly 5y ago

I so much agree with this. That's why our team is starting to use Discourse for Teams instead of email and Microsoft Teams. Structuring discussions per topic is key. Each discussion should have a title. That's how mailing lists, newsgroups, forums, but also Zulip work. That's what I miss the most in Slack, Discord, Teams, etc. Mailing lists work, but I miss the ability to edit a message to fix a typo or clarify something. Discourse provides a lot of quality of life improvements like to this compared to mailing lists. A forum like Discourse can also seem more lively, with typing notifications and live updates, without becoming annoying like a chat system.

raspyberr 5y ago

Scariest thing is Discord isn't accessible without an account. And it WILL close down within a decade. And with that all that information will be gone.

SamuelAdams 5y ago
Forums and plenty of other websites close down. They are not always archived or backed up. What is wrong with data being deleted after a service closes?
- z0r 5y ago
  They _can_ be backed up by the internet archive and other interested parties, because they are accessed through web standard technology. Discord is closed. It's worse for your information.
slightwinder 5y ago
If you don't have an account, discord asks for a nickname, and you still can enter the server without register that account. I think they will create some kind of guest-account. And that access will disappear at some point, so you need a new invite for this server. Did that changed in the meanwhile?
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  It's server adjustable.
- sneak 5y ago
  Yes. And the account also requires a phone number as often as not, and of course the agreement to their abusive TOS that is so restrictive that it even bans political cartoons.

drumhead 5y ago

Did people not learn a lesson about closed communities from Facebook? At somepoint Discord will want to agressively monetise the numbers of people using its platform, and a lot of the convenience it currently provides will find its way behind a direct or indirect payment mechanism.

samsolomon 5y ago

If you're a manager of a forum and are considering doing this, I would encourage you to look at discourse.org. It's mobile friendly, looks great and easy to install. They have a one-click DO setup, which requires only a little technical knowhow and is extremely affordable. I've managed a community—Product Notes—for several years on the platform and it has been fantastic.

FractalHQ 5y ago

I’m going to be downvoted for this, but I love discord for communities. GitHub issues for tracking long-standing bugs or feature requests, and discord for more granular, spontaneous support queries is great. The new Threads feature is nice, the amount of control and automation with channels and bots opens up endless possibilities. Not to mention the search is powerful and blazing fast. Forums feel sluggish and dated in comparison. I spend an hour or more providing support in the Svelte discord, and I love it.

slightwinder 5y ago

As useful as discord is for its primary purpose, it's probably also one of the worst development for communities in the last decades. Discord is a chat, not a forum, nor a wiki. It's just not meant to make knowledge accessible. And even proper discussion are barely possible after a certain group size. But on the other side, it's a very well protected walled garden, and communities can distance themselves from the rest of the world there quite well. Not really sure whether it's good to have so many communities growing in the shadows, outside the public attention.

stiltzkin 5y ago
Guilded is a Discord alternative with extra channel types as forums.
steffen84 5y ago
I am a member in a tabletop gaming club, and no one wants to be responsible if some new European internet law is broken. So our forum was closed an we have our private community on discord.
- dijit 5y ago
  Your tabletop gaming club is not the target of GDPR unless you’re _very_ sloppy with user data or you’re selling user data. All forums, even 20 year old ones, allow you to easily comply with GDPR data requests and deletions without additional tooling from the admin panels: because good moderation tools used to be a thing that didn’t need legal enforcement.

dangus 5y ago

Some of these forum owners want chat instead of forums. Forums just used to be one of the only ways to facilitate chat in a practical way. I think that the author of this article didn't really consider what the communities' and companies' needs are, and is more interested in criticizing them for "making the Internet worse." For the author, it was all about him and his preferences, not about what the owners of the forums or their users want: > Due to this, our forum community has declined over the years to the point where there are only a handful of people left actively using the forum. It says it right there. Eurogamer had a dead forum. There are going to be communities and companies that want forums for the exact reason the author likes them. They're great for technical support and searchable archiving of useful bits of knowledge. They're great for certain types of discussions. At the same time, not every community is out there looking to do that kind of thing. A lot of them just want to socialize live, and that's where services like Discord shine.

riantogo 5y ago

I'm swimming the other way and trying to create hosted software for plain old forums (https://discoflip.com https://discoflip.com). I started it to scratch my own itch and then opened it up. Honestly, not getting much traction.

abestic9 5y ago
Cool concept with channels, but it took me over 7.5 seconds to load the front page with half of it before any visible content, and almost 2.5 seconds to load About. Also, hot-linking images is bad practice, it may be worth just getting rid of the images while you build out functionality. Are you planning on releasing the source for it?
- riantogo 5y ago
  The performance sucks. 30 out of 100 on chrome web vitals. We are overhauling it this week (including eliminating the post load). Great point about hotlinking images which I have taken a note of (also creates mixed content http issues). I didn't think there would be value in releasing the source. So hadn't thought about it. But now that you mentioned it, maybe I should.

Topgamer7 5y ago

"Forums create a record, an archive we can search through" This article touches on the biggest frustration point of communities using discord for me. It completely removes from the public internet crowd sourced solutions to problems.

GoodJokes 5y ago

this seems like a old tech people yelling at clouds deal. Get over it

s0rce 5y ago

I haven't found discord replacing forums but Facebook groups certainly have and it really hampers searching and finding information and stuff just seems to vanish.

dethos 5y ago

I agree. Very unlikely that I will find a meaningful discussion on discord, about a subject or problem when I'm searching for it on Google/DDG/etc. If i cannot find it, I won't be able to participate. A web forum is very different from a chat program, they sit at different levels and have different purposes. Even Discord's support uses a forum like system and not a chat room [1]. [1]https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/topics https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/topics

silicon2401 5y ago

I second this article's sentiment. Back in the 2000s I spent a lot of time on forums and Wikia. I can still find lots of posts and conversations I had way back over a decade ago (on the forums that haven't shut down) and looking things up is easy. Even for forums you're not a part of, it's easy to benefit from their knowledge with an online search. In contrast, anything within discord is stuck within discord, and not only do you need an account to participate but it introduces a single point of failure: discord. If the company gets shut down or gets bought out and changed, everything's gone. If a server runs into issues with discord management/leadership, it's gone. Not to mention the slower pace of forums and chat nature of discord lead to completely different kinds of conversations and discussion. Ideally discord would be for unimportant or personal chat and forums would hold real discussion. We'll see if that approach survives.

uses 5y ago

Discord is amazing for getting fast answers to questions, but terrible at accumulating knowledge. For example, several times I've joined a server to ask a question about an obscure game mechanic, and gotten helpful answers in a few minutes. The flip side is none of that information is crawlable on the web, so it is lost like sand through an hourglass. Whereas with forums (or their replacement, reddit) somebody in the future could benefit from my Q/A session by finding it on a search engine. The second major problem I have is identity. When I post in a channel about school, I want to use my real face and name. When I post in a random server, I want anonymity.

jrm4 5y ago

Honestly, it feels like the best use of time would be to aggressively port as much Discord functionality as possible to, e.g. Matrix. You can count me in as an old head who loves (because it works SO WELL) and hates (because it's so locked down) Discord.

winddude 5y ago

or facebook groups. :(

winddude 5y ago
I see this a lot with automotive forums, or someone steals the name of a popular forum for their group.

gamerDude 5y ago

As someone who runs a discord server. The issue I had with a forum is that I hate all the off the shelf forums around. There doesn't seem to be any modern forums that I can just host. If there was, that would actually be really preferred to me. A web app that melded the discord experience of live chat, but also had topics that could be discussed and kept around for both search engines and archives to look back. But every forum I could find is still a very old and outdated experience. A big one being that you need to refresh the page to see a new response which really changes the dynamic of a conversation. The designs of those forums also really feel like the early 2000s. Did I miss something or did modern versions of forums just never really get developed?

mcbuilder 5y ago
Discourse is an option for a modern forum like experience.
- lucasverra 5y ago
  Growing bubble.io platform (tens of thousands forum members) community [0] use this since multiple years. And bubble community is one of the key aspects. [0]: https://forum.bubble.io https://forum.bubble.io
  - archon810 5y ago
    Wow it's like a straight up shameless Discourse clone.
    - tadfisher 5y ago
      The mobile experience is much better though.
    - truetraveller 5y ago
      It is Discourse, hosted by a company called "Bubble". Just do a "view source".
5y ago

dcdc123 5y ago

Also please get government organizations off of Facebook and Twitter. I don't use either and being disconnected from information about my government because of that is really shitty.

throw_m239339 5y ago
> Also please get government organizations off of Facebook and Twitter. I'm fine with that, since they are popular platforms, the problem is when Twitter or Facebook are used EXCLUSIVELY for communication, this is insane. Governments should have RSS channels or forums maintained by governments themselves as a redundancy. Another thing is all these businesses that have delegated their entire customer service to... Twitter and Facebook. My ISP did this recently, you can't even call them anymore or email them, they don't have a public phone number or phone line, you must go through Twitter for support, this is INSANE. I immediately cancelled my plan with them as soon as I found out.
- stiltzkin 5y ago
  I am really not fine if you need to have a Facebook or Twitter account to follow. Add Facebook blocks any RSS attempt to grab post from their pages. Facebook is GeoCities with restrictions.

ggregoire 5y ago

> Sadly, times change and the way people communicate also has changed. Traditional forums are no longer a popular place for people to come together to talk, and have been replaced in popularity with more modern community platforms like Discord, Twitter, and Twitch. Isn’t Reddit that killed forums like 10 years ago? People who used to read Eurogamer’s forums probably read /r/games nowadays, and some more specialized subreddits (by platforms, by genres, by games, etc), and some other ones unrelated to video games.

coolso 5y ago
> Isn’t Reddit that killed forums like 10 years ago? Unfortunately, yes. I love reddit, but it suffers from a major issue that most forums didn't suffer from: homogeneity of thought, with little options for those who go against the grain, either in general or on one particular issue. If you have an unpopular opinion amongst a subreddit's members, your comment is ignored at best or goes to the bottom of the pile, never to be seen by anyone. How is this healthy for discussion? Even if you were to go on a forum made of members with a completely different set of ideals and opinions, unless you were a jerk about it, your voice would be just as "audible" as everyone else's. Everyone could have their say and not be silenced just because they were outnumbered. And you weren't writing just to get the most upvotes, or having to tread super lightly in the hopes that you wouldn't offend anyone or have them downvote you instead of actually, you know, responding to you telling you why you're wrong. Sometimes we all need to be exposed to things we don't like. Yes, the upvote/downvote tree system may have largely solved the "asshole forum member" problem, and that's great. And for some things, the upvote/downvote system is awesome. Finding a solution to a problem? On a forum you have to go through most of the posts - on reddit, the best answer is probably going to be at the top. But at what cost? Reddit just feels like a form of censorship to me - even when politics aren't what's being discussed. Just because the government or a corporation isn't the one directly doing it, doesn't make it a good thing suddenly.
- Klonoar 5y ago
  I wouldn’t lump upvotes and downvotes in as censorship, personally, but I hold the opinion that they’re a cancer slowly destroying society nonetheless. Not even from a pure user posting perspective, it’s just too easy to manipulate them for things like subtle advertising. I worry though that we’ve entered a world where people don’t know how to look for content without it.

kthejoker2 5y ago

Just summarizing based on this thread, why wouldn't Reddit be a much better option? Forums + chat + voting + flairs. Automoderation for low quality stuff. Builtin anti-spam, reporting, etc. Pinning hot topics ... Search is ok not great but you could build better search on top if it's critical. Alt accounts are encouraged and relatively lightweight. ... and you can still have a Discord? I get it, it's just another big platform but feature wise it's way better for forum migration...

throw_m239339 5y ago
> Just summarizing based on this thread, why wouldn't Reddit be a much better option? Cause reddit will kick you out if other subs pressure reddit admins to do so.

jedberg 5y ago

I bought a product that had moved their support to Discord. Their Discord requires that you verify your phone number. I tried to do so but Discord told me my number, which I've had for 22 years, is not valid. I contacted support and their solution was: "Just find a friend who hasn't used discord and use their number". Why do people trust this company with anything important?

fouric 5y ago
I would be very interested to know what company this is so that I can never buy anything from them.
antifa 5y ago
And what happens when your friend needs to use discord? I have to have separate discord accounts for work, gaming, and the third reason, and I can only use my phone number on one of them, but I'd prefer to use it on none of them.

burnished 5y ago

It's weird reading an article about damage to the internet in-between two aggressive advertisements that I can't seem to get off my screen.

wiether 5y ago

A good example is CyclingTips[1]. They are using Slack for years but lots of people never went because it's messy. A few weeks ago they decided to launch their own forums[2] and there is already a thousand members and three times that of posts. I'm so glad they decided to go this way : build a community with a "fast and easy tool", and then improve this by setting up your own platform to welcome everyone. I use Discord everyday but I agree, it's not THE tool that fits every need. Especially if we're talking long term engagement and knowledge repository. [1] : https://cyclingtips.com/ https://cyclingtips.com/ [2] : https://forum.cyclingtips.com/about https://forum.cyclingtips.com/about

lazyjones 5y ago

I would love to have pre-spam Usenet back, or threaded forums like they used to make them before everyone used the BB-style flat forums. But I can understand companies not wanting to bother with this kind of software, moderation, data retention and privacy laws etc. ...

amattn 5y ago

Show HN: https://kbclip.com https://kbclip.com I don't think you can prevent people from migrating to discord or slack, but I built a Slack app that tries to bring the best and most frequent conversations to the web. The issues brought up here are exactly what I am trying to solve.

sneak 5y ago

Discord is not end to end encrypted, so Discord can see, mine, and sell off your private DM chat contents. Don't type anything into discord you wouldn't print out and mail to Microsoft Legal. (And don't install the client, it is spyware.)

Karrot_Kream 5y ago

Why not a Discourse forum, which has a mailing list mode and a forum view? Plus, Discourse is open source.

alkonaut 5y ago

Who does this? I haven’t seen that happen even once. They are completely orthogonal? Both have their uses. What should happen is closing of ancient phpbb boards and moving to discourse and that I see happen in tons of places. But closing a forum and moving to discord? A chat/voice-chat?

TillE 5y ago
I've seen a lot of communities moving from IRC to Discord, which is a fantastic improvement in accessibility, search, etc. For the types of communities I'm thinking of (eg, certain retro gaming niches), forums had essentially been dead for years before Discord rolled around and helped revive a lot of conversations. Maybe it's an awkward fit for technical stuff where you really just want Q&A, but I love it.

femto113 5y ago

As a middle ground I'd at least love to see some way to expose Discord's pinned messages to the web for anonymous viewing. It seems like they're acting as the de facto "forum post" of yore.

lvspiff 5y ago

My company has started moving people to Teams and Yammer and its the most annoying thing ever. Nothing is available anymore as all the links are dead because everything is moved. Finding information now is a chore because a search for the right question returns multiple results rather than a page that once contained all the FAQs individually. Getting feedback means wading through the noise of multiple posts of "thanks" for some reason. Its all very annoying and I yearn for the days of forum posts and wikis.

fossuser 5y ago

Forums are awful UX - really bad, it's why all this other stuff exists. I don't like discord either and don't like the model of megacorps sucking up all our communication and locking it away while creating a massive privacy risk and centralized control. I think HN and subreddit UX is far superior to forum threads. I'm also bullish on urbit as a solution to this core issue of solving this in a way that doesn't centralize ownership while also enabling a UI that doesn't suck. Asking people to use forums will not succeed. As far as their complaint about real time vs. static, I agree - but I think subreddits are just a better model for this anyway.

noasaservice 5y ago
Urbit a solution?!? Hardly! Urbit is a digital fiefdom made by a neo-fascist whom coded that arbitrary limits at the base of the protocol. I cant get far enough away from that garbage.
- fossuser 5y ago
  Its design is interesting and the non-zero cost of IDs make sense as a way to build reputation and eliminate spam: https://media.urbit.org/whitepaper.pdf https://media.urbit.org/whitepaper.pdf I'm no fan of CY's neo-reactionary politics, but he's also no longer involved in the project and they're not relevant to the problems the design solves. Similarly I think the 2008 monetary policy around QE was an incredible success, but I still think Bitcoin is worthwhile and interesting despite the fact Nakamoto thought the bailouts were a bad idea. It's possible to look at these things separately imo. (John Nash, Bobby Fischer, etc. - long list of people that do worthwhile things but may believe things I don't agree with). Simpler less technical intro: https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit
tester756 5y ago
I hardly disagree "HN" comment chains may be better (but that's debatable) than forum's linear discussions, but HN "news" model (front page oriented) is terrible and everything that falls from front page is automatically dead, end of topic. Forum discussions can last weeks, months or even years meanwhile everything that's 2 days old is dead on HN, here's no discussion once something disappears from front page.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

Not gonna happen unless someone makes forum software with better UX than Discord's, that is also as easy or easier to maintain / administer So, not gonna happen. Discord has won forums for the foreseeable and is well on its way to FAANG tier dominance, impregnability, & scale

antifa 5y ago
If we're calling discord a forum, it's probably the worst forum (UX, mod tools, etc) I can think of.

nikisweeting 5y ago

If only Zulip were search-engine-indexable it would be the perfect middleground. Unfortunately it's still a ways away from being implemented I think.

tabbott 5y ago
Search engine indexing is available in Zulip today via Zulip's public archive tool (https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive). Many larger OSS projects using Zulip, like Rust, Julia, and Lean Prover, use it. We expect to have a native feature allowing a configurable set of streams to be browsed using a real Zulip web app UI without creating an account, available in beta in the next few weeks; we're actively integrating the implementation via https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/18532 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/18532. We plan to look at optional search indexing in that native implementation once the logged-out access feature is complete.
- nikisweeting 5y ago
  I stand corrected, this is awesome! I didn't realize it was already a reality.

z3t4 5y ago

Discord is where communities go to die.

nilleo 5y ago

I feel the same way about Facebook groups. I'd much rather create a throwaway account registered with my domain (whateverforum@mydomain.com) for every forum than create and use a Facebook or Discord account to engage with multiple communities. I don't want or need a centralized "social" account.

leke 5y ago

Discord has its uses, but forums should be moving to Reddit.

stiltzkin 5y ago
I would not move away to a centralized solution which mods can kick you out. An open source and hostable alternative is better than Discord or Reddit.

ConanRus 5y ago

Forums/Newsgroups is the way

e2le 5y ago

I wonder if we're headed for a future in which knowledge is far less accessible than it was in previous years. With communities moving to these closed/proprietary platforms (Discord, Slack) which aren't fit for purpose (making knowledge accessible and easily searchable), I suspect it'll have a negative affect on the ability of individuals to learn, collaborate, and share knowledge.

MaxLeiter 5y ago

One downside not mentioned is the accessibility aspect. Screenreaders are great at reading basic HTML like forums. Discord? Significantly more work and trouble. Last I checked, VoiceOver completely skips emojis in Discord messages.

Lev1a 5y ago

It's not just forums, recently I looked around for information on an incremental game only to be told that there is no wiki or anything like that but to "join the discord". WHY?! would I ever use a chat software to look up static information on a game? I know that information may or may change between releases but the release isn't daily or even close to that, so using a platform where I might have to read through or at least skim over hundreds of messages in conversation/support channels to find the right crumb of information is just insane to me. Also having to get an account and/or installing additional software for serving information which could just as well have been done with a fandom/wikia page and no unnecessary barriers is just utterly stupid.

darkerside 5y ago

This is destroying the internet in the same way we raze neighborhoods to build skyscrapers. Yes, we destroying something real and valuable, and it sucks, but it's the inevitable march forward of human progress. Why shouldn't digital redevelopment work the same way as physical?

IMAYousaf 5y ago

Does anyone have any insights into the upper scalability of either of these solutions?

Nezteb 5y ago

insert old man yells at cloud meme (just having a laugh) My least favorite part about forums is having to create a new account for every single forum I want to access. Sure, password managers make it easy to have hundreds of different accounts on different sites, but I just don’t want to do that because it makes everything feel clunky and disconnected. Sure, most have Google/Twitter/GitHub logins available, but some don’t which only makes me think “wait did I use Google or Twitter to sign into this forum last time?”. Discord has three things I like: a single account, infinite chat history, and the ability to star/favorite messages that are relevant to me for future reference. Those are all I really need to consider it a useful platform for forum-like discourse. Speaking of that, some forum software like Discourse (and it’s mobile app, Discourse Hub) and Forem make it easier to consolidate tons of disparate forums, but any time I’m on an old phpBB or vBulletin site I usually don’t even bother making an account.

jbrains 5y ago

I routinely run a combination of Slack and Discourse for my online communities. I can move interesting Slack threads into Discourse for longer-term and more-thoughtful discussion. The immediacy of chat has its place, but so does the semi-permanence of something like Discourse or Groups.io or a good, old-fashioned mailing list.