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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 frustrati

• 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.
      • WorldMaker 5y ago
        People would do the same thing in forums: spam their question in the first or possibly every "board" whether it looked appropriate or not. The moderation needs don't change that much between chat and forum.
        • ajuc 5y ago
          Expectation in different media differ even if technically they can be used in the same way. Nobody uses search on discord chat. Google doesn't index discord chats. You cannot easily link to a discord message from 10 years ago nor quote it permanently. It's ephemeral for all intents and purposes. Meanwhile people mostly arrive at forums from google searches and link to posts without thinking about it. It's the difference between writing a book and giving a speech. Imagine if we started burning books because people can just talk over a phone. That's what replacing forums with discord is. Moving from forums to discord is another step in destroying everything that made open web great. It's sad that people don't even understand what they are losing.
          • WorldMaker 5y ago
            Google doesn't index most moderated forums either. They've always been walled gardens to avoid bad behaviors. For what it is worth, Discord does have permalinks to old messages. You definitely aren't going to find a 10 year old link today in large part because Discord hasn't been around 10 years yet, but I've copy and pasted Discord permalinks before to get points across and I have friends that use it for answering FAQs (have notes full of Discord links to copy/paste to answer common questions). For what it is worth, there are users that use search on Discord (including the sorts that copy/paste the permalinks to answer FAQs). Maybe "nobody" thinks to "search first" is a truism, but even then I've seen plenty of forums full of the exact same users that never think to search first when they enter a forum and go directly to asking a question previously answered many times before. (Even when they arrive in a forum from a google search on that very question, people like/prefer the immediacy/power/relationship of folks responding directly to them than a canned answer.) I'm not saying Discord is particularly great at some of these use cases or even the right answer, but they are very comparable and it's definitely nothing like burning books to chat over a phone. (That's a really broken analogy for several reasons.) (ETA: If there is something to criticize Discord here for, it's much more the centralizing force problem that old forums used to be distributed across every style of web host in the old web, but Discord is a single for-profit point of failure for so many eggs to be put in one basket.)
    • xwdv 5y ago
      You know why volunteer helpers get treated like servants? Because people are looking for answers, now. And there’s so many pointless barriers in the way, it’s maddening. Imagine if instead of Google being a search engine the way it is now where you get results damn near instantly, you instead had to jump into some big Google chat room and ask someone a question and wait some undefined amount of time to get a response, and often a useless one. People are in a hurry, if you’re not giving them what they want, then just get the fuck out of the way.
      • LocalH 5y ago
        This viewpoint is entitled as fuck, communities do not exist to serve you
        • xwdv 5y ago
          Believe me, I have zero desire to interact with “communities” when I am just trying to passively look up some quick information.
          • price 5y ago
            Then don't. If you aren't willing to interact with people as humans, that doesn't give you the right to treat them as tools. The people who are interested in talking about some game mod don't owe you the ability to quickly look up information about it.
            • xwdv 5y ago
              Why would they delete a forum and force people to go to a discord if they aren’t willing to serve?
              • chowells 5y ago
                Running a forum sucks. Why would you do that when your community is better served by other tools?
    • mnd999 5y ago
      This sounds like it could be easily solved using a forum instead of discord.
      • vikingerik 5y ago
        This has already happened. That forum is Reddit, for quite a large proportion of niche hobbies where someone would come in and ask a question. And it has the same problems of one-way escalating moderator strictness.
      • WorldMaker 5y ago
        Forums had all the same rules and rule enforcements for moderation. (Agree to the community rules, agree to the community terms of service, verify your email account, for the first few hours/days of your account you see only a curated subsection of the forums, etc.) It's a lot of the complexity in forum software that accumulated over time because it wasn't handled by "third party bots" and instead had to be baked into the forum app itself, which lead in part to why forum software is so hard to build/run/host because for a good, well moderated forum you need all of those moderation tools and generally can't just bolt them on with a "Forum Bot" from someone who isn't the forum software's author.
    • _jal 5y ago
      This is one reason why I always look at how support is handled when choosing software. If I run in to this, I'll go look at the next thing on my list. I'm not trying to downplay the problems you run in to, I've seen all of this and worse. It just seems that you chose tooling that doesn't work well for actually managing support, so you have to beat your users into the right shape to fit your software. Godspeed, I guess.
      • Meekro 5y ago
        If we're talking about formal support for a paid product, I agree with you. But I don't actually know any companies that use Discord as their primary support system, usually it'll be email or some sort of ticket system. Sometimes small internet companies will have a public Discord as well, and you might even be able to get questions answered there, but I can't think of any cases where they actually promote it as the primary support system. I was referring to things like open source software, game mods, photography enthusiast communities, etc. These kinds of communities are often on Discord these days, and suffer from the problems I mentioned previously. These lead to heavy-handed moderation.
    • prepend 5y ago
      I feel for mods, having moderated digital stuff for decades. But this seems like a problem of your own making. If users keep doing the same thing over and over, then the problem probably isn’t the users but the forum. I think this is because discord was designed for deep users and groups of friends who had lots of preexisting context as well as a desire to be part of something longstanding. Support forums are for people with no context and don’t want to join anything, they just need help. So making someone join a server, with specific rules they don’t give a shit about results in these problems. There needs to be a “read only” mode that lets me read a server and explore without joining. This is a strength of forums, mailing list archives, and even IRC. Mods complaining about modding hard stuff because they set it up to be hard doesn’t warrant much empathy from me.
      • Meekro 5y ago
        I get what you mean, and I agree with you that Discord shouldn't be a company's primary support system. I also haven't heard of any companies that do this. The issues I described come up when you have a community that occasionally offers help. For example, there might be a Discord devoted to a game mod. People can gather there to hang out with the mod developers or just talk about gaming. They sometimes answer newbie questions, too. If you come to take advantage of their generosity, you should do it with the right attitude and respect-- just like if you show up at a game shop in real life hoping someone will teach you how to play Dungeons & Dragons.
        • prepend 5y ago
          Right, but this is not a problem for IRC which sort of does the same thing. And IRC has solved this problem for like what 40 years. The issue, I think, is discord servers have variable and unintuitive rules that users fail to understand. I think I like protocols that follow the robustness principle in being accepting of lots of different inputs.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • cblconfederate 5y ago
      for all of those reasons you're better off with a forum. plus the lack of expectation for instant replies will discourage those users from spamming all threads
• Asraelite 5y ago
  This is true of a few other services too like Instagram and Twitter. Firefox containers are useful here, but it's a bit harder with native clients and mobile.
• bluetidepro 5y ago
  > I hate that everyone is using Discord not just because of searchability... I personally have found the search on Discord to be very robust and good, actually. I'm curious to see why you are saying it's not searchable?
  • baud147258 5y ago
    are discord servers indexed by search engines the same way regular forums are?
  • Denvercoder9 5y ago
    It's searchable if you've already found the Discord server and are in it. You won't find any of it if you're doing a web search.
    • loa_in_ 5y ago
      You can search across unjoined servers from within Discord.
      • hu3 5y ago
        That's neat. How do I proceed to do that?
        • loa_in_ 5y ago
          Scroll all the way down on your server list and the final entry is "Discover"
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • joconde 5y ago
        It's still out of reach of traditional search engines like Google, right? Stack Overflow and other forums have the huge advantage of being indexable by outside services.
      • 5y ago
• heinrich5991 5y ago
  You can open Discord in a private window in you browser to get another identity. On Linux, I can also recommend firejail with the --private= flag which allows you to have unlimited instances (well, limited by your RAM).
  • sascha_sl 5y ago
    Please do not use firejail. The code used to have, and probably still has, very amateurish security flaws (like trusting the USER env var) and should definitely not have SUID, especially now that linux is getting unprivileged namespacing.
    • loxias 5y ago
      Thanks for the heads up! Is there anything (packaged easily for Debian) you'd recommend instead?
      • sascha_sl 5y ago
        Your sibling comment has a few good ones.
    • ayushnix 5y ago
      I frankly don't understand what to trust when it comes to sandboxing in Linux. On the one hand, there are SUID binaries like Firejail and on the other, we have bubblewrap which uses unprivileged user namespaces, also used by Podman and Docker rootless containers. However, linux-hardened disables unprivileged user namespaces by default and the Arch Wiki has warnings plastered all over the Podman page about potential security risks of using unpriv user namespaces.
      • sascha_sl 5y ago
        I personally trust RedHat more with setting good defaults than random ArchLinux users (that also recommend firejail), considering the audience of RedHat (particularly some government agencies)
• true_religion 5y ago
  Why can’t you have multiple accounts? I have three: open source, gaming, personal. It’s not like social media where you are required to have only one account and link it to your real name.
  • elurg 5y ago
    Doesn't it require a phone number for validation?
    • jayshua 5y ago
      Last I tried you could reuse the same phone number to verify multiple accounts. There's just a cooldown period after each verification before the same number can be used again.
      • Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
        So your accounts will be retroactively and publicly correlated for time immemorial when discord’s database gets dumped? Using phone numbers for human verification is lazy and needlessly intrusive.
        • ziml77 5y ago
          Does Discord store the number alongside your account? The smart way to prevent issues with associating accounts by phone number is to only store the link up until the account is verified. After that, they don't need the number linked to the account. The number just has to be stored in a list alongside the last time it successfully validated an account, and then only stay in there until the cooldown period expires.
          • deleted 5y ago
            [deleted]
          • mindslight 5y ago
            Given that the smart way is to not ask for phone numbers in the first place, I wouldn't assume anything.
• danaris 5y ago
  Apparently someone on Discord is paying attention, because I just now updated my copy, and a popup came up drawing attention to their new feature: different nicknames per server! Edit: Ignore me; see reply.
  • rjbwork 5y ago
    This has been a feature as long as I remember (I've been using it since late 2015). The nickname is still tied to your name#dddd account identifier. And if someone checks your profile, they can still see mutual servers and friends. GP is asking for multiple accounts, not nicknames.
    • danaris 5y ago
      *blinks* You're right. Apparently the new part of the feature must be the ability for those with Nitro (the paid tier) to change their avatar per server. (At least, I'm guessing so; I've never had Nitro so I don't know if that was already available.) This is what I get for posting too early in the morning.
• nkotov 5y ago
  100% in the same boat. I don't want my gaming identity to be related to my day-to-day work. If I see a product/tool has a community Slack, I'd be more open to joining that.
• martin_a 5y ago
  > I don't want to join those with the same identity I use in gaming xXx~Pu55yDe5troy3r69~xXx, is this you? I saw you the other day on the StackOverflow Discord where you were helping me with my HTML-RegEx! Thanks again!
  • seneca 5y ago
    > xXx~Pu55yDe5troy3r69~xXx, is this you? I saw you the other day on the StackOverflow Discord where you were helping me with my HTML-RegEx! Thanks again! Please don't make posts like this here.
    • martin_a 5y ago
      Yeah, sorry, that RegEx-topic is really not for those with a weak heart. I'll use an XML parser instead.
      • lp0_on_fire 5y ago
        but have have you tried using rust??
        • cultofmetatron 5y ago
          a good portion of discord is using a combination of elixir and rust actually
          • cultofmetatron 5y ago
            https://discord.com/blog/why-discord-is-switching-from-go-to-rust https://discord.com/blog/why-discord-is-switching-from-go-to...
      • indigodaddy 5y ago
        Good point
        • 5y ago
• trutannus 5y ago
  Not even that. I just don't want to have to join a chat group to get documentation or ask questions. If I don't know the sorts of people in the server, joining is not generally something I'd be super comfortable with.
  • ziml77 5y ago
    That's certainly another barrier. As someone very socially anxious, it can be difficult to muster the courage to join a real-time conversation. Making forum posts is a lot easier.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• chakkepolja 5y ago
  At worst case can you use something like cookie containers or separate user profiles of chrome? I have more reasons to dislike discord (too bloated for my network, android app not good), by the way.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• lucasverra 5y ago
  >Discord not just because of searchability is it like slack that limit to < 10K messages on free spaces? Or Search is limitless?
  • clay10 5y ago
    Its limitless but not very good.
• uyt 5y ago
  I think they also force phone verification if you make multiple accounts connecting from the same ip. I don't want to run VPN just for a throwaway discord account and I don't know how to get burner phone numbers.
  • qualudeheart 5y ago
    Burner phones: you just ask privacy focused communities wether someone has successfully used a given VOIP service to sign up for something. You can also just buy a burner sim card. Either way it’ll only cost you a few dollars.
• evandale 5y ago
  I set up multiple chrome profiles and use different Discord users that way. On Android you can use an app such as App Cloner to create a new Discord app and even give the icon a custom colour.
• mlok 5y ago
  Firefox Multi-Accounts Containers might help a lot in this case : https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/multi-account-co...
  • denimnerd42 5y ago
    seemed that a great idea but in reality it's a hassle :/
    • Stevvo 5y ago
      It's a native feature in Chrome.
      • tristan957 5y ago
        Firfox containers are not the same thing as separate Chrome accounts.
• haliskerbas 5y ago
  I completely agree with this. For a while I’d have a second device for different discord identities. I really hope they add this support natively because I use discord in so many different contexts with real people and online strangers.
• Qub3d 5y ago
  If Discord could implement a "workspace" (or game-space or whatever) similar to slack, that would make me a lot more comfortable joining various servers.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• ganzuul 5y ago
  > searchability Forum representation is search results on Google in particular is abysmal. The way Google misrepresents the information mankind has created is actively making us less intelligent.
  • topspin 5y ago
    At least there IS a representation. Once some clue is found one need only go from there to the primary source and its native representation. What's so horrible about that? Stuff squirreled away in some discord server effectively doesn't exist outside of Discord's gamer chat platform. I'll take a poor representation that doesn't involve logging in and searching multiple platforms over essentially anything. What good are forums that don't appear in common search engines?
• floatingatoll 5y ago
  That is a feature to forum admins, because it means no longer having to deal with sock puppets, or at worst reporting them to Discord who then takes action to protect the platform. We've had twenty years of pseudonymous identities on the Internet and we've put the social fabric of humanity at risk. The needle is swinging towards "you get one identity, use it wisely" and I think that has absolutely been earned by those who abused pseudonymity to hurt others. No doubt the needle will swing back someday, and I will look forward to that once I've had a few years' break from the tragedy of today.
• neither_color 5y ago
  I also resent that discord/slack are companies that own their platforms, whereas IRC/Usenet/phpBB/etc were all software anyone could own and operate their own instance of. Sure you can have your own discord server, but youre still subject to the whims of Discord Inc. While they may not have done anything notably bad yet(I think there was a mini controversy with wallstreetbets but I didnt follow that story closely), but it's still centralization where it wasnt there before. Would you be ok with X Corporation you dont like buying Discord for cash tomorrow, even if they promise not to change any rules? Or does it make you feel easy to think about what they could do ? The Microsoft offer certainly scared some people.
  • extralobe 5y ago
    You can't have your own Discord server. Discord servers are not servers, they're partitions on Discord's own server.
  • TulliusCicero 5y ago
    That's also exactly why Discord was successful, though: because it's a centralized, owned thing. Open source doesn't always win.
• qualudeheart 5y ago
  Just use the web app on desktop with a password manager. Unlimited identities switchable with a few mouse clicks.
• wodenokoto 5y ago
  Discord works quite well on the web, so I have beeing toying with the idea of managing discord IDs using firefox container tabs.