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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

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.
- Inhibit 5y ago
  That reminds me of Reddit's endlessly repeated questions. Possibly there's a large audience that refuses to look for an answer prior to asking a question? Almost an expectation of free "service". That might result in a preference for Discord. With a refusal to research it's free developer tech support.
  - vladvasiliu 5y ago
    Well, that would explain why "users" prefer it, but not why "developers" prefer it. I'm not involved in any large open source project, but I'd expect I'd rather not answer the same question over and over. I'd therefore choose a platform which doesn't incite that behavior.
    - Fogest 5y ago
      I see a lot of communities on Discord will use bots that recognize keywords from commonly repeated questions. The bot then spits out the answer typically associated with that question. It seems to be somewhat helpful that way. I've also seen similar done but with a bit of manual intervention. Some kind of support/mod person will see a repeated question and use a command to trigger a canned answer to that commonly asked question. Or say they want log files, they would trigger a canned message from a bot explaining how a user can get that info. In some sense it almost works like a support chat on a webpage. The support agents have canned responses and can link out to support articles.
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    To be fair to Reddit reposters, it's on-site search is terrible. OK, it's still probably laziness 93% of the time.
- donmcronald 5y ago
  > I find it very hard to find whether my specific issue has already been discussed That's exactly the issue I have. I even find it hard to find discussions I participated in. The scenario is that you discuss something (technical) and it almost works, but not quite with the improvements you're interested in being planned. You wait 3 months and go back to see if anything has changed and you have 3 months of a single, infinite scrolling page to sort through to see if the topic has come up again. The threading support in discord will be interesting to see. I wonder if people will seek out historical threads and add to them or if you'll end up with an eternal September type situation where everyone gets fed up from answering the same questions over and over and starts screaming RTFM.
loxias 5y ago
I think you hit the nail on the head. The reasons Discord works well for you are unfortunately ... why it won't work for me. (I'm a late 30s male, but, I don't play video games. Nothing against games or gamers, I'm actually jealous! Just never found anything fun since Zelda and Tetris) I loathe seeing something I'm interested in, something math/science or technology oriented, on Discord. Quoting, and agreeing with you, "I think it's way better to use a system I am already signed up for." I don't want to sign up for a friggin Discord, or a Telegram, or a Slack, or a Whatsapp, and who knows how many other variants of IRC, just to find information!! I have "account fatigue". I already have a web browser! Why should I create an account on some closed source platform (that will probably collapse in 5-10 years like all of them), and learn yet another style of markup and communication and lingo... It's much better for this information to be on a webpage, possibly a web archive of a threaded email list, or a subreddit. I can read the thread, get my answer, then close the tab without carrying around a basket of one-off bullshit accounts I created to join a plethora of chat rooms. And when I leave, it's worth noting that the comments/questions are still on the page, and indexed by a search engine for those to find after I'm gone. Compare with discord, where it's ephemeral and behind a walled garden. Even worse, I think proliferation of discord chat rooms might suck the useful people and information away from areas of the internet I can easily access, and hide them somewhere hard to get. I'm appreciative of your comment and glad you made it. It's good to be reminded that kindred others enjoy the "other side", but remember it slices both ways. :) "Discordization" makes it more convenient for you, but at the cost of making it less accessible for others. I suspect the bulk of your happiness with it derives from your early presence in the ecosystem, not because of any strengths of the platform itself. A possibly better solution would be something that doesn't put up any barriers to entry for any of us. :)
- anticensor 5y ago
  > Compare with discord, where it's ephemeral and behind a walled garden Discord chats are persistent.
- ephbit 5y ago
  I'll repeat what I wrote a few comments up .. Couldn't the solution be a mastodon instance/server? If people used careful tagging combined with search, it might enable all that seeking for help online, but without signing on for another forum every time they're dealing with a new topic.
ntauthority 5y ago
Remember OpenID (from before it became a OAuth variant)? The premise of an universal identity from any IdP usable anywhere would've worked just as well.
carlgreene 5y ago
Forem[0] is trying to solve this with a browser extension. Looking promising! [0] https://www.forem.com/ https://www.forem.com/
- jdoss 5y ago
  We (I work for Forem) have an opensource selfhost installer [0] so you can have total control over your data and community too. [0] https://github.com/forem/selfhost https://github.com/forem/selfhost
zeepzeep 5y ago
> I don't want to sign up again for a million different forums like the old days. "Sign in with XYZ" exists on every serious website. > 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 helped because it's a forum feature, not a chat feature. > my comments/questions are still on the server for those to find via search if they join after I'm gone Nobody will ever see the answers, they'll ask again
- RNCTX 5y ago
  Yeah, what we have here is a failure of the post-GenX generations to understand how things work, and to not consider the ramifications of entrusting years worth of discourse to one platform. Because they never had to find a lengthy guide on how to implement something on a Rails blog that disappeared and took its information to the grave with it.
- only_as_i_fall 5y ago
  I find quick answers through web searching literally all the time. The walled off nature of discord and similar semi-private messaging platforms is a huge downside in disseminating information and I don't see how anyone could think otherwise.
  - xemdetia 5y ago
    Yeah, this is the other thing that is bonehead about this. Forums at least got indexed but the discoverability of useful discord servers is impossible for information you cared about. A forum is still useful when indexed and you don't sign up and login, and you also can find the fringe discussion/subforum area you actually care about and sign up and join in then.
    - Brave-Steak 5y ago
      Discord is an information/knowledge blackhole. Information goes in and never comes out. The amount of times I've searched for info and found it on some obscure forum I've never heard of before is staggering. Like, where the fuck would I be without xda-developers and its massive font of knowledge spanning back a decade, which is organized by device and topic? Like, Discord simply cannot replicate that, yet every community is defaulting to it. There are a bunch of technical products I repeatedly come into contact with that have coalesced around Discord instead of a forum, and it's a huge pain in the ass to find any information that I need.
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
Will Discord even be around in 20 or even 10 years or will all that information be lost? Can people find that information in the Discord by googling now?
- cube00 5y ago
  They're not exactly keen on allowing you to get your data out today let alone in 20 years https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360035147072-Export-Entire-Chats https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600351...
  - cosmotron 5y ago
    I feel like there's an interesting irony here (on HN, not in the particular link you shared). In a thread where folks are discussing how they like/dislike how companies shutter their forums in favor of Discord, you then see how Discord themselves use a more traditional thread based tool to manage their own support site rather than using Discord itself. Why wouldn't Discord's support site say, "Meet us in the Support Discord"?
    - Jensson 5y ago
      If you have an issue starting discord then it would feel wrong if the only way to contact support would be via discord.
    - Fogest 5y ago
      Discord never really advertised themselves as a good tool for support operations of large companies did they? They have mostly always focused on a more community focused side of gaming. Like one of their recent bigger features is that you can add a University you attend and verify your account via your uni email. You then get access to a hub that displays all the different Discord servers people have marked as being associated with the school. So now I can easily find a ton of clubs Discord servers and join them. These clubs would not be suited for a forum at all and they make more sense in a more "live" kind of setting. I see people in these club discords doing voice chats and streaming games to each other all the time. It seems like this is more the target for Discord, but a lot of people have repurposed it for their own things like using it for their companies chats and support. It's no surprise that you need to use a ton of bots to make this better supported as Discord so far hasn't really focused much on that side of things. Discord very-much seems like a younger generation kind of tool and a lot of older people come to it and try and make it fit other purposes. Reading another comment about someone whose company used this for their internal communication is just crazy. While yes it is a good platform they should have known it was a poor choice with having their historical chat history locked into the platform.
OrvalWintermute 5y ago
Discord|Slack, are the best all-around tools if you had to make a decision around one tool, and one tool only for a group of people. Discord being stronger for games, and Slack having insane integration capabilities and enterprise-enterprise communications provided the business partners are also on Slack, via their own corporation workplace or GRID plan. However, Slack|Discord individually are vastly inferior individually to: A Wiki (Take your pick) Text Based Chat (IRC/XMPP, you choose a client) Forums (Take your pick) Voice Chat (Mumble&Murmur/Teamspeak) Video Streams (Twitch/Youtube/Others) Mapping Strategy Apps (Take your pick) Tying this together with a common directory or identity service makes it really integrated, so you don't have 5k identities, but you may have credentials per service. This is what you see many mature gaming organizations doing. Of course, this is serious gaming and less accessible so less idea for a completely open "just join our discord" type community.
- ItsMonkk 5y ago
  I've been building an intuition that we can't just pick. We need all of them. Text: Chat -> Forums -> Wiki Video: Twitch -> YouTube -> Movies Voice: Discord -> Podcasts -> Books on Tape? Which can be summarized as, in how long the information lasts: Media: 1 minute -> 1 day -> 1 year Left side is experimental for people who absolutely love the activity, right side is high quality and condensed for people who just want the information. As the right side has higher standards, it will be more correct but less up to date. On things that are rapidly evolving you might want to drop down to a lower level. What we need is for it to be as trivial as possible for the information that is happening in chats to make its way to forum posts in a cleaner format, and eventually into wikis where all experimentation has been refined into just truths. All of this needs to be open and so we can't have 9 different services all trying to hold their section hostage.
  - mch82 5y ago
    I think you’re right. As information moves from idea to discussion to documentation, choose the right tool for the job. Chat systems like discord, or even an email list, are useful for ephemeral discussion and working things out. Once a concept stabilizes, move it to a wiki that is organized and edited to be a concise, focused document.
busterarm 5y ago
Discord has recently just started banning political undesirables.
- crocodiletears 5y ago
  They did that last June in a couple of mass ban waves. Who are they going after now?
  - busterarm 5y ago
    A gaming YouTuber named Spike Viper had his community banned because he's working on building a competing service to Discord. TheQuartering was banned yesterday after appearing on a stream with Alex Jones.
donmcronald 5y ago
> I love when I see forums on Discord I don't even consider it a forum. I consider it chat. I think there's really two different products. I don't mind discord for chat, but it's awful as a question / answer support system. Slack is the same thing. I think the reason they're popular as a support destination is because lazy people that don't want to make any effort can pop in, ask a question, and get an answer. I'm not calling you lazy BTW. My biggest issue is they don't scale and it's really hard to find historical information. The chat is usually cluttered with simple information and one huge, de-threaded, infinite scroll is almost impossible to navigate in any reasonable manner (at least for me). That said, I think discord could get better with the new threading feature. As people create high quality threads the moderators could pin them and categorize them. You could even create categories and let users create and manage their own threads. Oh wait. That's a traditional forum. Lol. Based on the very few discord servers I've joined, I think the biggest thing that makes it useful is that it isn't saturated with dumbasses (yet). For example, the Cloudflare discord for Workers / Pages seems to be a smaller, more informed userbase than the forums. I think some of the devs might even hang out there, but I imagine that'll stop if they see mass adoption and the same questions get asked repeatedly.
holler 5y ago
> 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. Wondering if https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im would fit this use case? Each post has a built-in chat room, is public and doesn't require a login to view on mobile/desktop web.
darcys22 5y ago
I actually agree, we use discord for our team and at the start i wasn’t happy about it. But after a while got used to it and now think its great. A lot of people in this thread saying its hard to find information in discord and disagreeing but ive never had any issues finding stuff with the search function. I think as the web and search engines have deteriorated things like discord, telegram and twitter have become the places you need to navigate to find information. If you want to learn how a brand new framework with zero docs works you need to ctrl-f their discord and ask questions there, its by far the quickest and easiest way
pndy 5y ago
Gotta be you, gotta be the personal preferences because I'm not that fond of Discord. I'm within same age and similar interests. The good side of using Discord - or similar chat platforms is that interaction seems to be faster than on forums but by a cost of being buried under memes or all sorts of unrelated information and messages. Then, there's also the issue of longevity of information on Discord if server beside the generic social operation is being used as a way of support for the community; the ticket systems are in most of the cases temporary - your issue once resolved is being deleted and you cannot access it again. The advantage of forums - at least for me, is that information on these is within the reach of every person by a standard search engine; you can "comb" through stuff globally or by using local forums search feature. You don't need to be on particular forums to access it, unlike on Discord. But there are of course downsides like limited access to content (register to access links, images) or search engines not being able to index all stuff. I'd personally prefer if Discord would be used as complementary tool for any community and not as the replacement of forums. Not sure if reddit with its subs counts as forums or more as an content aggregator with commenting feature. But still, some communities use subs as one of official communication channels or unofficial but with "blessing", or as an unofficial alternative to official forums (the r/guildwars2 vs official strictly moderated forums case).
ephbit 5y ago
I get your point. Signing up for yet another forum with confirmation email, password and so on ... totally annoying. Couldn't the solution be a mastodon instance/server? If people used careful tagging combined with search, it might enable all that seeking for help online, but without signing on for another forum every time they're dealing with a new topic.

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

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.

Inhibit 5y ago
That reminds me of Reddit's endlessly repeated questions. Possibly there's a large audience that refuses to look for an answer prior to asking a question? Almost an expectation of free "service". That might result in a preference for Discord. With a refusal to research it's free developer tech support.
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  Well, that would explain why "users" prefer it, but not why "developers" prefer it. I'm not involved in any large open source project, but I'd expect I'd rather not answer the same question over and over. I'd therefore choose a platform which doesn't incite that behavior.
  - Fogest 5y ago
    I see a lot of communities on Discord will use bots that recognize keywords from commonly repeated questions. The bot then spits out the answer typically associated with that question. It seems to be somewhat helpful that way. I've also seen similar done but with a bit of manual intervention. Some kind of support/mod person will see a repeated question and use a command to trigger a canned answer to that commonly asked question. Or say they want log files, they would trigger a canned message from a bot explaining how a user can get that info. In some sense it almost works like a support chat on a webpage. The support agents have canned responses and can link out to support articles.
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  To be fair to Reddit reposters, it's on-site search is terrible. OK, it's still probably laziness 93% of the time.
donmcronald 5y ago
> I find it very hard to find whether my specific issue has already been discussed That's exactly the issue I have. I even find it hard to find discussions I participated in. The scenario is that you discuss something (technical) and it almost works, but not quite with the improvements you're interested in being planned. You wait 3 months and go back to see if anything has changed and you have 3 months of a single, infinite scrolling page to sort through to see if the topic has come up again. The threading support in discord will be interesting to see. I wonder if people will seek out historical threads and add to them or if you'll end up with an eternal September type situation where everyone gets fed up from answering the same questions over and over and starts screaming RTFM.

loxias 5y ago

I think you hit the nail on the head. The reasons Discord works well for you are unfortunately ... why it won't work for me. (I'm a late 30s male, but, I don't play video games. Nothing against games or gamers, I'm actually jealous! Just never found anything fun since Zelda and Tetris) I loathe seeing something I'm interested in, something math/science or technology oriented, on Discord. Quoting, and agreeing with you, "I think it's way better to use a system I am already signed up for." I don't want to sign up for a friggin Discord, or a Telegram, or a Slack, or a Whatsapp, and who knows how many other variants of IRC, just to find information!! I have "account fatigue". I already have a web browser! Why should I create an account on some closed source platform (that will probably collapse in 5-10 years like all of them), and learn yet another style of markup and communication and lingo... It's much better for this information to be on a webpage, possibly a web archive of a threaded email list, or a subreddit. I can read the thread, get my answer, then close the tab without carrying around a basket of one-off bullshit accounts I created to join a plethora of chat rooms. And when I leave, it's worth noting that the comments/questions are still on the page, and indexed by a search engine for those to find after I'm gone. Compare with discord, where it's ephemeral and behind a walled garden. Even worse, I think proliferation of discord chat rooms might suck the useful people and information away from areas of the internet I can easily access, and hide them somewhere hard to get. I'm appreciative of your comment and glad you made it. It's good to be reminded that kindred others enjoy the "other side", but remember it slices both ways. :) "Discordization" makes it more convenient for you, but at the cost of making it less accessible for others. I suspect the bulk of your happiness with it derives from your early presence in the ecosystem, not because of any strengths of the platform itself. A possibly better solution would be something that doesn't put up any barriers to entry for any of us. :)

anticensor 5y ago
> Compare with discord, where it's ephemeral and behind a walled garden Discord chats are persistent.
ephbit 5y ago
I'll repeat what I wrote a few comments up .. Couldn't the solution be a mastodon instance/server? If people used careful tagging combined with search, it might enable all that seeking for help online, but without signing on for another forum every time they're dealing with a new topic.

ntauthority 5y ago

Remember OpenID (from before it became a OAuth variant)? The premise of an universal identity from any IdP usable anywhere would've worked just as well.

carlgreene 5y ago

Forem[0] is trying to solve this with a browser extension. Looking promising! [0] https://www.forem.com/ https://www.forem.com/

jdoss 5y ago
We (I work for Forem) have an opensource selfhost installer [0] so you can have total control over your data and community too. [0] https://github.com/forem/selfhost https://github.com/forem/selfhost

zeepzeep 5y ago

> I don't want to sign up again for a million different forums like the old days. "Sign in with XYZ" exists on every serious website. > 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 helped because it's a forum feature, not a chat feature. > my comments/questions are still on the server for those to find via search if they join after I'm gone Nobody will ever see the answers, they'll ask again

RNCTX 5y ago
Yeah, what we have here is a failure of the post-GenX generations to understand how things work, and to not consider the ramifications of entrusting years worth of discourse to one platform. Because they never had to find a lengthy guide on how to implement something on a Rails blog that disappeared and took its information to the grave with it.
only_as_i_fall 5y ago
I find quick answers through web searching literally all the time. The walled off nature of discord and similar semi-private messaging platforms is a huge downside in disseminating information and I don't see how anyone could think otherwise.
- xemdetia 5y ago
  Yeah, this is the other thing that is bonehead about this. Forums at least got indexed but the discoverability of useful discord servers is impossible for information you cared about. A forum is still useful when indexed and you don't sign up and login, and you also can find the fringe discussion/subforum area you actually care about and sign up and join in then.
  - Brave-Steak 5y ago
    Discord is an information/knowledge blackhole. Information goes in and never comes out. The amount of times I've searched for info and found it on some obscure forum I've never heard of before is staggering. Like, where the fuck would I be without xda-developers and its massive font of knowledge spanning back a decade, which is organized by device and topic? Like, Discord simply cannot replicate that, yet every community is defaulting to it. There are a bunch of technical products I repeatedly come into contact with that have coalesced around Discord instead of a forum, and it's a huge pain in the ass to find any information that I need.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

Will Discord even be around in 20 or even 10 years or will all that information be lost? Can people find that information in the Discord by googling now?

cube00 5y ago
They're not exactly keen on allowing you to get your data out today let alone in 20 years https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360035147072-Export-Entire-Chats https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600351...
- cosmotron 5y ago
  I feel like there's an interesting irony here (on HN, not in the particular link you shared). In a thread where folks are discussing how they like/dislike how companies shutter their forums in favor of Discord, you then see how Discord themselves use a more traditional thread based tool to manage their own support site rather than using Discord itself. Why wouldn't Discord's support site say, "Meet us in the Support Discord"?
  - Jensson 5y ago
    If you have an issue starting discord then it would feel wrong if the only way to contact support would be via discord.
  - Fogest 5y ago
    Discord never really advertised themselves as a good tool for support operations of large companies did they? They have mostly always focused on a more community focused side of gaming. Like one of their recent bigger features is that you can add a University you attend and verify your account via your uni email. You then get access to a hub that displays all the different Discord servers people have marked as being associated with the school. So now I can easily find a ton of clubs Discord servers and join them. These clubs would not be suited for a forum at all and they make more sense in a more "live" kind of setting. I see people in these club discords doing voice chats and streaming games to each other all the time. It seems like this is more the target for Discord, but a lot of people have repurposed it for their own things like using it for their companies chats and support. It's no surprise that you need to use a ton of bots to make this better supported as Discord so far hasn't really focused much on that side of things. Discord very-much seems like a younger generation kind of tool and a lot of older people come to it and try and make it fit other purposes. Reading another comment about someone whose company used this for their internal communication is just crazy. While yes it is a good platform they should have known it was a poor choice with having their historical chat history locked into the platform.

OrvalWintermute 5y ago

Discord|Slack, are the best all-around tools if you had to make a decision around one tool, and one tool only for a group of people. Discord being stronger for games, and Slack having insane integration capabilities and enterprise-enterprise communications provided the business partners are also on Slack, via their own corporation workplace or GRID plan. However, Slack|Discord individually are vastly inferior individually to: A Wiki (Take your pick) Text Based Chat (IRC/XMPP, you choose a client) Forums (Take your pick) Voice Chat (Mumble&Murmur/Teamspeak) Video Streams (Twitch/Youtube/Others) Mapping Strategy Apps (Take your pick) Tying this together with a common directory or identity service makes it really integrated, so you don't have 5k identities, but you may have credentials per service. This is what you see many mature gaming organizations doing. Of course, this is serious gaming and less accessible so less idea for a completely open "just join our discord" type community.

ItsMonkk 5y ago
I've been building an intuition that we can't just pick. We need all of them. Text: Chat -> Forums -> Wiki Video: Twitch -> YouTube -> Movies Voice: Discord -> Podcasts -> Books on Tape? Which can be summarized as, in how long the information lasts: Media: 1 minute -> 1 day -> 1 year Left side is experimental for people who absolutely love the activity, right side is high quality and condensed for people who just want the information. As the right side has higher standards, it will be more correct but less up to date. On things that are rapidly evolving you might want to drop down to a lower level. What we need is for it to be as trivial as possible for the information that is happening in chats to make its way to forum posts in a cleaner format, and eventually into wikis where all experimentation has been refined into just truths. All of this needs to be open and so we can't have 9 different services all trying to hold their section hostage.
- mch82 5y ago
  I think you’re right. As information moves from idea to discussion to documentation, choose the right tool for the job. Chat systems like discord, or even an email list, are useful for ephemeral discussion and working things out. Once a concept stabilizes, move it to a wiki that is organized and edited to be a concise, focused document.

busterarm 5y ago

Discord has recently just started banning political undesirables.

crocodiletears 5y ago
They did that last June in a couple of mass ban waves. Who are they going after now?
- busterarm 5y ago
  A gaming YouTuber named Spike Viper had his community banned because he's working on building a competing service to Discord. TheQuartering was banned yesterday after appearing on a stream with Alex Jones.

donmcronald 5y ago

> I love when I see forums on Discord I don't even consider it a forum. I consider it chat. I think there's really two different products. I don't mind discord for chat, but it's awful as a question / answer support system. Slack is the same thing. I think the reason they're popular as a support destination is because lazy people that don't want to make any effort can pop in, ask a question, and get an answer. I'm not calling you lazy BTW. My biggest issue is they don't scale and it's really hard to find historical information. The chat is usually cluttered with simple information and one huge, de-threaded, infinite scroll is almost impossible to navigate in any reasonable manner (at least for me). That said, I think discord could get better with the new threading feature. As people create high quality threads the moderators could pin them and categorize them. You could even create categories and let users create and manage their own threads. Oh wait. That's a traditional forum. Lol. Based on the very few discord servers I've joined, I think the biggest thing that makes it useful is that it isn't saturated with dumbasses (yet). For example, the Cloudflare discord for Workers / Pages seems to be a smaller, more informed userbase than the forums. I think some of the devs might even hang out there, but I imagine that'll stop if they see mass adoption and the same questions get asked repeatedly.

holler 5y ago

> 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. Wondering if https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im would fit this use case? Each post has a built-in chat room, is public and doesn't require a login to view on mobile/desktop web.

darcys22 5y ago

I actually agree, we use discord for our team and at the start i wasn’t happy about it. But after a while got used to it and now think its great. A lot of people in this thread saying its hard to find information in discord and disagreeing but ive never had any issues finding stuff with the search function. I think as the web and search engines have deteriorated things like discord, telegram and twitter have become the places you need to navigate to find information. If you want to learn how a brand new framework with zero docs works you need to ctrl-f their discord and ask questions there, its by far the quickest and easiest way

pndy 5y ago

Gotta be you, gotta be the personal preferences because I'm not that fond of Discord. I'm within same age and similar interests. The good side of using Discord - or similar chat platforms is that interaction seems to be faster than on forums but by a cost of being buried under memes or all sorts of unrelated information and messages. Then, there's also the issue of longevity of information on Discord if server beside the generic social operation is being used as a way of support for the community; the ticket systems are in most of the cases temporary - your issue once resolved is being deleted and you cannot access it again. The advantage of forums - at least for me, is that information on these is within the reach of every person by a standard search engine; you can "comb" through stuff globally or by using local forums search feature. You don't need to be on particular forums to access it, unlike on Discord. But there are of course downsides like limited access to content (register to access links, images) or search engines not being able to index all stuff. I'd personally prefer if Discord would be used as complementary tool for any community and not as the replacement of forums. Not sure if reddit with its subs counts as forums or more as an content aggregator with commenting feature. But still, some communities use subs as one of official communication channels or unofficial but with "blessing", or as an unofficial alternative to official forums (the r/guildwars2 vs official strictly moderated forums case).

ephbit 5y ago

I get your point. Signing up for yet another forum with confirmation email, password and so on ... totally annoying. Couldn't the solution be a mastodon instance/server? If people used careful tagging combined with search, it might enable all that seeking for help online, but without signing on for another forum every time they're dealing with a new topic.