7 ms·

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 cha

by 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.)
      - baud147258 5y ago
        > Google doesn't index most moderated forums either. They've always been walled gardens to avoid bad behaviors. forums don't necessarily need to block search engine crawlers to prevent bad behavior, that would most likely be done with restrictions on account registration or limitation on what new users can post (one forum I am on hides posts from new account until they've been reviewed by a mod)
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

by Meekro 5y ago

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.)
    - baud147258 5y ago
      > Google doesn't index most moderated forums either. They've always been walled gardens to avoid bad behaviors. forums don't necessarily need to block search engine crawlers to prevent bad behavior, that would most likely be done with restrictions on account registration or limitation on what new users can post (one forum I am on hides posts from new account until they've been reviewed by a mod)

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