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At least a web forum can be spidered by search engines and the Internet Archive. The forum may go bust but its content may live on. With Discord, once they go b

At least a web forum can be spidered by search engines and the Internet Archive. The forum may go bust but its content may live on. With Discord, once they go bust all of their data will likely disappear. There's also no way for me to search a Discord server without being in Discord. I can find some nugget of information on a web forum without having any prior relationship to that forum.

Fogest 5y ago
I personally think from a privacy standpoint I actually like that the chat messages I post on Discord aren't logged and archived on some random websites. Maybe this is because I don't use Discord like a forum, but I use it more like it is a live discussion. Just like if that discussion happened in person you can't really go back on it unless it was recorded somewhere. In the case of Discord you can go back on conversations, just not via a search engine. I think any important and useful information should be stored via other methods. And I actually have seen this done as well. I've seen common answers to questions that will get added to some kind of FAQ style page online and that will be linked to when someone asks that common question. Discord is pretty focused still on the gaming/community side of things and I think it does this part pretty well. I have seen it used to supplement many things. Many game servers have a Discord associated with them. Twitch streamers have their own Discord communities. Each game typically has at least one main Discord for it. Discord now supports discovering discord servers for clubs at your University. But in all of these cases I am mentioning being able to search this from a Google Search is not important. In fact in some ways I think it's preferred from a privacy standpoint to not have random chat messages I send be archived on random sites. I think the problem is that people are trying to use Discord for purposes it wasn't really designed for. So it's funny when these people then complain about it.
- giantrobot 5y ago
  > I think the problem is that people are trying to use Discord for purposes it wasn't really designed for. This is my problem with Discord-instead-of-forums. I completely agree with your privacy point, I don't want or need every word I type recorded and crawled by every search engine. Ephemeral conversations are useful and important. It's incredibly frustrating when a Discord server is the only avenue for help with a project. Discord, even at its best, isn't discoverable and is barely searchable. It's not necessarily a new problem though. Ten years ago it was "find us at #projectname on Freenode". Before that it was join a mailing list. What's amusing in an annoying way is groups are running into old problems but not learning from old solutions. FAQs were invented because online conversations weren't necessarily persistent. If you joined an IRC channel, mailing list, or followed a newsgroup at time t there was no guarantee you'd have access to any conversations that happened at t-1. So people would make curated lists of common, that is frequently asked, questions. These would end up posted regularly to those ephemeral communications or added to a persistent presence (web, FTP, etc). I'd be far less annoyed by "join our Discord" if someone involved would persist some common or just novel questions to a persistent FAQ that's discoverable on the Web. It might not be as good as a wiki or forum but it's a lot lower friction than joining a Discord server to ask a question a hundred other people have asked.
hombre_fatal 5y ago
I had a seven year old forum get deleted with no backups. Internet Archive saved virtually nothing and there is no way to search it. You have no clue which of the snapshots have saved a certain page of any topic or if any snapshot includes it at all. With Discord you (or any user) can at least run one of the various off-the-shelf logger bots. And someone would still have to make it available, and who knows how nice it would be to consume, probably not very. So I'm not sure either have much advantage here if the origin dies forever.

Fogest 5y ago

I personally think from a privacy standpoint I actually like that the chat messages I post on Discord aren't logged and archived on some random websites. Maybe this is because I don't use Discord like a forum, but I use it more like it is a live discussion. Just like if that discussion happened in person you can't really go back on it unless it was recorded somewhere. In the case of Discord you can go back on conversations, just not via a search engine. I think any important and useful information should be stored via other methods. And I actually have seen this done as well. I've seen common answers to questions that will get added to some kind of FAQ style page online and that will be linked to when someone asks that common question. Discord is pretty focused still on the gaming/community side of things and I think it does this part pretty well. I have seen it used to supplement many things. Many game servers have a Discord associated with them. Twitch streamers have their own Discord communities. Each game typically has at least one main Discord for it. Discord now supports discovering discord servers for clubs at your University. But in all of these cases I am mentioning being able to search this from a Google Search is not important. In fact in some ways I think it's preferred from a privacy standpoint to not have random chat messages I send be archived on random sites. I think the problem is that people are trying to use Discord for purposes it wasn't really designed for. So it's funny when these people then complain about it.

giantrobot 5y ago
> I think the problem is that people are trying to use Discord for purposes it wasn't really designed for. This is my problem with Discord-instead-of-forums. I completely agree with your privacy point, I don't want or need every word I type recorded and crawled by every search engine. Ephemeral conversations are useful and important. It's incredibly frustrating when a Discord server is the only avenue for help with a project. Discord, even at its best, isn't discoverable and is barely searchable. It's not necessarily a new problem though. Ten years ago it was "find us at #projectname on Freenode". Before that it was join a mailing list. What's amusing in an annoying way is groups are running into old problems but not learning from old solutions. FAQs were invented because online conversations weren't necessarily persistent. If you joined an IRC channel, mailing list, or followed a newsgroup at time t there was no guarantee you'd have access to any conversations that happened at t-1. So people would make curated lists of common, that is frequently asked, questions. These would end up posted regularly to those ephemeral communications or added to a persistent presence (web, FTP, etc). I'd be far less annoyed by "join our Discord" if someone involved would persist some common or just novel questions to a persistent FAQ that's discoverable on the Web. It might not be as good as a wiki or forum but it's a lot lower friction than joining a Discord server to ask a question a hundred other people have asked.

hombre_fatal 5y ago

I had a seven year old forum get deleted with no backups. Internet Archive saved virtually nothing and there is no way to search it. You have no clue which of the snapshots have saved a certain page of any topic or if any snapshot includes it at all. With Discord you (or any user) can at least run one of the various off-the-shelf logger bots. And someone would still have to make it available, and who knows how nice it would be to consume, probably not very. So I'm not sure either have much advantage here if the origin dies forever.