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I think you're being unfair to Reddit and others like it (thinking specifically of Discord). I run a product that has extensive community interaction, and Disco

by rp1 5y ago

I think you're being unfair to Reddit and others like it (thinking specifically of Discord). I run a product that has extensive community interaction, and Discord has been a life saver. There is no way we could have convinced people to sign up for a random forum, but they're happy to use Discord, which makes joining via invite link trivial. It also works better for synchronous communication. If someone reports an issue, I can immediately DM them and have them DM me back some info. It just works SO much better than a forum. Have you tried any alternatives to a forum? I see similar sentiment to your post a lot on HN, and the impression I always get is that people haven't given alternatives an honest chance. There is a reason the forum is dying. The alternatives are simply better.

sebow 5y ago
To directly answer your question: I did, and i'm not saying they're necessarily a bad idea, still better than nothing. It's just that obviously there's a trade being made. And i did not necessarily say full-fledged forums.Something like what spotify has, disqus, mastodon,etc. There are a lot of options, and i understand the "i don't want to make an account for that issue" argument, i truly do, but on the other hand i think if the issue is so important maybe another step doesn't hurt. Also naming clashing, spam/bots, eventually censorship issues are arguably way harder to appear. Again, i think this is better for actual product/services where we're talking about official support channels, and not something that you rely on the community: free software: editors, games, etc.