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What is strange about Discord is this great discrepancy between the ones that love it and the ones that hate it. If I were to guess on the reason of why that mi

• Aerroon 5y ago
  But do you need to know the past discussions? I don't really see why this would scare away newcomers to a group any more than usual.
  • qayxc 5y ago
    Do you remember IRC? It had similar issues. Past discussions are invaluable for providing context. The worst thing that can happen to a (technical) discussion is new people repeating points that have been resolved already while the discussion has since moved on. Admins and regulars alike may waste time and screen space repeating past conclusions, something a quick forum search avoids.
    • simias 5y ago
      I don't necessarily agree with that. On IRC you could have a specific rule listed explicitly in the topic and newcomers would still ignore it. The idea that they would trudge through megabytes worth of text to find the info is... optimistic. Your only hope is to have a curated, wiki-like resource that you point newcomers at, maybe with an IRC bot to easily reference it from the chat.
      • mmis1000 5y ago
        I think people will generally read the log up to one day in irc/telegram/discord. Log of one day in these type of applications can be thousands of messages in a big group. Require everyone to read every message before sending a message is just unrealistic.
    • selfhoster11 5y ago
      Discord also has a search feature, and it works across channels.
      • mmis1000 5y ago
        That actually done quite well compares to other message apps. The search query can be multi tags (text content, author, mention, is a file, contains link, before date, after date, at which channel) applies at same time. If you know what did you want to search, you can probably find it quickly.
  • PretzelPirate 5y ago
    If you go to technical discords you’ll find that there’s someone joining almost everyday who asks a set of questions that was aksed the day before. These people annoy existing servers members and get angry replies because people are so tired of answering the same basic question multiple times a day. Some servers have created processes where you can only access the FAQ channel until you prove your knowledge, and only then you can enter ‘general’. That clearly shows that something is wrong with content discovery on Discord.
    • netr0ute 5y ago
      > These people annoy existing servers members and get angry replies because people are so tired of answering the same basic question multiple times a day. From the numerous Discords I'm on, this problem is either fixed by making the members answering have a mindset to always help, or by using a bot with canned responses.
    • cinntaile 5y ago
      This always happens, people don't bother reading old info. Discord simply lowers the barrier to ask questions. It's probably a net positive overall.
    • magicalhippo 5y ago
      > If you go to technical discords you’ll find that there’s someone joining almost everyday who asks a set of questions that was aksed the day before. I've been in programming IRC channels since the late 90s. People asking the same questions as someone else asked the day before was the norm back then too. In fact, Discord is better than IRC in this regard, because it has history in the client. You can easily search what's been written by a member or in a channel. I've used it many times to find relevant information in the Home Assistant server and similar. You also get the history when you join, so you immediately get some sense for what kind of channel it is. Is it very active or not? Are they discussing relevant things or not? IRC has none of that. Sure some built bots that recorded the conversations, but you'd have to know where to find the logs. When joining a channel it was blank. In fact I did this just yesterday when I had some SystemD question, and hopped on their Libra Chat IRC channel. Took me a few hours to realize this was a dead place. That being said, I do think open source projects should consider alternatives like Gitter.
• simias 5y ago
  I've been using IRC for decades at this point and Discord is, seemingly, a modern, proprietary version of IRC so I assumed I'd feel at home the few times I've been invited to participate on it, but in practice it was an overwhelming, rather unpleasant experience and I never stuck with it. I think the main difference is that on IRC you'd usually be invited to a specific channel and you'd slowly work your way to other channels as your interests grow. If a given channel has too much activity and is too "off topic" you'll usually find like-minded people who'll just fork to a smaller, more manageable channel. But on Discord you're invited to what they abusively call a "server" and from there you usually see dozens of groups with various purposes and features and you're bombarded with gifs and notification icons all over the place. I think I agree with you, if I was an ~18yo right now and was willing to invest time into a community I'd love all this... stimulation. But as a boring old 35yo it's just overwhelming and feels like the signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal.
  • doublerabbit 5y ago
    Discord forces you to be online or nothing. You can hide the "server" within some folder but your presence is still online. If you truely wish to depart you need to leave the server and to return isn't an easy task; as to be able to get back in to the room you need the invite link which has it's own set of caveats. At the same time people tend to think your gone for good. Unlike IRC where if you desired to step away, you could close the channel and reappear at your own leisure and still continue where you left off. If you returned regularly you end up being known as a regular. IMO the current pitfall of IRC is that it's plagued with idling. And the days where I could post my own non-https link to a funny image are gone; it feels that most are now self-conscious of cliking linked-content from none-mainstream sources. How did we end this way?
    • pessimizer 5y ago
      Why would you ever want to turn anything off? What if you need it? Then what if it couldn't hear that you need it? You need it to be able to hear when you need it. Don't turn things off.
• JonathanMerklin 5y ago
  I'm not sure if "click" is intentional wordplay or not, but if it isn't, the word is "clique" FYI. I'm also strongly of the opinion that tying core business functionality and information transfer to a third-party chat application is a massive footgun, and other than the fact that I use it out of business needs and not just for voice, I think s/Discord/Slack/g applies. I've both heard Discord described as "Slack for hobbies" and Slack as "Discord for the employed" (although obviously it's not a perfect distinction and I've seen e.g. Netrunner groups on Slack and e.g. some startups communicating through Discord). That said, the number of teams and departments I have either encountered or heard about from engineering friends elsewhere whose primary - and sometimes only maintained - deployment interface is a Slack command clearly means that I'm the dumb one for trying to work the UNIX philosophy into most of my life's tools and nobody else is blinking twice about vendor lockin and memoizing solutions in a chat application. I just try and take any question/answer that was sufficiently obscure or anything asked more than once and shove it in an "OAQs" ("occasionally asked questions") on Confluence or whatever the knowledgebase application du jour is, but it still feels like teardrops against the ocean sometimes.
  • Coding_Cat 5y ago
    I use Discord a lot and I agree that it's bad to use it for anything that you can't afford to suddenly lose (though people still use Google and Paypal too). I do think a modern chat app is a value-add for fast moving (tech) companies. It is a nice hybrid between sending an email or knocking on someones door for a chat. And as for the 'chat commands', they're usually just thin wrappers around the UNIX style tool. It's maybe not the most reliable way, but it does have a low barrier and there's not much lock-in. I used to have my server email myself whenever something needed my attention, but now it'd probably use a Discord bot for that. However, I still wouldn't use it professionaly. the lack of self-hosting (privacy) and archival(bots can solve this pretty easilly) and restricting DMs (see slacks previous issues) makes Discord unsuitable.
    • tekknik 5y ago
      > However, I still wouldn't use it professionaly. the lack of self-hosting (privacy) and archival(bots can solve this pretty easilly) and restricting DMs (see slacks previous issues) makes Discord unsuitable. Slack doesn’t have a self hosted option either. This doesn’t stop literally every company on it from using it. This argument is a purist mentality. At some point you have to use someone else’s servers, or invent everything yourself. Self hosting doesn’t even give you control, the app owner can easily put command and control software in the server image and still do whatever they want. Don’t pay your license fee? Good luck getting the keys to your encrypted data store.
• friedturkey 5y ago
  I mean, people aren't really keeping up with the top posts 3 weeks ago on HN, reddit, or twitter. That's why reposts are so common. The first two are easily indexed by google, so that's one advantage. Twitter has a site-wide search. Discord doesn't (yet?) have such a thing, but I think the focus being private communities might keep that from happening... unless they get bought out and some MBA says "how can we better get clicks?"
  • zhte415 5y ago
    USP, Unique Selling Proposition, a term I'm shoehorning for wan of a better one. Different USPs, or pseudo USP as it's a weak U, more a network effect.. The USP of Facebook being closing a circle Facebook controls around you. Of Reddit being indexable/discoverable communities/interests, of Stackoverflow focused, transactional answers. Of Twitter being bullied into change from their earlier premise to serving bigmedia noise. Of Discord wasting users time for the reward of 'being part of..', that's their USP and Discord would die without the waste time through repetition that holds membership (for now).
• Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
  The issue comes frome people shoehorning Discord as a replacement for forums. Like a subreddit is a nice place for discussion and it's free. Discord is a chat app, not a forum app. It's about real time communication. In popular discords you can often just be ignored and they have to deal with the same stuff asked every single day. If I want to share something cool then I'd rather post it on a forum because you don't need to be only at that exact moment to see it. If I want to report a bug then I'd rather use a forum. If I want to ask questions then I'd rather use a forum. I love Discord, I think it really disrupted the industry. But a real-time chat app is not a replacement for a community forum.
  • zppln 5y ago
    A subreddit is a horrible place for discussion though.
    • etripe 5y ago
      Mostly, yes, but it comes down to moderation and subreddit culture. Reddit - as a company - doesn't take moderation seriously, as evidenced by it being left to unpaid volunteers.
      • guilherme-puida 5y ago
        Trying to find a specific post on a subreddit is a nightmare. The built in search functionality is horrible.
        • remram 5y ago
          At least it is indexed in Google. Not an excuse for Reddit's horrible search, I know, but IM doesn't even have that option.
        • rchaud 5y ago
          Just use Google. Reddit's built in search is useless in comparison. Yesterday I found a great thread about suit tailors in my city. The posts were all 3 years old but fortunately the tailor was still active. Digging up this info would be impossible on Discord, because at best I'd be locating individual comments asking about the topic, then scroll down to see if anybody bothered to post a response instead of changing the topic to something else.
• MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
• neutronicus 5y ago
  I love Discord because people were jerks on forums and they are nice on Discord. Something about knowing this flame war is for the permanent record (and the fact it keeps getting bumped) just seems to drive people off the deep end.
  • adam12 5y ago
    My experience is exactly opposite. People seem to go to war when they know that the conversation will just be lost over time.
    • mmis1000 5y ago
      The fire comes fast for sure, but also goes fast. Unless there is enough people just to keep the war 24/7. On the other end, this is much easier on forums. You can fire a war, and bump the thread again next day you come back. Without the admin kill the thread, this can goes forever.
    • tester756 5y ago
      weird if anybody wants, then he can save it easily also forums tend to be as anonymous as discord, so idk.
  • sweetbitter 5y ago
    >and the fact it keeps getting bumped One thing I never understood is why so many forums neglected to implement sage functionality like what you have on imageboards. There would never have been bans for so-called 'necroposting'.
• arriu 5y ago
  It seems like AI could be setup to address this. I would think it would be insanely useful. Personally, I’d rather look at an enriched summary than the original chat log in most cases. Can somebody get on this please :)
  • zerber 5y ago
• Smithalicious 5y ago
  In my experience discord servers will scale up to about about 20 people at most. I don't think that's the use case model discord is trying to push, but I think there's a large long tail of small friends-only discord servers in the order of 3-20 people. Within those parameters discord does work well. Nothing else has the necessary creature comforts (by default). I think most of my friends have misgivings about discord, but I don't think there's anything else that fills this niche well at the moment. Big discord servers are a completely different world, I don't understand how people put up with that.
  • wyclif 5y ago
    About half of the Discord servers I have joined completely stalled and became ghost towns; when they did I deleted them. The bigger ones, while thriving, have huge numbers of users but are terrible for finding information that the org they represent needs to retain.
    • urthor 5y ago
      Out of curiosity, why? Seems fairly simple to perform simple keyword searching, just like Slack.
      • wyclif 5y ago
        Sure, you can keyword search easily enough, but the information you might be looking for is sometimes scattered over dozens of channels.
        • tekknik 5y ago
          You can do a server wide search. Did you mean spread across servers?
      • donmcronald 5y ago
        The biggest problem is a lack of threading. I can often find questions matching mine, but the answers are impossible to search for because a lot of replies won't ever @ the question asker. So I'm left skimming an entire channel that includes 50 other things that I don't care about at the moment. The sheer volume can be overwhelming too. I went on the Zenith (VR MMO) Discord the day after release to ask a question and I found it to be useless. The channel was moving so fast that 2 min after I asked my question I couldn't even find it and had to search for it. There's no way to follow something going that fast (at least for me) and a lot of the chatter is tangential, so in addition to being poorly organized the signal to noise ratio is low.
• pmontra 5y ago
  > and therefore never need to look back at it Time passes by, memories fade away and sometimes you have to find that very piece of information you remember it's somewhere in there. I had to look for information on forums I was active in ten years before. Some of them were there, easily searchable or not, some went away. It seems that Discord is on the hard side of the searchability spectrum.
• woko 5y ago
  This situation becomes obvious when you want to use the search box to retrieve old conversations. I use Discord every day, so I fall in the first category in your post. However, every time I try to find an old conversation, Discord UX and search engine make it super hard, if not downright impossible. I can feel the pain of a user who would have just arrived on the server.
• andrecarini 5y ago
  A couple of things I personally find disappointing in Discord: 1) No concept of isolated identities for each server (or group of servers). 2) I use Discord maybe once per week, and every time I do, I have to log in again. The phone app quietly disconnects after a week or so. 3) Hard to find messages I have been mentioned in. I think there's an "inbox" that clears itself out after X days. 4) Pollution, mostly visually (can't collapse certain elements).
  • micromacrofoot 5y ago
    if you pay for nitro you can change your identity per server
    • charcircuit 5y ago
      Without nitro you can still nickname yourself.
      • remram 5y ago
        People will still see the "server you're both in" and the game your currently playing, etc. Not good for work servers.
        • spockz 5y ago
          Although you can disable automatically setting your status to whichever game you are playing though.
          • remram 5y ago
            You can disable it globally, for all servers, yes
        • ThatMedicIsASpy 5y ago
          Use web only discord and aggressively disable permissions. This results in less tracking and spying on you
• Accacin 5y ago
  To be honest, I do like Discord, but I only really use it for gaming with friends. We set up a server and use it for multiplayer games, occasionally share memes, etc. I really do not like it for communities, there's too much noise and too many annoucements.
  • remram 5y ago
    I was surprised to see that it's used more and more for work, instead of Slack. At first I thought this was a good thing (Discord feels much snappier, doesn't have the same search limitations, has voice channels) but it's been awkward. There is a way to change your name on specific servers, so you can be anonymous on gaming ones and recognizable on work ones, but people can still track you across (for example with the "servers you're both in" profile feature). Changing your avatar on specific servers is also a paid feature. I kind of want to run two instances, but this is apparently a ban-able offence.
    • russjr08 5y ago
      > I kind of want to run two instances, but this is apparently a ban-able offence. As far as I'm aware, Discord usually only hands out bans for this when you use an alt-account to ban evade. Though I can certainly understand not wanting to risk it if you use it for work (I'm affected by this as well).
  • pndy 5y ago
    In the last years I saw same amount of jerks on both. Trying to get help, any form of help or giving a feedback result in same canned replies, or irrelevant comments where you can clearly see people want to have own 5 mins of the Internet fame of becoming a meme. Also, on discord you have still a chance to reply but on forums people who become mods and who clearly shouldn't have been given such task in first place, will lock your thread and you can bite the dust. It's like you'd give the mythical Karen a chance to become the manager /s.
• charcircuit 5y ago
  You are missing the meta of informational channels which are read only channels which come with information for people to reference. Past information can be collected in these channels.
• n3dm 5y ago
  Not really, people despise it for other reasons. I.e. how bloated and sketchy their privacy practices are and just how invasive it is.
  • zerber 5y ago
• Zababa 5y ago
  Discord is also great for people that don't mind having just one identity on the internet. There is basically no support for multi account, so your account for talking with your friends, taking classes and finding information on that video game is the same. Lots of people seem to not mind doing that, but I've always thought that this was terrible if you want to protect your identity online.
  • continuational 5y ago
    Hey, sorry for replying off topic. We had a discussion on Firefly earlier, and I've just written the first small peice of Firefly documentation, introducing the new capability-based async/await inference: https://www.ahnfelt.net/async-await-inference-in-firefly/ https://www.ahnfelt.net/async-await-inference-in-firefly/ You said to reach out by email, but it's not showing up for me on your profile. If you're interested, there's also a draft on part 2 here: https://www.ahnfelt.net/p/ce19cc5c-d18c-452f-86c3-85a920e748b5/ https://www.ahnfelt.net/p/ce19cc5c-d18c-452f-86c3-85a920e748... Thank you :)
• deleted 5y ago
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