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My experience with the discord.py community left a bad taste and I imagine some people at Discord might see what I've seen and not want much to do with it. Suff

My experience with the discord.py community left a bad taste and I imagine some people at Discord might see what I've seen and not want much to do with it. Suffice it to say I stopped thinking about discord.py and switched to a thin layer with discord.js to python. This gist doesn't really help my view of the scene, it confuses me more and adds to the drama. The changes look great, the future plans look great, but discord.js already had (at least) slash commands and better documentation. Staying with js seems safer, more time efficient, and more drama free to me at the moment even if it's a bit awkward.

KennyBlanken 5y ago
The "I took my marbles and went home, but I hear you all are so bad at this stuff, so I'll trouble myself to come back and save everyone" bit was completely unnecessary and savior-complex-y. I nearly didn't read the important bit (discord is basically EOL'ing the current stable API in a matter of months) because my eyes rolled so hard I nearly fell off my chair. Discord is a company that seems to just fly by the seat of their pants. A great example would be "threads", for which they rolled out with no notice to server admins - it just suddenly appeared - and worse, threads were rolled out before thread-related roles were. Even worse: threads created before the roles were updated to include thread roles could not be deleted by server admins/moderators. The mind boggles that such a large company, presumably full of very qualified and well paid engineers (and likely piles of "UX" people) could generate such a clusterfuck. Another great "feature" of discord: blocking someone, unlike every other platform save IRC, does not hide your content from them. It hides them from you.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  In my experience this is a feature of startups. The enterprise I work at doesn’t ship releases with major bugs, period. But in exchange they release only once every 6 months, and releases are very likely to be postponed if any defect is found (even if this occurs in maybe 1/10,000 cases). Discord gets to move fast at some expense to the users, but mostly those users do not care, as long as messaging/voice chat functionality isn’t impacted.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- d3nj4l 5y ago
  Idk what you mean about threads. They were a long time coming and as a member of several communities most mods were well aware of them before they came up.
  - Operyl 5y ago
    Their launch was sudden and immediate for non-large servers (basically partnered servers iirc) and was a moderation hell for some of us medium size servers when they suddenly got turned on. Long time coming? Yes. Time to prepare? Zero, since it just immediately turned on for most users.
- pie_flavor 5y ago
  > unlike every other platform save IRC Blocking a user so you no longer see their posts is a long established feature of various web forums, chat systems, and comment sections. I do not know how you would come under the impression that the reverse is true; the only platforms I know of where it is, is the four or five social media giants. People do complain about Discord blocks, but they complain about them because there is still a 'N blocked messages' indicator, not because of what direction the blocks go.
- seanhunter 5y ago
  > Another great "feature" of discord: blocking someone, unlike every other platform save IRC, does not hide your content from them. It hides them from you. Not sure what point you're making here. The equivalent of a "block" that goes the other way is kicking or banning the user. That works the same on IRC.
tentacleuno 5y ago
> My experience with the discord.py community left a bad taste Could you expand on what you mean, please? Genuinely interested.
- falsenapkin 5y ago
  I'd say the negative parts of Discord mixed with the negative parts of classic forum/Q&A behaviors plus a heap of angst/martyrdom (good phrasing by a sibling). In my experience on the discord.py server, I had recently come back to discord bots after a couple of years and wanted to try slash commands and was told: "slash is trash", discord.py will never support slash commands (lol), the gist on the issue is SO OBVIOUS and easy to find just google it (it wasn't), talking about forks and other bot libraries is against the rules (wtf?), and this was all served with mild verbal abuse. It was also served while at least 2 people were asking if they were allowed to ping Danny to express bizarre levels of affection and they somehow got more positive traction than me trying to understand why this advertised API feature wasn't available in what I thought was a highly popular/respected library. Looking around the other channels had me cringing a bit on conversations and shared media to put it lightly. Sometimes going to a discord server feels like entering an online shooter voice lobby. If you try to be serious you just get talked past or berated by loud 15 year olds. If they even say something related to what you're trying to talk about, they're mindlessly parroting their idol and not thinking critically on their own. These servers often have a handful of active people forming their own little social club with hundreds or thousands of other members on the side never saying anything, probably not even lurking. This is something I've noticed a lot on Discord but I imagine extends to similar solutions in the same space. My experience on Slack has been less juvenile but also less populated and similarly useless. Anyway so mix that experience with the "I'm quitting" gist (which is something I can write a few paragraphs on but really don't want to) and yeah I wouldn't want to work with these people if I were a boring corporation, and I don't want to think about them when I'm doing a fun side project for friends.
  - ehsankia 5y ago
    I never really join library communities. I wanted to make a quick bot a few months ago, had some very old experience with discord.py but indeed wanted slash commands. Simply used discord-py-slash-command [0] library and had a bot in less than an hour that did what I needed. [0] https://discord-py-slash-command.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://discord-py-slash-command.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> My experience with the discord.py community left a bad taste and I imagine some people at Discord might see what I've seen and not want much to do with it. I only briefly looked at discord.py and left with the exact same impression. A lot of angsty energy. Felt like everyone was fighting with each other and Discord itself, with a heavy dose of martyrdom. Fortunately none of the other Discord libraries I looked at had anything remotely similar.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  I haven't look at the community at all, but I've used discord.py to make a few bots with no issues whatsoever. It was a fairly clean, complete and easy to use framework. Though my bots weren't very advanced, discord.py did everything I needed. What's the issue with it?
  - VoidWhisperer 5y ago
    I think the issue most people are finding with it is related to the community surrounding it and not necessarily the library itself - the library can work fine and be clean, but it's ability to live on (or die) depends on the community surrounding the project
  - falsenapkin 5y ago
    I agree, discord.py has been pleasant to use. However up until this gist, discord.py was lacking newer API features, most notably slash commands, and was otherwise abandoned. I'm not clear on the details but if you aren't currently using slash commands you may be forced to in the near future so if you have any operating bots responding to custom prompts you should look into whether you need to do some work or not. Now on what library to use... there have been various discord.py derivative projects to provide slash commands and now discord.py apparently supports them too. Personally I'm avoiding discord.py, I can't trust they'll continue development and I'm not trying to track community drama via discord. I also really dislike node. My solution for now is discord.js as a thin layer between discord and python.
    - 5y ago
lionkor 5y ago
Hijacking to day that `dpp` is an amazing library for discord bot development in C++ (not affiliated)
throwaway0984 5y ago
I'm left with a similar bad taste every time I take a look at the community. It seems kind of angsty and egotistical, and this gist doesn't help with their image at all. It comes off to me as if he's coming back as some sort of savior to the Python bot developer community. The points made in the original "deprecation" gist were also, at least in my opinion, greatly exaggerated. I can't really say I'm surprised, however. It seems like it's mostly always been this way with constant whining or drama from them when things didn't go their way.

KennyBlanken 5y ago

The "I took my marbles and went home, but I hear you all are so bad at this stuff, so I'll trouble myself to come back and save everyone" bit was completely unnecessary and savior-complex-y. I nearly didn't read the important bit (discord is basically EOL'ing the current stable API in a matter of months) because my eyes rolled so hard I nearly fell off my chair. Discord is a company that seems to just fly by the seat of their pants. A great example would be "threads", for which they rolled out with no notice to server admins - it just suddenly appeared - and worse, threads were rolled out before thread-related roles were. Even worse: threads created before the roles were updated to include thread roles could not be deleted by server admins/moderators. The mind boggles that such a large company, presumably full of very qualified and well paid engineers (and likely piles of "UX" people) could generate such a clusterfuck. Another great "feature" of discord: blocking someone, unlike every other platform save IRC, does not hide your content from them. It hides them from you.

Aeolun 5y ago
In my experience this is a feature of startups. The enterprise I work at doesn’t ship releases with major bugs, period. But in exchange they release only once every 6 months, and releases are very likely to be postponed if any defect is found (even if this occurs in maybe 1/10,000 cases). Discord gets to move fast at some expense to the users, but mostly those users do not care, as long as messaging/voice chat functionality isn’t impacted.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
d3nj4l 5y ago
Idk what you mean about threads. They were a long time coming and as a member of several communities most mods were well aware of them before they came up.
- Operyl 5y ago
  Their launch was sudden and immediate for non-large servers (basically partnered servers iirc) and was a moderation hell for some of us medium size servers when they suddenly got turned on. Long time coming? Yes. Time to prepare? Zero, since it just immediately turned on for most users.
pie_flavor 5y ago
> unlike every other platform save IRC Blocking a user so you no longer see their posts is a long established feature of various web forums, chat systems, and comment sections. I do not know how you would come under the impression that the reverse is true; the only platforms I know of where it is, is the four or five social media giants. People do complain about Discord blocks, but they complain about them because there is still a 'N blocked messages' indicator, not because of what direction the blocks go.
seanhunter 5y ago
> Another great "feature" of discord: blocking someone, unlike every other platform save IRC, does not hide your content from them. It hides them from you. Not sure what point you're making here. The equivalent of a "block" that goes the other way is kicking or banning the user. That works the same on IRC.

tentacleuno 5y ago

> My experience with the discord.py community left a bad taste Could you expand on what you mean, please? Genuinely interested.

falsenapkin 5y ago
I'd say the negative parts of Discord mixed with the negative parts of classic forum/Q&A behaviors plus a heap of angst/martyrdom (good phrasing by a sibling). In my experience on the discord.py server, I had recently come back to discord bots after a couple of years and wanted to try slash commands and was told: "slash is trash", discord.py will never support slash commands (lol), the gist on the issue is SO OBVIOUS and easy to find just google it (it wasn't), talking about forks and other bot libraries is against the rules (wtf?), and this was all served with mild verbal abuse. It was also served while at least 2 people were asking if they were allowed to ping Danny to express bizarre levels of affection and they somehow got more positive traction than me trying to understand why this advertised API feature wasn't available in what I thought was a highly popular/respected library. Looking around the other channels had me cringing a bit on conversations and shared media to put it lightly. Sometimes going to a discord server feels like entering an online shooter voice lobby. If you try to be serious you just get talked past or berated by loud 15 year olds. If they even say something related to what you're trying to talk about, they're mindlessly parroting their idol and not thinking critically on their own. These servers often have a handful of active people forming their own little social club with hundreds or thousands of other members on the side never saying anything, probably not even lurking. This is something I've noticed a lot on Discord but I imagine extends to similar solutions in the same space. My experience on Slack has been less juvenile but also less populated and similarly useless. Anyway so mix that experience with the "I'm quitting" gist (which is something I can write a few paragraphs on but really don't want to) and yeah I wouldn't want to work with these people if I were a boring corporation, and I don't want to think about them when I'm doing a fun side project for friends.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  I never really join library communities. I wanted to make a quick bot a few months ago, had some very old experience with discord.py but indeed wanted slash commands. Simply used discord-py-slash-command [0] library and had a bot in less than an hour that did what I needed. [0] https://discord-py-slash-command.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://discord-py-slash-command.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> My experience with the discord.py community left a bad taste and I imagine some people at Discord might see what I've seen and not want much to do with it. I only briefly looked at discord.py and left with the exact same impression. A lot of angsty energy. Felt like everyone was fighting with each other and Discord itself, with a heavy dose of martyrdom. Fortunately none of the other Discord libraries I looked at had anything remotely similar.

ehsankia 5y ago
I haven't look at the community at all, but I've used discord.py to make a few bots with no issues whatsoever. It was a fairly clean, complete and easy to use framework. Though my bots weren't very advanced, discord.py did everything I needed. What's the issue with it?
- VoidWhisperer 5y ago
  I think the issue most people are finding with it is related to the community surrounding it and not necessarily the library itself - the library can work fine and be clean, but it's ability to live on (or die) depends on the community surrounding the project
- falsenapkin 5y ago
  I agree, discord.py has been pleasant to use. However up until this gist, discord.py was lacking newer API features, most notably slash commands, and was otherwise abandoned. I'm not clear on the details but if you aren't currently using slash commands you may be forced to in the near future so if you have any operating bots responding to custom prompts you should look into whether you need to do some work or not. Now on what library to use... there have been various discord.py derivative projects to provide slash commands and now discord.py apparently supports them too. Personally I'm avoiding discord.py, I can't trust they'll continue development and I'm not trying to track community drama via discord. I also really dislike node. My solution for now is discord.js as a thin layer between discord and python.
  - 5y ago

lionkor 5y ago

Hijacking to day that `dpp` is an amazing library for discord bot development in C++ (not affiliated)

throwaway0984 5y ago

I'm left with a similar bad taste every time I take a look at the community. It seems kind of angsty and egotistical, and this gist doesn't help with their image at all. It comes off to me as if he's coming back as some sort of savior to the Python bot developer community. The points made in the original "deprecation" gist were also, at least in my opinion, greatly exaggerated. I can't really say I'm surprised, however. It seems like it's mostly always been this way with constant whining or drama from them when things didn't go their way.