4 ms·

In the past month I've stopped using discord entirely. I find myself feeling alarmed at the realization of not only what a black box it is, but at the effect it

by rnd0 4y ago

In the past month I've stopped using discord entirely. I find myself feeling alarmed at the realization of not only what a black box it is, but at the effect it's having on the archiving, the retention of information and know-how. It's not only easy to anticipate people looking back 20 years or so from now and saying "and then people moved to Discord, and we have no idea wtf happened after that" or even "dispite being connected through facebook and reddit, there seems to have been a general drop in shared knowlege for reasons unknown to us..." This is a known problem, I'm not saying anything new but it's amazing (to me, at least) to see just how stark the problem is after having left discord...

raxxorraxor 4y ago
I mean the service of discord is good, I use it too from time to time. But for building knowledge it is pretty bad. It is a black hole that sucks in all the content users have talked about. I see some startup developers exclusively using it and the numbers of their communities pretty much stagnate because they don't have a presence anywhere else. Reddit is also flawed but at least it can be indexed by crawlers. That offers a lot of advantages. Joining a new channel is quite a lot of work since you jump into discussions without context. There is a lot of loss on the way. As I said, IRC had the same problems but the scope was a lot smaller since it was always flanked by forums and other platforms. Within corporations with Slack and Teams there are similar effects. Yes, communication is effective but only on a very short term.
didericis 4y ago
I have an archiving/notes/forum tool I’ve been working on to try to solve this, noticed this problem a long time ago. I’ve gone through a couple iterations I’ve just tested on myself, intend to release it for wider testing/feedback in the near future. The goal is to make it as low friction as possible to share, link, and edit text snippets and raw files in a big graph. It’s similar to obsidian but I’m focusing more on mobile and creating something that allows for interrelated knowledge graphs.

by rnd0 4y ago

raxxorraxor 4y ago

I mean the service of discord is good, I use it too from time to time. But for building knowledge it is pretty bad. It is a black hole that sucks in all the content users have talked about. I see some startup developers exclusively using it and the numbers of their communities pretty much stagnate because they don't have a presence anywhere else. Reddit is also flawed but at least it can be indexed by crawlers. That offers a lot of advantages. Joining a new channel is quite a lot of work since you jump into discussions without context. There is a lot of loss on the way. As I said, IRC had the same problems but the scope was a lot smaller since it was always flanked by forums and other platforms. Within corporations with Slack and Teams there are similar effects. Yes, communication is effective but only on a very short term.

didericis 4y ago

I have an archiving/notes/forum tool I’ve been working on to try to solve this, noticed this problem a long time ago. I’ve gone through a couple iterations I’ve just tested on myself, intend to release it for wider testing/feedback in the near future. The goal is to make it as low friction as possible to share, link, and edit text snippets and raw files in a big graph. It’s similar to obsidian but I’m focusing more on mobile and creating something that allows for interrelated knowledge graphs.