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Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

249 points by bluetidepro 4y ago

bluetidepro 4y ago
I am personally very excited for this. While yes, we have gone full circle (as I'm sure many will point out), I do think this was missing from Discord for various use-cases. I'm excited to see servers I'm in evolve with this new feature.
- ronsor 4y ago
  Since we've come full circle, I'm now wondering what new chat thing will replace Discord later this decade.
  - wilsonnb3 4y ago
    Discord voice has finally become available on Xbox and Playstation support is coming soon. I think this is going to make it pretty difficult for potential Discord challengers to usurp it. Unless the competitor comes from a company with enough clout or money to convince Microsoft and Sony to support it.
- whateveracct 4y ago
  So Discord displaces forums..and then brings them back in a worse way (walled garden, in a web app, probably no search engine indexing because they aren't actually web pages)
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    Maybe the next evolution is something that's both good at being a forum and good at being interactive chat.
- tomtheelder 4y ago
  I think what people always miss in the "come full circle" bit is that it's usually "come full circle, but having integrated what we learned along the way." Discord took over due to the ability to have real or near-real time communication, and the vastly improved UX around a whole host of things. Discord was never intended/ to replace forums, that just happened because people started using in that way. Now they are recreating the forum experience with the addition of all of the learnings from having built discord. Should be good!
- matkoniecz 4y ago
  > we have gone full circle And ended with better interface and proprietary lock-in
aliqot 4y ago
Are they searchable and indexable? What made PHPBB and all that cool was that it'd turn up in search queries. As a hobbyist, this was an incredible wealth of information for me that has mostly dried up with the advent of walled gardens like slack, discord, etc. Some might point at BBS and IRC and say that those were the same, but I'd argue that they had lower volume, and less rich media, and I'd go one further to say that newsgroups were well indexed and searchable. We are in a 'dark decade' of lost history search-wise in some hobby communities.
- jhgg 4y ago
  There is talk about allowing public/discoverable servers to be indexed. I don't know when those plans might materialize, but it is very much top of mind for us that there is ever growing knowledge on Discord that isn't accessible via search indexes.
  - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
    This would be a huge boost in adoption! But how would it rank on google? At first there would be few to any links to content from discord.
    - gpm 4y ago
      That sounds like Google's problem? I imagine they'd figure it out pretty quickly given the size and popularity of discord.
    - SahAssar 4y ago
      I think with the amount of internal linking and original content it would start to rank pretty quickly. At least if the scrape algorithm makes any sense at all.
  - danudey 4y ago
    I'm already coming across more and more communities who say "For more information/to download the example files/to see our FAQ just join our Discord!", which is an immediate turnoff. I'm not going to "join a discord" just to see an FAQ or download some prerelease build or something else. Now even entire communities are going to move onto Discord and become completely unreachable for people like me who don't want to "join the community" just to read one post that one person wrote one time.
moepstar 4y ago
I wonder why information-heavy communities chose "knowledge storage" in the form of Discord. Example: i'm looking to build a PrintNC - they've got a really good Wiki, however with all the options i'm a tiny bit overwhelmed, especially since for newcomers like me, there's so much to wrap my head around... Anyways, if i could look up the answers to my questions very probably someone has asked before on a forum, i wouldn't have to join their Discord and use the (imho) subpar search to maybe find what i was looking for... So yeah, those kind of communities would be (again, IMHO) better served if they'd use a forum - especially since that knowledge also would be indexed by search engines.
- xena 4y ago
  People do it because Discord has a fundamentally better UX. It's bad for long term archival and the like, but it is an earth-shatteringly better UX than with traditional forum engines.
  - whateveracct 4y ago
    It's not actually that much better. It's mostly chat + sugar (aka good branding and emotes)
    - matkoniecz 4y ago
      Is there someone offering decent forum hosting for free?
      - whateveracct 4y ago
        Seems so - although forums also seem to gravitate towards slightly more self-hosted than Discord. Which is a feature in a way - own the domain and build something real. Discord basically won because of style over substance. I use it plenty because I don't have a choice. But there's nothing actually good about it besides the VC money they poured into going to market and branding.
        4y ago
ewuhic 4y ago
Maybe Discord could replace Confluence now?
resoluteteeth 4y ago
Didn't they add forum channels several months ago? Is this different? Or was it limited to certain servers and now they're rolling it out to everyone?
- nickthegreek 4y ago
  it was a beta feature before.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  They're not even rolling it out to everyone apparently, since you have to be a "community" server.
lapser 4y ago
Have we come full circle? Sounds like we have. Maybe next up is news groups.
- phatfish 4y ago
  Full circle to closed Cloud SaaS offerings where everyone is at the mercy of a corporation. Reddit has built the corporate version of Newsgroups already.
seydor 4y ago
How about FTP?
philippejara 4y ago
As long as their search feature continues being so monumentally terrible to the point where you can't even reliably search for specific words(and straight up is unable to search for exact strings[0]) I doubt any kind of forum-like usage will be pleasant. [0]: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360043045592-Exact-search https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600430...
- thrdbndndn 4y ago
  Discord's search definitely has lots of space for improvement, but it's already among the best in all these new IM services. For example, Telegram has it 10 times worse than Discord. It (roughly) can only search whole words, which basically means it doesn't work with East Asian languages at all (since they don't have spaces between words).
  - airstrike 4y ago
    Probably worth pointing out that Whatsapp has near perfect search. I can go into any group chat and search for words and quickly skip to some reference from 5 years ago, then reply to that message
- Night_Thastus 4y ago
  I've had the opposite experience. I've been thoroughly impressed with how I can search a word and find all instances of it going back months and months. It can do somewhat fuzzy searching too which is huge.
- acedTrex 4y ago
  Discord search? terrible? I've been ludicrously impressed with it over the years. one of my favorite discord features
josephd79 4y ago
so its just threads but a different view?
radiojasper 4y ago
All that, and still no photo gallery option... They added flicking through photo dumps, but thumbnailing them and putting them in a nice gallery is apparently still too hard.
- jhgg 4y ago
  This is actively being worked on right now actually :)
  - radiojasper 4y ago
    Oh for real? Thanks!
spankalee 4y ago
My OSS Project (Lit - at https://lit.dev https://lit.dev) just moved our community chat from Slack to Discord[1] and we couldn't be happier right now. one of the main reasons is the velocity that Discord is moving to add useful community oriented features like this. Assuming this means that Forum Channels are GA now, we're going to us them for our #ask-for-help channel to make them more organized and searchable. I think it's a great middle ground between Reddit / old-school forums and chats which are dominating the community space right now. Having both in one place (along with voice and video channels, and events) is awesome! btw, Discord's bot API is wonderful as well. We easily made a `/docs` bot that searches our Algolia site docs search index, shows results in Discord and lets the user choose a result to link to. It's great for answering questions. [1]: https://lit.dev/discord https://lit.dev/discord
- capableweb 4y ago
  Just a curious question: Why Discord instead of something like Zulip? I myself use both for different projects, but for OSS I tend to gravitate towards Zulip, and for closed-source ones Discord.
  - spankalee 4y ago
    In large part because it seems like just about every other OSS project is on Discord these days, and Discord makes it very easy to see all your servers at once and switch between them seamlessly. We're already seeing more activity even with only some users having migrated so far (it's only been a week for us). I looked into options a while back, and had also considered Matrix which seemed to fit with open-source a lot better, but it had a relative lack of features and momentum compared to Discord. Zulip seems more like Slack, and since we liked Discord's approach and feature set too, Zulip wasn't that appealing.
- danr4 4y ago
  The velocity????? Discord’s product has barely changed, they move so slow, but thanks to their market dominance no one has been able to compete
low_tech_punk 4y ago
A move against Reddit?
mdrzn 4y ago
Yoo they disrupted the old forums, and then add their own? No more phpBB or vBulletin, next they'll add BBS and news groups, can't wait.
capableweb 4y ago
Following the guide at https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-Forum-Channels-FAQ https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-... it seems I cannot add a "Forum Channel" to my own Discord channel. I only see the types "Text" and "Voice" when trying to add a new channel. Is this something that is rolling out over the next couple of days or should be possible? Seems strange to announce something before it completely rolled out to everyone, so thinking something is wrong with my setup.
- drewtato 4y ago
  I think this is a feature for community servers, so make sure you've converted yours to a community.
  - pteraspidomorph 4y ago
    Begs the question, why is this locked behind community mode? Most of what they add seems to be these days, and while in some cases it makes sense, in this case it does not.
    - TheFlyingFish 4y ago
      My guess is that a lot of small, tightly-knit (i.e. everybody knows everybody already) servers don't need or want all of the extra "community" stuff. Community features seem like they're mostly for managing loosely-knit communities that are big enough to need different trust levels, onboarding procedures, announcements etc. In fact, the Discord UI says as much: "Don't [convert your server to Community] if your server is just for you and a few friends. Community servers are for admins who are building larger spaces where people with shared interests can come together."
      - pteraspidomorph 4y ago
        I'm not sure any of that answers my question. If I don't want a public or large community I'm not supposed to convert to community, okay, but I can still want thread channels for organizing information. They aren't useless for small groups of people, and the same is true for some of the other community-locked features. And enabling community mode isn't necessarily the solution either. It comes with a bunch of dubious nonsense attached: > Scan media content from all members: this will scan all media sent in the server and delete any content that contains explicit content I don't trust an automated algorithm to make moderation decisions for me. > Rules or Guidelines Channel Useless in a private community. > Discord may check the contents of your server to make sure it’s safe! I don't need a paternalistic american tech company invisibly making judgement calls on what my private community does or doesn't do. https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047132851 https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047132851
Zopieux 4y ago
Google Wave finally found a new home.
angryasian 4y ago
I get discord is the hot thing but I find it to be so noisy. Maybe its because i'm old but I don't know how people are able to find relevant things. Its like slack on speed.
Kye 4y ago
Guilded had this a long time ago: https://support.guilded.gg/hc/en-us/articles/360040216933-Forums https://support.guilded.gg/hc/en-us/articles/360040216933-Fo... No one used them for the same reason Discord killed forums: realtime chat is better for most things people used forums for.
- asddubs 4y ago
  huh, is guilded basically just an exact replica of discord?
  - Kye 4y ago
    Early forum software copied features back and forth and often looked very similar. Modern PHPBB doesn't look much different from the original perl UBB, for example. Keeping the tradition alive.
    - asddubs 4y ago
      i'm pretty impressed by how close it is, at least from the screenshots. if you swapped out the logos for discord logos, there's no way I'd notice or even be able to tell you what's different if you told me
Siecje 4y ago
Why can't you discover Discord servers with less than 1 thousand users? IRC had this same discoverability problem, Discord can solve it. How do you grow a Discord server without having a community somewhere else?
candiddevmike 4y ago
When is Discord going to add advertisements?
phendrenad2 4y ago
I knew Discord would eventually try to become a forum. Every new communications paradigm tries to become all things to all people. Sadly, Discord will never be as good a forum as vbulletin/xenforo or even phpbb, and it'll lose some of it's focus elsewhere attempting to do so.
Night_Thastus 4y ago
I wish Discord had a better way to organize servers you're in. I'm in somewhere around a hundred, and have no proper way to categorize/sort/tree them. The best you have is top-level groups (which make the icons unreadably tiny) and that just isn't sufficient. Discord's UI acts like everyone is in all of 5 or so servers and that's it.
- nullwarp 4y ago
  Oh so much this. I find discord utterly impossible to use and keep up with. I'm in 8 servers, each one has a bunch of channels. I have no clue what's going on. Every time I log in I have to click through 8 servers and like 150 different channels. I've just given up and I'll just never use it again. Absolute dumpster fire.
emptysea 4y ago
I think it’s pretty common for open source projects and even companies to use a combination of Discord and Discourse. Discord entering the forum space makes a lot of sense. If they can figure out how to make the forums public / exposed to search engines then it could entirely remove the need for Discourse.
Prestoon 4y ago
Earlier discussion about Discord being a black hole for information https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30311982 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30311982
debacle 4y ago
Is Discord the "federated social media" that everyone has been looking for? How are they going to monetize?
- aaronax 4y ago
  It's not federated though...?
- grishka 4y ago
  No, it's as centralized as they ever come. The "servers" are a misnomer, really. That's what they call communities/workspaces for some reason. If you want federated social media, you're looking for Mastodon and other ActivityPub projects. I'm also building my own one.
- datalopers 4y ago
  Discord has a premium subscription tier and in 2021 did >$200M via that monetization strategy. https://discord.com/nitro https://discord.com/nitro
mizzao 4y ago
In terms of building a community to share and discuss information, would Reddit serve the same purpose as this, and if so would it be better or worse?
at_a_remove 4y ago
I wish they broke down and let people have the /ignore feature that they've been crying out for, instead of just having to rely on the very clumsy and comparatively loud blocking feature.
worble 4y ago
And then when Discord eventually folds all of this info will be lost, as it's not even easily archivable.
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  Meh, Internet Archive doesn’t meaningfully archive any dead forum either. It gets one page of one thread here and two pages of this other thread there. It’s basically unusable except to stimulate some nostalgia. So I don’t think Discord changes much in this regard.
BrainVirus 4y ago
I regret ever supporting Discord with Nitro subscription. At the time it seemed user-funded model would make them less dependent on external money. That simply didn't turn out to be the the case. They are obviously yet another wannabe big tech company based in California. Their privacy policy (and practices) is awful. They routinely suspend inconvenient servers without giving it a second thought. They've used gaming as a ticket to fame, but then scrubbed every mention of games from their UX after receiving $100M from a VC company. I've stopped using Discord for most purposes. For group chats I use Wire, which admittedly has much shittier UI, but it's free for small groups and E2E encrypts all conversations.
- shabbatt 4y ago
  What I hate more is more ppl are using discord as default support. IT moves to quick, and repeat questions and answers needs bot. It's easier for people to piss in the well because chat is so fleeting, can easily take conversations out of context with screenshots. I really miss the old school PHPBB forums which were "slower" and that was good for support from the vendor's point of view. Very few cases require real time staff chatting and available all the time. It seems to invite more trouble than its worth.
  - dmix 4y ago
    I don't think many people miss the dauys of PHBB in practice. Having to sign up for the hundred forum account, often needing admin approval before posting, etc.
    - shabbatt 4y ago
      actually many communities still using phpbb like nsxprime, ferrarichat i found that discussions were more civil, trolls were quickly purged and it was difficult for them to rejoin due to this admin wall. it created a nice garden effect against shill/ratioing where there is little to no barrier to creating mass number of accounts to impact opinions.
      - 4y ago
k__ 4y ago
Seems like a huge improvement over threads, which get lost all the time.
revskill 4y ago
Discord has unsuable registration feature. Lol, tried many times to register with username vs email and everything is a mess.
jmyeet 4y ago
Is Discord's UI/UX just hideously awful or is this just me? Here are a few highlights: - Icons for the servers you're on. I know what it's called. I don't know the name. Maybe there's a way to search for that? If so, it doesn't appear to be obvious; - Multiple places where you set settings; - You can create an alias for a given server but you have to do this manually. If you forget (or possibly people can see it anywhere) your identity is linked or can be leaked. Why is there no cohesive model for pseudonymity? - Searching and indexing. Nuff said; - Discord gives you a collection of essentially walled gardens. Personally I find this to be a subpar experience; - You can follow certain channels in another server. Or sometimes you can't. No idea why. Did the owner block it? I have no idea. Sometimes you just don't have the option and there's nothing to tell you why. Overall this is just a bad experience also; - Discord seems to be built for people who are terminally online on that server. People who see every chat message. If you're not in that category all you see is a hot mess with no direction; - Direct messages are another hot mess. Finding particular DMs or people can be a challenge. It's also used for spam and scams where servers haven't locked down the ability to DM other people on that server; - Discovery of servers is awful. You're relying on other sources for this in its entirety. So now we're having another communication model: forums. Great. Forums don't work for finding information. There's a reason why the likes of Reddit or even Stack Overflow supplanted forums: you can bubble up good comments or answers and skip all the noise that inevitably pollutes forums (eg "first!", "you shouldn't do X"). At least Discord has some authentication mechanisms to tie in with other platforms and the ability to make bots (note: I've never actually made one so I have no idea how easy or hard this is). Still, it's another embedded Chrome Electron bloatware nightmare. I've never understood the appeal. What am I missing? Because I'm sure I'm missing something.
- themagician 4y ago
  Its not you. It’s a disaster. I often wonder how something like this even came to be. For me the biggest issue is the most basic: the UI is a mix of random icons (some labeled and some not), text buttons and command line functions. But there is no rhyme or reason. It’s even difficult to explain how to do something. I imagine if you have a disability where you can’t use standard inputs or use a screen reader that Discord is, in fact, completely unusable.
dancemethis 4y ago
Oh, more ways to hoard user data and metadata and sell it.
datpuz 4y ago
I wonder if Discord will ever catch on in the corporate world. I use Slack for work and Discord for recreation. Is it just me, or does Discord just seem vastly superior to Slack? Slack is so tedious to navigate by comparison, especially when you have many channels with separate PMs in them. Discord just continues to get better in the right ways, but Slack just feels bloated with features that it takes too much effort to find what you need.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  I'm the same way. Slack for my day job and multiple Discord servers for my friend groups. I greatly prefer Discord over Slack (replies being one of the things I like most, stop trying to make ~~fetch~~ threads happen Slack). The only thing I wish Discord supported better are group chats (not on a server). They support them but there is no way to "pin" them to the main sidebar. In general I wish I had more control over the Discord sidebar (show specific channels and/or group chats).
- pie_flavor 4y ago
  The value of Slack is its integrations with dozens of business apps like Jira. They don't focus much on end user UX because that's not the point of it - they deliver straight business value. It wasn't until recently Discord bots were capable of much other than parsing chat messages and reactions for input, let alone the full menus google calendar puts into Slack. I'd love a Discord frontend to slack (see https://cancel.fm/ripcord https://cancel.fm/ripcord for a serious attempt at one) but Slack itself is not going away anytime soon.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  It's inevitable. Discord is still not profitable, and when it comes time to pay the bills with real money, they'll probably scramble to re-brand themselves with a boring name (maybe Coherence - the opposite of Discord) and try to capture some corporate clients. I can just hear the salespeople now: "We're just like Slack, only better!" (No mention of gamers anywhere).
- satiric 4y ago
  When slack had threads and discord didn't it was vastly superior, because without threads everything is a jumbled mess. I still find slack's threads implementation to be better.
gregwebs 4y ago
This seems closer to the Zulip model of chat, which I have always been a huge fan of (but forced to use Slack instead). I see open source projects using Discord. I ask a question and then it doesn't get answered and is lost in the chat. When a project uses forums via Discourse, information is much better organized.
RobotToaster 4y ago
What I don't get is why so many open source projects choose to use a closed source walled garden as their primary means of communication, it seems entirely counterethical to OSS.
- matkoniecz 4y ago
  It has really well designed UI and UX and for now is not intensively monetizing. (not saying that it is a good thing but Discourse, Telegram are awful, forums are horrible to maintain and so on)
ccleve 4y ago
I wonder that Discord doesn't use Discord for their own support forums: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us An example: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/5326426734615-Community-Features https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/532642... This looks a lot like Zendesk. Maybe they finally realize that long-term knowledge retention is a good thing.
yosito 4y ago
Great, Discord has reinvented forums in a walled garden with a gamified payment model.
- pie_flavor 4y ago
  There's no paywall at all. What are you talking about?
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    Try sending a big message or file over 8Mb.
    - TheAngush 4y ago
      What forums let you do that? Every forum I use (all based on Xenforo, admittedly) don't allow file uploads period, except for a small avatar. All other content must be embedded through external links. Which Discord also supports. Not sure where the paywalling of forum features is happening there.
jacooper 4y ago
Honestly I would rather just use Matrix. What they need now is just better clients, element needs to improve.
- Arathorn 4y ago
  We’re doing our best… https://element.io/blog/an-unrecognisable-improvement-elements-new-design-is-here/ https://element.io/blog/an-unrecognisable-improvement-elemen...
ilaksh 4y ago
"Hi, Discord, it looks like you are trying to take over the internet. Would you like another few hundred million so we can further centralize everything?"
alexb_ 4y ago
Is there ever going to be a way to do this that doesn't require all of my members to get verified email addresses and send every single message through automated content filters?

249 points by bluetidepro 4y ago

I am personally very excited for this. While yes, we have gone full circle (as I'm sure many will point out), I do think this was missing from Discord for various use-cases. I'm excited to see servers I'm in evolve with this new feature.

ronsor 4y ago
Since we've come full circle, I'm now wondering what new chat thing will replace Discord later this decade.
- wilsonnb3 4y ago
  Discord voice has finally become available on Xbox and Playstation support is coming soon. I think this is going to make it pretty difficult for potential Discord challengers to usurp it. Unless the competitor comes from a company with enough clout or money to convince Microsoft and Sony to support it.
whateveracct 4y ago
So Discord displaces forums..and then brings them back in a worse way (walled garden, in a web app, probably no search engine indexing because they aren't actually web pages)
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  Maybe the next evolution is something that's both good at being a forum and good at being interactive chat.
tomtheelder 4y ago
I think what people always miss in the "come full circle" bit is that it's usually "come full circle, but having integrated what we learned along the way." Discord took over due to the ability to have real or near-real time communication, and the vastly improved UX around a whole host of things. Discord was never intended/ to replace forums, that just happened because people started using in that way. Now they are recreating the forum experience with the addition of all of the learnings from having built discord. Should be good!
matkoniecz 4y ago
> we have gone full circle And ended with better interface and proprietary lock-in

aliqot 4y ago

Are they searchable and indexable? What made PHPBB and all that cool was that it'd turn up in search queries. As a hobbyist, this was an incredible wealth of information for me that has mostly dried up with the advent of walled gardens like slack, discord, etc. Some might point at BBS and IRC and say that those were the same, but I'd argue that they had lower volume, and less rich media, and I'd go one further to say that newsgroups were well indexed and searchable. We are in a 'dark decade' of lost history search-wise in some hobby communities.

jhgg 4y ago
There is talk about allowing public/discoverable servers to be indexed. I don't know when those plans might materialize, but it is very much top of mind for us that there is ever growing knowledge on Discord that isn't accessible via search indexes.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  This would be a huge boost in adoption! But how would it rank on google? At first there would be few to any links to content from discord.
  - gpm 4y ago
    That sounds like Google's problem? I imagine they'd figure it out pretty quickly given the size and popularity of discord.
  - SahAssar 4y ago
    I think with the amount of internal linking and original content it would start to rank pretty quickly. At least if the scrape algorithm makes any sense at all.
- danudey 4y ago
  I'm already coming across more and more communities who say "For more information/to download the example files/to see our FAQ just join our Discord!", which is an immediate turnoff. I'm not going to "join a discord" just to see an FAQ or download some prerelease build or something else. Now even entire communities are going to move onto Discord and become completely unreachable for people like me who don't want to "join the community" just to read one post that one person wrote one time.

moepstar 4y ago

I wonder why information-heavy communities chose "knowledge storage" in the form of Discord. Example: i'm looking to build a PrintNC - they've got a really good Wiki, however with all the options i'm a tiny bit overwhelmed, especially since for newcomers like me, there's so much to wrap my head around... Anyways, if i could look up the answers to my questions very probably someone has asked before on a forum, i wouldn't have to join their Discord and use the (imho) subpar search to maybe find what i was looking for... So yeah, those kind of communities would be (again, IMHO) better served if they'd use a forum - especially since that knowledge also would be indexed by search engines.

xena 4y ago
People do it because Discord has a fundamentally better UX. It's bad for long term archival and the like, but it is an earth-shatteringly better UX than with traditional forum engines.
- whateveracct 4y ago
  It's not actually that much better. It's mostly chat + sugar (aka good branding and emotes)
  - matkoniecz 4y ago
    Is there someone offering decent forum hosting for free?
    - whateveracct 4y ago
      Seems so - although forums also seem to gravitate towards slightly more self-hosted than Discord. Which is a feature in a way - own the domain and build something real. Discord basically won because of style over substance. I use it plenty because I don't have a choice. But there's nothing actually good about it besides the VC money they poured into going to market and branding.
      - 4y ago

ewuhic 4y ago

Maybe Discord could replace Confluence now?

resoluteteeth 4y ago

Didn't they add forum channels several months ago? Is this different? Or was it limited to certain servers and now they're rolling it out to everyone?

nickthegreek 4y ago
it was a beta feature before.
Dylan16807 4y ago
They're not even rolling it out to everyone apparently, since you have to be a "community" server.

lapser 4y ago

Have we come full circle? Sounds like we have. Maybe next up is news groups.

phatfish 4y ago
Full circle to closed Cloud SaaS offerings where everyone is at the mercy of a corporation. Reddit has built the corporate version of Newsgroups already.

seydor 4y ago

How about FTP?

philippejara 4y ago

As long as their search feature continues being so monumentally terrible to the point where you can't even reliably search for specific words(and straight up is unable to search for exact strings[0]) I doubt any kind of forum-like usage will be pleasant. [0]: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360043045592-Exact-search https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600430...

thrdbndndn 4y ago
Discord's search definitely has lots of space for improvement, but it's already among the best in all these new IM services. For example, Telegram has it 10 times worse than Discord. It (roughly) can only search whole words, which basically means it doesn't work with East Asian languages at all (since they don't have spaces between words).
- airstrike 4y ago
  Probably worth pointing out that Whatsapp has near perfect search. I can go into any group chat and search for words and quickly skip to some reference from 5 years ago, then reply to that message
Night_Thastus 4y ago
I've had the opposite experience. I've been thoroughly impressed with how I can search a word and find all instances of it going back months and months. It can do somewhat fuzzy searching too which is huge.
acedTrex 4y ago
Discord search? terrible? I've been ludicrously impressed with it over the years. one of my favorite discord features

josephd79 4y ago

so its just threads but a different view?

radiojasper 4y ago

All that, and still no photo gallery option... They added flicking through photo dumps, but thumbnailing them and putting them in a nice gallery is apparently still too hard.

jhgg 4y ago
This is actively being worked on right now actually :)
- radiojasper 4y ago
  Oh for real? Thanks!

spankalee 4y ago

My OSS Project (Lit - at https://lit.dev https://lit.dev) just moved our community chat from Slack to Discord[1] and we couldn't be happier right now. one of the main reasons is the velocity that Discord is moving to add useful community oriented features like this. Assuming this means that Forum Channels are GA now, we're going to us them for our #ask-for-help channel to make them more organized and searchable. I think it's a great middle ground between Reddit / old-school forums and chats which are dominating the community space right now. Having both in one place (along with voice and video channels, and events) is awesome! btw, Discord's bot API is wonderful as well. We easily made a `/docs` bot that searches our Algolia site docs search index, shows results in Discord and lets the user choose a result to link to. It's great for answering questions. [1]: https://lit.dev/discord https://lit.dev/discord

capableweb 4y ago
Just a curious question: Why Discord instead of something like Zulip? I myself use both for different projects, but for OSS I tend to gravitate towards Zulip, and for closed-source ones Discord.
- spankalee 4y ago
  In large part because it seems like just about every other OSS project is on Discord these days, and Discord makes it very easy to see all your servers at once and switch between them seamlessly. We're already seeing more activity even with only some users having migrated so far (it's only been a week for us). I looked into options a while back, and had also considered Matrix which seemed to fit with open-source a lot better, but it had a relative lack of features and momentum compared to Discord. Zulip seems more like Slack, and since we liked Discord's approach and feature set too, Zulip wasn't that appealing.
danr4 4y ago
The velocity????? Discord’s product has barely changed, they move so slow, but thanks to their market dominance no one has been able to compete

low_tech_punk 4y ago

A move against Reddit?

mdrzn 4y ago

Yoo they disrupted the old forums, and then add their own? No more phpBB or vBulletin, next they'll add BBS and news groups, can't wait.

capableweb 4y ago

Following the guide at https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-Forum-Channels-FAQ https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-... it seems I cannot add a "Forum Channel" to my own Discord channel. I only see the types "Text" and "Voice" when trying to add a new channel. Is this something that is rolling out over the next couple of days or should be possible? Seems strange to announce something before it completely rolled out to everyone, so thinking something is wrong with my setup.

drewtato 4y ago
I think this is a feature for community servers, so make sure you've converted yours to a community.
- pteraspidomorph 4y ago
  Begs the question, why is this locked behind community mode? Most of what they add seems to be these days, and while in some cases it makes sense, in this case it does not.
  - TheFlyingFish 4y ago
    My guess is that a lot of small, tightly-knit (i.e. everybody knows everybody already) servers don't need or want all of the extra "community" stuff. Community features seem like they're mostly for managing loosely-knit communities that are big enough to need different trust levels, onboarding procedures, announcements etc. In fact, the Discord UI says as much: "Don't [convert your server to Community] if your server is just for you and a few friends. Community servers are for admins who are building larger spaces where people with shared interests can come together."
    - pteraspidomorph 4y ago
      I'm not sure any of that answers my question. If I don't want a public or large community I'm not supposed to convert to community, okay, but I can still want thread channels for organizing information. They aren't useless for small groups of people, and the same is true for some of the other community-locked features. And enabling community mode isn't necessarily the solution either. It comes with a bunch of dubious nonsense attached: > Scan media content from all members: this will scan all media sent in the server and delete any content that contains explicit content I don't trust an automated algorithm to make moderation decisions for me. > Rules or Guidelines Channel Useless in a private community. > Discord may check the contents of your server to make sure it’s safe! I don't need a paternalistic american tech company invisibly making judgement calls on what my private community does or doesn't do. https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047132851 https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047132851

Zopieux 4y ago

Google Wave finally found a new home.

angryasian 4y ago

I get discord is the hot thing but I find it to be so noisy. Maybe its because i'm old but I don't know how people are able to find relevant things. Its like slack on speed.

Kye 4y ago

Guilded had this a long time ago: https://support.guilded.gg/hc/en-us/articles/360040216933-Forums https://support.guilded.gg/hc/en-us/articles/360040216933-Fo... No one used them for the same reason Discord killed forums: realtime chat is better for most things people used forums for.

asddubs 4y ago
huh, is guilded basically just an exact replica of discord?
- Kye 4y ago
  Early forum software copied features back and forth and often looked very similar. Modern PHPBB doesn't look much different from the original perl UBB, for example. Keeping the tradition alive.
  - asddubs 4y ago
    i'm pretty impressed by how close it is, at least from the screenshots. if you swapped out the logos for discord logos, there's no way I'd notice or even be able to tell you what's different if you told me

Siecje 4y ago

Why can't you discover Discord servers with less than 1 thousand users? IRC had this same discoverability problem, Discord can solve it. How do you grow a Discord server without having a community somewhere else?

candiddevmike 4y ago

When is Discord going to add advertisements?

phendrenad2 4y ago

I knew Discord would eventually try to become a forum. Every new communications paradigm tries to become all things to all people. Sadly, Discord will never be as good a forum as vbulletin/xenforo or even phpbb, and it'll lose some of it's focus elsewhere attempting to do so.

Night_Thastus 4y ago

I wish Discord had a better way to organize servers you're in. I'm in somewhere around a hundred, and have no proper way to categorize/sort/tree them. The best you have is top-level groups (which make the icons unreadably tiny) and that just isn't sufficient. Discord's UI acts like everyone is in all of 5 or so servers and that's it.

nullwarp 4y ago
Oh so much this. I find discord utterly impossible to use and keep up with. I'm in 8 servers, each one has a bunch of channels. I have no clue what's going on. Every time I log in I have to click through 8 servers and like 150 different channels. I've just given up and I'll just never use it again. Absolute dumpster fire.

emptysea 4y ago

I think it’s pretty common for open source projects and even companies to use a combination of Discord and Discourse. Discord entering the forum space makes a lot of sense. If they can figure out how to make the forums public / exposed to search engines then it could entirely remove the need for Discourse.

Prestoon 4y ago

Earlier discussion about Discord being a black hole for information https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30311982 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30311982

debacle 4y ago

Is Discord the "federated social media" that everyone has been looking for? How are they going to monetize?

aaronax 4y ago
It's not federated though...?
grishka 4y ago
No, it's as centralized as they ever come. The "servers" are a misnomer, really. That's what they call communities/workspaces for some reason. If you want federated social media, you're looking for Mastodon and other ActivityPub projects. I'm also building my own one.
datalopers 4y ago
Discord has a premium subscription tier and in 2021 did >$200M via that monetization strategy. https://discord.com/nitro https://discord.com/nitro

mizzao 4y ago

In terms of building a community to share and discuss information, would Reddit serve the same purpose as this, and if so would it be better or worse?

at_a_remove 4y ago

I wish they broke down and let people have the /ignore feature that they've been crying out for, instead of just having to rely on the very clumsy and comparatively loud blocking feature.

worble 4y ago

And then when Discord eventually folds all of this info will be lost, as it's not even easily archivable.

hombre_fatal 4y ago
Meh, Internet Archive doesn’t meaningfully archive any dead forum either. It gets one page of one thread here and two pages of this other thread there. It’s basically unusable except to stimulate some nostalgia. So I don’t think Discord changes much in this regard.

BrainVirus 4y ago

I regret ever supporting Discord with Nitro subscription. At the time it seemed user-funded model would make them less dependent on external money. That simply didn't turn out to be the the case. They are obviously yet another wannabe big tech company based in California. Their privacy policy (and practices) is awful. They routinely suspend inconvenient servers without giving it a second thought. They've used gaming as a ticket to fame, but then scrubbed every mention of games from their UX after receiving $100M from a VC company. I've stopped using Discord for most purposes. For group chats I use Wire, which admittedly has much shittier UI, but it's free for small groups and E2E encrypts all conversations.

shabbatt 4y ago
What I hate more is more ppl are using discord as default support. IT moves to quick, and repeat questions and answers needs bot. It's easier for people to piss in the well because chat is so fleeting, can easily take conversations out of context with screenshots. I really miss the old school PHPBB forums which were "slower" and that was good for support from the vendor's point of view. Very few cases require real time staff chatting and available all the time. It seems to invite more trouble than its worth.
- dmix 4y ago
  I don't think many people miss the dauys of PHBB in practice. Having to sign up for the hundred forum account, often needing admin approval before posting, etc.
  - shabbatt 4y ago
    actually many communities still using phpbb like nsxprime, ferrarichat i found that discussions were more civil, trolls were quickly purged and it was difficult for them to rejoin due to this admin wall. it created a nice garden effect against shill/ratioing where there is little to no barrier to creating mass number of accounts to impact opinions.
    - 4y ago

k__ 4y ago

Seems like a huge improvement over threads, which get lost all the time.

revskill 4y ago

Discord has unsuable registration feature. Lol, tried many times to register with username vs email and everything is a mess.

jmyeet 4y ago

Is Discord's UI/UX just hideously awful or is this just me? Here are a few highlights: - Icons for the servers you're on. I know what it's called. I don't know the name. Maybe there's a way to search for that? If so, it doesn't appear to be obvious; - Multiple places where you set settings; - You can create an alias for a given server but you have to do this manually. If you forget (or possibly people can see it anywhere) your identity is linked or can be leaked. Why is there no cohesive model for pseudonymity? - Searching and indexing. Nuff said; - Discord gives you a collection of essentially walled gardens. Personally I find this to be a subpar experience; - You can follow certain channels in another server. Or sometimes you can't. No idea why. Did the owner block it? I have no idea. Sometimes you just don't have the option and there's nothing to tell you why. Overall this is just a bad experience also; - Discord seems to be built for people who are terminally online on that server. People who see every chat message. If you're not in that category all you see is a hot mess with no direction; - Direct messages are another hot mess. Finding particular DMs or people can be a challenge. It's also used for spam and scams where servers haven't locked down the ability to DM other people on that server; - Discovery of servers is awful. You're relying on other sources for this in its entirety. So now we're having another communication model: forums. Great. Forums don't work for finding information. There's a reason why the likes of Reddit or even Stack Overflow supplanted forums: you can bubble up good comments or answers and skip all the noise that inevitably pollutes forums (eg "first!", "you shouldn't do X"). At least Discord has some authentication mechanisms to tie in with other platforms and the ability to make bots (note: I've never actually made one so I have no idea how easy or hard this is). Still, it's another embedded Chrome Electron bloatware nightmare. I've never understood the appeal. What am I missing? Because I'm sure I'm missing something.

themagician 4y ago
Its not you. It’s a disaster. I often wonder how something like this even came to be. For me the biggest issue is the most basic: the UI is a mix of random icons (some labeled and some not), text buttons and command line functions. But there is no rhyme or reason. It’s even difficult to explain how to do something. I imagine if you have a disability where you can’t use standard inputs or use a screen reader that Discord is, in fact, completely unusable.

dancemethis 4y ago

Oh, more ways to hoard user data and metadata and sell it.

datpuz 4y ago

I wonder if Discord will ever catch on in the corporate world. I use Slack for work and Discord for recreation. Is it just me, or does Discord just seem vastly superior to Slack? Slack is so tedious to navigate by comparison, especially when you have many channels with separate PMs in them. Discord just continues to get better in the right ways, but Slack just feels bloated with features that it takes too much effort to find what you need.

joshstrange 4y ago
I'm the same way. Slack for my day job and multiple Discord servers for my friend groups. I greatly prefer Discord over Slack (replies being one of the things I like most, stop trying to make ~~fetch~~ threads happen Slack). The only thing I wish Discord supported better are group chats (not on a server). They support them but there is no way to "pin" them to the main sidebar. In general I wish I had more control over the Discord sidebar (show specific channels and/or group chats).
pie_flavor 4y ago
The value of Slack is its integrations with dozens of business apps like Jira. They don't focus much on end user UX because that's not the point of it - they deliver straight business value. It wasn't until recently Discord bots were capable of much other than parsing chat messages and reactions for input, let alone the full menus google calendar puts into Slack. I'd love a Discord frontend to slack (see https://cancel.fm/ripcord https://cancel.fm/ripcord for a serious attempt at one) but Slack itself is not going away anytime soon.
phendrenad2 4y ago
It's inevitable. Discord is still not profitable, and when it comes time to pay the bills with real money, they'll probably scramble to re-brand themselves with a boring name (maybe Coherence - the opposite of Discord) and try to capture some corporate clients. I can just hear the salespeople now: "We're just like Slack, only better!" (No mention of gamers anywhere).
satiric 4y ago
When slack had threads and discord didn't it was vastly superior, because without threads everything is a jumbled mess. I still find slack's threads implementation to be better.

gregwebs 4y ago

This seems closer to the Zulip model of chat, which I have always been a huge fan of (but forced to use Slack instead). I see open source projects using Discord. I ask a question and then it doesn't get answered and is lost in the chat. When a project uses forums via Discourse, information is much better organized.

RobotToaster 4y ago

What I don't get is why so many open source projects choose to use a closed source walled garden as their primary means of communication, it seems entirely counterethical to OSS.

matkoniecz 4y ago
It has really well designed UI and UX and for now is not intensively monetizing. (not saying that it is a good thing but Discourse, Telegram are awful, forums are horrible to maintain and so on)

ccleve 4y ago

I wonder that Discord doesn't use Discord for their own support forums: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us An example: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/5326426734615-Community-Features https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/532642... This looks a lot like Zendesk. Maybe they finally realize that long-term knowledge retention is a good thing.

yosito 4y ago

Great, Discord has reinvented forums in a walled garden with a gamified payment model.

pie_flavor 4y ago
There's no paywall at all. What are you talking about?
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  Try sending a big message or file over 8Mb.
  - TheAngush 4y ago
    What forums let you do that? Every forum I use (all based on Xenforo, admittedly) don't allow file uploads period, except for a small avatar. All other content must be embedded through external links. Which Discord also supports. Not sure where the paywalling of forum features is happening there.

jacooper 4y ago

Honestly I would rather just use Matrix. What they need now is just better clients, element needs to improve.

Arathorn 4y ago
We’re doing our best… https://element.io/blog/an-unrecognisable-improvement-elements-new-design-is-here/ https://element.io/blog/an-unrecognisable-improvement-elemen...

ilaksh 4y ago

"Hi, Discord, it looks like you are trying to take over the internet. Would you like another few hundred million so we can further centralize everything?"

alexb_ 4y ago

Is there ever going to be a way to do this that doesn't require all of my members to get verified email addresses and send every single message through automated content filters?