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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 goo

• 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.
        • nemothekid 4y ago
          >Discord basically won because of style over substance. I use it plenty because I don't have a choice. This is incredibly reductive. You don't use it because "you don't have a choice", you use it because it's the best. If there was another option out there people would use it. There are plenty of choices out there; you go set up a self-hosted phpBB forum; try to maintain a live community on there; and moderate it. Or forget phpBB, try Discourse. When you say Discord is "Style over substance" you willfully ignore all the downsides about forums that caused people to migrate to Discord/Slack in the first place. We will never have robust forum software as long as people continue to believe that the reason Discord is as popular is it is is because of "VC marketing dollars".
          • GekkePrutser 4y ago
            > This is incredibly reductive. You don't use it because "you don't have a choice", you use it because it's the best. Not always. I hate discord with a passion because I don't want to be data mined by some corporate walled garden. Unfortunately some open source projects have taken the decision to use it so I have to in order to communicate with them. Home Assistant being the most notable one for me. It's a really poor choice for this IMO, matrix is so much better and you can use any client you want.
            • Qualadore 4y ago
              In my experience when I see an open-source community use something like Zulip, Glitter, Matrix, or Slack it seems inactive relative to an equivalent hypothetical Discord community. I think this outweighs the privacy concerns. Discord's biggest advantage in my eyes is that it makes it easy to build a critical mass of users. This makes it easy for newcomers to get answers to questions quickly.
              • dancemethis 4y ago
                It doesn't. You are the one heavily devaluating the need of privacy.
            • 4y ago
      • judge2020 4y ago
        It's not free hosting, but Discourse is quite popular for server admins that want a modern-looking design and it can be easily ran on a big box with docker-compose. If the admins have the cash, discourse does offer hosting[0], with companies like Cloudflare doing so[1]. 0: https://www.discourse.org/pricing https://www.discourse.org/pricing 1: https://community.cloudflare.com/ https://community.cloudflare.com/
        • joemi 4y ago
          I'll take a Discourse forum over a Discord any day (though I haven't tried Discord's new forum feature). Discourse is an evolution of a forum, while (until now maybe) Discord is an evolution of IRC. Huge difference.
        • matkoniecz 4y ago
          > it can be easily ran on a big box with docker-compose And Discord "server" can be setup within several seconds via GUI. Sadly, only for tiny minority really aware of vendor lock-in it will be preferable to setup Discourse.
    • boredtofears 4y ago
      Strong disagree. Usability and improved UX isn't sugar.
    • tyrfing 4y ago
      It took over like wildfire because it had 10x better UX than any combination of alternatives - and you definitely needed a combination to match the features. Start with the fact that it's not just chat, but also video, voice, and includes things like multimedia uploads that are a modern baseline, but still absent from many other services.
  • secabeen 4y ago
    Forcing each question to be asked fresh also eliminates out-of-date replies. I often run into answers on forum archives that no longer work because the fast-moving software they are regarding has changed.
  • grishka 4y ago
    Huh? Discord has really poor UX compared to other IM services I use, like Telegram. Notification settings are so complex that it takes trial, error, and missed important messages to end up with a sensible configuration (no broadcast mentions in any shape or form, no badges unless I'm mentioned by my own username or there's a reply to my message). Every little piece of its UI is custom-built and routinely defies my expectations about how UI controls should behave. Just a few examples of my pain points with Discord: - They somehow managed to mess up the message text field so much that my system-wide text replacements don't work. They work literally everywhere else. - When I want to add a reaction to a message, there's an emoji picker. It shows custom emoji FIRST, and it shows custom emoji from ALL "servers" I'm a member of. It takes actual time for something that should be a nearly-instant interaction. - There are no last seen statuses when a user is offline. - The files. Need I say more? Not only does that 8 MB limit feel like an insult in this day and age, so does Discord's insistence on always storing the original files as-is. OK for images, but I sometimes have to send screencasts, and you never know what size it even is. I end up having to upload them somewhere else and then send a link. Your files are too powerful, my ass. And, yes, it's Electron, and at this point I'm convinced that an Electron app just can't possibly be good, no matter how hard you try and how good your engineers are.
    • entropie 4y ago
      Discords notifications are actually are nightmare. I still have a single (1) on my direct messages link and I cannot figure out (since like 2 month) where it comes from. And that all after I had a little red dot in the taskbar discord icon for like a year which I somehow managed to get rid of. Overall its usability is okay for me, but there are really some big quirks.
      • grishka 4y ago
        > I still have a single (1) on my direct messages link and I cannot figure out Maybe it's a friend request? > And that all after I had a little red dot in the taskbar discord icon for like a year which I somehow managed to get rid of. This is the most annoying thing. I think it means you have "some" unread messages. A single message in any of the 100s of channels in a dozen "servers" you're in will trigger that with default notification settings.
  • jotm 4y ago
    Suuuure, earth shattering.
• tomtheelder 4y ago
  It's because people get a really large amount of value out of real (or near-real) time discussion- in many cases more than they get out of archival reference. Forums slow down the interaction time drastically. I'm plenty old enough to remember using forums and subsequently switching to chat, and the ability to work through things and problem solve increased massively. Not being able to find things later is, well, a problem for later, so it gets deprioritized vs the problems of now. This forum channels thing might be a middle ground that gives the possibility of free flowing interactions but with structure, and indexing as a possibility.
  • derefr 4y ago
    > Not being able to find things later is, well, a problem for later, so it gets deprioritized vs the problems of now. Who said anything about finding things later? I want a forum because, for niche topics/questions, slow+indexed is the only way to hope anyone will be able to answer my question at all. I can ask a question on a forum and maybe be answered a week later, by someone who's looking through older open threads under the expectation that they can still be of help; or I can ask a question in a chatroom and the people who know aren't online, chat continues, when they come online they've missed it, and so I get my response never. It's a key difference in assumptions, mostly due to different etiquette. When you solve a problem you asked about in a forum thread, you tend to say that. So a forum thread that remains open with no replies is effectively "left hanging", with the author still likely to be interested in an answer. So, for the people who offer help in such forums, there can be value in looking through old open forum threads / solving "cold cases." Meanwhile, chat messages are sort of "drive-by" things, where you'll write a thing, and then, if nobody responds, leave and never come back. You were hoping for an immediate response; you didn't get it; so you gave up. There's no expectation of someone ever coming back, or seeing a response given much later; so people don't try to offer them.
    • moepstar 4y ago
      ...as well as the tiring dance of having to explain things over and over and... In an ideal world, if i haven't found an answer from a previous thread on my own, i could be gently nudged into the right direction. Mind you, i've been around on IRC for a very long time and know how tiring it can get to basically get asked the same question in different form all the time (and "having" to answer it).
• spywaregorilla 4y ago
  I think discord is a very good knowledge storage channel for newbies who are too novice to even form their questions coherently and need help to do so. Though it is taxing to help them and takes a lot of patience.
• matkoniecz 4y ago
  Is it possible to setup within two minutes forum that will be hosted for free and has decent interface with minimal ads (to the point that many will not recognize them as ads)? Right now Discord has great usability and many people have Discord accounts.
  • shagie 4y ago
    Does GitHub discussions fill those requirements reasonably? https://docs.github.com/en/discussions https://docs.github.com/en/discussions An example of this - https://github.com/nodejs/node/discussions https://github.com/nodejs/node/discussions
    • Kye 4y ago
      Discord has almost twice the active users and probably not a great deal of overlap with GitHub. And people won't necessarily want to join a community they would join on one with an account made on the other.
      • cowtools 4y ago
        I get the impression that discord users are mostly children and not programmers. While there might be some overlap as discord users grow up and decide to keep their discord account, I'm guessing that even in that case they will have a separate github/gitlab/whatever account for their professional or unprofessional programming.
        • gorbypark 4y ago
          There are a ton of very active programming related channels, mostly for open source projects. It's quickly replacing freenode as the place to go to chat about projects (love it or hate it). In fact, it's markdown support for code blocks is unmatched (imo and compared to Slack/Teams/etc) and is actually very nice to use as a place to discuss programming.
    • RobotToaster 4y ago
• babypuncher 4y ago
  Discord has a low barrier to entry and continued use. With a single account, I can join a dozen communities and easily stay up to date with them, and get an instant notification on my phone or desktop when someone answers a question I asked in any of them. To do the same with a dozen phpbb communities, I need to create a dozen accounts and track each site individually.
  • pier25 4y ago
    > easily stay up to date with them How do you stay up to date when there are thousands and thousands of messages generated per day or even per hour?
    • matkoniecz 4y ago
      Aggressive muting of channels and servers.
    • babypuncher 4y ago
      You can control what triggers a notification on a per-server and even per-channel basis. For most big servers, I have everything set to mute except for when people @ me directly or respond to one of my messages.
• donkeybeer 4y ago
  And if you are kicked you can't access any of it, including your own content you wrote there.
  • StuckDuck 4y ago
    Yep, and that's the story of how I lost years worth of discussions and chats because Discord thought well that linking a phone number doesn't automatically allow you to verify yourself with it.
• pier25 4y ago
  > I wonder why information-heavy communities chose "knowledge storage" in the form of Discord. They don't. Obviously chats are not knowledge storages but a means for quick communication. I think chats like Gitter, Slack, and Discord proliferated because the realtime thing makes people feel differently vs async communication. But, like Discord realized, chats are just terrible tools for communities built around learning and solving problems (like dev communities around a tech project). There's no collective learning anymore, no stored knowledge, etc. And the problem gets worse as a community grows.