4 ms·

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 tr

by 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.
        nemothekid 4y ago
        >I hate discord with a passion because I don't want to be data mined by some corporate walled garden. So your disdain for discord has nothing to do with user experience, ease of use, UI, or anything else someone might consider when actually using the product, but it has to do with the ethics of the hosting company. I can say I hate Porsche because they benefitted from Nazi regime and I will never drive one for that reason, but I'm not going to try to assert that the Ford Pinto is a better car than the 911.
        GekkePrutser 4y ago
        Yes, "better" means different things to different people. But Porsche's history is just that, history. If a Porsche 911 would send all my data to Porsche it would not be a very good car in my eyes. I don't think the UI of Matrix is meaningfully different than the one from Discord though. It's a bit like clothing IMO. Mainstream users are very brand-sensitive. They buy Nike shoes not because they're good quality but because it says Nike on them. I bet it works the same way with services.
    - jhgg 4y ago
      All the marketing in the world isn't going to move the needle if your product doesn't solve a problem or offer a better experience for users. To say that the success of discord was due to "pouring VC money into marketing" completely misses the whole "we also spent a lot of time and effort to build a product that was better than what was out there and solved a problem for our users."
  - 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.

by 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.
      - nemothekid 4y ago
        >I hate discord with a passion because I don't want to be data mined by some corporate walled garden. So your disdain for discord has nothing to do with user experience, ease of use, UI, or anything else someone might consider when actually using the product, but it has to do with the ethics of the hosting company. I can say I hate Porsche because they benefitted from Nazi regime and I will never drive one for that reason, but I'm not going to try to assert that the Ford Pinto is a better car than the 911.
        GekkePrutser 4y ago
        Yes, "better" means different things to different people. But Porsche's history is just that, history. If a Porsche 911 would send all my data to Porsche it would not be a very good car in my eyes. I don't think the UI of Matrix is meaningfully different than the one from Discord though. It's a bit like clothing IMO. Mainstream users are very brand-sensitive. They buy Nike shoes not because they're good quality but because it says Nike on them. I bet it works the same way with services.
  - jhgg 4y ago
    All the marketing in the world isn't going to move the needle if your product doesn't solve a problem or offer a better experience for users. To say that the success of discord was due to "pouring VC money into marketing" completely misses the whole "we also spent a lot of time and effort to build a product that was better than what was out there and solved a problem for our users."
- 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.