7 ms·

Discord, or the Death of Lore

587 points by pabs3 4y ago

hernantz 4y ago
I often think that I would be a best practice for slack/discord to auto delete messages after 2 weeks, that would enforce the idea that they are really ephemeral
milsorgen 4y ago
What a well written description of a looming large problem. A great read.
acedTrex 4y ago
https://www.answeroverflow.com/ https://www.answeroverflow.com/ Cool bot looking to help with this problem.
- xtracto 4y ago
  I was thinking of something like this. Maybe have a bot that automatically archives and uploads everything to some site? To archive.org maybe?
coldacid 4y ago
How timely, given I was looking into how to archive the content of a server I "run".
pmichaud 4y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20230307024151/http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5509 https://web.archive.org/web/20230307024151/http://ascii.text...
Shank 4y ago
I ran a Discord community that had the privilege of being "permanently banned" from Discord for "distributing cheats" for a game, which was reversed when we explained that no, we actually distribute anticheat software, and discussed cheats quite heavily in order to ensure that the anticheat software was effective. While the ban was reversed after much campaigning and cajoling, Discord Trust & Safety informed us that the data was lost forever. Unfortunately, we just couldn't back down from the demands to have a discord server, and thus, one was eventually recreated. But the point stands: if you're in a Discord server of sufficient size for something you care about, take note that it can go up in-smoke. If it's a software project, you owe it to yourself to at least have GitHub Discussions so that people aren't railroaded into Discord for everything.
- Slighted 4y ago
  >Unfortunately, we just couldn't back down from the demands to have a discord server Except you could've, and still can. People need to learn how to adapt. There's no reason a Discord server is necessary for distributing and discussing anticheat software. Thousands of much larger, more important projects are doing just fine without Discord™ servers, and part of it is the people with influence putting their feet down at the mention of Discord, a glorified spyware platform populated with the socially deprived. Discord is rarely ever a key piece of infrastructure necessary for advertising and documentation for the majority of projects that have one attached to themselves.
  - RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 4y ago
    > Except you could've, and still can. For many scenes, the community is an integral part of the ecosystem. Unless OP is the only person who can develop anti-cheat software, s/he's beholden to the community even if s/he's among the leader(s). > People need to learn how to adapt. They will adapt by starting their own Discord and cutting OP out.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      This is exactly it. I’m in a few forums that insist on no discord and unless you go out of your way to provide a chat alternative there will just be unofficial discords. Discord is a cancer.
      - the_af 4y ago
        Sadly. The good news is that you'll have additional fragmentation with facebook groups and reddit, all overlapping your community so that no two groups are exactly the same! If you want to post an update to the community for $thing, you must remember the Discord, Facebook group and reddit sub! "Hey guys, we already have a reddit sub, do we really need a facebook group?" "Well, if you don't mind I'll go create an unofficial $thing fb group!" (Bonus points if you subscribe to all and get to see the same content being posted to every venue, with somewhat the same people reacting to it. It boggles the mind)
Slighted 4y ago
That NSA datacenter in Utah is probably at what, a few hundred exabytes of capacity now? They should make themselves useful for once and repopulate all the dead images they've certainly collected over the past few decades.
- Nasrudith 4y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA datacenter has only a fraction of the claimed capacity and they used the secrecy to embezzle funds on top of the overpaid contracts to Quislings. Because that is what authoritarians do to buy loyalty. After all their nominal function is to prevent terrorism by sorting through needle stacks many months after the fact. Failure just means more chances to attack encryption again!
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    Hah. I am torn between what I hope to be more true.
- Havoc 4y ago
  When it comes to discord the linkages to China side seem stronger via Tencent
- lunatuna 4y ago
  This is the problem of the shitweb. Shitweb being a concern from law enforcement agencies regarding the difficulties to capture and analyze internet activities that are buried in pictures with text, video, hyperlocal cultural language (think l33tspeak) and temporal communications. The size of the datacentre likely won't help much. (Tried to find a link to the definition of shitweb, wow not a great search)
Panzer04 4y ago
It’s a little unsettling to think about how much information and knowledge is being locked up in walled-garden servers on discord, basically unsearchable (discord has a search feature, but it’s pretty awful). There’s so many communities that end up moving to it because it serves their most engaged members so well, but it’s terrible for everyone else. For example, “Voron” 3D printers are an awesome open-source design, but more and more I am directed to their discord to ask questions - many of which were, in all likelihood, asked dozens of times before. It’s great for their engaged members, who are all super helpful - but if it’s a reddit thread I can get my answer almost immediately, rather than asking, waiting and consuming someone else’s time for trivialities. Sites like reddit at least can be readily searched from a conventional search engine, and can be crawled and stored externally in a pinch. Discord has its place, especially for game communities or other such personal things, but I’m not sure it’s ideal compared to a conventional forum as time passes and more information is built up and either lost or hidden away.
- hanniabu 4y ago
  > discord has a search feature, but it’s pretty awful I don't think it's bad at all, why do you say it's awful? I feel like you think it's bad because you have a negative bias towards discord
  - Panzer04 4y ago
    It only really works for exact matches. If I have a general idea of what I'm looking for, I can usually hunt it down with google. Discord will give me too many results or no results, which sucks. I like discord - It makes up a very significant (honestly, majority) portion of my social life. But it's not good for any kind of real information storage (FAQ, guides, expert answers and so on) compared to a forum.
- MH15 4y ago
  I remember chatting on the RepRap 3D Printer forums in the early 2010s, everything searchable by Google and static text. That mode is long gone now, Discord's superior UX seems to have swallowed up most of the forums.
- 4y ago
EngManagerIsMe 4y ago
What if recording everything that transpires on the internet is a mistake? Yes, I'm aware I should treat everything online as permanent anyways, but surely there's value in making the intentional choice to archive lore vs just recording everything. Chat has always been ephemera, whether it was on AIM, IRC, or ICQ. Is Discord different? (Again, yes, I'm aware large IRC servers likely archived some of their content.)
- pixl97 4y ago
  I mean you self answered here. Any person in that discord could be transcribing all the data to a public site, so nothing really changes.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  It is different when some communities don't even bother with a website and keep asking you to come to Discord for help... which is then not on the Web to be crawled and found !
- Root_Denied 4y ago
  The problem that arises here is that a large subset of support and documentation is "locked" behind discord's walled garden. If and when those communities disintegrate there's no real way to get that information back or archive it in some way. As and example, it's very possible that some Stack Overflow questions from a decade ago are still relevant. If StackOverflow were a discord server then anything from 10 years ago would be impossible to search or completely gone forever. This isn't about transcribing everything on the internet necessarily, but it is about erring on the side of archival because you don't necessarily know up front what's going to last and what's going to be useful years and decades from now.
- velox_neb 4y ago
  A middle ground would be to offer public searchable logs, but strip the usernames. I would be fine with that.
guluarte 4y ago
well, there are multiple solutions for that https://top.gg/tag/backup https://top.gg/tag/backup
eternityforest 4y ago
I don't think anything has ever really been a suitable replacement for forums. Just bring back proboards and PHPBB, with an automatic CC-BY or similar license, and some archiving and exporting tools, and maybe a mobile app.
- mtremsal 4y ago
  https://discourse.org/ https://discourse.org/ is the closest thing I’ve seen to what you’re asking.
  - muzani 4y ago
    I'm actually looking for something like this. Discourse pricing seems to be around $100 per month minimum for a group of 500? It's a huge leap from the forums where minimum cost is about $8/month.
    - doodlesdev 4y ago
      Discourse is free software [0], you can simply host it elsewhere, the pricing you're looking at is their managed option, which while convenient absolutely isn't necessary. [0]: https://github.com/discourse/discourse https://github.com/discourse/discourse
      - eternityforest 4y ago
        Self hosting seems like a bad idea if you're a random club for vintage cars or something and don't have IT staff. What happens when someone finds a 0day? Or some browser feature changes and nothing works until you update?
    - zappchance 4y ago
      It's open-source and easy to self-host: https://blog.discourse.org/2014/04/install-discourse-in-under-30-minutes/ https://blog.discourse.org/2014/04/install-discourse-in-unde...
orangepurple 4y ago
Discord has no legal and accessible way of deleting all of your messages. You have to resort to abuse of their terms of service and risk getting banned to delete all of your messages. Do not use Discord seriously or in large quantities.
- popcalc 4y ago
  >Inb4 new service that automates getting you banned
- Nemo_bis 4y ago
  > You have to resort to abuse of their terms of service Or make a GDPR request and ask your local data protection authority to order Discord to delete them for you. https://noyb.eu/en/exercise-your-rights https://noyb.eu/en/exercise-your-rights
hresvelgr 4y ago
This is becoming a really annoying problem for niche hobbies/communities where resources are already scarce. I think the problem is that accessibility from a search engine was a side-effect more than an intended outcome when people asked questions online. It's too easy to just chat to a real person now on Discord, get an answer, and then have that answer be buried in a matter of hours. This problem isn't unique to Discord either. In organisations with Slack it's impossible to find answers to previously asked questions, which has in turn caused us to appoint some champions to get people to put stuff in our organisation wiki.
- the_af 4y ago
  > In organisations with Slack it's impossible to find answers to previously asked questions It's doubly hard when you had a private chat with someone who got laid off. For some reason Slack makes such accounts/chat history really hard to browse once some time has passed. And sometimes you have valuable information in your chat history with that person!
BlueTemplar 4y ago
Oh wow, yeah, just yesterday I had the unpleasant discovery that what I was specifically searching for had been moved from forums to the Discord black hole... which took a while to notice, since it would by definition not show up in search !
ilaksh 4y ago
Discord really doesn't have an export feature? Seems like something we should all immediately demand. Especially for paying customers. Also see https://github.com/freenet/locutus https://github.com/freenet/locutus
- password4321 4y ago
  Unofficial / unauthorized with unique ToU: https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter
  - RadiozRadioz 4y ago
    That certainly is a unique ToU. While I support the cause referenced in the ToU, I do not support the ToU itself. It violates the ideals of the Free Software movement and the GPL that the software is licensed under.
pabs3 4y ago
I note that if you are using one of the alternative clients (like Pidgin with purple-discord), they can store local logs that you can then index and search. There is also Harmony for managing your account without touching the Discord website. Note that using unofficial Discord clients can get you banned. https://pidgin.im/ https://pidgin.im/ https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-discord/ https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-discord/ https://github.com/taylordotfish/harmony/ https://github.com/taylordotfish/harmony/
gigel82 4y ago
Most things Discord can do (except audio / video), you could do in IRC 30 years ago; Discord just has a nice / usable webclient. Maybe there's an opportunity for someone to create a nice webclient for IRC (which you could self-host with little effort and get to own your data).
- gcau 4y ago
  This is not true at all. IRC has, maybe, 10% of the features and ability Discord has. I do agree a good, usable and more modern IRC client is a good opportunity.
  - toastal 4y ago
    A MUC on a modern XMPP client/server can do most of it. There are XEPs for reactions, stickers, threading, etc. and it still works well for small voice and video chats. The voice chat for gaming though is better handled by Mumble.
  - acuozzo 4y ago
    Can you please list some features Discord has that IRC lacks? (Since IRC is a protocol, let's use the mIRC application for comparison with Discord.)
    - madars 4y ago
      A big one is mobile (and laptop roaming) support. IRC alternative is to either run a bouncer (excludes casual users) or to pay for something like IRCCloud.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - toastal 4y ago
        The bouncer SourceHut provides is the only thing that makes IRC usable for me.
    - 4y ago
satvikpendem 4y ago
I actually wrote about this phenomenon in my Tell HN post a few weeks ago: Tell HN: Discord is obviating my need to use StackOverflow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34746262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34746262
- Swizec 4y ago
  Reading your Tell made me realize something – I just don’t really google things anymore or look for answers online. Either read the official docs or ask the resident expert in my company for help. SO feels increasingly less fitting as my problems become more niche and discord et al are flooded with newbies who can’t help me. Or it would take so long to even explain my problem that there’s no way a chat has the attention span required.
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    Depends on the Discord. Some have some pretty advanced members in there, usually the creators of whatever library or framework I need to use.
    - Swizec 4y ago
      That might be it. I haven’t needed help with a specific library or framework in a long time. The problems I struggle with are more conceptual in nature. Like how to design a solution so the implementation itself is easy or obvious. The tools are like a 3rd level concern. Just pick whatever gets closest.
      - satvikpendem 4y ago
        Makes sense. For me, the tools are what trip me up more since they might not be fully documented (and why would they, they have a Discord to answer people's questions /s) so it's incredibly annoying to find a tool that you know should work but don't know exactly how to make it work the way you want. For more conceptual stuff, I don't usually need to ask questions, I just work it out myself generally. However, there are some great general Discords for that too. Recently I was looking into CRDTs and I joined a Discord that had a lot of researchers for precisely that topic and I could ask them questions on theory and implementation.
cheeseblubber 4y ago
This is one of the reasons I created Linen.dev(A Google searchable Slack/Discord alternative) I had a decent size Slack and Discord community for my previous project and it became a blackhole of information. You can check it out the repo here: https://github.com/linen-dev/linen.dev https://github.com/linen-dev/linen.dev Linen.dev/s/cypress slack-chats.kotlinlang.org You can also google: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Alinen.dev https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Alinen.dev to see the conversations that has been indexed
- ElijahLynn 4y ago
  THIS. YES.
- bostonvaulter2 4y ago
  I wish the `@mention` `!mention` distinction become more widely used. I'm looking forward to checking out Linen once I find a group using it.
  - kevincox 4y ago
    +1 I often like to tag people so that it is unambiguous which "Alex" I am referring to and avoids me misspelling the names. But often I don't need to bother people. It would be nice if I could link to the user without notifying them.
- jbaber 4y ago
  How do I compare this to mattermost?
- iFreilicht 4y ago
  Quick note: On your website, there's this metric: > Our largest community has seen over 180,0000 Google impressions Is that 180,000 or 1,800,000? Apart from that, it looks really good! As I understand it, you actually cache all those conversations, right? So basically, it's like mailing-list archives, but for discord and slack; even if the servers go down or get closed or threads are deleted or move somewhere else, the content on your site stays up?
yackback 4y ago
Also related: companies that think because they have a slack thread discussing a design they have documentation. Hard to find that thing 3 or 4 months later.
- VectorLock 4y ago
  Even harder when you've turned on Slack auto-delete for "security reasons." Really Slack is more approaching IRC when configured like that, except I could still scroll back my IRC client. In Slack they're just _gone_.
  - djmips 4y ago
    Or your company hasn't paid for the 'good' version and the all the old conversations past a certain date are consumed by the Langoliers.
radicalriddler 4y ago
I was trying to find some info about an issue I was seeing on ESLINT the other day... and they told me to join their discord, I couldn't believe it. No, I'm not going to join the discord for a javascript linter.
textfiles 4y ago
The site will return to responsiveness when the Hackernews storm is passed. I assure everyone the writing will still be relevant in a day.
pie_flavor 4y ago
The problem with written-down lore is that for every one piece of information, there are six hundred pieces of copy-pasted information, false information, or malicious information; entire forums get SEO-cloned these days. Receiving it in real time from another human being is one of the very few ways you can guarantee it is real.
- swyx 4y ago
  well.. if you can tell its a human being..
famahar 4y ago
How feasible would it be for a team of hobby data archivists to scrape a whole server and put it on the public web? I'm guessing this is against Discord rules?
- textfiles 4y ago
  Someone should form a team of archivists. An Archive Force
loktarogar 4y ago
I hate having to join discord servers just to see a certain bit of information. It's been especially bad with some open source projects. I've seen a couple of discord servers using a service called disc.wiki[0]. even though all their actual info is stored and edited in discord, it's then pushed to that service and they can share it without having to invite people into their servers. Came across it first with a world of warcraft guild who collated a bunch of raid resources there [0]: https://disc.wiki https://disc.wiki
- taink 4y ago
  This comes pretty darn close to what the author is asking! > Right now every channel is meant to be both transient and permanent. I know that’ll never change, so create a new “Lore” or “Archive” channel where the moderators tap on wisdom and preserve-forever statements or threads, and they get added over there. Think of it as “Pinning” but they’re pinned forever and there’s a bunch of them. Disc.wiki seems to literally provide a similar feature, check! > Make it possible to export this Lore/Archive channel to a reasonable file, like JSON or any other text format. Disc.wiki provides a web interface for browsing "pinned" messages. HTML is a mostly parse-able text format, so check! > At the very least, consider some sort of “FAQ” feature/contingency that does a similar function to the old-style FAQs, so people can contribute sets of knowledge in a structured manual instead of an endless search for terms from everyone who ever touched a server. Ok, there's still some room for improvement. Disc.wiki's homepage claims their docs[0] are built on disc.wiki, so something similar could work. There could be an open source version of both the cms and the bot but that's at least a step in the right direction. [0]: https://disc.wiki/docs https://disc.wiki/docs
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    It's better, but it still doesn't solve the preservation of "lore" issue : only preserving curated "knowledge". For instance the failure mode of a detail that might not make it from discussed lore to actually preserved knowledge, but might be critical years later.
WirelessGigabit 4y ago
And then there are companies that hire security people fresh out of school and then Discord ends up being blocked.
madrox 4y ago
I've seen this rhetoric since Geocities. Discord is the latest scapegoat in a long lineage of successful products that are paradoxically ruining the internet and holding us back from the digital utopia we all dream of. Thinking like this leaves out the most decentralized part of the system: people. People are the real repositories of lore, and they're the ones who bring the useful things from place to place. It's a mistake to ever think of the internet as a library. Libraries take the kind of work and time you can never expect at a massively distributed group of volunteers to do. The internet has been and will always be ephemeral.
- djmips 4y ago
  While you are on your soapbox, I'm down here googling for a way to unstick my van window and the diagram is no longer available but at least I can work out what they were probably doing from the text in the Internet Archive. Yeah try that with a defunct Discord.
- Zetice 4y ago
  It's funny to me; what halcyon days are people longing for? When was the Internet an organized, easy place to navigate?
  - medstrom 4y ago
    2000-2010 or so.
  - zamnos 4y ago
    There was a brief moment in 1999 when this tiny startup came on the scene and introduced a search engine that was so much better that all the rest of them functionally died off. Before SEO bots destroyed a lot of that particular search engine's results, it made the Internet feel much more organized, and just typing in what you wanted made it quite easy to navigate! It's now a quarter century later and Google Search has plenty of critics, but for one brief moment in history, the act of finding things on the Internet took a giant leap forwards.
    - 4y ago
tonymet 4y ago
sounds like you have a business at a company i worked at we had a bot system that would convert significant chat messages into full posts with indexing create a discord plugin that makes preserving , highlighting , indexing and contextualizing important messages east
sneak 4y ago
Mostly when people think they want a Discord server (ie. not a server), what will actually solve their problem is a Discourse server (an actual server).
- RadiozRadioz 4y ago
  They should go back to calling them "guilds", as they still do internally. While also a pre-existing word, its real definition is sufficiently different for there to be no confusion that this is a new & special concept unique to Discord.
toastal 4y ago
I'm so tired of programming communities using Discord in an official capacity. We are the folks that know better and what it means to lose this information and what it means to require sign-ups and giving private conversations to proprietary entities. If you're choosing it as the sole community of your project, you've alienated folks that value their digital privacy—and it was just as easy to set up an IRC room, Matrix channel, or XMPP MUC on a public server which offer broader platform support and a wider array of clients, and some are even decentralized. Do we not believe in FOSS software for our FOSS software?
- toastal 4y ago
  For a better explanation from someone more eloquent than myself: https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/28/Dont-use-Discord-for-FOSS.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/28/Dont-use-Discord-for-FOSS...
- herbst 4y ago
  Totally this. When a project decides to go down this route I start questioning their whole decision making and feel alienated as you say. I can't even tell how often I stopped looking into something because it was too discord based.
- bad_alloc 4y ago
  Maybe we do, but the mass of people who are just learning is enormous. The idea of keeping this information open and searchable is a cultural thing, and big companies actively undermined this culture with their walled gardens. They became the norm for a vast part of the population. The question is: Can this be reversed? The mess with Twitter moved a lot of people to Mastodon, we need more events like that.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Note how it took a decade for most people to realize that Twitter is harmful after the 2013 APIpocalypse (when Mastodon got started). And in the mean time we even had Trump showing every day just how bad it is !
  - 4y ago
darthrupert 4y ago
Discord is a horrible echo chamber for gamers. It is responsible for many of the social contagion-based mental issues and political confusion of our youth and young adults. Not only FOSS projects should stay away from it, but everyone else too. Don't let your children use it.
- Nasrudith 4y ago
  What toxic communities did you follow to wind up with that take?
  - herbst 4y ago
    Join anything related to crypto. Openly scamming kids is very very common, not even counting the abysmal spam/scam protection for PMs. 100% echo chambers, all negativity is an instant ban.
- haunter 4y ago
  > Discord is a horrible echo chamber Mastodon is the same yet most people want that, smaller communities where they tagalong with others.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    Agreed. Frankly, the chamber is itself a problem. The community is just a nicer name for a tribe you currently subscribe to. It is downright folksy. I don't automatically mind, but there is no reason to pretend otherwise.
Zetobal 4y ago
I blame slack for gaslighting everyone into believing chat makes a good knowledgebase.
sovietswag 4y ago
Further down this rabbit hole: "The Web of Alexandria" by Bret Victor, http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria. ---- > Vannevar Bush's "library of a million volumes, compressed into one end of a desk" may sound quaint to us today. Bush naively assumed that immediate access to a million volumes would require the physical presence of those million volumes. His proposal -- a million volumes in every desk. > > The web, of course, took a different approach. A million volumes, yes, but our desks remain empty. Instead, when we summon a volume, we are granted a transient and ephemeral peek at its sole instance, out there somewhere in the world, typically secured within a large institution. > > Two thoughts: > > It's interesting that life itself chose Bush's approach. Every cell of every organism has a full copy of the genome. That works pretty well -- DNA gets damaged, cells die, organisms die, the genome lives on. It's been working pretty well for about 4 billion years. > > It's also interesting to consider how someone from Bush's time might view our situation. For someone who's thinking about a library in every desk, going on the web today might feel like visiting the Library of Alexandria. Things didn't work out so well with the Library of Alexandria. > >It's not working so well today either. > > We, as a species, are currently putting together a universal repository of knowledge and ideas, unprecedented in scope and scale. Which information-handling technology should we model it on? The one that's worked for 4 billion years and is responsible for our existence? Or the one that's led to the greatest intellectual tragedies in history?
- wnkrshm 4y ago
  Imagine how much further along libraries could be if they had big research and development budgets - you could use all the NLP, image processing and robotics in the world to catalogue, digitize, sort and backup every hardcopy in existence. And then there is digital media. If we want to go into a TNG Star Trek future, taking the media and knowledge from those walled gardens and making them accessible and searchable should be a priority for what we would like to call civilization. Instead, we have multiple digital circuses that happen to contain knowledge, just by grace of providing a way for people to host and discover media.
mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
I was trying to join Discord, not having any memory of having used it before. Didn't realise I had an account already, so I made a new one. I was then flagged as "suspicious"(I was on my home network...) and told I had to provide a phone number, to verify my humanity. So I did. It then tells me that phone number is already tied to an account, bans the new account, the old account, and blacklists my phone number. And there appears to be no recourse, no way to explain that I simply forgot I had an account already. So now I guess discord is just off limits to me. I see people defending discord for lacking search because hurr durr so does IRC. Well, IRC at least doesn't ban you just for trying to use the service.
- herbst 4y ago
  I don't use my real phone number for foreign data selling companies so I use SMS verification services. Your situation explains why my accounts always get suddenly banned after a while without information. You can't get around the number thing usually, but having a number that works is not enough appearantly
  - jerezzprime 4y ago
    Which services do you use?
  - 12345hn6789 4y ago
    What services are you using? Most I have looked into do not work for the vast majority of applications that are popular
    - herbst 4y ago
      Mostly SMSpva. Depending on the service some countries never work. If I got 2 fails I just ask the support and they usually name me a country that works.
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  Discord's policies are frankly absurd. I'm pretty sure that at one point, if not now, they suggest using a friend's phone to verify your account if you're prompted to provide a phone number. Discord is too big now to excuse such careless behavior.
gambiting 4y ago
This is happening elsewhere too - all kinds of traditional forums for hardware, be it cars laptops or watches have now almost entirely moved to Facebook groups, only the biggest communities still hang around and even then just barely, with a shadow of their former selves. And Facebook is even worse than discord, with absolutely abysmal search and very few tools to engage with your community effectively. But it's easy to join so a lot of people prefer it.
rcarmo 4y ago
I am on so Discords, but whenever I come across an Open Source project that uses it as sole form of support/discussion, I move on and look for an alternative. It is just not useful at all for any kind of documentation/reference, but also for support: if it’s a reasonably popular project and you’re not on the same time zone, you will never be able to see any replies at all.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
herbst 4y ago
Sometimes I can't ask a question to a open source project because they decided to move everything to discord and lock it behind a account verification that needs a phone number I am not willing to put there (or rather don't have) I literally use less promising products sometimes just because they not yet moved everything to discord
thinkingemote 4y ago
Worse are open source communities only using Slack. As a normal user you cannot search beyond a very small amount of days without paying Slack money. Slack, often found in American centred projects Vs European in my experience, possibly where the devs already use slack for their paid startup jobs, and where they don't really understand or like libre software as well as the average German developer.
- Karawebnetwork 4y ago
  I don't know if it's as true these days but in the early days you couldn't get Discord installed on office computers because of the association that it was a "gaming app".
- chadlavi 4y ago
  The free version is unfortunately hobbled but slack is a lot better than discord at least at critical things like "getting caught up on messages that were sent since you last read." Some friends and I recently started a discord server for an async D&D game and it's a real pain to get caught up. They have the same red "you were here" line and the same "X new messages" banner as slack, but discord's default scrolling behavior works against you.
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
Is this guy writing articles about his own tweets?
- textfiles 4y ago
  Yeah! What the hell is wrong with him! Nobody wants to read that!
solarkraft 4y ago
I'm glad we agree that IRC isn't any better but even worse. As much as I dislike Discord (bad search, terrible notification system) there's also no open platform that can really compete with Discord, they all crumble when it comes to voice chats. I'll admit that a thing I like about private communities is that they feel more comfortable - that not every single user of the internet will be able to see it. The whole archival thing (like on IRC) can be done with bots. You could forward a message, add an emoji or ping the bot to archive a message.
- hardware2win 4y ago
  Indeed, not every conversation has to be on the internet, accessible to everyone. I thought hackers would care about privacy after all. Discord is still an unparallelled product if you use it correctly. If you want open and long conversations then use forum (real forum, not hn)
pmontra 4y ago
Whenever I see content organized as chat messages I know that it will fade away. It just moves too fast and in too small chunks to be searched, to be interpreted by humans years after it was created. Add a walled garden, it's dead content. It happened to IRC, it happens to Skype logs, WhatsApp, Telegram, whatever. It's convenient but I know that all my chat-like messages will be lost or at least not as easy to access as my email. Same thing for services like Discord vs web sites or forums. It will take ten years for people to realize it, enough time for them to move to something else, come back and failing to find what they were looking for. Then the next generation of content creators will be on another unarchiveable/unsearcheable medium.
- setman2 4y ago
  Do you think this is true in the world of Chat GPT? Couldn't the IRC/Discord content be indexed and then queried from an AI service?
iLoveOncall 4y ago
My company, a FAANG, went from having all our documentation in a wiki that is searchable by anyone, to heavily using Quip (some sort of Google Docs). Engineers resisted for a while because it's obviously awful for documentation. You can't even search it AT ALL. But since all the non-technical staff had an easier life editing Quip than editing the Wiki it's now the defacto solution for all. This is going to be doom of engineering at this company. Over the years I have found countless things on random wikis from random teams that helped me achieve my own solution. Quip destroyed that. Discord is the same.
totalhack 4y ago
If I think an open source library question might have value to someone else I'll always open an issue on GitHub, even if they try to push to discord. Maybe if discord communities added AI chat agents trained on their docs and discord discussions you'd have less of an information black hole.
lbayes 4y ago
I just think it's the incredible to realize that with all this technology available to us, human brains are still where (most or at least much?) knowledge and lore are stored and retrieved from.
aaws11 4y ago
for whoever unable to access the article directly: https://web.archive.org/web/20230306164958/http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5509 https://web.archive.org/web/20230306164958/http://ascii.text...
elif 4y ago
I've noticed lately that Facebook has been implementing every feature that discord has, though some arbitrarily gated to iOS only or phone app only. It occurred to me that the only functional difference between the two is that Facebook retains its original content relevancy algorithms and this can be seen as a superset of features, with also an almost monopolistic superset of users. That leaves Discord's only reason for existence largely cultural and generational. Like the submitter, my mind immediately went back to how great IRC was and how over the years it became increasingly difficult to evangelize for what was essentially an increasingly niche culture more than a platform. My personal time with discord functionally ended accidentally a little over a year ago with a quiet quitting over about 6 months as hundreds of individual discords with their own set of notification levels culminated in an uncontrollable torrent of annoying noises and popups. It now gives me anxiety thinking about launching the app.
- kvandy 4y ago
  The app launch anxiety rings true for me. Discord is sensory overload for me.
- genevra 4y ago
  You can mute notifications for the entire server, change them to mentions only, or any picked channels quite easily by right clicking it
  - elif 4y ago
    "the entire server" of which there are hundreds
birracerveza 4y ago
Centralization does not scale. Discord's death is inevitable, and it will be far worse than ImageShack.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  You're not wrong, but Imgur hasn't even hit that level yet.
kevincox 4y ago
While I agree that the locked-off history is a downside to me I think this is actually a benifit to the target audience. A lot of people want to start communities and this lock in if knowledge and constant asking of the same questions keeps a view of activity and boosts users numbers. It also gives a more personal feel that may encourage people to stay. Especially for streamers who are trying to make a personal-feeling connection I suspect this is incredibly valuable. Especially if you offload a lot of the repetitive work to unpaid moderators. Basically the goal of Discord isn't to hold and organize information. The information is just a lure. The search feature exists so that you can convince yourself that the history is useful and available. This leads to people needing to come in and engage in a personal-feeling way.
usrbinbash 4y ago
The age old question between convenience and safety. Why did people use imageshack? Because easy, because free. Just write a small plugin for the forum software du jour, or download one, and that's it, you're set. Discord-Is-The-Docs is just the newest iteration of this struggle, and it's not the only one. How much documentation exists "de-facto" only, sitting in some issue tracking software that may or may not be accessible 4 years from now?
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  Maybe that is not the issue. Maybe it is merely a symptom of how ephemeral and temporary existing systems are and 'Discord4Documents' is just a lazy way to port all the unsexy documentation to one place so that the ones that need to gorge on it, can.
  - usrbinbash 4y ago
    But the ones who need to "gorge on it" can't, because there is no good way to extract, catalogue, organize, archive, or search it. Yes documentation isn't sexy. It's boring, it's tedious, and I can understand everyone who doesn't want to do it. And it's also key to a projects long term viability. If the only documentation for a project is "the discord", I won't use it, even if an alternative is a less optima technical fit. Because if I have to come back to fix an issue 2 years later, and I need the documentation, I'd rather read a badly maintained, badly formatted 90s style HTML-ony page, than stare in frustration at an info telling me the discord channel no longer exists.
api 4y ago
Lore will be dead anyway in a few years. AI bots will be flooding the net with shilling indistinguishable from human beings. The only way to get valid information will be from someone you can be pretty sure is human. The audio video features of things like Discord help, as do verified identities.
dancemethis 4y ago
Well, and that's not to mention the massive amounts of personal data and metadata Discord is hoarding and doing whatever it wants with. I fail to see why this article didn't mention that OpenFeint had a privacy lawsuit in its end as well. One can only hope this privacy-hostile proprietary platform dies sooner rather than later.
erremerre 4y ago
I have been trying to find and join some community of things that interest me. However I am not an expert on any of those things that interest me. I have attempted several times to join into Discord, forums, subreddits, etc... From all of those places and over the paper, Discord which is informal chatting should be the one I probably should feel more comfortable with. However, it is not the case. I always feel like an outsider. This is completely irrelevant to the no back-up search problem here. But I struggle to understand in which case Discord would make for a good community place.
bantunes 4y ago
We will at one point know more about the Roman Empire than the World Wide Web 1994-1998, and it doesn't seem right. Huge chunks of cultural output that would be gold for future historians just... lost.
Eumenes 4y ago
Does anyone remember xfire? I had such a popular username on there that I'd often get messages to sell the account for several $100 as a young kid, which I never did because I liked the name so much. That was my favorite chat/IM app for gaming. That plus IRC + whatever in-game messaging/chat service, worked just fine. I dont know why they need "community" now ... or "archive" ability. Seems to overcomplicate things.
PaulHoule 4y ago
This is just one bit of the death of text. Circa 2010 most games had highly literate walkthroughs on sites like GameFAQs. By 2020 you could find only find walkthroughs in YouTube which occasionally answer a question hard to explain in words (like that level with a jump that doesn’t look like you can make it but you can) but means seeking through 20 hours of video to find the right 15 seconds.
- rchaud 4y ago
  I remember going to a copy shop in 1999 to print out a GameFAQs walkthrough for Fallout 2.
anilakar 4y ago
The cancer called Discord has become so disgustinly common that they ought to be designated as a Common Carrier.
b1c1jones 4y ago
T'was always thus. Every so often, another cave is uncovered, knowledge of how to hunt or recordings of various activities etched or painted on the walls. Thousands of other caves are missing or lost forever.
zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
I hate discord. Bring back MSN and Yahoo Messengers
andrewclunn 4y ago
I love that Discord is ephemeral. The right to be forgotten doesn't exist on the searchable web no matter how much the EU wishes it were so.
- anticensor 4y ago
  No, it is persistent with denial by deletion.
marcus_holmes 4y ago
Unpopular opinion: I don't think it matters too much that we lose all this. 90% of everything is crap. In the case of chat, I think that's more like 99.9% of everything is crap. The good/important stuff will be repeated and spread outside of its original container. All the good tweets are already on Reddit or Imgur. If Twitter died tomorrow (not as unlikely as it was 6 months ago) then we'd still have a decent archive of the good tweets. All we'd lose is all the dross. The same is true for other platforms; the good stuff gets cross-posted and preserved. I think it's important that we do forget things. We all say things every now and again that we don't mean, because we're human. I would hate a world where there was a permanent record of everything I've said. I already regret most of my Facebook posts. Also, some answers that used to be correct are now incorrect. We get this problem with tech - I often filter my search for "last year only" when bug hunting because old solutions aren't relevant any more. I understand that maintaining an archive is important for history, don't get me wrong. I just don't think we need all of it, and I think the important stuff will get preserved through duplication.
- ilyt 4y ago
  > 90% of everything is crap. In the case of chat, I think that's more like 99.9% of everything is crap. Right but with 90% of everything crap you moved the 10% of good things into closed (for search results) system. > If Twitter died tomorrow (not as unlikely as it was 6 months ago) then we'd still have a decent archive of the good tweets. All we'd lose is all the dross. The same is true for other platforms; the good stuff gets cross-posted and preserved. Tweets are searchable and you can't archive.org discord chat easily. Terrible comparison and it is not same for other platforms.
  - marcus_holmes 4y ago
    My point is that the good stuff gets cross-posted. So a worthy Discord discussion will be screenshotted or otherwise recorded, and cross-posted to another platform.
- genevra 4y ago
  Not necessarily I was trying to get little big planet 2 working on an emulator recently (yesterday) and a lot of information about how to get secret dlc / costumes and use mod tools were hidden in a discord that I only found after a day of searching for the info. someone in the emulator discord recommended a different discord server, which I never would have known about and couldn't find that information anywhere else on the web (archive.org, YouTube videos, alternate search engines)
noobermin 4y ago
Jason Scott put out a plead to discord in 2021[0], with asks similar to the end of the article to add archiveability to their service, and I basically replied saying this is what we get for ditching irc, and he replied a tepid "I know what you're trying to say." I love Jason and the work he does and I don't blame him. The thing is Discord was never going to play ball, why would they? Again, we're going to have this discussion in 2026 too and nothing will change. I appreciate now he does offer thoughtful rebuff wrt IRC, but it is a pain then that other platforms like matrix haven't had Discord's uptick. People just gave up on better interfaces to IRC or other protocols. I get it many things are magic and we don't know how to get numbers, but it can't hurt to try. [0] https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1345422597505351685 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1345422597505351685
- textfiles 4y ago
  My experience, down to the moment, is that IRC may be "superior" to other services because it never tries to extend past its small set of core competencies. Which means it appeals exclusively to people who are fine with that small set, and every extension past that is lambasted and doomed to obscurity because there's no interest on the whole to push the entire realm as a whole into the late 20th century, much less the 21st. My response was tepid because I don't like telling someone stuck in a little tiny fishbowl going "the fishbowl is perfectly adequate" and dissuading them that the fishbowl is not adequate. Not that Discord is "the ocean" but it's a cruise ship and it's expensive, and a very nice ride comparatively. My weblog entry describes a situation beyond Discord, and that of knowledge, and is at best a framing of the problem in a static area, because I believe this is the year Twitter closes down, closes up, or dies.
- Nemo_bis 4y ago
  Err, ArchiveTeam uses IRC as primary communication method.
rhyssullivan1 4y ago
I’ve been working on a fix for this at https://www.answeroverflow.com/ https://www.answeroverflow.com/ ! It’s an open source project https://github.com/AnswerOverflow/AnswerOverflow https://github.com/AnswerOverflow/AnswerOverflow designed to index the content of your Discord community into Google Some example pages you can check out: An indexed question: https://www.answeroverflow.com/m/1055246179887230986 https://www.answeroverflow.com/m/1055246179887230986 The C# community page: https://www.answeroverflow.com/c/143867839282020352 https://www.answeroverflow.com/c/143867839282020352
- setman2 4y ago
  pretty neat solution!
seydor 4y ago
I m often baffled why discord became popular. I guess because genz hate the web and prefer apps. The www is such a boomer perhaps. Discord even brings the UI of apps to the web. But it's not open, how can they live with that
Slow_Hand 4y ago
I moderate a server/community of high-end record makers discussing music production and a common question among us is how can we create a long-term database of all of the niche wisdom being divulged, for the benefit of the younger generations. So far our best idea has been to publish an Obsidian Vault.
steponlego 4y ago
I really do hate Discord and other types of chat-oriented help and forums. Mailing lists are still the gold standard, IMHO. It's super easy to keep updated, works with any computer, etc. And most importantly you're not using somebody else's server.
CyberSimon 4y ago
A nifty tool to archive chats: https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter
Rantenki 4y ago
It's worth mentioning that Jason (the author) has dedicated his life to the preservation of information as the "containing" technologies are shifting like sand beneath our collective feet. He's thought about this stuff for a very long time, in great depth, and is very much worth listening to.
- textfiles 4y ago
  Finger guns
x-desire 4y ago
More like Death of Internet as we used to know it. Imagine a tranquil and secluded nature reserve [internet] that attracts like-minded people [nerds/geeks/tech enthusiasts] seeking peace and tranquillity. But with the addition of an airport, a nearby suburban development and a sprawling ski resort, the once idyllic space has been transformed into a bustling commercial hub, unrecognisable from its former state. Although you still venture into the park, it feels like a different place altogether, leaving you with a sense of isolation and disconnection. I'm afraid that the next thing we'll see is AI that creates content that is indistinguishable from human-generated content completely taking over online discourse and social media, together with entire fake personas. Why? Sales & Marketing.
pxoe 4y ago
[dead]

587 points by pabs3 4y ago

I often think that I would be a best practice for slack/discord to auto delete messages after 2 weeks, that would enforce the idea that they are really ephemeral

milsorgen 4y ago

What a well written description of a looming large problem. A great read.

acedTrex 4y ago

https://www.answeroverflow.com/ https://www.answeroverflow.com/ Cool bot looking to help with this problem.

xtracto 4y ago
I was thinking of something like this. Maybe have a bot that automatically archives and uploads everything to some site? To archive.org maybe?

coldacid 4y ago

How timely, given I was looking into how to archive the content of a server I "run".

pmichaud 4y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20230307024151/http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5509 https://web.archive.org/web/20230307024151/http://ascii.text...

Shank 4y ago

I ran a Discord community that had the privilege of being "permanently banned" from Discord for "distributing cheats" for a game, which was reversed when we explained that no, we actually distribute anticheat software, and discussed cheats quite heavily in order to ensure that the anticheat software was effective. While the ban was reversed after much campaigning and cajoling, Discord Trust & Safety informed us that the data was lost forever. Unfortunately, we just couldn't back down from the demands to have a discord server, and thus, one was eventually recreated. But the point stands: if you're in a Discord server of sufficient size for something you care about, take note that it can go up in-smoke. If it's a software project, you owe it to yourself to at least have GitHub Discussions so that people aren't railroaded into Discord for everything.

Slighted 4y ago
>Unfortunately, we just couldn't back down from the demands to have a discord server Except you could've, and still can. People need to learn how to adapt. There's no reason a Discord server is necessary for distributing and discussing anticheat software. Thousands of much larger, more important projects are doing just fine without Discord™ servers, and part of it is the people with influence putting their feet down at the mention of Discord, a glorified spyware platform populated with the socially deprived. Discord is rarely ever a key piece of infrastructure necessary for advertising and documentation for the majority of projects that have one attached to themselves.
- RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 4y ago
  > Except you could've, and still can. For many scenes, the community is an integral part of the ecosystem. Unless OP is the only person who can develop anti-cheat software, s/he's beholden to the community even if s/he's among the leader(s). > People need to learn how to adapt. They will adapt by starting their own Discord and cutting OP out.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    This is exactly it. I’m in a few forums that insist on no discord and unless you go out of your way to provide a chat alternative there will just be unofficial discords. Discord is a cancer.
    - the_af 4y ago
      Sadly. The good news is that you'll have additional fragmentation with facebook groups and reddit, all overlapping your community so that no two groups are exactly the same! If you want to post an update to the community for $thing, you must remember the Discord, Facebook group and reddit sub! "Hey guys, we already have a reddit sub, do we really need a facebook group?" "Well, if you don't mind I'll go create an unofficial $thing fb group!" (Bonus points if you subscribe to all and get to see the same content being posted to every venue, with somewhat the same people reacting to it. It boggles the mind)

Slighted 4y ago

That NSA datacenter in Utah is probably at what, a few hundred exabytes of capacity now? They should make themselves useful for once and repopulate all the dead images they've certainly collected over the past few decades.

Nasrudith 4y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA datacenter has only a fraction of the claimed capacity and they used the secrecy to embezzle funds on top of the overpaid contracts to Quislings. Because that is what authoritarians do to buy loyalty. After all their nominal function is to prevent terrorism by sorting through needle stacks many months after the fact. Failure just means more chances to attack encryption again!
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  Hah. I am torn between what I hope to be more true.
Havoc 4y ago
When it comes to discord the linkages to China side seem stronger via Tencent
lunatuna 4y ago
This is the problem of the shitweb. Shitweb being a concern from law enforcement agencies regarding the difficulties to capture and analyze internet activities that are buried in pictures with text, video, hyperlocal cultural language (think l33tspeak) and temporal communications. The size of the datacentre likely won't help much. (Tried to find a link to the definition of shitweb, wow not a great search)

Panzer04 4y ago

It’s a little unsettling to think about how much information and knowledge is being locked up in walled-garden servers on discord, basically unsearchable (discord has a search feature, but it’s pretty awful). There’s so many communities that end up moving to it because it serves their most engaged members so well, but it’s terrible for everyone else. For example, “Voron” 3D printers are an awesome open-source design, but more and more I am directed to their discord to ask questions - many of which were, in all likelihood, asked dozens of times before. It’s great for their engaged members, who are all super helpful - but if it’s a reddit thread I can get my answer almost immediately, rather than asking, waiting and consuming someone else’s time for trivialities. Sites like reddit at least can be readily searched from a conventional search engine, and can be crawled and stored externally in a pinch. Discord has its place, especially for game communities or other such personal things, but I’m not sure it’s ideal compared to a conventional forum as time passes and more information is built up and either lost or hidden away.

hanniabu 4y ago
> discord has a search feature, but it’s pretty awful I don't think it's bad at all, why do you say it's awful? I feel like you think it's bad because you have a negative bias towards discord
- Panzer04 4y ago
  It only really works for exact matches. If I have a general idea of what I'm looking for, I can usually hunt it down with google. Discord will give me too many results or no results, which sucks. I like discord - It makes up a very significant (honestly, majority) portion of my social life. But it's not good for any kind of real information storage (FAQ, guides, expert answers and so on) compared to a forum.
MH15 4y ago
I remember chatting on the RepRap 3D Printer forums in the early 2010s, everything searchable by Google and static text. That mode is long gone now, Discord's superior UX seems to have swallowed up most of the forums.
4y ago

EngManagerIsMe 4y ago

What if recording everything that transpires on the internet is a mistake? Yes, I'm aware I should treat everything online as permanent anyways, but surely there's value in making the intentional choice to archive lore vs just recording everything. Chat has always been ephemera, whether it was on AIM, IRC, or ICQ. Is Discord different? (Again, yes, I'm aware large IRC servers likely archived some of their content.)

pixl97 4y ago
I mean you self answered here. Any person in that discord could be transcribing all the data to a public site, so nothing really changes.
BlueTemplar 4y ago
It is different when some communities don't even bother with a website and keep asking you to come to Discord for help... which is then not on the Web to be crawled and found !
Root_Denied 4y ago
The problem that arises here is that a large subset of support and documentation is "locked" behind discord's walled garden. If and when those communities disintegrate there's no real way to get that information back or archive it in some way. As and example, it's very possible that some Stack Overflow questions from a decade ago are still relevant. If StackOverflow were a discord server then anything from 10 years ago would be impossible to search or completely gone forever. This isn't about transcribing everything on the internet necessarily, but it is about erring on the side of archival because you don't necessarily know up front what's going to last and what's going to be useful years and decades from now.
velox_neb 4y ago
A middle ground would be to offer public searchable logs, but strip the usernames. I would be fine with that.

guluarte 4y ago

well, there are multiple solutions for that https://top.gg/tag/backup https://top.gg/tag/backup

eternityforest 4y ago

I don't think anything has ever really been a suitable replacement for forums. Just bring back proboards and PHPBB, with an automatic CC-BY or similar license, and some archiving and exporting tools, and maybe a mobile app.

mtremsal 4y ago
https://discourse.org/ https://discourse.org/ is the closest thing I’ve seen to what you’re asking.
- muzani 4y ago
  I'm actually looking for something like this. Discourse pricing seems to be around $100 per month minimum for a group of 500? It's a huge leap from the forums where minimum cost is about $8/month.
  - doodlesdev 4y ago
    Discourse is free software [0], you can simply host it elsewhere, the pricing you're looking at is their managed option, which while convenient absolutely isn't necessary. [0]: https://github.com/discourse/discourse https://github.com/discourse/discourse
    - eternityforest 4y ago
      Self hosting seems like a bad idea if you're a random club for vintage cars or something and don't have IT staff. What happens when someone finds a 0day? Or some browser feature changes and nothing works until you update?
  - zappchance 4y ago
    It's open-source and easy to self-host: https://blog.discourse.org/2014/04/install-discourse-in-under-30-minutes/ https://blog.discourse.org/2014/04/install-discourse-in-unde...

orangepurple 4y ago

Discord has no legal and accessible way of deleting all of your messages. You have to resort to abuse of their terms of service and risk getting banned to delete all of your messages. Do not use Discord seriously or in large quantities.

popcalc 4y ago
>Inb4 new service that automates getting you banned
Nemo_bis 4y ago
> You have to resort to abuse of their terms of service Or make a GDPR request and ask your local data protection authority to order Discord to delete them for you. https://noyb.eu/en/exercise-your-rights https://noyb.eu/en/exercise-your-rights

hresvelgr 4y ago

This is becoming a really annoying problem for niche hobbies/communities where resources are already scarce. I think the problem is that accessibility from a search engine was a side-effect more than an intended outcome when people asked questions online. It's too easy to just chat to a real person now on Discord, get an answer, and then have that answer be buried in a matter of hours. This problem isn't unique to Discord either. In organisations with Slack it's impossible to find answers to previously asked questions, which has in turn caused us to appoint some champions to get people to put stuff in our organisation wiki.

the_af 4y ago
> In organisations with Slack it's impossible to find answers to previously asked questions It's doubly hard when you had a private chat with someone who got laid off. For some reason Slack makes such accounts/chat history really hard to browse once some time has passed. And sometimes you have valuable information in your chat history with that person!

BlueTemplar 4y ago

Oh wow, yeah, just yesterday I had the unpleasant discovery that what I was specifically searching for had been moved from forums to the Discord black hole... which took a while to notice, since it would by definition not show up in search !

ilaksh 4y ago

Discord really doesn't have an export feature? Seems like something we should all immediately demand. Especially for paying customers. Also see https://github.com/freenet/locutus https://github.com/freenet/locutus

password4321 4y ago
Unofficial / unauthorized with unique ToU: https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter
- RadiozRadioz 4y ago
  That certainly is a unique ToU. While I support the cause referenced in the ToU, I do not support the ToU itself. It violates the ideals of the Free Software movement and the GPL that the software is licensed under.

pabs3 4y ago

I note that if you are using one of the alternative clients (like Pidgin with purple-discord), they can store local logs that you can then index and search. There is also Harmony for managing your account without touching the Discord website. Note that using unofficial Discord clients can get you banned. https://pidgin.im/ https://pidgin.im/ https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-discord/ https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-discord/ https://github.com/taylordotfish/harmony/ https://github.com/taylordotfish/harmony/

gigel82 4y ago

Most things Discord can do (except audio / video), you could do in IRC 30 years ago; Discord just has a nice / usable webclient. Maybe there's an opportunity for someone to create a nice webclient for IRC (which you could self-host with little effort and get to own your data).

gcau 4y ago
This is not true at all. IRC has, maybe, 10% of the features and ability Discord has. I do agree a good, usable and more modern IRC client is a good opportunity.
- toastal 4y ago
  A MUC on a modern XMPP client/server can do most of it. There are XEPs for reactions, stickers, threading, etc. and it still works well for small voice and video chats. The voice chat for gaming though is better handled by Mumble.
- acuozzo 4y ago
  Can you please list some features Discord has that IRC lacks? (Since IRC is a protocol, let's use the mIRC application for comparison with Discord.)
  - madars 4y ago
    A big one is mobile (and laptop roaming) support. IRC alternative is to either run a bouncer (excludes casual users) or to pay for something like IRCCloud.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - toastal 4y ago
      The bouncer SourceHut provides is the only thing that makes IRC usable for me.
  - 4y ago

satvikpendem 4y ago

I actually wrote about this phenomenon in my Tell HN post a few weeks ago: Tell HN: Discord is obviating my need to use StackOverflow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34746262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34746262

Swizec 4y ago
Reading your Tell made me realize something – I just don’t really google things anymore or look for answers online. Either read the official docs or ask the resident expert in my company for help. SO feels increasingly less fitting as my problems become more niche and discord et al are flooded with newbies who can’t help me. Or it would take so long to even explain my problem that there’s no way a chat has the attention span required.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  Depends on the Discord. Some have some pretty advanced members in there, usually the creators of whatever library or framework I need to use.
  - Swizec 4y ago
    That might be it. I haven’t needed help with a specific library or framework in a long time. The problems I struggle with are more conceptual in nature. Like how to design a solution so the implementation itself is easy or obvious. The tools are like a 3rd level concern. Just pick whatever gets closest.
    - satvikpendem 4y ago
      Makes sense. For me, the tools are what trip me up more since they might not be fully documented (and why would they, they have a Discord to answer people's questions /s) so it's incredibly annoying to find a tool that you know should work but don't know exactly how to make it work the way you want. For more conceptual stuff, I don't usually need to ask questions, I just work it out myself generally. However, there are some great general Discords for that too. Recently I was looking into CRDTs and I joined a Discord that had a lot of researchers for precisely that topic and I could ask them questions on theory and implementation.

cheeseblubber 4y ago

This is one of the reasons I created Linen.dev(A Google searchable Slack/Discord alternative) I had a decent size Slack and Discord community for my previous project and it became a blackhole of information. You can check it out the repo here: https://github.com/linen-dev/linen.dev https://github.com/linen-dev/linen.dev Linen.dev/s/cypress slack-chats.kotlinlang.org You can also google: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Alinen.dev https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Alinen.dev to see the conversations that has been indexed

ElijahLynn 4y ago
THIS. YES.
bostonvaulter2 4y ago
I wish the `@mention` `!mention` distinction become more widely used. I'm looking forward to checking out Linen once I find a group using it.
- kevincox 4y ago
  +1 I often like to tag people so that it is unambiguous which "Alex" I am referring to and avoids me misspelling the names. But often I don't need to bother people. It would be nice if I could link to the user without notifying them.
jbaber 4y ago
How do I compare this to mattermost?
iFreilicht 4y ago
Quick note: On your website, there's this metric: > Our largest community has seen over 180,0000 Google impressions Is that 180,000 or 1,800,000? Apart from that, it looks really good! As I understand it, you actually cache all those conversations, right? So basically, it's like mailing-list archives, but for discord and slack; even if the servers go down or get closed or threads are deleted or move somewhere else, the content on your site stays up?

yackback 4y ago

Also related: companies that think because they have a slack thread discussing a design they have documentation. Hard to find that thing 3 or 4 months later.

VectorLock 4y ago
Even harder when you've turned on Slack auto-delete for "security reasons." Really Slack is more approaching IRC when configured like that, except I could still scroll back my IRC client. In Slack they're just _gone_.
- djmips 4y ago
  Or your company hasn't paid for the 'good' version and the all the old conversations past a certain date are consumed by the Langoliers.

radicalriddler 4y ago

I was trying to find some info about an issue I was seeing on ESLINT the other day... and they told me to join their discord, I couldn't believe it. No, I'm not going to join the discord for a javascript linter.

textfiles 4y ago

The site will return to responsiveness when the Hackernews storm is passed. I assure everyone the writing will still be relevant in a day.

pie_flavor 4y ago

The problem with written-down lore is that for every one piece of information, there are six hundred pieces of copy-pasted information, false information, or malicious information; entire forums get SEO-cloned these days. Receiving it in real time from another human being is one of the very few ways you can guarantee it is real.

swyx 4y ago
well.. if you can tell its a human being..

famahar 4y ago

How feasible would it be for a team of hobby data archivists to scrape a whole server and put it on the public web? I'm guessing this is against Discord rules?

textfiles 4y ago
Someone should form a team of archivists. An Archive Force

loktarogar 4y ago

I hate having to join discord servers just to see a certain bit of information. It's been especially bad with some open source projects. I've seen a couple of discord servers using a service called disc.wiki[0]. even though all their actual info is stored and edited in discord, it's then pushed to that service and they can share it without having to invite people into their servers. Came across it first with a world of warcraft guild who collated a bunch of raid resources there [0]: https://disc.wiki https://disc.wiki

taink 4y ago
This comes pretty darn close to what the author is asking! > Right now every channel is meant to be both transient and permanent. I know that’ll never change, so create a new “Lore” or “Archive” channel where the moderators tap on wisdom and preserve-forever statements or threads, and they get added over there. Think of it as “Pinning” but they’re pinned forever and there’s a bunch of them. Disc.wiki seems to literally provide a similar feature, check! > Make it possible to export this Lore/Archive channel to a reasonable file, like JSON or any other text format. Disc.wiki provides a web interface for browsing "pinned" messages. HTML is a mostly parse-able text format, so check! > At the very least, consider some sort of “FAQ” feature/contingency that does a similar function to the old-style FAQs, so people can contribute sets of knowledge in a structured manual instead of an endless search for terms from everyone who ever touched a server. Ok, there's still some room for improvement. Disc.wiki's homepage claims their docs[0] are built on disc.wiki, so something similar could work. There could be an open source version of both the cms and the bot but that's at least a step in the right direction. [0]: https://disc.wiki/docs https://disc.wiki/docs
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  It's better, but it still doesn't solve the preservation of "lore" issue : only preserving curated "knowledge". For instance the failure mode of a detail that might not make it from discussed lore to actually preserved knowledge, but might be critical years later.

WirelessGigabit 4y ago

And then there are companies that hire security people fresh out of school and then Discord ends up being blocked.

madrox 4y ago

I've seen this rhetoric since Geocities. Discord is the latest scapegoat in a long lineage of successful products that are paradoxically ruining the internet and holding us back from the digital utopia we all dream of. Thinking like this leaves out the most decentralized part of the system: people. People are the real repositories of lore, and they're the ones who bring the useful things from place to place. It's a mistake to ever think of the internet as a library. Libraries take the kind of work and time you can never expect at a massively distributed group of volunteers to do. The internet has been and will always be ephemeral.

djmips 4y ago
While you are on your soapbox, I'm down here googling for a way to unstick my van window and the diagram is no longer available but at least I can work out what they were probably doing from the text in the Internet Archive. Yeah try that with a defunct Discord.
Zetice 4y ago
It's funny to me; what halcyon days are people longing for? When was the Internet an organized, easy place to navigate?
- medstrom 4y ago
  2000-2010 or so.
- zamnos 4y ago
  There was a brief moment in 1999 when this tiny startup came on the scene and introduced a search engine that was so much better that all the rest of them functionally died off. Before SEO bots destroyed a lot of that particular search engine's results, it made the Internet feel much more organized, and just typing in what you wanted made it quite easy to navigate! It's now a quarter century later and Google Search has plenty of critics, but for one brief moment in history, the act of finding things on the Internet took a giant leap forwards.
  - 4y ago

tonymet 4y ago

sounds like you have a business at a company i worked at we had a bot system that would convert significant chat messages into full posts with indexing create a discord plugin that makes preserving , highlighting , indexing and contextualizing important messages east

sneak 4y ago

Mostly when people think they want a Discord server (ie. not a server), what will actually solve their problem is a Discourse server (an actual server).

RadiozRadioz 4y ago
They should go back to calling them "guilds", as they still do internally. While also a pre-existing word, its real definition is sufficiently different for there to be no confusion that this is a new & special concept unique to Discord.

toastal 4y ago

I'm so tired of programming communities using Discord in an official capacity. We are the folks that know better and what it means to lose this information and what it means to require sign-ups and giving private conversations to proprietary entities. If you're choosing it as the sole community of your project, you've alienated folks that value their digital privacy—and it was just as easy to set up an IRC room, Matrix channel, or XMPP MUC on a public server which offer broader platform support and a wider array of clients, and some are even decentralized. Do we not believe in FOSS software for our FOSS software?

toastal 4y ago
For a better explanation from someone more eloquent than myself: https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/28/Dont-use-Discord-for-FOSS.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/28/Dont-use-Discord-for-FOSS...
herbst 4y ago
Totally this. When a project decides to go down this route I start questioning their whole decision making and feel alienated as you say. I can't even tell how often I stopped looking into something because it was too discord based.
bad_alloc 4y ago
Maybe we do, but the mass of people who are just learning is enormous. The idea of keeping this information open and searchable is a cultural thing, and big companies actively undermined this culture with their walled gardens. They became the norm for a vast part of the population. The question is: Can this be reversed? The mess with Twitter moved a lot of people to Mastodon, we need more events like that.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Note how it took a decade for most people to realize that Twitter is harmful after the 2013 APIpocalypse (when Mastodon got started). And in the mean time we even had Trump showing every day just how bad it is !
- 4y ago

darthrupert 4y ago

Discord is a horrible echo chamber for gamers. It is responsible for many of the social contagion-based mental issues and political confusion of our youth and young adults. Not only FOSS projects should stay away from it, but everyone else too. Don't let your children use it.

Nasrudith 4y ago
What toxic communities did you follow to wind up with that take?
- herbst 4y ago
  Join anything related to crypto. Openly scamming kids is very very common, not even counting the abysmal spam/scam protection for PMs. 100% echo chambers, all negativity is an instant ban.
haunter 4y ago
> Discord is a horrible echo chamber Mastodon is the same yet most people want that, smaller communities where they tagalong with others.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  Agreed. Frankly, the chamber is itself a problem. The community is just a nicer name for a tribe you currently subscribe to. It is downright folksy. I don't automatically mind, but there is no reason to pretend otherwise.

Zetobal 4y ago

I blame slack for gaslighting everyone into believing chat makes a good knowledgebase.

sovietswag 4y ago

Further down this rabbit hole: "The Web of Alexandria" by Bret Victor, http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria. ---- > Vannevar Bush's "library of a million volumes, compressed into one end of a desk" may sound quaint to us today. Bush naively assumed that immediate access to a million volumes would require the physical presence of those million volumes. His proposal -- a million volumes in every desk. > > The web, of course, took a different approach. A million volumes, yes, but our desks remain empty. Instead, when we summon a volume, we are granted a transient and ephemeral peek at its sole instance, out there somewhere in the world, typically secured within a large institution. > > Two thoughts: > > It's interesting that life itself chose Bush's approach. Every cell of every organism has a full copy of the genome. That works pretty well -- DNA gets damaged, cells die, organisms die, the genome lives on. It's been working pretty well for about 4 billion years. > > It's also interesting to consider how someone from Bush's time might view our situation. For someone who's thinking about a library in every desk, going on the web today might feel like visiting the Library of Alexandria. Things didn't work out so well with the Library of Alexandria. > >It's not working so well today either. > > We, as a species, are currently putting together a universal repository of knowledge and ideas, unprecedented in scope and scale. Which information-handling technology should we model it on? The one that's worked for 4 billion years and is responsible for our existence? Or the one that's led to the greatest intellectual tragedies in history?

wnkrshm 4y ago
Imagine how much further along libraries could be if they had big research and development budgets - you could use all the NLP, image processing and robotics in the world to catalogue, digitize, sort and backup every hardcopy in existence. And then there is digital media. If we want to go into a TNG Star Trek future, taking the media and knowledge from those walled gardens and making them accessible and searchable should be a priority for what we would like to call civilization. Instead, we have multiple digital circuses that happen to contain knowledge, just by grace of providing a way for people to host and discover media.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago

I was trying to join Discord, not having any memory of having used it before. Didn't realise I had an account already, so I made a new one. I was then flagged as "suspicious"(I was on my home network...) and told I had to provide a phone number, to verify my humanity. So I did. It then tells me that phone number is already tied to an account, bans the new account, the old account, and blacklists my phone number. And there appears to be no recourse, no way to explain that I simply forgot I had an account already. So now I guess discord is just off limits to me. I see people defending discord for lacking search because hurr durr so does IRC. Well, IRC at least doesn't ban you just for trying to use the service.

herbst 4y ago
I don't use my real phone number for foreign data selling companies so I use SMS verification services. Your situation explains why my accounts always get suddenly banned after a while without information. You can't get around the number thing usually, but having a number that works is not enough appearantly
- jerezzprime 4y ago
  Which services do you use?
- 12345hn6789 4y ago
  What services are you using? Most I have looked into do not work for the vast majority of applications that are popular
  - herbst 4y ago
    Mostly SMSpva. Depending on the service some countries never work. If I got 2 fails I just ask the support and they usually name me a country that works.
CatWChainsaw 4y ago
Discord's policies are frankly absurd. I'm pretty sure that at one point, if not now, they suggest using a friend's phone to verify your account if you're prompted to provide a phone number. Discord is too big now to excuse such careless behavior.

gambiting 4y ago

This is happening elsewhere too - all kinds of traditional forums for hardware, be it cars laptops or watches have now almost entirely moved to Facebook groups, only the biggest communities still hang around and even then just barely, with a shadow of their former selves. And Facebook is even worse than discord, with absolutely abysmal search and very few tools to engage with your community effectively. But it's easy to join so a lot of people prefer it.

rcarmo 4y ago

I am on so Discords, but whenever I come across an Open Source project that uses it as sole form of support/discussion, I move on and look for an alternative. It is just not useful at all for any kind of documentation/reference, but also for support: if it’s a reasonably popular project and you’re not on the same time zone, you will never be able to see any replies at all.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

herbst 4y ago

Sometimes I can't ask a question to a open source project because they decided to move everything to discord and lock it behind a account verification that needs a phone number I am not willing to put there (or rather don't have) I literally use less promising products sometimes just because they not yet moved everything to discord

thinkingemote 4y ago

Worse are open source communities only using Slack. As a normal user you cannot search beyond a very small amount of days without paying Slack money. Slack, often found in American centred projects Vs European in my experience, possibly where the devs already use slack for their paid startup jobs, and where they don't really understand or like libre software as well as the average German developer.

Karawebnetwork 4y ago
I don't know if it's as true these days but in the early days you couldn't get Discord installed on office computers because of the association that it was a "gaming app".
chadlavi 4y ago
The free version is unfortunately hobbled but slack is a lot better than discord at least at critical things like "getting caught up on messages that were sent since you last read." Some friends and I recently started a discord server for an async D&D game and it's a real pain to get caught up. They have the same red "you were here" line and the same "X new messages" banner as slack, but discord's default scrolling behavior works against you.

MagicMoonlight 4y ago

Is this guy writing articles about his own tweets?

textfiles 4y ago
Yeah! What the hell is wrong with him! Nobody wants to read that!

solarkraft 4y ago

I'm glad we agree that IRC isn't any better but even worse. As much as I dislike Discord (bad search, terrible notification system) there's also no open platform that can really compete with Discord, they all crumble when it comes to voice chats. I'll admit that a thing I like about private communities is that they feel more comfortable - that not every single user of the internet will be able to see it. The whole archival thing (like on IRC) can be done with bots. You could forward a message, add an emoji or ping the bot to archive a message.

hardware2win 4y ago
Indeed, not every conversation has to be on the internet, accessible to everyone. I thought hackers would care about privacy after all. Discord is still an unparallelled product if you use it correctly. If you want open and long conversations then use forum (real forum, not hn)

pmontra 4y ago

Whenever I see content organized as chat messages I know that it will fade away. It just moves too fast and in too small chunks to be searched, to be interpreted by humans years after it was created. Add a walled garden, it's dead content. It happened to IRC, it happens to Skype logs, WhatsApp, Telegram, whatever. It's convenient but I know that all my chat-like messages will be lost or at least not as easy to access as my email. Same thing for services like Discord vs web sites or forums. It will take ten years for people to realize it, enough time for them to move to something else, come back and failing to find what they were looking for. Then the next generation of content creators will be on another unarchiveable/unsearcheable medium.

setman2 4y ago
Do you think this is true in the world of Chat GPT? Couldn't the IRC/Discord content be indexed and then queried from an AI service?

iLoveOncall 4y ago

My company, a FAANG, went from having all our documentation in a wiki that is searchable by anyone, to heavily using Quip (some sort of Google Docs). Engineers resisted for a while because it's obviously awful for documentation. You can't even search it AT ALL. But since all the non-technical staff had an easier life editing Quip than editing the Wiki it's now the defacto solution for all. This is going to be doom of engineering at this company. Over the years I have found countless things on random wikis from random teams that helped me achieve my own solution. Quip destroyed that. Discord is the same.

totalhack 4y ago

If I think an open source library question might have value to someone else I'll always open an issue on GitHub, even if they try to push to discord. Maybe if discord communities added AI chat agents trained on their docs and discord discussions you'd have less of an information black hole.

lbayes 4y ago

I just think it's the incredible to realize that with all this technology available to us, human brains are still where (most or at least much?) knowledge and lore are stored and retrieved from.

aaws11 4y ago

for whoever unable to access the article directly: https://web.archive.org/web/20230306164958/http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5509 https://web.archive.org/web/20230306164958/http://ascii.text...

elif 4y ago

I've noticed lately that Facebook has been implementing every feature that discord has, though some arbitrarily gated to iOS only or phone app only. It occurred to me that the only functional difference between the two is that Facebook retains its original content relevancy algorithms and this can be seen as a superset of features, with also an almost monopolistic superset of users. That leaves Discord's only reason for existence largely cultural and generational. Like the submitter, my mind immediately went back to how great IRC was and how over the years it became increasingly difficult to evangelize for what was essentially an increasingly niche culture more than a platform. My personal time with discord functionally ended accidentally a little over a year ago with a quiet quitting over about 6 months as hundreds of individual discords with their own set of notification levels culminated in an uncontrollable torrent of annoying noises and popups. It now gives me anxiety thinking about launching the app.

kvandy 4y ago
The app launch anxiety rings true for me. Discord is sensory overload for me.
genevra 4y ago
You can mute notifications for the entire server, change them to mentions only, or any picked channels quite easily by right clicking it
- elif 4y ago
  "the entire server" of which there are hundreds

birracerveza 4y ago

Centralization does not scale. Discord's death is inevitable, and it will be far worse than ImageShack.

Apocryphon 4y ago
You're not wrong, but Imgur hasn't even hit that level yet.

kevincox 4y ago

While I agree that the locked-off history is a downside to me I think this is actually a benifit to the target audience. A lot of people want to start communities and this lock in if knowledge and constant asking of the same questions keeps a view of activity and boosts users numbers. It also gives a more personal feel that may encourage people to stay. Especially for streamers who are trying to make a personal-feeling connection I suspect this is incredibly valuable. Especially if you offload a lot of the repetitive work to unpaid moderators. Basically the goal of Discord isn't to hold and organize information. The information is just a lure. The search feature exists so that you can convince yourself that the history is useful and available. This leads to people needing to come in and engage in a personal-feeling way.

usrbinbash 4y ago

The age old question between convenience and safety. Why did people use imageshack? Because easy, because free. Just write a small plugin for the forum software du jour, or download one, and that's it, you're set. Discord-Is-The-Docs is just the newest iteration of this struggle, and it's not the only one. How much documentation exists "de-facto" only, sitting in some issue tracking software that may or may not be accessible 4 years from now?

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
Maybe that is not the issue. Maybe it is merely a symptom of how ephemeral and temporary existing systems are and 'Discord4Documents' is just a lazy way to port all the unsexy documentation to one place so that the ones that need to gorge on it, can.
- usrbinbash 4y ago
  But the ones who need to "gorge on it" can't, because there is no good way to extract, catalogue, organize, archive, or search it. Yes documentation isn't sexy. It's boring, it's tedious, and I can understand everyone who doesn't want to do it. And it's also key to a projects long term viability. If the only documentation for a project is "the discord", I won't use it, even if an alternative is a less optima technical fit. Because if I have to come back to fix an issue 2 years later, and I need the documentation, I'd rather read a badly maintained, badly formatted 90s style HTML-ony page, than stare in frustration at an info telling me the discord channel no longer exists.

api 4y ago

Lore will be dead anyway in a few years. AI bots will be flooding the net with shilling indistinguishable from human beings. The only way to get valid information will be from someone you can be pretty sure is human. The audio video features of things like Discord help, as do verified identities.

dancemethis 4y ago

Well, and that's not to mention the massive amounts of personal data and metadata Discord is hoarding and doing whatever it wants with. I fail to see why this article didn't mention that OpenFeint had a privacy lawsuit in its end as well. One can only hope this privacy-hostile proprietary platform dies sooner rather than later.

erremerre 4y ago

I have been trying to find and join some community of things that interest me. However I am not an expert on any of those things that interest me. I have attempted several times to join into Discord, forums, subreddits, etc... From all of those places and over the paper, Discord which is informal chatting should be the one I probably should feel more comfortable with. However, it is not the case. I always feel like an outsider. This is completely irrelevant to the no back-up search problem here. But I struggle to understand in which case Discord would make for a good community place.

bantunes 4y ago

We will at one point know more about the Roman Empire than the World Wide Web 1994-1998, and it doesn't seem right. Huge chunks of cultural output that would be gold for future historians just... lost.

Eumenes 4y ago

Does anyone remember xfire? I had such a popular username on there that I'd often get messages to sell the account for several $100 as a young kid, which I never did because I liked the name so much. That was my favorite chat/IM app for gaming. That plus IRC + whatever in-game messaging/chat service, worked just fine. I dont know why they need "community" now ... or "archive" ability. Seems to overcomplicate things.

PaulHoule 4y ago

This is just one bit of the death of text. Circa 2010 most games had highly literate walkthroughs on sites like GameFAQs. By 2020 you could find only find walkthroughs in YouTube which occasionally answer a question hard to explain in words (like that level with a jump that doesn’t look like you can make it but you can) but means seeking through 20 hours of video to find the right 15 seconds.

rchaud 4y ago
I remember going to a copy shop in 1999 to print out a GameFAQs walkthrough for Fallout 2.

anilakar 4y ago

The cancer called Discord has become so disgustinly common that they ought to be designated as a Common Carrier.

b1c1jones 4y ago

T'was always thus. Every so often, another cave is uncovered, knowledge of how to hunt or recordings of various activities etched or painted on the walls. Thousands of other caves are missing or lost forever.

zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago

I hate discord. Bring back MSN and Yahoo Messengers

andrewclunn 4y ago

I love that Discord is ephemeral. The right to be forgotten doesn't exist on the searchable web no matter how much the EU wishes it were so.

anticensor 4y ago
No, it is persistent with denial by deletion.

marcus_holmes 4y ago

Unpopular opinion: I don't think it matters too much that we lose all this. 90% of everything is crap. In the case of chat, I think that's more like 99.9% of everything is crap. The good/important stuff will be repeated and spread outside of its original container. All the good tweets are already on Reddit or Imgur. If Twitter died tomorrow (not as unlikely as it was 6 months ago) then we'd still have a decent archive of the good tweets. All we'd lose is all the dross. The same is true for other platforms; the good stuff gets cross-posted and preserved. I think it's important that we do forget things. We all say things every now and again that we don't mean, because we're human. I would hate a world where there was a permanent record of everything I've said. I already regret most of my Facebook posts. Also, some answers that used to be correct are now incorrect. We get this problem with tech - I often filter my search for "last year only" when bug hunting because old solutions aren't relevant any more. I understand that maintaining an archive is important for history, don't get me wrong. I just don't think we need all of it, and I think the important stuff will get preserved through duplication.

ilyt 4y ago
> 90% of everything is crap. In the case of chat, I think that's more like 99.9% of everything is crap. Right but with 90% of everything crap you moved the 10% of good things into closed (for search results) system. > If Twitter died tomorrow (not as unlikely as it was 6 months ago) then we'd still have a decent archive of the good tweets. All we'd lose is all the dross. The same is true for other platforms; the good stuff gets cross-posted and preserved. Tweets are searchable and you can't archive.org discord chat easily. Terrible comparison and it is not same for other platforms.
- marcus_holmes 4y ago
  My point is that the good stuff gets cross-posted. So a worthy Discord discussion will be screenshotted or otherwise recorded, and cross-posted to another platform.
genevra 4y ago
Not necessarily I was trying to get little big planet 2 working on an emulator recently (yesterday) and a lot of information about how to get secret dlc / costumes and use mod tools were hidden in a discord that I only found after a day of searching for the info. someone in the emulator discord recommended a different discord server, which I never would have known about and couldn't find that information anywhere else on the web (archive.org, YouTube videos, alternate search engines)

noobermin 4y ago

Jason Scott put out a plead to discord in 2021[0], with asks similar to the end of the article to add archiveability to their service, and I basically replied saying this is what we get for ditching irc, and he replied a tepid "I know what you're trying to say." I love Jason and the work he does and I don't blame him. The thing is Discord was never going to play ball, why would they? Again, we're going to have this discussion in 2026 too and nothing will change. I appreciate now he does offer thoughtful rebuff wrt IRC, but it is a pain then that other platforms like matrix haven't had Discord's uptick. People just gave up on better interfaces to IRC or other protocols. I get it many things are magic and we don't know how to get numbers, but it can't hurt to try. [0] https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1345422597505351685 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1345422597505351685

textfiles 4y ago
My experience, down to the moment, is that IRC may be "superior" to other services because it never tries to extend past its small set of core competencies. Which means it appeals exclusively to people who are fine with that small set, and every extension past that is lambasted and doomed to obscurity because there's no interest on the whole to push the entire realm as a whole into the late 20th century, much less the 21st. My response was tepid because I don't like telling someone stuck in a little tiny fishbowl going "the fishbowl is perfectly adequate" and dissuading them that the fishbowl is not adequate. Not that Discord is "the ocean" but it's a cruise ship and it's expensive, and a very nice ride comparatively. My weblog entry describes a situation beyond Discord, and that of knowledge, and is at best a framing of the problem in a static area, because I believe this is the year Twitter closes down, closes up, or dies.
Nemo_bis 4y ago
Err, ArchiveTeam uses IRC as primary communication method.

rhyssullivan1 4y ago

I’ve been working on a fix for this at https://www.answeroverflow.com/ https://www.answeroverflow.com/ ! It’s an open source project https://github.com/AnswerOverflow/AnswerOverflow https://github.com/AnswerOverflow/AnswerOverflow designed to index the content of your Discord community into Google Some example pages you can check out: An indexed question: https://www.answeroverflow.com/m/1055246179887230986 https://www.answeroverflow.com/m/1055246179887230986 The C# community page: https://www.answeroverflow.com/c/143867839282020352 https://www.answeroverflow.com/c/143867839282020352

setman2 4y ago
pretty neat solution!

seydor 4y ago

I m often baffled why discord became popular. I guess because genz hate the web and prefer apps. The www is such a boomer perhaps. Discord even brings the UI of apps to the web. But it's not open, how can they live with that

Slow_Hand 4y ago

I moderate a server/community of high-end record makers discussing music production and a common question among us is how can we create a long-term database of all of the niche wisdom being divulged, for the benefit of the younger generations. So far our best idea has been to publish an Obsidian Vault.

steponlego 4y ago

I really do hate Discord and other types of chat-oriented help and forums. Mailing lists are still the gold standard, IMHO. It's super easy to keep updated, works with any computer, etc. And most importantly you're not using somebody else's server.

CyberSimon 4y ago

A nifty tool to archive chats: https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter

Rantenki 4y ago

It's worth mentioning that Jason (the author) has dedicated his life to the preservation of information as the "containing" technologies are shifting like sand beneath our collective feet. He's thought about this stuff for a very long time, in great depth, and is very much worth listening to.

textfiles 4y ago
Finger guns

x-desire 4y ago

More like Death of Internet as we used to know it. Imagine a tranquil and secluded nature reserve [internet] that attracts like-minded people [nerds/geeks/tech enthusiasts] seeking peace and tranquillity. But with the addition of an airport, a nearby suburban development and a sprawling ski resort, the once idyllic space has been transformed into a bustling commercial hub, unrecognisable from its former state. Although you still venture into the park, it feels like a different place altogether, leaving you with a sense of isolation and disconnection. I'm afraid that the next thing we'll see is AI that creates content that is indistinguishable from human-generated content completely taking over online discourse and social media, together with entire fake personas. Why? Sales & Marketing.

pxoe 4y ago

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